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Malcolm X Today
(May 19, 1925-February 21, 1965)
Be sure to read the books, Malcolm X Speaks and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. And since we now have the opportunity over the Internet, check out the Malcolm X videos on YouTube.com. There's just nothing like seeing him speak and experiencing the confidence and power he and his words exude. I was impressed all over again.
Here are a few film clips of Malcolm X in action. You cannot fail to be impressed.
* We are Living in a Police State
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adiy075EGOs
* On the Second Amendment-The Right to Bear Arms
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cz3isgUZe5Y&NR=1
* There's a Worldwide Revolution Going On
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74_pFXwRgCE&feature=related
* That House Should Catch on Fire and Burn Down
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG6E-sV1kJg&feature=related
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I AM SEAN BELL, black boys speak
by Stacey Muhammad plus
1 year ago 1 year ago: Thu, Jan 1, 2009 6:22pm EST (Eastern Standard Time)
http://vimeo.com/2691617
I AM SEAN BELL
black boys speak
A Short Form Documentary from Wildseed Films
Directed by Stacey Muhammad
Asst. Directed by Shomari Mason
Edited by: Stacey Muhammad & R.H. Bless
Principal Photography: May 17, 2008
Brooklyn, NY
Running Time 10:30
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STOP SPENDING TRILLIONS ON THE WARS! BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
FOOD NOT GUNS IN HAITI!
U.S. OUT OF IRAQ & AFGHANISTAN!
FREE PALESTINE!
MONEY FOR HEALTHCARE, JOBS AND EDUCATION!
U.S. HANDS OFF LATIN AMERICA!
SAN FRANCISCO MARCH AND RALLY
SATURDAY, MARCH 20, 11:00 A.M., CIVIC CENTER
GET THE WORD OUT ABOUT MARCH 20!
Volunteers Needed!
Postering and Flyering Work Sessions every Tues. 7pm and every Sat. 2pm
Volunteers are needed to help put up posters, hand out leaflets and make alert phone calls to fellow activists. Call 415-821-6545 for more info and for office hours. Come by the office to pick up posters and flyers in English, Spanish or Chinese. Participate in an Outreach Work Session held every Tues. 7pm and Sat. 2pm, meeting at the ANSWER Coalition Office: 2489 Mission St. #24 (at 21st St.), San Francisco, near 24th St. BART/#14, #49 MUNI.
Call 415-821-6545 for leafleting and posting schedule.
DONATIONS NEEDED:
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Donation?ACTION=SHOW_DONATION_OPTIONS&CAMPAIGN_ID=1443&JServSessionIdr004=nou1lpg115.app202a
NEXT MARCH 20 COALITION MEETING:
SATURDAY, March 6, 2010, 2:00 P.M.
(Preceded by steering committee at 12 noon)
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO
474 VALENCIA STREET
Between 16th and 15th Streets, SF)
For more information call: 415-821-6545
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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Table of Contents:
A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
C. ARTICLES IN FULL
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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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On February 20, the Black is Back Coalition will hold a National March and Rally to Defend Haiti, in Miami, Florida. "Our people in Haiti must have reparations, not self serving charity from France and the U.S."
http://www.blackisbackcoalition.org/haiti_mobilization.shtml
http://www.blackisbackcoalition.org/index.shtml
Sisters, brothers, and allies of the Black community, the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations (BIBC) is calling on the African community to take up our responsibility to defend and uplift our sisters and brothers in Haiti in the wake of the earthquake of January 12, 2010.
The relief effort from others getting in touch with their humanity has some positives. However, African people everywhere and all who believe in justice are called on to join the in the National March and Rally to Defend Haiti, which is going to be held in Miami, Florida on February 20th 2010.
We believe the people of Haiti are part of the Black world and therefore African people everywhere have a special responsibility to step forward and address the tragic conditions of our people in Haiti. Furthermore, we understand that the dire poverty of Haiti is a result of French colonialism and U.S. military intervention in Haiti over the last 200 years and the earthquake of January 12, 2010 exacerbated the underdevelopment existent in Haiti since the beginning of its ongoing struggle for liberation. Our people in Haiti are representative of the spirit of resistance and pride that has to be emulated and replicated by the entire African world.
Our people need democracy and self determination, not more military interventions by the U.S., which has sent more than 10,000 troops to subdue our people. Our people in Haiti must have reparations not self serving charity from France and the U.S.
France and all of Europe have worked to make an example of Haiti by brutally starving us there as punishment for leading the first gloriously successful workers' revolution in the world and for creating a constitution that exposed the hypocrisy of the U.S., France and all of Europe by making Haiti a safe haven for anyone fleeing slavery and oppression.
Reparations and democracy for Haiti and the African world is the rallying call of resistance to all freedom loving people in this hour of great challenge. Sisters, brothers and allies, we can't let Haiti become the disaster for African people that hurricane Katrina was, where hundreds of Africans perished due to U.S. government policy. Join the resistance.
Join the March and rally to defend Haiti and demand:
* Reparations must be paid to Haiti by France as repayment for the billions of dollars that Haiti was forced to pay France following the struggle for the abolition of slavery and the creation of the First African Republic in the Western Hemisphere on the 1st January 1804. We also demand that the United States makes reparations to Haiti for its brutal and unjust occupation of Haiti from 1915 - 1934 that culminated in the looting of the Haitian Treasury. This should include the cancellation of all debt. We can't owe them if they owe us!
* The removal of all foreign military troops in Haiti including those from the United States, Canada, Europe and the combined imperial forces of the United Nations. No military occupation of Haiti.
* The repudiation of the Wet Foot/Dry Foot Policy that unfairly discriminates against Africans from Haiti and the establishment of an open door policy that allows Africans from Haiti to enter the United States, and any other country, unrestricted.
Saturday FEB 20th 10AM- Miami, FL
Rally @ Athalie Range Park - 525 NW 62nd St Miami, FL - 10:00AM
March to U.S. Immigration & Naturalization Center - 8801 NW 7th Avenue Miami, FL 12:00PM
More info: stpeteinpdum@yahoo.com (727) 821-6620
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PRISONERS OF CONSCIENCE COMMITTEE, LABOR ACTION COMMITTEE AND PRISON RADIO PRESENTS:
FREE 'EM ALL! FREE MUMIA
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 6:30 P.M.
HUMANIST HALL
390 27TH STREET, OAKLAND, CA 94605
SPEAKERS INCLUDE:
PAM AFRICA
Spokeswoman for the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
POCC CHAIRMAN FRED HAMPTON JR.
Founder of the Prisoners of Conscience Committee; Former political prisoner; and son of the assassinated Black Panther leader.
RAMONA AFRICA
Survivor of the 1985 police bomb that was dropped on the MOVE house in Philly; Former political prisoner and member of the MOVE Organization.
POCC MINISTER OF INFORMATION JR
POCC organizer; founder of POCC: Block Report Radio; Associate editor of the San Fransisco Bay View; and one of the last defendants in the Oakland 100 case.
JACK HEYMAN
Executive Board Member, Local 10, of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU); Member of th eLabor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal; Organizer of the ILWU West Coast Port Shutdown to Free Mumia on April 24, 1999
Updates from:
PIERRE LABOSSIERRE
Of the Haiti Action Committee
Donations of $10-$1000 (No one will be turned away due to lack of funds.)
There will be a sneak preview of the full-length new film, "OPERATION SMALL AXE," with POCC Minister of Informaiton, JR and Director, Adimu Maoyun on hand...
This event is done in honor of the lifes of freedom fighters Minister Huey P. Newton (Birthday February 17, 1942) and El Hajj Malik Shabazz (Assassination Date, February 21, 1965)
www.blockreportradio.com
www.prisonradio.org
www.sfbayview.com
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!
DEFEND JR VALREY! • DEFEND HOLLY WORKS!
Demonstrate!
and attend the trials of JR and Holly Works...
Monday, February 22nd - JR's trial begins
Monday, March 1st - Holly's trial begins
Both events...
8 AM - Protest outside the court
9 AM - Proceedings, Room 11
Alameda County Court House • 12th & Oak St, Oakland
(from 12th Street BART Station, walk down 12th St toward Lake Merritt.
Demonstrate / enter court at 12th and Oak St)
JR Valrey and Holly Works are the remaining defendants of the Oakland 100, the arrestees in the police crackdown against the protests in Oakland over the police murder of Oscar Grant, on New Years Day, 2009. Framed on felony charges, both are facing years behind bars, but... JR and Holly are innocent!
Oscar Grant was a young black retail grocery worker and father of a young daughter. He was out with friends for New Years Eve when he was detained by BART police. He was shot in the back at point blank range by a BART cop as he lay face-down on the Fruitvale station platform on New Years Day. Cell-phone videos taken of the incident by witnesses on the station platform were posted on the internet, and protests erupted in Oakland. Over a week later, the officer, Johannes Mehserle, was finally charged with murder. He was granted a change of venue, and is being tried in Los Angeles.
JR, a journalist with Block Report Radio, Flashpoints (KPFA), and the SF Bay View, and POCC Minister of Information, has consistently covered police brutality and terrorism in Oakland, as well as the framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal and other issues. He was arrested for covering the protests in the street following the police murder of Oscar Grant. The bogus charge: felony arson!
Holly Works, a local musician and activist, was arrested before she even arrived at the protest! Walking down the street with a friend, she was detained and fraudulently charged with... assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer!
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Join Unitarian Universalists for Peace-SF to promote the March 20 Coalition antiwar demonstration.:
Sunday, 28 February 2010
12:15 pm
@ Unitarian Universalist Center
1187 Franklin Street (@ Geary), SF, 94109
We invite you to...
-- Lunch (vegetarian) and
-- Movie, Howard Zinn: You Can't be Neutral on a Moving Train
A vegetarian lunch will start @ 12:15. We're asking "guests" for $1 - $5 contribution. (UU members, the usual $5). It includes a brief program on "Why I will be protesting the wars on March 20"
RSVP by 25 Feb so we know how much lunch to prepare: blee1931@yahoo.com (415.668.9572) or doloresmp@aol.com (415.387.2287)
The inspiring documentary on recently departed Howard Zinn will start about !:15 pm. Length approx 78 mins.
Donations will be solicited to benefit the March 20 Coalition to defray expenses of the anti-war march & rally on:
Saturday 20 March 2010
11 am
Civic Center Plaza, SF
This lunch and movie social is hosted by Unitarian Universalists for Peace-SF, a member of the March 20 Coalition, calling for an end to the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan: to use our taxes for health care, jobs and education, not death and destruction!
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RALLY FOR CALIFORNIA'S FUTURE!
Rally at Civic Center in Defense
Of Public Education and All Public-Sector Services!
Thursday, March 4, 5:00 P.M.
The San Francisco Labor Council calls on all labor affiliates, community organizations, and student groups to mobilize their memberships to attend the 5 p.m. rally and demonstration at the San Francisco Civic Center on March 4.
This rally is being organized and sponsored by United Educators of San Francisco, AFT Local 2121, and the California Faculty Association as part of the statewide March 4 Strike/Day of Action in Defense of Public Education that was called by a statewide conference of students, faculty, and staff unions held in Berkeley on October 24, 2009.
Responding to layoffs, furloughs and widespread cutbacks, the October 24 conference summoned all sectors of education to struggle collectively to save public education in California. The California Federation of Teachers (CFT) and California Teachers Association (CTA) have endorsed the Day of Action. Massive demonstrations are being organized across the state on March 4.
The San Francisco Labor Council believes that those who work in the education sector should not be placed in competition with state workers, where each fights against the other for scarce funds.
That is why we are urging that California enact a program of progressive taxation. This could ensure that all our communities can thrive. We could create ample funds so that everyone has the opportunity, through quality, accessible education, to fully develop their potential and become productive members of society. And, at the same time, we could establish fully funded social services and job security for public workers.
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Note: UESF is calling on all teacher unionists and K-12 families to gather at 4 p.m. at the State Building on the corner of Van Ness & McAllister, before joining the mass rally at the Civic Center.
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Bay Area Latin American Solidarity Coalition presents:
The Future of Honduras
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Centro del Pueblo
474 Valencia (between 15th and 16th Streets)
San Francisco
$5-25 donations
(No one will be turned away due to lack of funds.)
415-924-3227
www.mitfamericas.org, www.balasc.org
Come hear Andres Conteris tell the story of his 129 days inside the Brazillian Embassy under seige with President Mel Zelaya after the Honduran coup.
Andres was the last English speaking journalist inside the Embassy, staying until the day that Zelaya was allowed to leave.
Now returned to San Francisco, Andres will tell us about those months withi the Embassy, and inform us of the most recent developments from Honduras.
Andres Conteris is a Latin American Correspondent with Democracy Now! and Flaspoints; has lived in Honduras; and has been involved in human rights activism for many years.
Andres will also be leading a human rights delegation to Honduras later in March, organized through the Task Force on the Americas. Proceeds from the March 10th presentation will benefit the Honduras Delegation Scholarship Fund.
Endorsed by: Chiapas Support Committee; FMLN Northern California; Haiti Action Committee; Nicaragua Center for Community Action; SOA Watch West; Task Force on the Americas
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NEXT MARCH 20 COALITION MEETING:
SATURDAY, March 6, 2010, 2:00 P.M.
(Preceded by steering committee at 12 noon)
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO
474 VALENCIA STREET
Between 16th and 15th Streets, SF)
For more information call: 415-821-6545
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U.S. OUT OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN NOW!
FREE PALESTINE!
San Francisco March and Rally
on Saturday, March 20, 2010
11am, Civic Center Plaza
National March on Washington
on Saturday, March 20, 2010
Fri., March 19 Day of Action & Outreach in D.C.
People from all over the country are organizing to converge on Washington, D.C., to demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan and Iraq.
On Saturday, March 20, 2010, there will be a massive National March & Rally in D.C. A day of action and outreach in Washington, D.C., will take place on Friday, March 19, preceding the Saturday march.
There will be coinciding mass marches on March 20 in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
The national actions are initiated by a large number of organizations and prominent individuals. see below)
Click here to become an endorser:
http://answer.pephost.org/site/Survey?SURVEY_ID=5940&ACTION_REQUIRED=URI_ACTION_USER_REQUESTS&autologin=true&link=endorse-body-1
Click here to make a donation:
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Donation?ACTION=SHOW_DONATION_OPTIONS&CAMPAIGN_ID=2302&autologin=true&donate=body-1&JServSessionIdr002=2yzk5fh8x2.app13b
We will march together to say "No Colonial-type Wars and Occupations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine!" We will march together to say "No War Against Iran!" We will march together to say "No War for Empire Anywhere!"
Instead of war, we will demand funds so that every person can have a job, free and universal health care, decent schools, and affordable housing.
March 20 is the seventh anniversary of the criminal war of aggression launched by Bush and Cheney against Iraq. One million or more Iraqis have died. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops have lost their lives or been maimed, and continue to suffer a whole host of enduring problems from this terrible war.
This is the time for united action. The slogans on banners may differ, but all those who carry them should be marching shoulder to shoulder.
Killing and dying to avoid the perception of defeat
Bush is gone, but the war and occupation in Iraq still go on. The Pentagon is demanding a widening of the war in Afghanistan. They project an endless war with shifting battlefields. And a "single-payer" war budget that only grows larger and larger each year. We must act.
Both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were predicated on the imperial fantasy that the U.S. could create stable, proxy colonial-type governments in both countries. They were to serve as an extension of "American" power in these strategic and resource-rich regions.
That fantasy has been destroyed. Now U.S. troops are being sent to kill or be killed so that the politicians in uniform "the generals and admirals") and those in three-piece suits "our elected officials") can avoid taking responsibility for a military setback in wars that should have never been started. Their military ambitions are now reduced to avoiding the appearance of defeat.
That is exactly what happened in Vietnam! Avoiding defeat, or the perception of defeat, was the goal Nixon and Kissinger set for themselves when they took office in 1969. For this noble cause, another 30,000 young GIs perished before the inevitable troop pullout from Vietnam in 1973. The number of Vietnamese killed between 1969 and 1973 was greater by many hundreds of thousands.
All of us can make the difference - progress and change comes from the streets and from the grassroots.
The people went to the polls in 2008, and the enthusiasm and desire for change after eight years of the Bush regime was the dominant cause that led to election of a big Democratic Party majority in both Houses of Congress and the election of Barack Obama to the White House.
But it should now be obvious to all that waiting for politicians to bring real change - on any front - is simply a prescription for passivity by progressives and an invitation to the array of corporate interests from military contractors to the banks, to big oil, to the health insurance giants that dominate the political life of the country. These corporate interests work around the clock to frustrate efforts for real change, and they are the guiding hand behind the recent street mobilizations of the ultra-right.
It is up to us to act. If people had waited for politicians to do the right thing, there would have never been a Civil Rights Act, or unions, women's rights, an end to the Vietnam war or any of the profound social achievements and basic rights that people cherish.
It is time to be back in the streets. Organizing centers are being set up in cities and towns throughout the country.
We must raise $50,000 immediately just to get started. Please make your contribution today. We need to reserve buses, which are expensive $1,800 from NYC, $5,000 from Chicago, etc.). We have to print 100,000 leaflets, posters and stickers. There will be other substantial expenses as March 20 draws closer.
Please become an endorser and active supporter of the March 20 National March on Washington.
Please make an urgently needed tax-deductible donation today. We can't do this without your active support.
The initiators of the March 20 National March on Washington preceded by the March 19 Day of Action and Outreach in D.C.) include: the ANSWER Coalition; Muslim American Society Freedom; National Council of Arab Americans; Cynthia McKinney; Malik Rahim, co-founder of Common Ground Collective; Ramsey Clark; Cindy Sheehan; Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK; Deborah Sweet, Director, World Can't Wait; Mike Ferner, President, Veterans for Peace; Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition; Heidi Boghosian, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild; Ron Kovic, author of "Born on the 4th of July"; Juan Jose Gutierrez, Director, Latino Movement USA; Col. Ann Wright ret.); March Forward!; Partnership for Civil Justice; Palestinian American Women Association; Alliance for a Just and Lasting Peace in the Philippines; Alliance for Global Justice; Claudia de la Cruz, Pastor, Iglesia San Romero de Las Americas-UCC; Phil Portluck, Social Justice Ministry, Covenant Baptist Church, D.C.; Blase & Theresa Bonpane, Office of the Americas; Coalition for Peace and Democracy in Honduras; Comite Pro-Democracia en Mexico; Frente Unido de los Pueblos Americanos; Comites de Base FMLN, Los Angeles; Free Palestine Alliance; GABRIELA Network; Justice for Filipino American Veterans; KmB Pro-People Youth; Students Fight Back; Jim Lafferty, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild - LA Chapter; LEF Foundation; National Coalition to Free the Angola 3; Community Futures Collective; Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival; Companeros del Barrio; Barrio Unido for Full and Unconditional Amnesty, Bay Area United Against War.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.answercoalition.org/
info@internationalanswer.org
National Office in Washington DC: 202-265-1948
New York City: 212-694-8720
Los Angeles: 213-251-1025
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
Chicago: 773-463-0311
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The US Social Forum II
" June 22-26, 2010 "
Detroit, Michigan, USA
Another World Is Possible! Another US is Necessary!
http://www.ussf2010.org/
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B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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A Carnival Artist Without a Carnival
A Haitian Artist Struggles to Show His Work
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/world/index.html
War veterans and resisters say "All Out for March 20th-National March on Washington!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwsLfG9JjF8
Bilin Reenacts Avatar Film 12-02-2010 By Haitham Al Katib
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Chw32qG-M7E
Watch the video: "Haiti and the Devil's Curse" at:
http://www.michaelmoore.com/
or
Haiti And The 'Devil's Curse' - The Truth About Haiti & Lies Of The Media PART 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWqgOe0-0xA
Haiti And The 'Devil's Curse' - The Truth About Haiti & Lies Of The Media PART 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9Qki6TrI7M&feature=related
It's a powerful and accurate history of Haiti--including historical film footage of French, U.S., Canadian, and UN invasions, mass murder and torture, exploitation and occupation of Haiti--featuring Danny Glover.
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New York Times Video: For Haitian Children, a Crisis Escalates
Front page of the Times, February 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/
This video shows the frustration of doctors that haven't the supplies or equipment to help severely wounded Haitian children. One child, the doctor explains, had her foot amputated by her family in order to free her from the rubble she was buried under. They finally got her to the hospital after two weeks. By then, of course, the wound was infected. But, not having enough antibiotics, her other foot got infected and that had to be amputated. She is still rotting away at the hospital that can't care for her properly--as hard as the doctors are trying--and they are trying hard.
As it stands now--they haven't got the antibiotics and surgical supplies and they can't get the children to a hospital in the U.S. Since the attempted kidnapping of children by the American missionaries, the children are not allowed out of the country without papers--even when accompanied by their parents. The thing is, nobody has papers in Haiti so the parents can't prove it's their child. Nobody has driver's licenses, birth cirtificates--not the parents nor the children--if such proof exists, it's buried under the rubble along with all their other belongings. So, again, the innocent suffer because of the inability/unwillingness of the wealthiest nation in the world to bring the stuff that is needed to the people who need it because they are experts at bringing bombs, daisy-cutters and white phosphorous, not humanitarian aid. ...bw
The article of the same title is:
Paperwork Hinders Airlifts of Ill Haitian Children
By IAN URBINA
February 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/world/americas/09airlift.html?ref=world
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Gaza in Plain Language: a video by Anthony Lawson and Joe Mowrey
Anthony Lawson and Joe Mowrey have created an amazing video. The narrative is from an article published not long ago in Dissident Voice written by Mr. Mowrey. [See article with the same name, No. 14, below. A warning, however. This video is very graphic and very brutal but this is a truth we must see!..bw] A video that narrates just what happened, without emotion... just the facts, ma'am! Share it with those you know! Now on PTT TV so Google and YouTube can't censor this information totally.
http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/02/video-gaza-in-plain-language/
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Glen Ford on Black Delusion in the Age of Obama
[A speech delivered to the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations conference. This is a great speech full of information.]
blackisbackcoalition.org
http://blip.tv/file/3169123
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Security in an Insecure Land
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/01/30/world/americas/1247466794033/security-in-an-insecure-land.html?hp
What the US/UN police and military are doing in Haiti -- really.
This video takes us to the poorest section of Port-au-Prince, Cité Soleil. It looks like a giant concentration camp in the middle of a desert. The UN Police caravan have nothing with them but cameras and guns! People--men, women, children, are standing alongside the road begging for help. They say they have had no help at all since the earthquake.
The UN police bring NO AID with them. No food, water--nothing! Then the police, guarded by soldiers with automatic weapons, and their camera stop among a large group of people. The UN cop, Alix Sainvil, a Haitian-American United Nations police officer who worked to secure Cité Soleil before the earthquake, is talking to the camera; he explains that since the jail collapsed and prisoners escaped after the earthquake, he worried about how the "gangs" are taking over again.
The camera pans the faces of ALL the men.
One "gang member" (synonym "male") overhears what Soleil is saying to the camera and speaks up and says, "Even if your not a looter, when you walk past a store police will just shoot you for no reason. That's the only thing you do!" That, of course, designates him a "gang member."
The cop, Soleil, says as they are driving away, "that young man is a 'troublemaker.'"
This video illustrates just what the UN has been doing in Haiti. They have been patrolling these slums with automatic weapons and targeting anyone who shows any signs of resistance to the deplorable state of poverty they live in. It is a heinous atrocity orchestrated by the U.S.!
Haiti is US/UN occupied territory now. AND THEY STILL HAVEN'T GIVEN OUT ANY MEANINGFUL AMOUNTS OF AID! They typically pull up with one-tenth of the supplies needed so that most go hungry and get nothing but their fury ignited. And who the hell wouldn't be furious? This is Katrina in powers of ten!
In another article in the Times, "Food Distribution Retooled; Americans Arrested," by DAMIEN CAVE, (number 19, below) "After two weeks of often chaotic food distribution, the United Nations announced plans on Saturday for a coupon-based system that aims to give rice to 10,000 Haitians a day at each of 16 locations around Port-au-Prince." (The article points out that the rice will be given to women only.)
AFTER TWO WEEKS THEY WILL BEGIN THIS WEEK?!?!? I guess they're thinking it'll be cheaper in the long run if more people die first. And that's the bottom line for this government! By the way, the ten Americans were arrested by the Haitian government for trying to take 33 Haitian children across into the Dominican Republic for "adoption." The thing is, they had no proof the children were orphans. I wonder how much they were going to charge for them?
--Bonnie Weinstein
Also see:
Haitian Law Enforcement Returns
The Haitian police are back on patrol in Port-au-Prince.
http://video.nytimes.com/video/playlist/world/americas/1194811622209/index.html#1247466794033
Haitians Scramble for Aid
France24 reports on desperate Haitians trying to get some aid food in the Cité Soleil district of Port-au-Prince.
http://video.nytimes.com/video/playlist/world/americas/1194811622209/index.html#1247466794033
HOW MANY CRIMES CAN THE U.S. COMMIT IN A CENTURY? EVIDENTLY THEIR PENCHANT FOR MORE AND MORE EGREGIOUS CRIMES ARE LIMITLESS! IT'S UP TO US TO STOP THEM! U.S. OUT OF HAITI NOW! LEAVE THE FOOD AND SUPPLIES AND GET THE HELL OUT! AND TAKE YOUR MARINES, GUNS AND TANKS WITH YOU!
U.S. Marines prevent the distribution of food to starving people due to "lack of security." They bring a truck full of supplies then, because their chain of command says they haven't enough men with guns, they drive away with the truckload of food leaving the starving Haitians running after the truck empty-handed! This is shown in detail in the video in the New York Times titled, "Confusion in Haitian Countryside." The Marines-the strong, the brave--turn tail and run! INCAPABLE, EVEN, OF DISTRIBUTING FOOD TO UNARMED, STARVING, MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN!
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/01/22/world/americas/1247466678828/confusion-in-the-haitian-countryside.html?ref=world
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Lost Generation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42E2fAWM6rA
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Sign the petition. Drop the charges against Alexis Hutchinson!
"...four separate court martial charges have been brought against Specialist Alexis Hutchinson, a single parent with a one-year old son, who missed deployment in early November 2009 when her childcare plan fell through at the last moment, due to circumstances beyond her control."
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/811/1/
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Please sign the petition to stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal and
and forward it to all your lists.
"Mumia Abu-Jamal and The Global Abolition of the Death Penalty"
http://www.petitiononline.com/Mumialaw/petition.html
(A Life In the Balance - The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, at 34, Amnesty Int'l, 2000; www. Amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/001/2000.)
[Note: This petition is approved by Mumia Abu-Jamal and his lead attorney, Robert R. Bryan, San Francisco (E-mail: MumiaLegalDefense@gmail.com; Website: www.MumiaLegalDefense.org).]
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Alert! New Threat To Mumia's Life!
Supreme Court Set To Announce A Decision
On the State Appeal To Reinstate Mumia's Death Sentence
17 January 2010
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222 Oakland CA 94610
(510) 763-2347
Visit our newly-rebuilt and updated web site for background information on Mumia's innocence. See the "What You Can Do Now" page: www.laboractionmumia.org
- The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222 Oakland CA 94610
(510) 763-2347
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The Pay at the Top
The compensation research firm Equilar compiled data reflecting pay for 200 chief executives at 198 public companies that filed their annual proxies by March 27 and had revenue of at least $6.3 billion. (Two companies, Motorola and Synnex, had co-C.E.O.'s.) | See a detailed description of the methodology.
http://projects.nytimes.com/executive_compensation?ref=business
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AMAZING SPEECH BY WAR VETERAN
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akm3nYN8aG8
The Unemployment Game Show: Are You *Really* Unemployed? - From Mint.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ulu3SCAmeBA
Video: Gaza Lives On
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU5Wi2jhnW0
ASSESSMENT - "LEFT IN THE COLD"- CROW CREEK - 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmfue_pjwho&feature=PlayList&p=217F560F18109313&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=5
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FREE LYNNE STEWART NOW!
Lynne Stewart in Jail!
Mail tax free contributions payable to National Lawyers Guild Foundation. Write in memo box: "Lynne Stewart Defense." Mail to: Lynne Stewart Defense, P.O. Box 10328, Oakland, CA 94610.
SEND RESOLUTIONS AND STATEMENTS OF SUPPORT TO DEFENSE ATTORNEY JOSHUA L. DRATEL, ESQ. FAX: 212) 571 3792 AND EMAIL: jdratel@aol.com
SEND PROTESTS TO ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER:
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Department of Justice Main Switchboard - 202-514-2000
AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
Office of the Attorney General Public Comment Line - 202-353-1555
To send Lynne a letter, write:
Lynne Stewart
53504-054
MCC-NY
150 Park Row
New York, NY 10007
Lynne Stewart speaks in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOQ5_VKRf5k&feature=related
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With a New Smile, 'Rage' Fades Away [SINGLE PAYER NOW!!!]
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/12/08/health/20091208_Clinic/index.html?ref=us
FTA [F**k The Army] Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HlkgPCgU7g
Buffy Sainte Marie - No No Keshagesh
[Keshagesh is the Cree word to describe a greedy puppy that wants to keep eating everything, a metaphor for corporate greed]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKmAb1gNN74&feature=player_embedded#
Buffy Sainte-Marie - No No Keshagesh lyrics:
http://www.lyricsmode.com/?i=print_lyrics&id=705368
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The Story of Mouseland: As told by Tommy Douglas in 1944
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqgOvzUeiAA
The Communist Manifesto illustrated by Cartoons
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KUl4yfABE4
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HELP VFP PUT THIS BOOK IN YOUR HIGH SCHOOL OR PUBLIC LIBRARY
For a donation of only $18.95, we can put a copy of the book "10 Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military" into a public or high school library of your choice. [Reason number 1: You may be killed]
A letter and bookplate will let readers know that your donation helped make this possible.
Putting a book in either a public or school library ensures that students, parents, and members of the community will have this valuable information when they need it.
Don't have a library you would like us to put it in? We'll find one for you!
https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/826/t/9311/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=4906
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This is a must-see video about the life of Oscar Grant, a young man who loved his family and was loved by his family. It's important to watch to understand the tremendous loss felt by his whole family as a result of his cold-blooded murder by BART police officers--Johannes Mehserle being the shooter while the others held Oscar down and handcuffed him to aid Mehserle in the murder of Oscar Grant January 1, 2009.
The family wants to share this video here with you who support justice for Oscar Grant.
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/07/21/18611878.php
WE DEMAND JUSTICE FOR OSCAR GRANT!
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Troy Anthony Davis is an African American man who has spent the last 18 years on death row for a murder he did not commit. There is no physical evidence tying him to the crime and seven out of nine witnesses have recanted. New evidence and new testimony have been presented to the Georgia courts, but the justice system refuses to consider this evidence, which would prove Troy Davis' innocence once and for all.
Sign the petition and join the NAACP, Amnesty International USA, and other partners in demanding justice for Troy Davis!
http://www.iamtroy.com/
For Now, High Court Punts on Troy Davis, on Death Row for 18 Years
By Ashby Jones
Wall Street Journal Law Blog
June 30, 2009
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/06/30/for-now-high-court-punts-on-troy-davis-on-death-row-for-18-years/
Take action now:
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&aid=12361&ICID=A0906A01&tr=y&auid=5030305
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Committee To Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 2012
New York, NY 10159-2012
New videos from April 24 Oakland Mumia event
http://abu-jamal-news.com/article?name=jlboak
Donations for Mumia's Legal Defense in the U.S. Our legal effort is the front line of the battle for Mumia's freedom and life. His legal defense needs help. The costs are substantial for our litigation in the U.S. Supreme Court and at the state level. To help, please make your checks payable to the National Lawyers Guild Foundation indicate "Mumia" on the bottom left). All donations are tax deductible under the Internal Revenue Code, section 501c)3), and should be mailed to:
It is outrageous and a violation of human rights that Mumia remains in prison and on death row. His life hangs in the balance. My career has been marked by successfully representing people facing death in murder cases. I will not rest until we win Mumia's case. Justice requires no less.
With best wishes,
Robert R. Bryan
Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal
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Short Video About Al-Awda's Work
The following link is to a short video which provides an overview of Al-Awda's work since the founding of our organization in 2000. This video was first shown on Saturday May 23, 2009 at the fundraising banquet of the 7th Annual Int'l Al-Awda Convention in Anaheim California. It was produced from footage collected over the past nine years.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiAkbB5uC0&eurl
Support Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, depends on your financial support to carry out its work.
To submit your tax-deductible donation to support our work, go to
http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html and follow the simple instructions.
Thank you for your generosity!
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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT!
FLASHPOINTS Interview with Innocent San Quentin Death Row Inmate
Kevin Cooper -- Aired Monday, May 18,2009
http://www.flashpoints.net/#GOOGLE_SEARCH_ENGINE
To learn more about Kevin Cooper go to:
savekevincooper.org
LINKS
San Francisco Chronicle article on the recent ruling:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/13/BAM517J8T3.DTL
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling and dissent:
http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2009/05/11/05-99004o.pdf
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COURAGE TO RESIST!
Support the troops who refuse to fight!
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/
Donate:
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/21/57/
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C. ARTICLES IN FULL
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1) Top US Court Sends Mumia Abu-Jamal Closer to Execution
Mumia Abu-Jamal is an innocent man on death row. In two recent decisions, the US Supreme Court has ignored both evidence of his innocence and it's own precedents to deny Mumia's appeal and bring him closer to execution. In this statement, the Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal lays bare the truth behind these actions, and proposes a course of workers' and mass action to free Mumia.
Cops, Courts and Politicians To Mumia:
We Will Kill You, and the Law Be Damned!
For Labor Action To Free Mumia!
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, February 2010
For more information, view our web site at: www.laboractionmumia.org
See the article, "Mumia Abu-Jamal and the Labor Movement," at http://www.laboractionmumia.org/laborsfight1.html
And see, "What You Can Do Now," at http://www.laboractionmumia.org/whatyoucandonow.html
2) The Making of a Euromess
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
February 15, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/opinion/15krugman.html
3) Seven Paragraphs
Editorial
February 15, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/opinion/15mon1.html
4) An Officer Shoots, a 73-Year-Old Dies, and Schisms Return
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
Homer Journal
February 15, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/us/15homer.html
5) Talk to Hamas
As Israeli soldiers we hang our heads in shame over last year's attack on Gaza's civilian population. Dialogue, not war, is needed
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/15/hamas-gaza-israel-palestinians
6) The Economic Elite Have Engineered an Extraordinary Coup, Threatening the Very Existence of the Middle Class
By David DeGraw, Amped Status
Posted on February 15, 2010, Printed on February 15, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145667/
7) What's Wrong With Us?
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
February 16, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/opinion/16herbert.html
8) European Union Sets Deadline for Greece to Make Cuts
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 17, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/business/global/17euro.html?hp
9) New Questions Over Hamas Killing
By ROBERT F. WORTH
February 17, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/world/middleeast/17dubai.html?hp
10) France: Report Says Army Exposed Troops to Radiation
By SCOTT SAYARE
February 17, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/world/europe/17france.html?ref=world
11) Officers Won't Face Federal Charges in Sean Bell Killing
By AL BAKER and JOHN ELIGON
February 16, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/nyregion/17bell.html?ref=nyregion
12) Detainee Abuse Conviction Under Review
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Washington
February 17, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/us/17brfs-DETAINEEABUS_BRF.html?ref=us
13) 25 Afghan Police May Have Joined Taliban
By ROD NORDLAND
February 19, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/world/asia/19police.html?ref=world
14) Judges Free Inmate on Recommendation of Special Innocence Panel
By ROBBIE BROWN
February 18, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/us/18innocent.html?ref=us
15) Death Threat against Martha Giraldo
http://www.soaw.org/presente/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=257&Itemid=81#deathtreat
Video: U.S. Military in Colombia
http://www.soaw.org/presente/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=271&Itemid=81
Bertha Oliva at the gates of Ft. Benning
http://www.soaw.org/presente/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=254&Itemid=81
16) Three in a Million: Voices From the Haitian Camps
By Bill Quigley [1]
February 18, 2010
http://www.sfbayview.com/2010/three-in-a-million-voices-from-the-haitian-camps/
17) World's top firms cause $2.2tn of environmental damage, report estimates
By Juliette Jowit
February 18, 2010
guardian.co.uk
18) Kent Massacre Mural/Wall Blog
Post your messages at http://kentmassacre.wordpress.com
Send comments to: alewitz@comcast.net
Please distribute this message widely
MIKE ALEWITZ
Associate Professor
Artistic Director/ Labor Art & Mural Project
http://kentmassacre.wordpress.com/
19) Operation New Dawn
Cindy Sheehan
From: Cindy Sheehan
Date: February 19, 2010 3:37:04 AM EST
Subject: Operation New Dawn by Cindy Sheehan
Reply-To: pota-planning@googlegroups.com
20) Missile Kills Militant Commander's Brother in Pakistan
By PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
February 20, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/20/world/asia/20pstan.html?hp
21) Myths Obscure Voodoo, Source of Comfort in Haiti
On Religion
"Voodoo is very close to the ground. It's a neighborhood to neighborhood, courtyard kind of religion. And one where you support each other in time of need."
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
February 20, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/20/world/americas/20religion.html?hp
22) States Consider Medicaid Cuts as Use Grows
[Money for healthcare not warfare. A good reason to take to the streets March 20, 11 A.M., Civic Center. For more information: 415-821-6545 ...bw]
By KEVIN SACK and ROBERT PEAR
February 19, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/us/politics/19medicaid.html?ref=us
23) A Sight All Too Familiar in Poor Neighborhoods
By ERIK ECKHOLM
February 19, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/us/19evict.html?ref=us
24) Pennsylvania: Schools Accused of Spying
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Mid-Atlantic
February 19, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/us/19brfs-SCHOOLSACCUS_BRF.html?ref=us
25) Fed Move May Signal End to Easy Bank Profits
[You can bet your bottom dollar that the banks will make up their profits through higher banking fees for checking accounts. There will be no more free checking. That's the advantage you have when you own your own corporation and can make your rules up as you go...bw]
By GRAHAM BOWLEY and ERIC DASH
February 19, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/business/economy/19banks.html?ref=business
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1) Top US Court Sends Mumia Abu-Jamal Closer to Execution
Mumia Abu-Jamal is an innocent man on death row. In two recent decisions, the US Supreme Court has ignored both evidence of his innocence and it's own precedents to deny Mumia's appeal and bring him closer to execution. In this statement, the Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal lays bare the truth behind these actions, and proposes a course of workers' and mass action to free Mumia.
Cops, Courts and Politicians To Mumia:
We Will Kill You, and the Law Be Damned!
For Labor Action To Free Mumia!
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, February 2010
For more information, view our web site at: www.laboractionmumia.org
See the article, "Mumia Abu-Jamal and the Labor Movement," at http://www.laboractionmumia.org/laborsfight1.html
And see, "What You Can Do Now," at http://www.laboractionmumia.org/whatyoucandonow.html
Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther, award winning journalist, behind-bars commentator on critical social issues--and an innocent man on death row. In April 2009, after more than two decades of court rulings that ignored mounting evidence of his innocence, the Supreme Court upheld his 1982 frame-up conviction without comment. Then, this January, the Court moved closer to reinstating his death sentence--which had been put on hold by lower court rulings.
The US Supreme Court has shown it will do anything necessary to support the rule of their big corporate bosses, as seen most recently in the Citizens United ruling, which threw out the ban on independent corporate spending during an election. Years of legislation was undone in a single blow, to further tighten the death grip of big money over politics in the US. But the courts also obey the commands of their armed thugs in the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), and politicians that support them, even if it means walking all over their own legal precedents and trampling on the most basic principles of justice.
Supreme Court "Vacates" the Stay of Mumia's Death Sentence
On January 19th the Supreme Court "vacated" the Third Circuit (federal appellate) ruling, which--after upholding Mumia's conviction--said that Mumia's death sentence had been imposed under faulty instructions to the jury. The Third Circuit had instructed Pennsylvania state courts that under Mills v Maryland--a 1988 Supreme Court precedent--Mumia's sentence should be decided again in a new sentencing hearing, or (if no such hearing was held) converted to a life sentence without the possibility of parole. In Mills, the Supreme Court had struck down a Maryland statute which said that juries in capital cases must be unanimous on any aggravating or mitigating factor when deciding the sentence. The Mills ruling said that while aggravating factors need be unanimous, factors that mitigate against imposing death required a simple majority only. The Third Circuit said Mills applied in Mumia's case, and so required reconsideration of the sentence.
But now, the Supreme Court has ordered the Third Circuit to reconsider this decision. They did so in light of their recent ruling on another case, Smith v Spisak. Having summarily tossed out Mumia's appeal against his conviction last year, the Court waited until now, after its Spisak ruling, to take up the cross-appeal by the Philadelphia DA, seeking to reinstate Mumia's death sentence. It was obvious that the Court planned to use its Spisak ruling against Mumia, and now it has. The clear implication was that the Third Circuit had just lost its reason (the Mills precedent) for setting aside Mumia's death sentence:
"Of the cases summarily decided [January 19th], one is especially noteworthy: the Court has granted the petition in Beard v. Abu-Jamal (08-652), vacating and remanding to the Third Circuit to consider in light of Smith v. Spisak." (http://www.scotusblog.com/)
Smith v Spisak stemmed from a case in Ohio of an avowed neo-Nazi, who confessed in court to murdering five people for racist reasons. Spisak's death sentence had been set aside, based on faulty jury instructions under the Mills precedent, similar to Mumia's, in two lower court rulings. The Supreme Court unanimously reversed these, and said Spisak should be executed. The Mills ruling had the effect of inhibiting, somewhat, the rush to execute. But in its current ruling in Spisak, the Court said that Mills may not apply in any given state, based on differing jury-instruction forms which may or may not be confusing to jurors on the issue of mitigating factors. Thus the Court watered down what was considered to be a binding national precedent, with language allowing different states to make their own interpretations--a "states rights" position.
A Long-Established Tactic of Deception
But that's just the beginning. It is important to see through the haze of legal gibberish here. In saying that Mills didn't apply in the Spisak case, the Supreme Court allowed itself to say, only days later, that Mills probably didn't apply to the politically more important case of Mumia Abu-Jamal either. The Court thus weakened its own precedent in order to reinforce and strengthen the death penalty generally. And at the same time, it used the case of a confessed racist murderer to set back the struggle of a world-renowned, innocent and anti-racist death-row prisoner--Mumia Abu-Jamal--a prisoner whom the FOP and US political establishment is falling all over itself to execute.
Taking precedent-breaking legal measures against hard right-wing targets in order to use them against the working-class left, is a long-established tactic of a ruling class which seeks above all to preserve its own power. But in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal particularly, breaking legal precedent in order to hasten his execution is the norm. In making its flat-out rejection of Mumia's appeal last April, the Supreme Court had to knowingly violate its own well-established precedent in Batson v Kentucky--the 1986 ruling which said that purging a jury on the basis of race was unconstitutional. One of the best-known legal precedents in modern US history, Batson required that convictions be thrown out for even one incident of racially-based juror exclusion. And, it was to be applied retroactively. In Mumia's 1982 trial, the prosecutor used at least ten out of 15 peremptory challenges to exclude blacks for reasons that were not applied to prospective white jurors.
Precedent? Hell, No! Courts Do What They Want
Many other precedents have been broken as well by appellate courts, which were then upheld by the Supreme Court. The Third Circuit reversed a well-established rule preventing prosecutors from undermining the principle of "innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" in their summations to the jury. In Mumia's case, the prosecutor said that Mumia would go free immediately if acquitted, but would get "appeal after appeal" if convicted, thus saying to the jury that if in doubt they should convict, not acquit. Having tossed this practice in an earlier case involving the same prosecutor, they upheld it in Mumia's case, and this in turn was upheld by the Supreme Court. (In yet another case, the Third Circuit later restored the earlier precedent on this issue.)
Still more fundamental is the question of innocence itself. In order to convict and uphold Mumia's conviction the prosecution manufactured false confessions, planted evidence, and threatened "witnesses" into saying they saw what they didn't see. All of these illegal tricks were used against Mumia, yet no court has overturned the conviction because of them. Meanwhile, the real evidence--including witnesses who saw the real killer or killers run away, and a witness (William Singletary) who said Mumia didn't shoot anybody but who was not called to testify--should haven proven Mumia's innocence from the start. But more evidence of innocence has come in since the trial, including witness recantations, another man (Arnold Beverly) who confessed, and photos of the crime scene that show that police lied. Yet very little of this has ever been heard in court, and none of it has been used to throw out this blatantly obvious frame-up.
"Innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" is perhaps the most fundamental of all legal precedents, predating the US legal system itself. The whim of the feudal lord to execute whom he pleased, has (supposedly) been replaced in bourgeois society by the rule of law. And if the state has failed to really prove guilt or has ignored new evidence of innocence, but is still holding the prisoner, there is the ancient precedent of habeas corpus, under which the state must explain why it is still holding the person.
"Innocence Is No Defense"!
But in the US, where the term "lynch-law" entered the language, and where the legal system is based largely on the law of the slave-holders, both of these fundamental principles have been thoroughly undermined. In the Supreme Court's Herrera v Collins decision, and in the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (ATEDPA) signed by Democratic President Bill Clinton, US legal precedent makes it nearly impossible to overturn a fraudulent conviction on appeal. The "facts" of the case as established in state courts must now be accepted in federal appeals courts regardless of merit, and the "timeliness" of appeal filings must be observed, thus gutting the right of habeas corpus. For US courts, if you're outside these narrow boundaries, and especially if you're targeted as an enemy of the state the way Mumia is, innocence is no defense!
A small handful of innocents on death row have been released for factors such as false confessions, police corruption of witnesses, ineffective assistance of counsel, or the confession of someone else to the crime. And more recently, DNA evidence has provided relief to some frame-up victims, although even this can be distorted by police, or studiously overlooked by the courts (see the Kevin Cooper case for instance. www.savekevincooper.org). In one state out of 50 (Illinois), death sentences were systematically tossed when half of death row inmates were found to be innocent. The death penalty is losing favor in the polls as more and more people become aware of its inherent brutality, and the fact that innocent people have been executed (Camron Todd Willingham in Texas is a recent example). But the Supreme Court is still breaking precedent to set up an innocent man, Mumia Abu-Jamal, for execution, as well as to reinforce the death penalty in general. Why?
The case of Mumia Abu-Jamal shows that the much-heralded "rule of law" in this so-called democracy is a fraud from beginning to end. For nearly half a century, Mumia has been hounded by the state's forces of "law and order." First targeted when he was 15 under the FBI's counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO) for his political work as an activist exposing police racism and brutality, Mumia was framed on the spot in December of 1981 for killing a police officer who was probably talking to the Justice Department about the corruption of inner-city cops in his district. A man named Arnold Beverly later confessed that he was hired by corrupt cops to kill the officer, Daniel Faulkner, because Faulkner had been "interfering" with police pay-offs in downtown Philadelphia. Despite a federal prosecution aimed against police corruption, and despite the fact that it was some of the same corrupt cops who framed Mumia for the killing, the Justice Department never lifted a finger to save Mumia.
It's the System That's Guilty, Not Mumia Abu-Jamal
The twists and turns of the criminal justice system show beyond a reasonable doubt: it's the system that's guilty, not Mumia Abu-Jamal. Since his horrendously unfair trial before a racist judge (who was overheard to say privately that he was going to "help fry the n____r"), Mumia has been relentlessly pursued by a drum-beat campaign to execute him, spearheaded by the Fraternal Order of Police, many of whom are complicit in his frame-up, and possibly also in the Faulkner killing itself!
But this conspiracy of "legal" murder doesn't stop with the cops; it reaches all the way up the political ladder to the very top, where it continues unabated today. This includes Congress, which, under prompting from the FOP, pressured National Public Radio (NPR) to cancel a planned series of broadcasts by Mumia called "Live From Death Row" in 1994. Twelve years later, again under FOP pressure, Congress took the extraordinary step of condemning a city in France for naming a street after Mumia. By a vote of 368 to 31, Congress, including many prominent Democrats in the majority, demanded a reversal of the street-naming, defended all police world-wide, and declared Mumia a murderer.
Democratic and Republican officials in Pennsylvania are up to their eyeballs with the frame-up of Mumia, the cover-up, and the conspiracy to execute this innocent man. Since Mumia's trial, every candidate for Philadelphia district attorney has sworn to pursue death for Mumia, including Seth Williams, the current DA and the first black man to hold the office. Officials under then-Governor Tom Ridge, later named chief of Homeland Security by George W Bush, conducted a highly illegal surveillance (opening and reading) of Mumia's mail from his lawyer in 1995, in which they learned of an appeal Mumia's lawyers were planning. This information allowed Ridge, who had pledged to execute Jamal in his election campaign the year before, to try to sabotage the defense by preemptively signing a death warrant against Mumia just before the appeal filing. This trumped up deadline allowed the presiding judge--who was the same racist, Albert Sabo, that presided over the original trial--to ramrod and rig the proceedings.
Obama's Political Bandwagon of Death For Mumia
The Democratic Party establishment, both in Pennsylvania and nationally, is committed to the same "legal" murder of Mumia. The current governor, Ed Rendell, who was district attorney at the time of Mumia's trial and oversaw the frame-up, is on board with this on-going conspiracy. He was central to Obama's carrying of Pennsylvania in the 2008 election. For its part, the Fraternal Order of Police wasn't taking any chances with presidential candidates. The FOP interviewed both Obama and McCain, and included a question about Mumia, referring to the street-naming by the Paris suburb of St. Denis, France. "I deplore acts to harm or kill our nation's police officers," replied Obama, "and oppose efforts to glorify those who commit such acts."
Not to be left out, certain media pundits have weighed in against Mumia, helping those in the ruling circles to be sure about where their loyalties needed to be. Right wing Philadelphia talk show host Michael Smerconish, the co-author (with Faulkner's wife) of a lying diatribe called "Murdered By Mumia" (Lyons Press 2008), also weighed in with an interview of Obama during the campaign. When Smerconish asked him about Mumia, Obama said he didn't know much about the case, but added, "if somebody killed a police officer, they deserve the death penalty, or life in prison." On this basis, the Republican Smerconish backed Obama in the campaign, which helped to put Obama over the top in Pennsylvania.
Smerconish & Co. are starting to break through internationally as well. Mumia Abu-Jamal has long had a strong following around the world, where in most countries, the particular loyalties of the US ruling class to its police force don't apply. Support for Mumia has come from the European Parliament, Amnesty International, the city of Paris (which gave Mumia an honorary citizenship), and luminaries such as Nelson Mandela. Mumia supporters are particularly strong in France and Germany. But the FOP, and pundits such as Smerconish, have recently scored with an anti-Mumia hit piece based largely on the lies in "Murdered By Mumia," in der Spiegel, a major German weekly.
Eric Holder... and the Fraternal Order of Police
Although it supported McCain in the election, the Fraternal Order of Police backed the nomination of Eric Holder for attorney general. Holder subsequently spoke to an FOP "memorial" gathering, where he threatened "all those out there who would do harm to police officers... We are coming to get you," he continued, "you will be arrested, you will be prosecuted, and you will be sentenced to the full extent of the law." This ominous warning made the intentions of the Obama administration clear. As it took office at the head of the world's preeminent imperialist power, the new administration reassured the US ruling circles that despite being the first black president, Obama was not about to change 40 years of murderous wrongs committed against revolutionary activists such as the Black Panthers, and spokesmen such as Mumia Abu-Jamal.
In a commentary in August of 2008, anticipating the possible election of the first black president of the US, Mumia related the impending Obama victory to the experience with Carl Stokes, who was elected mayor of Cleveland in 1967. As a harbinger of "the emergence of black political power in major American cities," Stokes' election prompted many Blacks to see "the beginning of an age of freedom for our people," said Mumia. However, "From the 1960s to now, we most certainly have been disabused of that notion," he continued. Among other disappointments, Stokes hired a former US Army lieutenant general as "a kind of super police chief." This Vietnam-war honcho ordered 30,000 rounds of illegal hollow point bullets to go after the Cleveland Black Panther Party, and one of its support organizations.
"Black Faces In High Places Does Not Freedom Make"
"Just because [Stokes] was a Black mayor," said Mumia, "didn't mean he wasn't dedicated to destroying a Black organization. Indeed, in times of Black uprising and mass discontent, Black mayors seem the perfect instrument of repression, for they dispel charges of racism... But Black faces in high places," concluded Mumia, "does not freedom make." ("The Perils of Black Political Power," Aug 6th 2008).
We should also remember the experience with Wilson Goode, a black Democratic mayor of Philadelphia, who presided over the firebombing of the home of MOVE, the black community group which Mumia supports, in 1985. In "The Perils of Black Political Power," Mumia touched on a central truth: power in a society ruled by an economic elite, though racist to its core, will not be altered by replacing a few white individuals with black ones, even at the very top of the power structure.
Only by seeing the true nature of the enemy can we move forward. Mumia's case shows conclusively that a ruling-class power structure, not "the law," is pulling the strings. It's true that Mumia is up against a very big obstacle indeed: the system has targeted him as one of its highest profile enemies. In this, Mumia shares the stage with Leonard Peltier, an innocent activist with the American Indian Movement, who remains jailed for life because of a well-organized FBI vendetta against him. (He also shares this stage with earlier victims of the system such as Sacco and Vanzetti--frame-up victims of the "red scare" of the 1920's.) In his last day in office, President Bill Clinton refused to pardon Leonard Peltier after armed FBI agents mobilized in the streets in New York to oppose it. And it was the FBI's COINTELPRO program that led to the police killings of 38 Black Panthers in virtually scripted shoot-outs!
"Justice" System v Class Struggle
While we support pursuing all available legal avenues to defend Mumia in court, and we support and urge that donations be made to Mumia's legal defense fund, we find that there is no point in petitioning corrupt authorities such as Obama and the US Justice Department to correct wrongs which they themselves are either responsible for, or firmly committed to. Pleading with such a system to have a change of heart can only sow illusions, and undermine Mumia's defense. The petitions demand nothing, they only ask for an internal review of the system, by the system. These criminals--and they are criminals--are not about to turn around now and say, "Oops, sorry, we violated civil rights." They are committed to their side, and so should we be to ours.
In its effort to try to free Mumia, the Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal (LAC) recognized "that relief for Mumia cannot be expected from the biased and racist so-called 'justice' system in this country;" and we dedicated ourselves to, "educating workers about Jamal's case, and to promoting a class-struggle movement, including strikes and other job actions wherever possible, to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!" (LAC founding statement, January 1999). Several workers actions have taken place since that statement was made, including a West Coast port shutdown to free Mumia, conducted by longshore workers in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in April 1999. Oakland teachers conducted an unauthorized teach-in on Mumia and the death penalty, also in 1999; and Brazilian teachers in Rio de Janeiro have conducted many work actions to free Mumia, from 1999 through to 2008.
"An Injury To One Is An Injury To All! Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!"
We have no quarrel with the millions of well-meaning individuals around the world who have already signed the two petitions (one to the US Justice Department under Holder, and another to Obama). The problem is rather one of leadership. Rather than working within a power structure that's dead set against us, let's ask how Mumia supporters can be mobilized to take positive action aimed against the system that's trying to kill Mumia. Labor and minorities share a common history of being victimized by the criminal justice system in this country, and both have long been aware of police repression and the unequal use of the death penalty against minorities and the poor.
When longshore workers shut down West Coast ports and marched through San Francisco streets in 1999, they chanted, "An injury to one is an injury to all! Free Mumia Abu-Jamal," thereby uniting the black freedom struggle and the workers movement in one powerful action. We know that if freedom is to be won for Mumia, a massive movement of working people must be mobilized. The system that victimizes innocent revolutionaries like Mumia is the same system that threatens all of us with police brutality, as well as oppression, exploitation and financial meltdown. This system can be brought to a halt through mass actions that mobilize the power of labor. But we must start out in that direction. Educate, agitate, organize and demonstrate. Build workers actions to free Mumia!
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2) The Making of a Euromess
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
February 15, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/opinion/15krugman.html
Lately, financial news has been dominated by reports from Greece and other nations on the European periphery. And rightly so.
But I've been troubled by reporting that focuses almost exclusively on European debts and deficits, conveying the impression that it's all about government profligacy - and feeding into the narrative of our own deficit hawks, who want to slash spending even in the face of mass unemployment, and hold Greece up as an object lesson of what will happen if we don't.
For the truth is that lack of fiscal discipline isn't the whole, or even the main, source of Europe's troubles - not even in Greece, whose government was indeed irresponsible (and hid its irresponsibility with creative accounting).
No, the real story behind the euromess lies not in the profligacy of politicians but in the arrogance of elites - specifically, the policy elites who pushed Europe into adopting a single currency well before the continent was ready for such an experiment.
Consider the case of Spain, which on the eve of the crisis appeared to be a model fiscal citizen. Its debts were low - 43 percent of G.D.P. in 2007, compared with 66 percent in Germany. It was running budget surpluses. And it had exemplary bank regulation.
But with its warm weather and beaches, Spain was also the Florida of Europe - and like Florida, it experienced a huge housing boom. The financing for this boom came largely from outside the country: there were giant inflows of capital from the rest of Europe, Germany in particular.
The result was rapid growth combined with significant inflation: between 2000 and 2008, the prices of goods and services produced in Spain rose by 35 percent, compared with a rise of only 10 percent in Germany. Thanks to rising costs, Spanish exports became increasingly uncompetitive, but job growth stayed strong thanks to the housing boom.
Then the bubble burst. Spanish unemployment soared, and the budget went into deep deficit. But the flood of red ink - which was caused partly by the way the slump depressed revenues and partly by emergency spending to limit the slump's human costs - was a result, not a cause, of Spain's problems.
And there's not much that Spain's government can do to make things better. The nation's core economic problem is that costs and prices have gotten out of line with those in the rest of Europe. If Spain still had its old currency, the peseta, it could remedy that problem quickly through devaluation - by, say, reducing the value of a peseta by 20 percent against other European currencies. But Spain no longer has its own money, which means that it can regain competitiveness only through a slow, grinding process of deflation.
Now, if Spain were an American state rather than a European country, things wouldn't be so bad. For one thing, costs and prices wouldn't have gotten so far out of line: Florida, which among other things was freely able to attract workers from other states and keep labor costs down, never experienced anything like Spain's relative inflation. For another, Spain would be receiving a lot of automatic support in the crisis: Florida's housing boom has gone bust, but Washington keeps sending the Social Security and Medicare checks.
But Spain isn't an American state, and as a result it's in deep trouble. Greece, of course, is in even deeper trouble, because the Greeks, unlike the Spaniards, actually were fiscally irresponsible. Greece, however, has a small economy, whose troubles matter mainly because they're spilling over to much bigger economies, like Spain's. So the inflexibility of the euro, not deficit spending, lies at the heart of the crisis.
None of this should come as a big surprise. Long before the euro came into being, economists warned that Europe wasn't ready for a single currency. But these warnings were ignored, and the crisis came.
Now what? A breakup of the euro is very nearly unthinkable, as a sheer matter of practicality. As Berkeley's Barry Eichengreen puts it, an attempt to reintroduce a national currency would trigger "the mother of all financial crises." So the only way out is forward: to make the euro work, Europe needs to move much further toward political union, so that European nations start to function more like American states.
But that's not going to happen anytime soon. What we'll probably see over the next few years is a painful process of muddling through: bailouts accompanied by demands for savage austerity, all against a background of very high unemployment, perpetuated by the grinding deflation I already mentioned.
It's an ugly picture. But it's important to understand the nature of Europe's fatal flaw. Yes, some governments were irresponsible; but the fundamental problem was hubris, the arrogant belief that Europe could make a single currency work despite strong reasons to believe that it wasn't ready.
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3) Seven Paragraphs
Editorial
February 15, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/opinion/15mon1.html
There are times when governments fight to keep documents secret to protect sensitive intelligence or other vital national security interests. And there are times when they are just trying to cover up incompetence, misbehavior or lawbreaking.
Last week, when a British court released secret intelligence material relating to the torture allegations of a former Guantánamo prisoner, Binyam Mohamed, it was clear that the second motive had been in play when both the Bush and the Obama administrations and some high-ranking British officials tried to prevent the disclosure.
Mr. Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born British resident, is a victim of President George W. Bush's extraordinary rendition program, under which foreigners were kidnapped and flown to other countries for interrogation and torture. He was subjected to physical and psychological abuse in Pakistan, Morocco and a C.I.A.-run prison outside Kabul before being sent to Guantánamo. His seven-year ordeal ended when he was freed last February.
At issue in the British court were seven paragraphs derived from American intelligence documents. The Bush administration claimed the material contained top-secret information and threatened to cut off intelligence sharing with Britain if it was released. Last year, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton repeated those threats, despite President Obama's campaign promises of openness and the rule of law in his detainee policy.
The paragraphs contained no real secrets. Mainly, the document - a summary of information that American intelligence provided to Britain's security service, MI5 - echoes previous disclosures by the C.I.A. and Mr. Mohamed's harrowing account of his ordeal.
But what it does contain is the assessment by British intelligence that his treatment violated legal prohibitions against torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners.
A spokesman for President Obama expressed "deep disappointment" in the court's decision, which might have been shocking except that Mr. Obama has refused to support any real investigation of Mr. Bush's lawless detention policies. His lawyers have tried to shut down court cases filed by victims of those policies, with the same extravagant claims of state secrets and executive power that Mr. Bush made.
The full Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is weighing the Justice Department's attempt to shut down a civil lawsuit brought by Mr. Mohamed and four others - on a flimsy national security claim that has been rendered even flimsier by the British court.
Then there is the case of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was seized at Kennedy Airport by federal agents acting on bad information. After being harshly interrogated, he was sent to Syria, where he was tortured. In November, Mr. Arar's civil suit was dismissed by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which essentially bought the Bush administration's bogus national security claims, extended under Mr. Obama. Mr. Arar has appealed to the Supreme Court. Rather than fight, the Obama administration should offer an apology and a monetary settlement like Canada did three years ago.
It has always been true that a real accounting of the Bush administration's abuses is vital if Mr. Obama truly wants to repair them and try to prevent them from recurring. It is more important than ever now, when the Republican right is trying hard to turn the clock back to those dark times by painting Democrats as "soft on terror" during an election year.
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4) An Officer Shoots, a 73-Year-Old Dies, and Schisms Return
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
Homer Journal
February 15, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/us/15homer.html
HOMER, La. - For the past year, many residents of this tiny town in the northern Louisiana hill country have waited in anger.
They have waited ever since last Feb. 20, when Bernard Monroe, a 73-year-old black man left mute from throat cancer, was shot to death in his front yard by a white police officer who claimed, contrary to other witnesses, that Mr. Monroe had a pistol. They waited as the state police finished its investigation, as the case was passed on to the state attorney general and as a grand jury deliberated on a list of charges, including murder, manslaughter and negligent homicide.
And on Feb. 4, after two days of testimony, the jury delivered its decision: no indictment.
The outcome jarred a town of 3,400 that, like so many small Southern towns, has been struggling to move past a heritage of racial mistrust. Even among disillusioned black residents, it seemed like a throwback to uglier times.
"Nobody felt like he was going to get jail time," said Faye Williams, 55, discussing the decision with others at Laketha's Salon downtown and referring to the officer. "But we thought there'd be at least a trial or something. It just ain't right."
Last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a wrongful death lawsuit on behalf of Mr. Monroe's family against the town and two former police officers, arguing that they had failed "to exercise reasonable care" and "created a volatile situation" in the series of events that led up to the shooting.
Jim Colvin, the town attorney, said he had just received the lawsuit and did not know enough about it to respond to its accusations.
The shooting happened on a Friday afternoon. Mr. Monroe had been sitting in a folding chair on the edge of his yard, amid more than a dozen friends and relatives. Two Homer police officers, Tim Cox and Joseph Henry, pulled up in separate cars and began making small talk, several witnesses said.
Shaun Monroe, Mr. Monroe's son, who had been sitting in his truck in the street, pulled into the driveway. The younger Mr. Monroe, 38, has a criminal record, including charges in 1994 of firearms possession and assaulting a police officer, his last felony charges.
But there was no warrant for his arrest that Friday. Kurt Wall, the assistant attorney general who presented the evidence in the case to the grand jury, said the officers had been told that if they ever saw Shaun Monroe with a black bag, which they say they did, it probably contained drugs.
No other witnesses saw such a bag that day. But when Officer Henry called his name, Shaun Monroe darted behind the house, went back around the front and ran inside. Officer Cox followed and chased him through the house, a chase that, the lawsuit argues, was "without just cause" or legal justification.
Shaun Monroe burst out of the front door and was at the front gate when Officer Henry, who was in the yard, hit him with a Taser. Seconds later, Officer Cox reached the front screen door from the inside, witnesses said, as the elder Mr. Monroe was walking up the steps to the porch.
Officer Cox told investigators that the elder Mr. Monroe had picked up a pistol he kept on the porch and was aiming it at Officer Henry. All of the civilian witnesses say Mr. Monroe was carrying only a sports drink bottle.
But this is not in dispute: Mr. Cox shot Mr. Monroe seven times in the chest, side and back. Several witnesses said they saw a police officer later place the pistol next to Mr. Monroe's body, but the police officers said that was because it had been moved when they were checking his wounds.
Much of the town, which is nearly two-thirds black, went into an uproar. In April, the Rev. Al Sharpton led a rally in Homer. In July, the two officers, who had been on leave, resigned and left town.
The state police produced a report in August, and, after reviewing it for several months, the district attorney passed it on to the state attorney general. A local prosecution presented a conflict, he said, as the two officers were witnesses in other parish cases.
The grand jury consisted of eight whites and four blacks, all from Homer and the surrounding area. Mr. Wall said that more than 20 witnesses testified, civilians as well as law enforcement officers.
"We just put everybody on and let them say whatever they had to say or observe and let the jury make their determination," he said. "We felt it was a very thorough and accurate presentation."
Many in the town, including some whites, are skeptical. They point out, for instance, that the forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy was never called to testify about the nature of Mr. Monroe's wounds.
"No one knows more about the way Mr. Monroe died than I do," said Frank Peretti, the Little Rock-based pathologist, who was surprised to learn about the grand jury's decision in the news. (Mr. Wall said his presence had not been necessary, as the parish coroner testified and had the autopsy report.)
Others see the case as closed.
"I just wish the black community could get beyond this," said Toney Johnson, 61, one of two whites on the five-person town council. "The law has done its job, in my opinion."
Mr. Johnson, who pointed out that Homer elected a black mayor several years ago with significant white support, said the council had become polarized along racial lines since the shooting. He says that Officer Cox was only doing what many residents in the poor, mostly black parts of town had requested - getting tough on the drug problem.
"It's very tragic that this happened, but it happens," he said.
The elected chief of police, Russell Mills, who is white, said he was advised by the town lawyer not to comment. He drew criticism shortly after the shooting for a statement he made to The Chicago Tribune that seemed to advocate racial profiling.
In a letter clarifying that statement in The Guardian-Journal of Claiborne Parish, Mr. Mills wrote that residents of high-crime neighborhoods had urged him to do something about numerous shootings, so he had developed a policy of "preventative policing," in which officers stop groups of young people walking in these neighborhoods, ask for identification "and possibly pat them down."
That approach, also used by some big-city police departments, is all too familiar to black residents here, many of whom call it harassment.
Though Homer has come far from the intense racial friction of the 1960s, a sense of mistrust has lingered, both white and black residents say. And though even some whites in town are privately troubled by the grand jury's decision, many black residents have come away with bitter resignation.
"If it was a black man killing a white man, he'd be in jail, no question," said Shavontae Ball, 20, whose sisters saw the shooting. "It's like my grandmother said: 'Ain't nothing ever change in Homer.' "
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5) Talk to Hamas
As Israeli soldiers we hang our heads in shame over last year's attack on Gaza's civilian population. Dialogue, not war, is needed
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/15/hamas-gaza-israel-palestinians
The Israeli media marked the one-year anniversary of Operation Cast Lead, the war on Gaza, almost as a celebration. The operation is recognised almost unanimously in Israel as a military triumph, a combat victory over one of Israel's deadliest enemies: Hamas.
As combat soldiers of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), we have serious doubts about this conclusion, primarily because hardly any combat against Hamas took place during the operation. As soon as the operation started, Hamas went underground.
Most casualties were inflicted on Palestinians by air strikes, artillery fire, and snipers from afar. Combat victory? Shooting fish in a barrel is more like it. Operation Cast Lead consisted essentially of bombing one of the most crowded places on earth, striking civilian targets such as homes, schools and mosques, and ultimately leaving a trail of more than 1,300 casualties, mostly civilians, over 300 of whom were children. As soldiers of the IDF reserves, we bow our heads in shame against this hideous attack on a civilian population.
As for the goals of the operation, these too are questionable. Allegedly, operation Cast Lead was intended to stop the firing of missiles by Hamas. But the Qassam missile problem had been solved before the operation started. The ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel in place from 19 June 2008 had resulted in a drastic reduction of missiles fired from Gaza from a few hundreds per month to about a dozen for a period of five months. It was Israel that never lived up to its end of the bargain to end the siege of Gaza, breached the ceasefire in November 2008 by attacking targets in the Strip, essentially ignored Hamas's proposal to renew the ceasefire, and eventually began operation Cast Lead a few weeks later.
The true goal of this operation was different from the one announced by Israeli officials. The real objective was not to stop the Qassams but to overthrow the Hamas government. As such, the operation failed. Hamas in Gaza is stronger than ever.
A year after this brutal war, a change of strategy is needed. Israel should commence immediate talks with Hamas, negotiating not only a ceasefire but also the "core issues" to be part of an end-of-conflict agreement. An open dialogue with Hamas is clearly in Israel's interest.
First, because Hamas was democratically elected in Gaza and has won the trust and respect of a significant part of the Palestinian people, anyone hoping to resolve this conflict will eventually need to bargain with the group.
Second, Hamas has proven capable of delivering peace and quiet to the citizens of southern Israel. As demonstrated before, Hamas has a strong hold on all organisations acting in Gaza and can enforce a truce.
Third, a prisoner exchange deal is our only chance to bring back the abducted IDF soldier, Gilad Shalit. In return, Israel will release hundreds of Hamas prisoners, out of the 8,000 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails. Such a deal can have a pacifying influence on public opinion both in Israel and in Palestine and can be an important step towards reconciliation between the two peoples.
Hamas is currently Israel's enemy, but peace is made with enemies, not with friends. Hamas is also a powerful, pragmatic and well organised movement, possibly a future partner with whom Israel can "cut a deal". A reluctance to recognise Hamas as the party in charge in Gaza is a strategy that failed and needs to be replaced. A nation that is truly looking for peace cannot afford to ignore its partners.
• Arik Diamant and David Zonsheine are the founders of Courage to Refuse, a movement of Israeli reserve soldiers who refuse to serve in the occupied territories. In November 2009 they launched an initiative calling Israel to open a dialogue with Hamas.
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6) The Economic Elite Have Engineered an Extraordinary Coup, Threatening the Very Existence of the Middle Class
By David DeGraw, Amped Status
Posted on February 15, 2010, Printed on February 15, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145667/
"The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight." -- Michael Lind, To Have and to Have Not
We all have very strong differences of opinion on many issues. However, like our founding fathers before us, we must put aside our differences and unite to fight a common enemy.
It has now become evident to a critical mass that the Republican and Democratic parties, along with all three branches of our government, have been bought off by a well-organized Economic Elite who are tactically destroying our way of life. The harsh truth is that 99 percent of the U.S. population no longer has political representation. The U.S. economy, government and tax system is now blatantly rigged against us.
Current statistical societal indicators clearly demonstrate that a strategic attack has been launched and an analysis of current governmental policies prove that conditions for 99 percent of Americans will continue to deteriorate. The Economic Elite have engineered a financial coup and have brought war to our doorstep...and make no mistake, they have launched a war to eliminate the U.S. middle class.
To those who feel I am using extreme rhetoric, I ask you to please take a few minutes of your time to hear me out and research the evidence put forth. The facts are there for the unprejudiced, rational and reasoned mind to absorb. It is the unfortunate reality of our current crisis.
Unless we all unite and organize on common ground, our very way of life and the ideals that our country was founded upon will continue to unravel.
Before exposing exactly who the Economic Elite are, and discussing common sense ways in which we can defeat them, let's take a look at how much damage they have already caused.
Buy the Book: The Economic Elite Vs. The People of the United States of America
Casualties of Economic Terrorism, Surveying the Damage
The devastating numbers across-the-board on the economic front are staggering. I'll go through some of them here, many we have already become all too familiar with. We hear some of these numbers all the time, so much so that it appears as if we have already begun "to normalize the unthinkable." You may be sick of hearing them, but behind each number is an enormous amount of individual suffering, American lives and families who are struggling worse than they ever have.
America is the richest nation in history, yet we now have the highest poverty rate in the industrialized world with an unprecedented amount of Americans living in dire straights and over 50 million citizens already living in poverty.
The government has come up with clever ways to downplay all of these numbers, but we have over 50 million people who need to use food stamps to eat, and a stunning 50 percent of U.S. children will use food stamps to eat at some point in their childhoods. Approximately 20,000 people are added to this total every day. In 2009, one out of five U.S. households didn't have enough money to buy food. In households with children, this number rose to 24 percent, as the hunger rate among U.S. citizens has now reached an all-time high.
We also currently have over 50 million U.S. citizens without health care. 1.4 million Americans filed for bankruptcy in 2009, a 32 percent increase from 2008. As bankruptcies continue to skyrocket, medical bankruptcies are responsible for over 60 percent of them, and over 75 percent of the medical bankruptcies filed are from people who have health care insurance. We have the most expensive health care system in the world, we are forced to pay twice as much as other countries and the overall care we get in return ranks 37th in the world.
In total, Americans have lost $5 trillion from their pensions and savings since the economic crisis began and $13 trillion in the value of their homes. During the first full year of the crisis, workers between the age of 55 - 60, who have worked for 20 - 29 years, have lost an average of 25 percent off their 401k. "Personal debt has risen from 65 percent of income in 1980 to 125 percent today." Over five million U.S. families have already lost their homes, in total 13 million U.S. families are expected to lose their home by 2014, with 25 percent of current mortgages underwater. Deutsche Bank has an even grimmer prediction: "The percentage of 'underwater' loans may rise to 48 percent, or 25 million homes." Every day 10,000 U.S. homes enter foreclosure. Statistics show that an increasing number of these people are not finding shelter elsewhere, there are now over 3 million homeless Americans, the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population is single parents with children.
One place more and more Americans are finding a home is in prison. With a prison population of 2.3 million people, we now have more people incarcerated than any other nation in the world -- the per capita statistics are 700 per 100,000 citizens. In comparison, China has 110 per 100,000, France has 80 per 100,000, Saudi Arabia has 45 per 100,000. The prison industry is thriving and expecting major growth over the next few years. A recent report from the Hartford Advocate titled "Incarceration Nation" revealed that "a new prison opens every week somewhere in America."
Mass Unemployment
The government unemployment rate is deceptive on several levels. It doesn't count people who are "involuntary part-time workers," meaning workers who are working part-time but want to find full-time work. It also doesn't count "discouraged workers," meaning long-term unemployed people who have lost hope and don't consistently look for work. As time goes by, more and more people stop consistently looking for work and are discounted from the unemployment figure. For instance, in January, 1.1 million workers were eliminated from the unemployment total because they were "officially" labeled discouraged workers. So instead of the number rising, we will hear deceptive reports about unemployment leveling off.
On top of this, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently discovered that 824,000 job losses were never accounted for due to a "modeling error" in their data. Even in their initial January data there appears to be a huge understating, with the newest report saying the economy lost 20,000 jobs. TrimTabs employment analysis, which has consistently provided more accurate data, "estimated that the U.S. economy shed 104,000 jobs in January."
When you factor in all these uncounted workers -- "involuntary part-time" and "discouraged workers" -- the unemployment rate rises from 9.7 percent to over 20 percent. In total, we now have over 30 million U.S. citizens who are unemployed or underemployed. The rarely cited "employment-participation" rate, which reveals the percentage of the population that is currently in the workforce, has now fallen to 64 percent.
Even based on the "official" unemployment rate, just to get back to the unemployment level of 4.6 percent that we had in 2007, we need to create over 10 million new jobs, and most every serious economist will tell you that these jobs are not coming back. In fact, we are still consistently shedding jobs, on just one day, January 27, several companies announced new cuts of more than 60,000 jobs.
Due to the length of this crisis already, millions of Americans are reaching a point where the unemployment benefits they have been living on are coming to an end. More workers have already been out of work longer than at any point since statistics have been recorded, with over six million now unemployed for over six months. A record 20 million Americans qualified for unemployment insurance benefits last year, causing 27 states to run out of funds, with seven more also expected to go into the red within the next few months. In total, 40 state programs are expected to go broke.
Most economists believe the unemployment rate will remain high for the foreseeable future. What will happen when we have millions of laid-off workers without any unemployment benefits to save them?
Working More for Less
The millions struggling to find work are just part of the story. Due to the fact that we now have a record high six people for every one job opening, companies have been able to further increase the workload on their remaining employees. They have been able to increase the amount of hours Americans are working, reduce wages and drastically cut back on benefits. Even though Americans were already the most productive workers in the world before the economic crisis, in the third quarter of 2009, average worker productivity increased by an annualized rate of 9.5 percent, at the same time unit labor cost decreased by 5.2 percent. This has led to record profits for many companies. Of the 220 companies in the S&P 500 who have reported fourth-quarter results thus far, 78 percent of them had "better-than-expected profits" with earnings 17 percent above expectations, "the highest for any quarter since Thomson Reuters began tracking data."
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national median wage was only $32,390 per year in 2008, and median household income fell by 3.6 percent while the unemployment rate was 5.8 percent. With the unemployment rate now at 10 percent, median income has been falling at a 5 percent rate and is expected to continue its decline. Not surprisingly, Americans' job satisfaction level is now at an all-time low.
There are also a growing number of employed people who, despite having a job, are still living in poverty. There are at least 15 million workers who now fall into this rapidly growing category. $32,390 a year is not going to get you far in today's economy, and half of the country is making less than that. This is why many Americans are now forced to work two jobs to provide for their family to hopefully make ends meet.
A Crime Against Humanity
The mainstream news media will numb us to this horrifying reality by endlessly talking about the latest numbers, but they never piece them together to show you the whole devastating picture, and they rarely show you all the immense individual suffering behind them. This is how they "normalize the unthinkable" and make us become passive in the face of such a high causality count.
Behind each of these numbers, is a tremendous amount of misery; the physical toll is only outdone by the severe psychological toll. Anyone who has had to put off medical care, or who couldn't get medical care for one of their family members due to financial circumstances, can tell you about the psychological toll that is on top of the physical suffering. Anyone who has felt the stress of wondering how they were going to get their child's next meal or their own, or the stress of not knowing how they are going to pay the mortgage, rent, electricity or heat bill, let alone the car payment, gas, phone, cable or Internet bill.
There are now well over 150 million Americans who feel stress over these things on a consistent basis. Over 60 percent of Americans now live paycheck to paycheck.
These are all basic things every person should be able to easily afford in a technologically advanced society such as ours. The reason we struggle with these things is because the Economic Elite have robbed us all. This amount of suffering in the United States of America is literally a crime against humanity.
This is Part I of David DeGraw's report, "The Economic Elite vs. People of the USA. " AlterNet will run Part II in the coming days.
Read more of David DeGraw's work on Amped Status.
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7) What's Wrong With Us?
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
February 16, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/opinion/16herbert.html
Harrisburg, Pa.
Gov. Ed Rendell likes to tell a story that goes back to his days as mayor of Philadelphia.
As he recalled, the city had a long cold snap with about a month and a half of below-freezing temperatures. Then, abruptly, the mercury rose into the 60s, he said, "and 58 of our water mains broke, causing all sorts of havoc."
The pipes were old. Some were ancient. "My water people told me that some had been laid in the 19th century," said Mr. Rendell, "and they were laid shallow, without much protection. So with any radical changes in temperature, they were susceptible to breaking. We had a real emergency on our hands."
Infrastructure, that least sexy of issues, is not just a significant interest of Ed Rendell's; it's more like a consuming passion. He can talk about it energetically and enthusiastically for hours and days at a time. He has tried to stop the hemorrhaging of Pennsylvania's infrastructure, and he travels the country explaining how crucially important it is for the United States to rebuild a national infrastructure landscape that has deteriorated so badly that it is threatening the nation's economic viability.
Two years ago, a bridge inspector who had stopped for lunch in Philadelphia's Port Richmond neighborhood happened to glance up at a viaduct that carries Interstate 95 over the neighborhood. He noticed a 6-foot crack in a 15-foot column that was supporting the highway. His sandwich was quickly forgotten. Two miles of the highway had to be closed for three days for emergency repairs to prevent a catastrophe from occurring.
These kinds of problems are not peculiar to Pennsylvania. New Orleans was lost for want of an adequate system of levees and floodwalls. Lawrence Summers, President Obama's chief economic adviser, tells us that 75 percent of America's public schools have structural deficiencies. The nation's ports, inland waterways, drinking water and wastewater systems - you name it - are hurting to one degree or another.
Ignoring these problems imperils public safety, diminishes our economic competitiveness, is penny-wise and pound-foolish, and results in tremendous missed opportunities to create new jobs on a vast scale.
Competitors are leaving us behind when it comes to infrastructure investment. China is building a network of 42 high-speed rail lines, while the U.S. has yet to build its first. Other nations are well ahead of us in the deployment of broadband service and green energy technology. We spend scandalous amounts of time sitting in traffic jams or enduring the endless horrors of airline travel. Low-cost, high-speed Internet access is a science-fiction fantasy in many parts of the United States.
What's wrong with us?
We're so far behind in some areas that Governor Rendell has said that getting our infrastructure act together can feel like "sledding uphill."
"When I took over as governor," he said, "I was told that Pennsylvania led the nation in the number of structurally deficient or functionally obsolete bridges. We had more than 5,600 of them. So I put a ton of money into bridge repair. We more than tripled the amount in the capital budget, from $200 million a year to $700 million a year. And I got a special appropriation from the Legislature to do $200 million a year extra for the next four years."
The result? "Well, the good news is that we repaired a lot of bridges," said Mr. Rendell. "The bad news is that by the end of my sixth year, the end of 2008, the number of deficient or structurally obsolete bridges had gone from 5,600 to more than 6,000.
"The reason is that we lead the nation in bridges 75 years or older, and the recommended lifespan for a bridge is 40 years. So every time we fixed two, three would bump onto the list."
He said he hopes that by the end of this year the list will be pared to 4,300 bridges, which he described as "still way too high."
It's easy, especially in tough economic times, to push aside infrastructure initiatives, including basic maintenance and repair, in favor of issues that seem more pressing or more appealing. But this misses the point that infrastructure spending that is thoughtful and wise is an investment, a crucial investment in the nation's future - and it's a world-class source of high-value jobs.
The great danger right now is that we will do exactly the wrong thing, that we'll turn away from our screaming infrastructure needs and let the deterioration continue. With infrastructure costs so high (the needs are enormous and enormously expensive) and with the eyes in Washington increasingly focused on deficit reduction, the absolutely essential modernizing of the American infrastructure may not take place. That would be worse than foolish. It would be tragic.
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8) European Union Sets Deadline for Greece to Make Cuts
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 17, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/business/global/17euro.html?hp
BRUSSELS - European finance ministers gave the Greece government on Tuesday just a month to show it is making drastic budget cuts in a bid to calm markets and stop Athen's debt crisis from spreading to other countries.
The continent's top economy official also said he would investigate Greece's use of complex finance deals to mask debt in previous years.
Ministers from the 27-nation block said in a statement that Greece must show by March 16 that it is on track to cut its deficit by a hefty 4 percent of gross domestic product - from a staggering 12.7 percent of gross domestic product to 8.7 percent this year, and that it will bring it under a 3 percent limit by 2012.
Even as workers from his ministry struck joined a strike against the cuts back in Athens, the Greek finance minister George Papaconstantinou told reporters in Brussels that the country was already ahead of its deficit reduction goals. He said it even ran a January surplus thanks to a one-off tax on large companies.
European national leaders pledged last week to help Greece "if needed to safeguard the financial stability of the euro area as a whole" - but did not say how any bailout would work. Wednesday's statement from the finance ministers did not offer any detail either.
The Greek government says it was not asking for a bailout and would not need one.
The European Union economy commissioner, Olli Rehn, said the group "can help Greece to overcome these difficult times provided that Greece is prepared to help itself with difficult actions."
Euro-zone finance ministers said Monday that they want the Greek government to ready new spending cuts, increase sales and energy taxes and impose new levies on luxury goods, including cars if it cannot by mid-March show that it is making hefty deficit reductions.
Greece has promised it will take such extra measures if it has to in order to restore its credibility, shattered by news that it falsified statistics to make its deficit look smaller last year and that it used complex financial deals to massage figures dating back to 2001.
Mr. Rehn said he had told Greece "to provide information on market currency swaps and ... their impact on debt and deficit figures" by Friday.
"It is clear that a profound investigation must be done on this matter and I ensure that we conduct such an inquiry to see whether all the rules were respected," he said.
The Greek government, which is also promising to reform pensions and health care, is facing opposition at home to its current plan to freeze public sector pay, with Greek customs officials walking off the job Tuesday for a three-day strike which will hamper imports and exports.
The Associated Press
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9) New Questions Over Hamas Killing
By ROBERT F. WORTH
February 17, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/world/middleeast/17dubai.html?hp
BEIRUT, Lebanon - The murder was straight out of a cheap spy thriller. A team of at least 11 professional assassins, some wearing wigs and fake beards, tracked a senior Hamas official to his Dubai hotel in January and killed him with cold precision, fleeing the country afterwards on European passports, the Dubai police say.
But even as the Dubai authorities called for an international manhunt Tuesday, questions emerged about the identities of the suspects, deepening the mystery around the killing.
British and Irish officials said the suspected killers' passports - which were unveiled at a news conference Monday by the Dubai police along with their photographs and surveillance video footage - appeared to be fake, and in at least three cases appear to have been stolen from British citizens living in Israel.
"We believe that the passports used were fraudulent and have begun our own investigation," the Foreign Office in London said in a statement. Six of the 11 suspects identified by the Dubai police Monday are British and three are Irish. In Dublin, the Department of Foreign Affairs said it had been "unable to find any record of Irish passports having been issued with details corresponding to those published in Emirati newspapers," and added that "we have received no evidence that any Irish nationals were involved."
An Emirati official said the passports had been used repeatedly for several months before the killing, in Europe and Asia. He added that the hit team had included a total of 17 people, six of whom have not yet been identified. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.
In Israel, a British man named Melvyn Adam Mildner told Reuters that he had the same name as one of the suspects, but that he was a different person from the one whose photograph was provided by the Dubai police, and that he had his passport with him.
"I am obviously angry, upset, and scared - any number of things," Mr. Mildner was quoted as saying. "And I'm looking into what I can do to try to sort things out and clear my name."
Two other British men living in Israel, Steven Daniel Hodes -- who lives in the same town as Mr. Mildner -- and Paul John Kealey, also appear to have had their identities used by the suspects, according to reports on Israel's Channel Two News, which interviewed the men.Because the victim, Mahmoud al Mabhouh, was a senior Hamas official, many have suspected that Israel's intelligence service was behind his assassination. Hamas has accused Israel and vowed to take revenge.
The Dubai police chief, Dahi Khalfan al Tamim, did not accuse Israel, but said it was possible a foreign government had ordered its intelligence agency to carry out the killing.
Mr. Mabhouh played a role in the kidnapping and killing of two Israeli soldiers in 1989, and was involved in supplying Iranian weapons to Hamas.
Dubai is an open city, often used by intelligence officials for covert meetings. But Israel has also nurtured a quiet friendship with Dubai leaders.
"The Israeli diamond business is particularly dependent on Dubai to access fast-growing markets in the Gulf," said Jim Krane, the author of "City of Gold," a recent book about Dubai. "If Israel did authorize the hit, it either found Mabhouh's elimination worth the damage to its relationship with Dubai, or the hit squad made a big mistake."
Dubai officials suggested that the killers - whoever they were - did indeed practice some sloppy tradecraft. Although the assassination itself was carried out without attracting any notice, the suspects allowed themselves to be photographed repeatedly on surveillance cameras, sometimes ducking into bathrooms and emerging with fake beards but still recognizable, the Dubai police say.
One of the suspects, a woman identified as Gail Folliard, can be seen on surveillance footage wearing a wig, and at other times a big hat and sunglasses, apparently to blend in as a tourist. The suspects arrived in Dubai, flying from different countries, at the same time, and carefully tracked Mr. Mabhouh, according to the Dubai police account. Some even rode in the hotel elevator with the victim, following discreetly to make sure he entered his room.
A four-man team carried out the killing, which took only 10 minutes, by suffocating Mr. Mabhouh after entering his room with an electronic device, the Dubai police account said, andafterwards, the suspects all left Dubai on different airlines, traveling to various destinations in Europe and Asia.
Reporting was contributed by Ali Shouk in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Sarah Lyall in London, and Isabel Kershner in Jerusalem.
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10) France: Report Says Army Exposed Troops to Radiation
By SCOTT SAYARE
February 17, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/world/europe/17france.html?ref=world
PARIS - The French military deliberately exposed enlisted men to nuclear radiation in the Sahara Desert in 1961 in order to study resulting physical and psychological effects, according to a classified 1998 report published Tuesday by a French daily, Le Parisien.
While the exposure of French military personnel to nuclear radiation during weapons tests has been well documented, the 1998 report appears to represent the only concrete indication to date that military officials intentionally subjected soldiers to potentially dangerous conditions. The Defense Ministry commissioned the report in 1996, following the termination of France's nuclear testing program.
The Defense Ministry on Tuesday maintained that France had never knowingly placed individuals in harm's way.
"We do not use men as guinea pigs," said a spokeswoman, Stéphanie Prunier, adding that the ministry had publicly acknowledged in a 2007 report the "military exercises" conducted at Algerian testing sites.
France for decades rejected links between its nuclear testing programs and health problems amongst the military and civilian personnel involved in them, but the government last year announced the creation of a victims' compensation program. The program has drawn criticism from veterans, however, who call it too limited in scope.
The 1998 report was first obtained about a year ago by French Center for Documentation and Research on Peace and Conflicts, which waited for an opportune moment to release it, according to its president, Patrice Bouveret. That moment arrived with the debate over the compensation program.
The report details the atomic test known as Green Jerboa, the last of four French above-ground nuclear tests performed in the Algerian desert. The test, conducted on April 25, 1961, was accompanied by a series of "tactical experiments" involving some 300 army personnel, according to Le Parisien.
In the hours following the blast, at least one group was sent to within 275 meters of ground zero in order to "study attack possibilities in contaminated zones"; a corollary goal of the maneuvers was "to study the physiological and psychological effects produced on men by nuclear arms, in order to glean the elements necessary for the physical preparation and moral training of the modern combatant," according to the document.
"You have to place it in the context of cold war priorities," cautioned Dr. Bruno Tertrais, a senior research fellow at the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research and a former Defense Ministry adviser. "Ground maneuvers in a nuclear environment were conducted by most, if not all, nuclear capable countries."
"There was a widespread expectation," he continued, "that the soldier of the future would have to fight in a nuclear atmosphere."
According to the classified report published Tuesday, the "Green Jerboa" tests indicated that "special clothing would offer only relative protection" for infantry called to fight in a contaminated zone, and that "the time spent by units in such a zone would have to be reduced."
Veterans said the documents confirmed what they long believed.
"For me, this is not a revelation," said Alain Peyrot, a representative of the French Association of Veterans of Nuclear Tests, referring to the document published Tuesday. Mr. Peyrot, 64, served as a "decontaminator" in the French Navy during nuclear tests in the Sahara and French Polynesia in 1965 and 1966.
"We knew these things," he said, but in the military "it was obey and shut up."
France conducted 210 nuclear weapons tests in the Algerian Sahara and French Polynesia between 1960 and 1996. The Defense Ministry has estimated that a total 150,000 military personnel and civilians may have suffered adverse health consequences as a result.
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11) Officers Won't Face Federal Charges in Sean Bell Killing
By AL BAKER and JOHN ELIGON
February 16, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/nyregion/17bell.html?ref=nyregion
Citing insufficient evidence, federal authorities said Tuesday that they would not bring a civil rights case against the New York City police officers involved in the killing of Sean Bell, a 23-year-old black man who was shot by the police outside a strip club in Queens on his wedding day.
The decision by the Justice Department came after prosecutors and federal agents reviewed the case, in which five police officers fired 50 shots into the Nissan Altima that Mr. Bell was driving. The car struck a detective in the leg and hit a police van just before the officers began firing their weapons.
Mr. Bell was killed and two passengers, Trent Benefield and Joseph Guzman, were wounded. None of the men had guns, although the police officers apparently believed at least one did.
In their review, officials from the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, the United States attorney's office for the Eastern District of New York and the Federal Bureau of Investigation did not find enough evidence to prove that the officers had willfully acted to deny the men their constitutional rights, according to a statement from the Justice Department.
"Neither accident, mistake, fear, negligence, nor bad judgment is sufficient to establish a federal criminal civil rights violation," the statement said.
Any disciplinary action now lies with the Police Department, whose critics saw the shooting as an indictment of police training and the department's use of deadly force.
The department can now pursue an administrative review of the case and the officers involved. Seven officers, including four of the five who shot at the car, have been internally charged with breaking departmental rules.
Of the five who opened fire - Detectives Gescard F. Isnora, Michael Oliver, Marc Cooper and Paul Headley and Officer Michael Carey - all but Detective Headley remain on desk duty, with no gun and shield, said Paul J. Browne, the department's chief spokesman. Lt. Gary Napoli, the supervising officer that night, is also on desk duty, he said, facing internal charges of failing to supervise the operation.
Two other officers, Detective Robert Knapp and Sgt. Hugh McNeil of the Crime Scene Unit, were also charged internally, the detective with failing to thoroughly process the crime scene and the sergeant with failing to ensure that thorough processing was done.
If internal charges are substantiated, some of the officers could be fired. Mr. Browne said that the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, would not comment on the matter because "he is the final arbiter" of any punishment.
Detectives Isnora, Oliver and Cooper were acquitted by a Queens judge in April 2008 of criminal charges. The two other officers who opened fire were not charged criminally.
On Tuesday, federal officials met with Mr. Bell's family; his fiancée, Nicole Paultre Bell; and others to tell them of their decision. Later, many in the Bell family and their supporters expressed disappointment in a news conference at the headquarters of the Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network.
Ms. Paultre Bell said she hoped to get the attention of the White House. "There is a history of black men being killed by police officers, and something needs to be done," she said. "We're hoping to eventually meet with President Obama, and that he'll do something, because this is a national problem."
Michael Hardy, a lawyer for Ms. Paultre Bell and for Mr. Benefield and Mr. Guzman, read a statement from Mr. Sharpton, who has been a spokesman for the Bell family.
Using a cane and wearing a boot on his right foot, Mr. Guzman called Mr. Bell "the people's champ" and asserted that police violence was disproportionately affecting urban communities and black and Latino men.
Lawyers for the officers involved expressed support for the government's position.
Paul P. Martin, a lawyer for Detective Cooper, said he was not surprised by it. "There's no basis for them to bring a federal proceeding," Mr. Martin said.
Anthony L. Ricco, the lawyer for Detective Isnora, who was struck by Mr. Bell's car and who fired the first shot, said he spoke with his client, who was "very relieved."
The lawyer added that Detective Isnora was hopeful he would be cleared of internal charges and that he hoped to attend law school.
Detective Oliver, who fired 31 shots, was told of the decision by his lawyer, James J. Culleton. "I called him, and he was very relieved and very happy," Mr. Culleton said. "It took a long time for this decision to come down."
Michael J. Palladino, the president of the Detectives Endowment Association, said he was "gratified" with the government's decision.
Mr. Benefield, Mr. Guzman and the family of Mr. Bell still intend to move ahead with a civil lawsuit. Mr. Sharpton said he hoped that a civil case, as well as possible departmental charges, would "bring some justice" to Mr. Bell's family and his wounded friends.
Stacey Solie contributed reporting.
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12) Detainee Abuse Conviction Under Review
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Washington
February 17, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/us/17brfs-DETAINEEABUS_BRF.html?ref=us
The military's highest court said Tuesday that it would review the conviction of an Army reservist who prosecutors said was the ringleader of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The soldier, Pvt. Charles A. Graner Jr., was sentenced in 2005 to 10 years in prison for his role in the scandal. The United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces said it would consider whether the trial judge erred by refusing to let jurors see memorandums approving "enhanced interrogation tactics" for detainees. Private Graner, of Uniontown, Pa., was accused of stacking naked prisoners in a human pyramid and ordering them to masturbate while other soldiers took photographs. He was also accused of knocking out a prisoner with a punch to the head.
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13) 25 Afghan Police May Have Joined Taliban
By ROD NORDLAND
February 19, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/world/asia/19police.html?ref=world
JALREZ, Afghanistan - A group of 25 Afghan national police officers may have defected to the Taliban, according to American and Afghan officers here in Wardak Province.
The police officers left their posts in the remote Chak District of Wardak just before midnight Wednesday, and on Thursday morning a Taliban spokesman claimed they had surrendered to them.
"They left with all their weapons, two trucks and machine guns and heavy weapons," said Maj. Abdul Khalil, the police chief in Jalrez District, just north of Chak.
Major Khalil said there had been some sort of pay dispute. "We don't know if they have gone over to the Taliban, or they just ran away, or what has happened," Major Khalil said. "We're concerned, though, because they took heavy weapons."
Finding ways to make sure that corruption does not whittle away the already-low pay of Afghan policemen has been a preocuppation of NATO advisers here, and in this district in Wardak Province, an innovative program is inder way to pay them by text messaging - circumventing corrupt maymasters and reaching the sort of remote outposts where many of the Afghan police are stationed.
At about the same time Major Khalil was speaking, a Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, said in a telephone interview that 24 policemen in Chak had surrendered to the Taliban along with their weapons and two trucks.
"They are safe now and will not be harmed and will be treated well under our code of conduct," Mr. Mujahid said.
The American Army battalion commander in charge of training the police in Wardak, Lt. Col. David Sink, said he had been informed about the policemen's disappearance by the Afghan national police but had no further details.
The spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Interior, Zemaray Bashary, said that "more than eight policemen were captured by the Taliban" in the Chak district incident. "We don't know yet whether it was an inside plot by one of those soldiers, or they were ambushed and captured," he said.
In an unrelated episode, seven policemen were killed and two wounded in a NATO airstrike during a joint patrol in eastern Kunduz Province, Mr. Bashary said. The international forces confirmed in an e-mailed statement that "several" policemen had been reported killed and wounded in the airstrike.
Gunmen in the village of Qurghan Tepa in Imam Sahib district and opened small-arms fire on the Afghan and international soldiers. An airstrike was ordered, and a single bomb destroyed a police truck as it was approaching the military units, only about 200 yards away. "We conducted a joint investigation with ISAF, and so far we just pray for the wounded and give condolences for those who were martyred," Mr. Bashary said.
In the Chak area where the policemen disappeared, there are no American or other NATO forces, although there are Afghan police and soldiers. Taliban fighters are active there and in much of Wardak Province, in central Afghanistan, just west of Kabul Province.
Colonel Sink said his forces were partnering with the national police in Wardak and Logar Provinces, giving them advanced training and monitoring whether police units were receiving their pay. The Afghan national police until recently were paid less than Taliban fighters, often had little or no training, and have high levels of illiteracy and drug abuse. This year their pay was greatly increased, financed by NATO and its allies directly, which in some cases doubled a policeman's income. Typical pay in Wardak is now about $240 a month for the lowest ranks, compared with the $200 that Taliban recruits are paid.
However, coalition monitors discovered that many of the police officers were not receiving all their pay because of skimming by their paymasters. To solve that, NATO's training mission in Afghanistan has been running a pilot "Pay by Phone" program in Jalrez District, paying the 54 police officers by text messages to their cellphones. The idea is to make sure the money gets to them, while avoiding the temptations involved in distributing cash in remote areas.
Because the area has no banks, the plan was for them to collect their pay from the local office of Roshan, an Afghan cellphone carrier. "The first time we did that, the policemen thought they had gotten a 36 percent pay raise," said Col. Trent Edwards of the United States Air Force, who oversees that project. "They had no idea how much they were really paid."
He called it "leveraging technology to mitigate the opportunity for corruption."
However, a corrupt Afghan commander soon found a way to leverage back, and in November he took all the SIM cards from the policemen's phones and tried to collect the money himself, according to Colonel Edwards.
A Roshan Mobile Money representative reported that to American officers, who urged the Ministry of the Interior to crack down on the officer, and the practice was stopped, Colonel Edwards said. No one was prosecuted, however.
Now the NATO training mission is hoping to hand control of the program over to the Ministry of the Interior and expand it to other districts and provinces, and Colonel Edwards visited Jalrez on Thursday to make sure it was still going well.
When he got to Combat Outpost Apache, a coalition base here where Afghan police and army are also stationed, he found a lot of policemen who were thankful they were getting their full pay - but unhappy they could not collect it locally.
The Jalrez representative for Roshan's M-Paisa (Mobile Money) office, the policemen said, never had enough cash available, so they all had to travel back to Kabul to collect their pay. For some of them, transportation costs ran as high as 10 percent of their pay; many just gave their SIM cards and personal identification numbers to a sergeant to do it for them.
"That is definitely solvable," Colonel Edwards said. "We'll find a solution."
In the meantime, he said, he asked the police chief, Major Khalil, to post a list of police officers' pay so they would all have an independent way to verify their salaries.
Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar.
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14) Judges Free Inmate on Recommendation of Special Innocence Panel
By ROBBIE BROWN
February 18, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/us/18innocent.html?ref=us
Acting at the recommendation of a special state innocence commission - the only one of its kind in the nation - a panel of North Carolina judges ruled Wednesday that a man was wrongfully convicted of murdering a prostitute in 1991 and freed him after 16 years in prison.
The three-judge panel found "clear and convincing evidence" that the man, Gregory F. Taylor, was innocent and had been convicted based on flawed evidence and unreliable testimony.
It was the first case won by the commission, which was established in 2006 after a wave of embarrassing wrongful convictions in North Carolina.
Celebrating with friends and family over a shrimp salad at a cafe in downtown Raleigh, Mr. Taylor said he was still in shock after "6,149 days in prison."
"This morning, I was laying in a jail cell with a crazy person banging on the wall next to me," he said. "Now I'm sitting at a fancy Italian restaurant talking on a cellphone."
After the verdict, the Wake County district attorney, C. Colon Willoughby Jr., apologized to Mr. Taylor.
"I told him I'm very sorry he was convicted," Mr. Willoughby told The Associated Press. "I wish we had had all of this evidence in 1991."
The eight-member North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission considers claims of innocence from convicts or anyone else with pertinent information. It has reviewed hundreds of claims by prisoners and brought only three to a hearing. If the commission agrees that a claim has merit, it refers cases to a three-judge panel, which has happened only once except for Mr. Taylor's case, and the argument in the other case was rejected.
In most states, convictions are usually overturned only by governors and pardon boards, or occasionally by judicial review. Inmate advocates used the ruling for Mr. Taylor to renew their call for others states to create commissions to investigate claims of innocence, even years after ordinary statutes of limitation have expired.
"North Carolina's commission is an important model for the adjudication of innocence claims," said Barry C. Scheck, director of the Innocence Project in New York. "In the American court system, there are normally procedural bars that get in the way of litigating whether someone is innocent or not."
Much national attention has been focused to using DNA to overturn wrongful convictions, said Stephen B. Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights. But 90 percent of criminal cases, like Mr. Taylor's, do not involve any DNA evidence.
Mr. Taylor, 47, has always maintained that he did not murder Jacquetta Thomas, whose battered body was discovered in a cul-de-sac in Raleigh. He testified that he found the body while taking drugs with a friend but did not report it to the police.
Defense lawyers argued that prosecutors misrepresented evidence against Mr. Taylor, who was sentenced to life in prison in 1993. They said that stains on his truck turned out to not have been human blood, and that witnesses were later proven to have described scenarios that could not have happened.
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15) Death Threat against Martha Giraldo
http://www.soaw.org/presente/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=257&Itemid=81#deathtreat
Video: U.S. Military in Colombia
http://www.soaw.org/presente/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=271&Itemid=81
Bertha Oliva at the gates of Ft. Benning
http://www.soaw.org/presente/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=254&Itemid=81
Martha Giraldo, a Colombian human rights activist and a featured speaker at the 2009 November vigil to close the SOA (video), was subjected to a chilling death threat earlier this week in Cali, Colombia. Two SUVs with tinted windows -- the vehicle of choice of Colombian assassins -- tried to run her car off of the road. As they pulled up beside her, they pulled out guns and pointed them at her. They never fired a shot, but the message was clear: we can kill you, and if you don't keep quiet, we will.
Martha Giraldo and her family continue to tell the truth about how the Colombian army killed her father, a campesino, and dressed him up in guerrilla clothing to make the murder look like a "combat kill." Colombian human rights organizations report that extrajudicial executions of civilians by the Colombian Armed Forces is on the rise. Please take two minutes out of your day today to call one of the Colombia specialists at the State Department, Terry Steers-Gonzalez (202-647-4173) or Susan Sanford (202-647-3142). Click here for the message Martha would like you to communicate.
Video: U.S. Military in Colombia
http://www.soaw.org/presente/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=271&Itemid=81
U.S. Colombia Bases Agreement In the fall 2009, U.S. and Colombian officials signed an agreement granting the U.S. military access to seven Colombian bases for ten years. (Watch the 21min. video about the agreement)
SOA Watch is extremely concerned about the drastic increase of U.S. militarization in Latin America. The bases agreement operates from the same failed military mindset that has given rise to the School of the Americas (SOA/ WHINSEC). The purpose of the bases and the purpose of the SOA/ WHINSEC are the same: to ensure U.S. control over the region through military means.
Already, the SOA/ WHINSEC is deploying "Mobile Training Teams" to Colombia and other Latin American countries, that train hundreds of soldiers annually. Over 10,000 soldiers of the Colombian military (the military with the worst human rights record in the Americas) have received SOA/ WHINSEC training and used the lessons learned in their brutal war that has left thousands dead and millions displaced.
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16) Three in a Million: Voices From the Haitian Camps
By Bill Quigley [1]
February 18, 2010
http://www.sfbayview.com/2010/three-in-a-million-voices-from-the-haitian-camps/
The United Nations reported there are 1.2 million people living in "spontaneous settlements" or homeless camps around Port-au-Prince. Three people living in the camps spoke with this author this week, before the hard rains hit.
Jean Dora, 71
My name is Jean Dora. I was born in 1939. I live in a plaza in front of St. Pierre's church in Petionville [outside of Port-au-Prince]. I am here with 12 members of my family. We all lost our home.
We have a sheet of green plastic to shade us from the sun. We put up some bed sheets around our space.
I have many small grandchildren living here with me. My son and daughters live here too.
My daughter will soon have a child. She will go to the Red Cross tent when it is time for the baby to come.
I worked for the Chinese Embassy for 36 years. I cleaned their offices. I retired in 2007. Until the earthquake I lived in an apartment with my family. The building was destroyed.
At night we put a piece of carpet down on the ground. Then we lay covers down and try to sleep. When it rains, the water comes in.
We bring bottles to fill up with water. But we have very little food.
There is no toilet in the park. We must go behind the church.
My son used to work to support us. He is a good chef. He worked at a restaurant by the Hotel Montana. The restaurant was destroyed. He lost his job. There is no work.
During all my days, I have never seen anything like this. I am not in a good position to say what will happen next. I think things are not going to change. I hope things will get better. But I don't think so.
My son has no job and he cannot help our family. If my son is working, we can all stand up. If he is not working, we are down.
The future is not clear. It looks dark for us.
Nadege Dora, 28
My name is Nadege Dora. I am 28. I have three boys and one girl. I am supposed to deliver my baby this month.
I now live in the plaza in Petionville with the rest of my family. Our house was destroyed. I used to sell bread on the street to make a little money. The father of the children does not help us. It is as if we are not alive to him.
We are just trying to survive. No one in our family is working. There is no work.
If you get a ticket you can go get a bag of rice. But I am a pregnant woman. I cannot fight the crowds for a ticket. I tried. But people were squashing me and I was afraid I would get knocked down and crushed.
My niece helped a woman bring rice back from Delmas [another neighborhood outside of Port-au-Prince]. She shared her rice with us. Right now we still have some rice. But we have no oil. No meat, no milk, nothing but rice. We have no money to buy other ingredients.
Since the earthquake I have never eaten a full meal.
When my baby comes, I will go to the Red Cross tent to have the baby. I went there to see a doctor. They gave me some pills. Those pills made me sick.
The mayor came here and asked people if we had relatives in the countryside. They would help us go there. But we do not want to go to the countryside. We don't know anybody in the countryside. We need to have a better life than this.
Garry Philippe, 47
My name is Garry Philippe. I am 47. I live by the airport entrance. I built my own tent. I tied a sheet to a tree and I put up poles to hold up other sheets.
I live here with my five children. My wife was killed in our house in the incident. We lived in Village Solidarity. I owned our house. I built our house over four years, step by step, as I got the money.
I was outside when it happened. My girls were by the front door and ran out. My wife ran back to help the boys and she died.
We had no funeral for my wife because we have no money for a funeral. I buried her myself in a cemetery by Cite Soleil.
The children cannot imagine that their mother is gone just like that. They are always thinking about their mother.
We do not have beds. When it is time to sleep we put bags on the ground. Then we put our covers on the bags and sleep.
We wash ourselves by putting water in a bottle. Then we stand in a pot and pour the water on ourselves.
When it rained, we went to a place where they had a plastic tent. We stayed there till the rain stopped. More than 20 people were inside that tent.
Before, I was a mechanic in a garage. Where I worked was destroyed. There is no work since the quake.
We heard other camps got bags of rice. In our camp, nothing. I ask friends for food. Sometimes someone will give us something to eat.
We have no toilet in this camp. When we have to make a toilet, we do it in a bag. Then we bring the bag to the edge of the camp. It is about a one-minute walk away.
We see the trucks going in and out of the airport. Many trucks. But the trucks never stop for us.
It is not safe here. But what can I do? I accept it; it is God's work. We pray in the camp together.
No one has come to talk to us to tell us what is going on. We know nothing about tents or tarps. There is no school for the children.
I cannot tell you exactly what is going to happen next. I am not the Lord.
I think it is going to get worse for us in the camps. We need tents and food. We need water and school and jobs.
We need help to find a place to stay. The rain is coming soon. Water is going to come and our babies will lose their lives.
[1] Bill Quigley is legal director at the Center for Constitutional rights and a long time human rights advocate. This article was written with the assistance of Vladimir Laguerre in Port-au-Prince. You can contact Bill at quigley77@gmail.com
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17) World's top firms cause $2.2tn of environmental damage, report estimates
By Juliette Jowit
February 18, 2010
guardian.co.uk
Report for the UN into the activities of the world's 3,000 biggest companies estimates one-third of profits would be lost if firms were forced to pay for use, loss and damage of environment
The cost of pollution and other damage to the natural environment caused by the world's biggest companies would wipe out more than one-third of their profits if they were held financially accountable, a major unpublished study for the United Nations has found.
The report comes amid growing concern that no one is made to pay for most of the use, loss and damage of the environment, which is reaching crisis proportions in the form of pollution and the rapid loss of freshwater, fisheries and fertile soils.
Later this year, another huge UN study - dubbed the "Stern for nature" after the influential report on the economics of climate change by Sir Nicholas Stern - will attempt to put a price on such global environmental damage, and suggest ways to prevent it. The report, led by economist Pavan Sukhdev, is likely to argue for abolition of billions of dollars of subsidies to harmful industries like agriculture, energy and transport, tougher regulations and more taxes on companies that cause the damage.
Ahead of changes which would have a profound effect - not just on companies' profits but also their customers and pension funds and other investors - the UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investment initiative and the United Nations Environment Programme jointly ordered a report into the activities of the 3,000 biggest public companies in the world, which includes household names from the UK's FTSE 100 and other major stockmarkets.
The study, conducted by London-based consultancy Trucost and due to be published this summer, found the estimated combined damage was worth US$2.2 trillion (£1.4tn) in 2008 - a figure bigger than the national economies of all but seven countries in the world that year.
The figure equates to 6-7% of the companies' combined turnover, or an average of one-third of their profits, though some businesses would be much harder hit than others.
"What we're talking about is a completely new paradigm," said Richard Mattison, Trucost's chief operating officer and leader of the report team. "Externalities of this scale and nature pose a major risk to the global economy and markets are not fully aware of these risks, nor do they know how to deal with them."
The biggest single impact on the $2.2tn estimate, accounting for more than half of the total, was emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for climate change. Other major "costs" were local air pollution such as particulates, and the damage caused by the over-use and pollution of freshwater.
The true figure is likely to be even higher because the $2.2tn does not include damage caused by household and government consumption of goods and services, such as energy used to power appliances or waste; the "social impacts" such as the migration of people driven out of affected areas, or the long-term effects of any damage other than that from climate change. The final report will also include a higher total estimate which includes those long-term effects of problems such as toxic waste.
Trucost did not want to comment before the final report on which sectors incurred the highest "costs" of environmental damage, but they are likely to include power companies and heavy energy users like aluminium producers because of the greenhouse gases that result from burning fossil fuels. Heavy water users like food, drink and clothing companies are also likely to feature high up on the list.
Sukhdev said the heads of the major companies at this year's annual economic summit in Davos, Switzerland, were increasingly concerned about the impact on their business if they were stopped or forced to pay for the damage.
"It can make the difference between profit and loss," Sukhdev told the annual Earthwatch Oxford lecture last week. "That sense of foreboding is there with many, many [chief executives], and that potential is a good thing because it leads to solutions."
The aim of the study is to encourage and help investors lobby companies to reduce their environmental impact before concerned governments act to restrict them through taxes or regulations, said Mattison.
"It's going to be a significant proportion of a lot of companies' profit margins," Mattison told the Guardian. "Whether they actually have to pay for these costs will be determined by the appetite for policy makers to enforce the 'polluter pays' principle. We should be seeking ways to fix the system, rather than waiting for the economy to adapt. Continued inefficient use of natural resources will cause significant impacts on [national economies] overall, and a massive problem for governments to fix."
Another major concern is the risk that companies simply run out of resources they need to operate, said Andrea Moffat, of the US-based investor lobby group Ceres, whose members include more than 80 funds with assets worth more than US$8tn. An example was the estimated loss of 20,000 jobs and $1bn last year for agricultural companies because of water shortages in California, said Moffat.
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18) Kent Massacre Mural/Wall Blog
Post your messages at http://kentmassacre.wordpress.com
Send comments to: alewitz@comcast.net
Please distribute this message widely
MIKE ALEWITZ
Associate Professor
Artistic Director/ Labor Art & Mural Project
http://kentmassacre.wordpress.com/
Dear Friends,
May 4, 2010, will mark the 40-year anniversary of the massacre at Kent
State University in Ohio.
The events of that day - the killing of four and wounding of nine
students, sparked a national student strike, the largest such action
in US history. Ten days later, two students were killed and at least
twelve wounded at Jackson State University in Mississippi - and the
strike spread and deepened.
The campus shutdowns marked a turning point in the fight against the
war, as students took over the universities and reached out to the
working class, particularly within the armed forces.
I was the chairman of the Kent Student Mobilization Committee Against
the War, and an eyewitness to the slaughter - among the victims were
close friends and fellow activists. After the shootings, like
thousands of others, I threw myself into building the strike - telling
our story at meetings and rallies around the country demanding an end
to the war.
I did not return to Kent. The strike led me to Austin, Texas,
organizing for the SMC and the regional anti-war coalition. From that
vantage point I saw how the student movement provided important
support to one of the most extraordinary chapters in the history of
the US working class - the movement of active-duty GIs that was
critical in forcing the US to withdraw from Southeast Asia.
Years later, I returned to school to study art. Since then, I've tried
to paint murals that reveal the hidden history and martyrs of our
class: a monument to the heroes of Chernobyl in the Ukraine, Malcolm X
in Belfast, Karen Silkwood for energy workers, Ben Linder in
Nicaragua, Rachel Corrie in Palestine and others.
But I have yet to paint a mural about May 4. I suppose I was hoping
that at some point they'd break down and invite me back to Kent. But,
as the witnesses, participants and observers of those events become
older, and memories dim, (particularly my own,) it seems like I better
get going and put some paint on the wall.
I'd like to begin by asking for your participation. I have set up a
temporary blog site at http://kentmassacre.wordpress.com to post
recollections of that day and those times - what the Kent State
Massacre meant to you.
You can write just a few words or a longer story. It can be about
political events, your reactions, how it affected your life, a
recollection about someone else, etc. Photos and images would also be
great. My hope is that we create a digital "wall" that is a mural in
it's own right.
Over the years, I've given hundreds of slide shows and presentations
about the massacre. People often approach me with anecdotes - so I
know there is a wealth of history worth sharing. This is for everyone
- strikers, students, artists, soldiers, activists, observers, young
or old, from the US or internationally, etc.
The mural itself will be a modest initiative - perhaps portable, for
use at demonstrations. In the true spirit our movement, it will be
lacking in time, resources and organization. The project will be
planned, and perhaps painted, here at Central Connecticut State
University, where we have a socially engaged art department and mural
program.
By a fortunate coincidence, Jerry Butler, a gifted public artist and
muralist, has recently joined our department. He was a participant in
the protests at Jackson State and may paint something about those
events - we have begun to explore coordinated works for both
anniversaries, and I'm sure he would appreciate your comments, as well.
In the past four decades, much of the history of the massacre has been
misrepresented or buried - including the nature of the anti-war
movement at Kent. Our movement was not the actions of a small group of
radicals - it was a mass movement that involved thousands of Kent
students - part of an international movement of millions of people
that confronted and defeated US imperialism. In the process, we
inspired new movements and created culture that changed the world.
Those who fell deserve images that reveal the truth - from many
artists. Our collective memory of those times must be preserved - to
help build a renewed and determined anti-war movement today.
Bring the Troops Home Now!
In Solidarity
Mike Alewitz
Post your messages at http://kentmassacre.wordpress.com.
Send comments to: alewitz@comcast.net
Please distribute this message widely
MIKE ALEWITZ
Associate Professor
Artistic Director/ Labor Art & Mural Project
Art Department/ Central CT State University
1615 Stanley Street/ New Britain, CT 06050
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19) Operation New Dawn
Cindy Sheehan
From: Cindy Sheehan
Date: February 19, 2010 3:37:04 AM EST
Subject: Operation New Dawn by Cindy Sheehan
Reply-To: pota-planning@googlegroups.com
Operation New Dawn
Cindy Sheehan
"The very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. ... War is Peace."
George Orwell, 1984
If I forget everything else in my life, I will never forget the night I walked in my front door with my dogs, Buster and Chewy, and saw the three military officers standing in my living room.
I knew the moment I saw them that Casey was dead. It doesn't take a genius to put that equation together. On one side of the equal sign is your recently deployed soldier-son, and on the other side are three Army officers standing in your house looking like they would rather be just about anywhere else.
I didn't go to sleep that night, or indeed for a few nights. I didn't want to go to sleep and have to wake up after brief oblivion to the realization that my oldest son was dead: Killed in a war that, like most wars, never should have been fought in the first place. Casey's number came up and he became just one more in a long-line of humans killed for profit. Casey certainly wasn't the first, and he certainly won't be the last, but my first-born preceded his parents and three of his grandparents in death.
It seemed like within minutes of the notification at 9pm on 04 April, 2004, our house was filled with friends and the tears, screams, questions and memories flowed freely. Around 6am, I went outside to sit on the porch on my porch swing. Through my tears, shock and grief, I could see my neighborhood begin to awaken. People coming outside to pick up their papers, or head for work. I wanted to scream at them: "Don't you know my son is dead? How can you pretend like the world is normal?" The world has never been "normal," but I have lived in an even more surreal version since Casey was killed.
Today, I found out that the "operation" that killed my son is over. "Operation Iraqi Freedom" got its name after the "great" Powers That Be figured out that "Operation Iraqi Liberation" stood for "OIL." Now, Obama's SecDef, Robert Gates, has changed that benign name to an even more New-Agey, Sweeter-than-Honey name: "Operation New Dawn." Doesn't that sound nice? Who doesn't like New Dawns? Except perhaps the people of Falluja who were brutalized in a Marine siege back in 2004 that was inappropriately entitled, Operation New Dawn.
When Obama first took over the trappings of Empire, he changed the name of the "Global War on Terror" the GWOT to: OCO, or Overseas Contingency Operation-doesn't that sound benevolent, too? Like the U.S. Empire is involved in Overseas Aid. You have a need for "Aid?" We have a "contingency" for you!
Illegal invasions and occupations are now called: "Interventions" as if the U.S. and its allies, are sweeping in and saving a country or society from a drug or alcohol problem, when clearly it is The Empire that is suffering from an addiction to mass murder and pillage.
It doesn't matter what the U.S. decides to call its "Operations:" part of us will reject the propaganda, and part of us will embrace it wanting very desperately to believe that our country is not a rogue state and/or that Obama is not as bad, or worse, than Bush.
Innocent people still die and our soldiers are still victims, whether they come home dead or alive, whatever the war criminals in DC decide to label their crimes as.
It doesn't matter for me either. One day, whether voluntarily, or by force, these "Operations," "Contingencies," "Interventions," or "Crimes against humanity" will eventually end, but my oldest son will be always be dead. There's absolutely no way in hell for The Empire to euphemize that reality to make it any less painful or easier for me to bear.
Accountability for Casey's death won't make the pain go away, either, but it may prevent other mothers and families from having to suffer from our nation's continuous wars.
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20) Missile Kills Militant Commander's Brother in Pakistan
By PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
February 20, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/20/world/asia/20pstan.html?hp
Islamabad, Pakistan - A missile believed to have been fired Thursday from an American drone killed the younger brother of a top militant commander in the North Waziristan tribal area, according to several Pakistani security and intelligence officials, residents in Waziristan and a friend of the commander's family.
The apparent target of the attack was Sirajuddin Haqqani, who the Americans say operates from his base in North Waziristan. He took over major responsibilities for the family's militant network in recent months from his father, Jalaluddin Haqqani, who has been reported to be ill. The Americans blame the Haqqani network for helping plan the suicide bombing against the C.I.A. base in Afghanistan's Khost Province last December, in which several C.I.A. operatives and a Jordanian intelligence officer were killed.
The brother, Mohammad Haqqani, was killed along with three others when their white station wagon was hit by a missile in Dande Darpakhel village of North Waziristan bordering Afghanistan. Americans believe that the commander, Sirajuddin Haqqani, is closely affiliated with Al Qaeda and that his force is the most potent one working against international forces in eastern and central Afghanistan.
Dande Darpakhel, is about a mile north of Miranshah, the capital of North Waziristan, and is considered the main base of the Haqqani network since the war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. It has been a repeated target in missile strikes, one of which was believed to have killed several members of the Haqqani clan last year.
According to a family friend of the Haqqanis, Mohammad, who was about 20, was on his way to see his brother, the commander, when the missile struck. The family friend in the village said Mohammad Haqqani was not an active member of the militant network and that his brother had wanted him to pursue religious studies away from the area so that he could lead a more normal life. Mohammad and Sirajuddin, the sons of a militant leader named Jalaluddin Haqqani, share an Afghan mother and have an Arab stepmother. Funeral prayers for Mohammad Haqqani were held in Miranshah Friday afternoon, said a resident of the city who was reached by phone.
Sirajuddin Haqqani has subcommanders threaded throughout eastern and southern Afghanistan. His fighters control Paktika, Paktia and Khost Provinces in Afghanistan, which lie close to North Waziristan. His men are also strong in Ghazni, Logar and Wardak Provinces, Pakistani security officials said.
The United States is pressing Pakistan to act more aggressively against the Haqqani network but Pakistan has so far resisted the pressure, as it considers the group more of an asset than a threat because his forces mostly operate primarily in Afghanistan. It considers Mr. Haqqani and his control of large areas of Afghan territory vital to Pakistan in the jostling for influence that will pit Pakistan, India, Russia, China and Iran against one another in the post-American Afghan arena, Pakistani officials said. Pakistan is particularly eager to counter the growing influence of its archenemy, India, which is pouring $1.2 billion in aid into Afghanistan.
Mr. Haqqani has anywhere from 4,000 to 12,000 Taliban fighters under his command. He is technically a member of the Afghan Taliban leadership based in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan's Baluchistan Province.
That leadership is headed by Mullah Muhammad Omar, the former leader of the Taliban regime. But Mr. Haqqani operates somewhat independently of them inside Afghanistan.
The strike intended for Mr. Haqqani came shortly after American and Pakistani security forces arrested a Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a deputy to Mullah Omar, in a joint raid last month in the port city of Karachi. Two of the Taliban's shadow governors were later arrested on the information provided by Mullah Baradar, Pakistani officials said.
The United States has stepped up its use of missile strikes from C.I.A.-operated drones in Pakistan's lawless tribal area against suspected Taliban and Qaeda targets and have killed some of the top commanders in recent months. The drones are focusing on North Waziristan because of the presence of large number of local and foreign fighters allied with Al Qaeda in the area and also partly because of the reluctance of the Pakistani government to launch an operation there.
One such strike killed the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, last year while another one recently was aimed at his successor, Hakimullah Mehsud. The fate of Hakimullah Mehsud, whose network is believed to have played the leading role in the attack in Khost against the C.I.A., is still shrouded in confusion, with conflicting reports about whether he is alive.
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21) Myths Obscure Voodoo, Source of Comfort in Haiti
On Religion
"Voodoo is very close to the ground. It's a neighborhood to neighborhood, courtyard kind of religion. And one where you support each other in time of need."
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
February 20, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/20/world/americas/20religion.html?hp
Barely 18 hours after an earthquake devastated Haiti on Jan. 12, the Rev. Pat Robertson supplied a televised discourse on the nation's history, theology and destiny. Haiti has suffered, he explained, because its rebellious slaves "swore a pact with the devil" to overthrow the French two centuries ago. Ever since, he went on, "they have been cursed by one thing or another."
Crude and harsh as Mr. Robertson's words were, he deserved a perverse kind of credit for one thing. He actually did recognize the centrality of voodoo to Haiti. In the voluminous media coverage of the quake and its aftermath, relatively few journalists and commentators have done so, and even fewer have gotten voodoo right.
Consider a few facts. Voodoo is one of the official religions of Haiti, and its designation in 2003 merely granted official acknowledgment to a longstanding reality. The slave revolt that brought Haiti independence indeed relied on voodoo, the New World version of ancestral African faiths. To this day, by various scholarly estimates, between 50 and 95 percent of Haitians practice at least elements of voodoo, often in conjunction with Catholicism.
Yet in searching the Lexis-Nexis database of news coverage and doing a Google search earlier this week, I found that Catholicism figured into three times as many accounts of the Haitian earthquake as did voodoo. A substantial share of the reports that did mention voodoo were either recounting Mr. Robertson's canard or adopting it in articles asking Haitian survivors if they felt their country was cursed.
At a putatively more informed level, articles, broadcasts and blogs depicted voodoo as the source of Haiti's poverty and political instability - not because of divine punishment, mind you, but because voodoo supposedly is fatalistic and primitive by nature.
"The kind of religion one practices makes a huge difference in how the community lives - for better or for worse," wrote Rod Dreher on the Web site beliefnet. "I suppose it's at least arguable that the Haitians would be better off at the Church of Christopher Hitchens rather than as followers of voodoo."
For scholars whose expertise runs somewhat deeper, such words have understandably provoked indignation. Worse still, the dismissive attitude about voodoo follows a tawdry history of misrepresentation in American journalism and popular culture.
"The media has reported a lot about voodoo but not much of it very insightful or intelligent," said Diane Winston, a professor of religion and media at the University of Southern California. "Voodoo is one of those flashpoints for Americans because it's exotic, unknown and has strange connotations. It may be a matter of underlying racism because voodoo is African and Caribbean in its origins, or because voodoo seems so different from Christianity that it's the perfect Other." Prof. Leslie G. Desmangles of Trinity College in Hartford, who is the author of several scholarly and reference books about voodoo, views these current caricatures of voodoo as all too familiar.
"There's been a very degrading, derogatory language about voodoo," he said in a recent interview. "It's language that goes back to the 19th century."
The Roman Catholic Church in Haiti began a series of antisuperstition campaigns in the 1860s. These efforts continued until the early 1940s, and they imparted an assumption - often embraced by Haiti's elite - that while Catholicism was legitimate religion, voodoo was pagan heresy.
The occupation of Haiti by American military forces from 1915 until 1934 introduced a cartoonish version of voodoo enduringly into pop culture. The 1929 book "Magic Island," by the Briton W. B. Seabrook, became a best seller in the United States. While Mr. Seabrook was arguably enlightened for his time, the commercial success of his book inspired an array of B-movies in the 1930s and 1940s, like "White Zombie" and "I Walked With a Zombie."
The resulting image of voodoo as sinister sorcery has, amazingly enough, survived into the present multicultural age. A sensitive book about voodoo in modern Haiti, "The Serpent and the Rainbow" by the ethnobotanist Wade Davis, was transformed by Hollywood into a fright movie that recycled every intolerant cliché about the religion.
Within the past year, the animated film "The Frog and the Princess" featured a voodoo magician as its villain. The movie was produced by Disney, which if anything has been relativistic to a fault. But voodoo, apparently, does not even merit the condescending sort of exoticization that Disney afforded American Indian polytheism in "Pocahontas."
In American political rhetoric, "voodoo" functions as a synonym for fraudulent, going back to George H.W. Bush's description of supply-side economics. Would any public figure dare use "Baptist" or "Hindu" or "Hasidic" in the same way?
Superficially, the emphasis on Catholicism in recent reporting from Haiti appears sensible. A majority of Haitians are Catholic; major Catholic buildings were destroyed in the quake; the Catholic Church operates important relief and refugee agencies. Voodoo lacks such a visible infrastructure.
But Catholicism in Haiti, as too few journalists seemed to realize, is not more or less like Catholicism in a Polish parish in Chicago or an Irish one in Boston. It is a Catholicism in symbiosis with voodoo, a Catholicism in which saints are conflated with African deities and dead ancestors serve as interlocutors between God and humanity.
Prof. Patrick Bellegarde-Smith of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, an expert in voodoo as well as a voodoo priest, likens the religious texture of Haiti to that of Japan. The same Japanese person, he said, will observe the Shinto faith for certain rituals, Buddhism for others, and will see no contradiction or mutual exclusivity.
"I'd tell reporters to go into the shanties and find the local voodoo priest," said Amy Wilentz, the author of an acclaimed book on contemporary Haiti, "The Rainy Season." "Voodoo is very close to the ground. It's a neighborhood to neighborhood, courtyard kind of religion. And one where you support each other in time of need."
E-mail: sgfreedman@nytimes.com
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22) States Consider Medicaid Cuts as Use Grows
By KEVIN SACK and ROBERT PEAR
February 19, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/us/politics/19medicaid.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON - Facing relentless fiscal pressure and exploding demand for government health care, virtually every state is making or considering substantial cuts in Medicaid, even as Democrats push to add 15 million people to the rolls.
Because they are temporarily barred from reducing eligibility, states have been left to cut "optional benefits," like dental and vision care, and reduce payments to doctors and other health care providers. [Reducing payments to doctors and other healthcare providers means that the coverage people may still have, as part of a retirement benefit, will cover much less. As it is, most dental insurance packages are a fraction of the cost to cover the dental work the policyholder needs. In California they have already eliminated both dental and eye care from Medicaid.]
In some states, governors are trying to avoid the deepest cuts by pushing for increases in tobacco taxes or new levies on hospitals and doctors, but many of those proposals are running into election-year trouble in conservative legislatures. [Again, these costs would only be passed on to the poliyholder. So the medical corporations and insurance companies loose nothing.]
In Nevada, which faces an $881 million budget gap, Gov. Jim Gibbons, a Republican, proposed this month to end Medicaid coverage of adult day care, eyeglasses, hearing aids and dentures, and, for a savings of $829,304, to reduce the number of diapers provided monthly to incontinent adults (to 186 from 300). [what an indignity!]
"We are down to the ugly list of options," the state's director of health and human services, Mike Willden, told a legislative committee last week.
The Medicaid program already pays doctors and hospitals at levels well below those of Medicare and private insurance, and often below actual costs. Large numbers of doctors, therefore, do not accept Medicaid patients, and cuts may further discourage participation in the program, which primarily serves low-income children, disabled adults and nursing home residents.
In Kansas, a 10 percent cut in provider payments that took effect on Jan. 1 has prompted such an outcry that Gov. Mark Parkinson, who imposed it, now wants to restore the money by raising tobacco and sales taxes. [Here again, the cost gets passed off to the consumer/policyholder! These taxes mean nothing to the wealthy. But they compound all the other ways that the costs are being passed off to workers as a whole.]
Even if Mr. Parkinson, a Democrat, overcomes resistance in his Republican-controlled Legislature, it will be too late for Dr. C. Joseph Beck, a Wichita ophthalmologist who informed his Medicaid patients last month that he could no longer afford to treat them.
Dr. Beck said that over eight months last year, his practice wrote off $36,000 in losses from treating 17 Medicaid patients. The state-imposed payment cut, he said, was "the final straw."
"I'm out, I'm done," Dr. Beck said in a telephone interview. "I didn't want to. I want to take care of people. But I also have three children and many employees to take care of."
Concerns about health care costs are likely to dominate the winter meeting of the National Governors Association, which begins Saturday in Washington.
In advance of the gathering, administration officials have urged governors to endorse President Obama's health care proposals, or at least to avoid criticizing them. The Democratic plan, which is stalled in Congress, would vastly expand eligibility for Medicaid as one means of reducing the number of uninsured.
But many governors said they were more concerned about the growth of existing health programs. The recession and high unemployment have driven up enrollment in Medicaid while depleting state revenues that help pay for it.
A survey released Thursday by the Kaiser Family Foundation found a record one-year increase in Medicaid enrollment of 3.3 million from June 2008 to June 2009, a period when the unemployment rate rose by 4 percentage points. Total enrollment jumped 7.5 percent, to 46.9 million, and 13 states had double-digit increases.
Because Medicaid enrollment often lags behind unemployment, this year's increase could prove even greater.
The National Association of State Medicaid Directors estimates that state budget shortfalls in the coming fiscal year, which begins in July in most states, will total $140 billion. Because Medicaid is one of the largest expenditures in every state budget, and one of the fastest-growing, it makes an unavoidable target.
"For most states, the fiscal situation is still dire, and the Medicaid cuts are significant," said Scott D. Pattison, executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers.
Governors and legislators have managed to defer the deepest cuts because the federal stimulus package provided $87 billion to states in Medicaid relief. The cost of Medicaid is shared by the federal and state governments, with states setting eligibility, benefit and reimbursement levels within broad federal guidelines, and Washington covering the majority of the expense.
But the stimulus assistance is due to expire at the end of December, in the middle of many states' fiscal years, leaving budget officials to peer over a precipice. Congress and the White House are considering extending the enhanced payments for six more months, at a cost of about $25 billion.
The House has passed such a measure and Mr. Obama included it in his budget this month, but the Senate has not acted.
The extension would not come close to filling the Medicaid gap in many states. In Georgia, for instance, Gov. Sonny Perdue assumed in his budget proposal that the additional federal money would be provided, but that the state would still face a Medicaid imbalance of $608 million, said Dr. Rhonda M. Medows, the commissioner of community health.
Mr. Perdue, a Republican, decided it would be unwise to cut optional benefits because that might drive Medicaid patients into expensive emergency rooms. He proposed instead to levy a 1.6 percent tax on hospital and managed care revenues and to cut payments to many providers by nearly 2 percent.
Without the tax increases, which face opposition in the General Assembly, the state will have to cut provider payments by 16.5 percent, Dr. Medows said.
"I won't have any primary care doctors left, much less specialists," she said. "Certainly down here nobody likes to talk about taxes, but sometimes you have to bite the bullet and do what's right for a whole lot of people."
In the Kaiser survey, almost every state reported that Medicaid enrollment for the current fiscal year was exceeding expectations, making midyear budget cuts necessary.
The options are limited by several realities. To qualify for Medicaid dollars provided in the stimulus package, states agreed not to tighten eligibility for low-income people. And any time a state cuts spending on Medicaid, it loses at least that much in federal matching money.
Despite the ban on restricting eligibility, hard-hit states like California and Arizona are considering proposals by their governors that would remove hundreds of thousands from the rolls once the federal financing ends. Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, a Republican, has called for eliminating Medicaid coverage for 310,000 childless adults and ending the Children's Health Insurance Program to help close a two-year budget gap of about $4.5 billion.
Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee, a Democrat, is proposing the largest cuts in the history of TennCare, his state's Medicaid program. To trim 9 percent of the TennCare budget, he would establish a $10,000 cap on inpatient hospital services for nonpregnant adults and would limit coverage of X-rays, laboratory services and doctor's office visits.
"I have no choice," Mr. Bredesen said.
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23) A Sight All Too Familiar in Poor Neighborhoods
By ERIK ECKHOLM
February 19, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/us/19evict.html?ref=us
MILWAUKEE - Shantana Smith, a single mother who had not paid rent for three months, watched on a recent morning as men from Eagle Moving carried her tattered furniture to the sidewalk.
Bystanders knew too well what was happening.
"When you see the Eagle movers truck, you know it's time to get going," a neighbor said.
On Milwaukee's impoverished North Side, the mover's name is nearly as familiar as McDonald's, because Eagle often accompanies sheriffs on evictions. They haul tenants' belongings into storage or, as Ms. Smith preferred, leave them outside for tenants to truck away.
Here and in swaths of many cities, evictions from rental properties are so common that they are part of the texture of life. New research is showing that eviction is a particular burden on low-income black women, often single mothers, who have an easier time renting apartments than their male counterparts, but are vulnerable to losing them because their wages or public benefits have not kept up with the cost of housing.
And evictions, in turn, can easily throw families into cascades of turmoil and debt.
"Just as incarceration has become typical in the lives of poor black men, eviction has become typical in the lives of poor black women," said Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin whose research on trends in Milwaukee since 2002 provides a rare portrait of gender patterns in inner-city rentals.
The study found that one of every 25 renter-occupied households in the city is evicted each year. In black neighborhoods, the rate is one in 14. These figures include only court-ordered evictions; the true toll, experts say, is greater because far more tenants, under threat of eviction, move in with relatives, into more run-down apartments or, sometimes, into homeless shelters.
Women from largely black neighborhoods in Milwaukee constitute 13 percent of the city's population, but 40 percent of those evicted. Housing lawyers in Los Angeles and New York described a similar predominance of minority women, including Hispanic women, in eviction cases. (The figures do not include displaced renters from foreclosed properties.)
Even for working mothers, evictions and the ensuing damage to social ties, schooling and credit ratings can be an ever-hovering threat. Clarissa Adams, 38, a mother of three in Milwaukee, has been evicted four times in 10 years and is now trying desperately to break the pattern.
Since July she has shared a $570-a-month two-bedroom apartment with her daughters, ages 15, 18 and 23, and two small grandchildren. She is studying for a degree in social services and lost her job as a cashier in the fall after a dispute with her boss.
Unable to pay the last three months rent, Ms. Adams received some emergency assistance through Community Advocates, a private group. To stave off eviction, she promised to pay the landlord $1,000 by Feb. 15, just as her tax refund arrived. She owes an additional $955 by March 1 and hopes to scrape the money together while she looks for a job.
Previous evictions sent her into a deep depression, she said, and had temporarily split up the family, with her children staying a relative who did not want her.
"We just need someplace where we can be a family," Ms. Adams said.
Compared with foreclosures, which are carefully tracked, national data on evictions, especially those not involving a court decision, remain scarce, but the annual total is almost certainly in the millions, said Chester Hartman, an urban planner with the Poverty and Race Research Action Council in Washington. The role of evictions in the cycle of poverty had been relatively overlooked by scholars and officials, he said.
In one sign of rising concern, Congress in the stimulus act last year provided $1.5 billion for emergency housing aid, and that may help explain why legal evictions in Milwaukee did not surge last year. But this temporary measure and other rent subsidies help only a fraction of the poor.
The potentially crippling impact of evictions on family finances and prospects are not widely appreciated, said Nicolas P. Retsinas, director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. "There is a contagion effect," he said. "It's not just the loss of shelter. Eviction can force a change in school and break a very tenuous tie to a job."
The disparate effect on minority women has a host of causes, according to landlords, housing lawyers and Mr. Desmond's research, which he conducted for his doctoral dissertation. The work is not yet published, but has been praised by experts who have seen it for offering new insights into women's poverty.
Marriage is an exception among the poor, and single mothers need larger, more expensive housing than single men. At the same time, black women are more often able to get leases because they are likelier to have steady incomes, whether from work or public benefits, and far less likely to have disqualifying criminal records.
Irresponsible or destructive tenant behavior is sometimes a factor. Three landlords in Milwaukee said in interviews that live-in fathers or boyfriends had sometimes spent women's rent money or engaged in illegal activities that led to eviction, and some women stopped paying when they turned to drugs.
But there is also evidence that women more readily complain to city agencies about repairs, potentially angering landlords who then find excuses to evict them.
And police reports of domestic violence can backfire on women, leading some landlords to seek evictions out of fear that they will be fined for tolerating disturbances.
Sometimes the causes of evictions are hotly disputed. Ms. Smith said she had withheld rent because the apartment was not maintained. But the landlord said that she had never made a formal complaint and failed to show up for a court hearing.
Still, at the root of most evictions is money, which can evaporate with an illness, a job loss or other crisis.
Angela Sandifer, 28, can just afford the $950 rental she shares with four children and a cast of relatives because she receives disability payments for three of the children. But in early January, she said, her rent money was stolen from a wallet at home when she rushed her 9-year-old daughter to the hospital.
A lawyer from Legal Action of Wisconsin helped her delay eviction and Ms. Sandifer, who has started a part-time job, hopes to use her first paycheck to pay off the back rent.
Tim Ballering, who owns or manages some 900 rental units in Milwaukee, said a basic problem was the growing imbalance between low-end incomes and rents. A minimum-wage worker may gross little more than $1,100 a month; a welfare recipient in Wisconsin receives $673 a month, while two-bedroom units start at about $475.
"On $673 a month, how do you buy tennis shoes for the kids, clean shirts for school and still pay your rent?" Mr. Ballering said.
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24) Pennsylvania: Schools Accused of Spying
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Mid-Atlantic
February 19, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/us/19brfs-SCHOOLSACCUS_BRF.html?ref=us
A suburban Philadelphia school district used school-issued laptop Webcams to spy on students at home, a family claims in a federal lawsuit. Lower Merion School District officials can activate the Webcams without students' knowledge or permission, the suit said. The plaintiffs, Michael and Holly Robbins, suspect the cameras captured students and family members as they undressed and in other embarrassing situations. The district prides itself on its technology initiatives, including giving laptops to its 2,300 high school students. The district could not immediately confirm whether it has the ability to activate the Webcams remotely, a spokesman said.
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25) Fed Move May Signal End to Easy Bank Profits
[You can bet your bottom dollar that the banks will make up their profits through higher banking fees for checking accounts. There will be no more free checking. That's the advantage you have when you own your own corporation and can make your rules up as you go...bw]
By GRAHAM BOWLEY and ERIC DASH
February 19, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/business/economy/19banks.html?ref=business
Federal Reserve to Wall Street: The days of easy money - and, just maybe, easy profits - are numbered.
News on Thursday that the Fed would raise the interest rate that it charges banks for temporary loans was seen by lenders as a sign that their long, profitable period of ultralow rates was coming to an end.
The move suggested that policy makers believed the nation's banks had healed enough to withdraw some of the extraordinary support that Washington put in place during the financial crisis. And, while all those bailouts stabilized the banking industry, it was low rates from the Fed that helped propel banks' rapid recovery.
Even though the Fed had telegraphed its intention to raise the largely symbolic discount rate, the timing of the move, coming between scheduled policy meetings, caught some economists by surprise. Stocks and bonds sank in after-hours trading, suggesting Friday could be an anxious day for the markets.
"This is a victory lap by the Fed," Zach Pandl, economist at Nomura Securities, said. "It is a signal that the Fed is very confident in the health of the banking system. Fundamentally, these actions are a sign of policy success."
Since the crisis, the Fed has nursed banks back to health with extraordinarily low rates. Banks have been able to borrow money cheaply and put it to work in lucrative ways, whether using the money to make loans at higher rates or to trade in the markets.
The difference between short- and long-term interest rates is near a record high, presenting a profitable opportunity for banks. The difference between two- and 10-year Treasury rates, for instance, is about 2.9 percentage points. Buoyed by such policies, banks' profits - and banking stocks - have rocketed over the last year.
Many economists said banks were no longer borrowing in large amounts from the Fed using the discount rate, and so the move on Thursday was, in a sense, purely technical.
But it was a sign that the threat of a collapse in financial markets - so real just a year and a half ago - had dissipated. Some economists said that, with unemployment high and the economy growing slowly, the Fed would not be raising the more important benchmark interest rates for some time.
"This does not say anything about interest rates, but it does say something about what has happened on the ground, that the financial industry is not under same stress as it was previously," Frederic S. Mishkin, a professor at Columbia and a former member of the Fed's board of governors, said.
Others countered that the move at least brought forward the moment when interest rates would begin to rise again - and put an end to the banks' period of easy money.
Louis V. Crandall, chief economist at Wrightson ICAP, said it demonstrated "a willingness to entertain an early start to the real business of retreating from the Fed's very accommodating stance."
Unnerved by this prospect, at least in the short term, the bond market fell after the Fed's announcement, driving up the yield on 10-year Treasury notes about seven basis points, or seven-hundredths of a percentage point, to 3.8 percent.
Stock futures also fell in after-hours trading. Financial shares were particularly hard hit, with shares of big banks like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America each falling about 1 percent.
The uncertainty over what the Fed will do next, and when, is a big worry for bankers.
"It creates real havoc in managing a bank when you have to ride through these cycles when interest rates change rapidly," said Douglas J. Leech, the chairman and chief executive of Centra Bank, in Morgantown, W.Va.
Many banks are still coping with bad mortgages and other loans. "This poses a new threat," Mr. Leech said.
Rising interest rates will invariably squeeze banks' profit margins and reduce the value of some lenders' own investments. Taken together, those developments will hurt banks' bottom lines, a particular worry for the many small and midsize banks that are struggling to cope with the weak economy.
Many banks have tried to prepare for an inevitable rise in rates by locking up customers' deposits, which provide a stable source of funding for loans. Centra, for instance, began extending the term of its certificates of deposits to 16 months, from 12 months, last year. The bank also began offering low-rate loans that it can reset at higher rates in 18 months, in case, as Mr. Leech expects, interest rates rise.
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