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Haiti Earthquake: The Hidden Holocaust
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSfWtA-A8QE
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STOP SPENDING TRILLIONS ON THE WARS! BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
END US/UN MILITARY OCCUPATION OF HAITI! 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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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.
http://calaction.org/actions/?id=4230
Stop Attack On Education! DAY OF ACTION!
Thurs. March 4 - Statewide Strike and Protest
Stop the Attacks on Education!
Money for Schools--Not for Wars and Bailouts!
Thursday, March 4 will be a statewide day of action to defend public education and to fight against the cuts. Students, parents, faculty, and school employees at all levels--K12, community college and university--and everyone who supports the right to education are mobilizing to fight back.
Last fall, the UC Regents announced a huge 32% increase in tuition.
Last week, it was announced that more than 900 K-12 public school teachers and staff would be laid-off in San Francisco. This is part of a plan to cut the San Francisco Unified School District's budget by $113 million, or by over 25 percent!
In early February, City College of San Francisco, the only option for many working-class students, announced that its entire summer school program would be scrapped. The huge tuition increases and cutbacks are making higher education an impossible dream for hundreds of thousands of young people in California.
Public education all over the country is under attack. As the rich attempt to "solve" the economic crisis by cutting the things that people need most, the government has handed over between $9 trillion and $11 trillion to the richest bankers, and submitted the largest military budget in U.S. history, which includes nearly $500 million each day to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan.
If there is money for wars, bank bailouts and prisons, why is there no money for public education? It's time to stand up and make our voices heard.
Following are some of the many actions taking place on Mar. 4:
.. 10am - City College of San Francisco, action starting at Ocean Ave. & Phelan, main campus
.. 10am - San Francisco State University, action starting at 19th and Holloway Ave.
.. 3pm - Save Our Schools march, starting at 24th and Mission, marching to Van Ness and MacAllister Sts.
.. 4pm - Defend Public Education! Solidarity with Teachers and Students, Meet at Van Ness and McAllister Sts.
.. 5pm - Rally in Defense of Public Education and All Public-Sector Services!, Civic Center Plaza
Join us for an organizing meeting on Sat. Mar. 13, 2pm at 2489 Mission St. #28, SF to discuss future actions against the cuts and plans for the Students & Teachers contingent at the Mar. 20 Anti-War Protest to demand "Money for Schools, Not for War!"
Call 415-821-6545 for more information or to get involved.
ANSWER: San Francisco Bay Area
www.ANSWERcoalition.org
To vote on the action, Please go to http://calaction.org/_admin/vote/, which will require clicking LOGIN.
Be sure to forward word of this action to your members.
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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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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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Angela Davis, Linda Evans, Susan Rosenberg & Laura Whitehorn
invite you to:
SPARKS FLY 2010 -
An evening in celebration of Marilyn Buck and Women Political Prisoners
Saturday, March 13, 2010, 7 PM
10 PM Dance Party with DJ Kuttin Kandi
Uptown Body and Fender Garage
401 26th St., Oakland (Telegraph Ave)
Art Auction, Speakers & Music including, Maisha Quint, devorah major, Phavia Kujichagulia, Kayla Marin, Yuri Kochiyama, Graciela Perez-Trevisan & Bomberas de la Bahia Afro-Puerto Rican Bomba Plena
$10-50 (no one turned away)
Sparks Fly has honored women political prisoners for 20 years. Marilyn Buck is scheduled to get out of prison later this year after serving more than 25 years. Let's welcome her home! All money raised will go to the Release Fund for Marilyn Buck.
During this evening we also pay tribute to Safiya Bukhari on publication of her posthumous book, The War Before.
For book tour dates go to http://www.feministpress.org/books/safiya-bukhari/war.
Endorsed by: AK Press, All of Us or None, Arab Resource & Organizing Center, BACORR, California Coalition of Women Prisoners, Campaign to End the Death Penalty, Code Pink, East Bay Prisoners Support, East Side Arts Alliance, Freedom Archives, Free the SF 8 Comm. Friends of Marilyn Buck, Haiti Action Committee, Kevin Cooper Defense Comm, KPFA Women's Magazine, LAGAI, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, Long Haul, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, National Lawyers Guild/Bay Area, Out of Control, PM Press, Prison Activist Resource Center, Prison Radio Project, QUIT, Radical Women, SF Dyke March, SF Women In Black, Speak Out!, Stanley Tookie Williams Legacy Network
wheelchair accessible
for more information: sparksfly2010@gmail.com
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LABOR'S STAKE IN ENDING THE WARS
Why are we in Afghanistan?
San Francisco
Saturday, March 20, 10:00 A.M.-12:00 Noon*
Plumbers Hall
1621 Market Street (Near Franklin)
U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq and its consequences.
Program Includes:
--"Why Are We in Afghanistan" a short video.
--Stephen Zunes, USF Professor and Middle East specialist
--Afghanistan War Veteran
--Military Families Speak Out
--Labor Leaders
Speakers followed by Q&A and Audience Response
Followed by a Labor Contingent march to Civic Center to join antiwar rally and march in solidarity with Unite HERE Local 2 members at downtown hotels. (Bring union banners and colors)
*Coffee, bagels and music at 10:00 A.M., march to Civic Center at Noon. Park in lot next to building or exit Civic Center BART station, walk about 6 blocks west on Market to Franklin.
Sponsored by:
San Francisco Labor Council and Bay Area U.S. Labor Against the War
Endorsed by:
Alameda Labor Council; AFT Local 2121; Bay Area Labor Committee for Peace and Justice; ILWU Local 10; Oakland Education Association; OPEIU Local 3; Peralta Federation of Teachers; SEIU Local 1021; Unite HERE Local 2; United Educators of San Francisco.
This list is in formation. Additional endorsements are invited.
For more information: 510-263-5303
labor-for-peace-and-justice@igc.org
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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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Defend Holly Works!
Monday April 5th 2010, 8 AM,
Alameda County Courthouse,
12th & Oak St, Oakland
8 AM demonstrate! 9 AM, attend trial.
(from 12th Street BART Station, walk down 12th St toward Lake Merritt.
Demonstrate/enter court at 12th and Oak St)
Holly Works is the now the last remaining defendant of the Oakland 100. Her trial was to start Monday, March 1st. But a defense motion for a postponement was granted, since Holly's chief witness is out of the country at this time.
A local musician and activist, Holly 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!
This took place at least an hour before the protest was even to have started! Originally charged with assaulting a cop with a knife, Holly had no knife, and so that had to be changed. Since she had a screw driver in her purse, the cops accused her of using this "deadly weapon" to assault an officer. Once again, a total fabrication, made up by the police to tie up protesters with time-consuming prosecutions.
DROP ALL CHARGES AGAINST HOLLY WORKS!
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 early on New Years Day, 2009. 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.
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222 • Oakland CA 94610 • 510 763-2347
www.laboractionmumia.org
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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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Check out:
Hotter than a Motherfucker!
By: Warren E. Henderson
[Warren E. Henderson has been incarcerated for many years. He is mentioned in the book, "Jailhouse Lawyers," By Mumia Abu-Jamal of one of the most effective "jailhouse lawyers." He has written two books from prison. Only this one is still available...]
ISBN: 1-4257-8463-1 (Trade Paperback 6x9 )
ISBN13: 978-1-4257-8463-8 (Trade Paperback 6x9 )
Pages : 130
Book Format :Trade Book 6x9
Subject :
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / General
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / People of Color
HISTORY / United States / General
LITERARY CRITICISM & COLLECTIONS / American
Availability
Trade Paperback 6x9 ($17.84)
Please choose book availability
https://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.aspx?bookid=39510
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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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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. 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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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) Union Election Further Complicates a Tangled City Budget
By GERRY SHIH
February 25, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/26/us/26sflabor.html?ref=us
2) 8.8-Magnitude Earthquake Strikes Chile
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
February 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/world/americas/28chile.html?hp
3) California Campus Sees Uneasy Race Relations
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
February 26, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/27/education/27sandiego.html?ref=us
4) Troubled Iraq vet charged with murder dies
Carmen Duarte
Arizona Daily Star
February 27, 2010
http://www.azstarnet.com/news/local/article_65251ae3-6949-5e7c-9ecc-c6eb65fcd620.html
5) 2 Million Displaced After Chile Quake
By MARC LACEY and ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
February 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/world/americas/01chile.html?hp
6) Jails Hope Eye Scanners Can Provide Foolproof Identification System for Inmates
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/us/28eyes.html?ref=us
7) Buffett's Bargain Shopping Spree
By GRAHAM BOWLEY
February 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/business/economy/28buffett.html?ref=us
8) Protests and Promises of Improvements at Schools
"If we stop this reform at flipping the adults and hiring a bunch of new teachers and leaders and that's the extent of the new support," Mr. Knowles said, "the likelihood is this will repeat failed experiments of the past."
By CRYSTAL YEDNAK
February 26, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/us/28cncreform.html?ref=education
9) As U.S. Aid Grows, Oversight Is Urged for Charter Schools
By SAM DILLON
February 24, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/education/25educ.html?ref=education
10) Letters: The Task for Unions
Letters To the Editor
February 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/business/28backpage-THETASKFORUN_LETTERS.html?ref=business
11) For Buyout Kingpins, the TXU Utility Deal Gets Tricky
By JENNY ANDERSON and JULIE CRESWELL
"'When I started hearing certain legislative members - members who would naturally otherwise be allies to us - parrot the bullet points that were being made by the company, I knew we were in trouble,' recalls Tim Morstad, who represented AARP and who was an advocate for significant electricity rate cuts. The buyout group also sought friends in high places. It signed on several powerful Texas politicos as lobbyists, directors or advisers, including Ronald Kirk, the former mayor of Dallas who is now the Obama administration's trade representative; James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state and Bush family confidant, who was given a million shares as part of the buyout; Donald L. Evans, the former secretary of commerce; and Lyndon L. Olson Jr., a former Texas state representative. 'They were hiring Democrats and Republicans alike," says Tom Smith, director of the Texas division of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group. "They would have hired a socialist if we had any in Texas.'"
February 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/business/energy-environment/28txu.html?ref=business
12) Another Foreclosure Alternative
By BOB TEDESCHI
February 24, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/realestate/28mort.html?ref=business
13) Haiti's Futile Race Against the Rain
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
Editorial Observer
March 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/opinion/01mon4.html?hp
14) Doctors Without Morals
By LEONARD S. RUBENSTEIN and STEPHEN N. XENAKIS
Op-Ed Contributors
March 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/opinion/01xenakis.html?hp
15) Aftershocks Jolt Chile as Troops Seek to Keep Order
By MARC LACEY
March 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/world/americas/02chile.html?hp
16) Rulings Restrict Clean Water Act, Foiling E.P.A.
By CHARLES DUHIGG and JANET ROBERTS
February 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/us/01water.html?hp
17) Slain Hamas Operative Was Drugged, Dubai Police Say
By ROBERT F. WORTH
February 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/world/middleeast/01dubai.html?ref=world
18) Community, Labor Unite with IUE-CWA at Whirlpool Rally
by James Parks
February 28, 2010
http://blog.aflcio.org/2010/02/28/community-labor-unite-with-iue-cwa-at-whirlpool-rally/
19) Tomgram: Jo Comerford, A Budgetary SOS for 2011
By Jo Comerford
Posted on February 28, 2010, Printed on March 1, 2010
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175212/
20) Watching Certain People
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
March 2, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/opinion/02herbert.html?hp
21) Greece Expected to Release New Austerity Plan
By NIKI KITSANTONIS
March 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/business/global/03greece.html
22) PA Security Forces Arrest PFLP Comrades in Nablus
by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
[Let's not forget this repression is financed by the US and is done by troops trained by US military personnel who are in Palestine right now.]
US Out of Palestine!
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/pflp010310.html
For more information, go to www.pflp.ps
23) Clinton Arrives as Chile Sends Troops to Hard-Hit City
[As in Haiti, they accuse starving people who have lost everything including access to food and water as "looters." Instead of distributing all that food in supermarkets to those who need it, they send troops with guns!...bw]
By GINGER THOMPSON and ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
March 2, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/world/americas/03chile.html?hp
24) An appeal to anti-war organizations & activists
to oppose the increasing threats against Iran
Press Release from the
Campaign Against Sanctions & Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII)
Feb. 20, 2010
This appeal has been initiated by the
Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII)
For more information or to contact CASMII please visit:
http://www.campaigniran.org
25) Two Suspects Entered U.S. After Killing in Dubai
By ROBERT F. WORTH
March 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/world/middleeast/02dubai.html?ref=world
26) Immigrants Rally for a Nationwide Strike in Italy
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO
March 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/world/europe/02iht-italy.html?ref=world
27) For Pennies, a Disposable Toilet That Could Help Grow Crops
[I think they should hand these bags out to the politicians and corporate elite and invite the homeless to use the luxurious, marble-encrusted, bathrooms on Wall Street, at the Whitehouse and all the Governors' mansions. ...bw]
By SINDYA N. BHANOO
March 2, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/science/02bag.html?ref=world
28) New Evidence Surfaces in New Orleans Killings
"The Orleans Parish District Attorney's Office has had a problematic history with capital cases. Of the 36 people sentenced to death in the parish since 1976, more have been exonerated than have been executed - five compared with four - two have been retried and acquitted, and more than half are no longer on death row after their cases were reviewed by the Louisiana Supreme Court..."
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
March 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/us/02orleans.html?ref=us
29) Defense files motion for new trial for man convicted of killing 5
by Mike Hoss and Mike Perlstein / Eyewitness News
[There is a very informative news video with this article...bw]
Posted on March 1, 2010 at 5:51 PM
Updated yesterday at 11:01 PM
http://www.wwltv.com/news/Defense-files-motion-for-new-trial-for-man-convicted-of-killing-5-85866427.html
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1) Union Election Further Complicates a Tangled City Budget
By GERRY SHIH
February 25, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/26/us/26sflabor.html?ref=us
When the ballot counters at Local 1021 of the Service Employees International Union announce the results of the union's bitter leadership election Saturday, the news will be felt keenly in two quarters.
One is the fractious world of labor: the former leaders pushed aside during a reorganization of regional unions three years ago are seeking to return to power by promising to hold back the recent tide of pay cuts and layoffs. The leadership installed three years ago is making similar promises to retain power.
The second is in San Francisco City Hall, which spends 52 percent of its $6.6 billion budget on personnel costs. Unless it can manage to trim what it pays those nurses, social workers and janitors, the city will not be able to make ends meet next year.
What this means in the near term is that the city's goal of winning labor's backing for the short- and long-term solutions to budget deficits is likely to be difficult to achieve.
The looming deficit for the fiscal year that begins July 1, and the difficult decisions it brings, comes on the heels of cuts made by the city to close last year's $438 million gap. Last June, services like substance-abuse programs were sharply reduced and more than 500 public employees were laid off.
In the longer term, the results could loosen the knots that have bound unions with the dominant Democratic Party and its mayors and supervisors, which would be a striking change for a city where labor leaders like Harry Bridges once held sway.
Despite all the young professionals and affluent retirees who have arrived in the decades since, and notwithstanding all the other issues the left has rallied around along the way, like gay rights, steadfast support for labor has been the beating heart of this city's progressive politics.
It is a banner carried today by members of the Board of Supervisors like David Campos and Eric Mar. "I used to be a shop steward for the S.E.I.U. and organized in the workplace," Mr. Mar said. "This is a strongly labor town and as one of the elected officials, I'm doing my best to make sure they are represented."
But, he added, "we're in the worst economic crisis of our lifetime, and people's fears of the economy and their pocketbooks will drive their decision making."
Steve Ponder, a compensation analyst in the city's Department of Human Resources said that while San Francisco's unionized city workers were paid about the same as other public employees in the Bay Area, they did considerably better than private-sector peers.
A janitor working for the city can make as much as $50,000 in base salary, not including $27,800 in benefits. Mr. Ponder said a janitor in the private sector typically earned less than half that amount in total compensation.
Against that backdrop, the city is facing both short- and long-term bills accumulated during decades of mutual support between labor unions and City Hall.
The unified city and county government now spends about 13 percent of the budget, or $890 million, on pensions and benefits. By 2014, these alone will rise 57 percent, to $1.4 billion. Most of the expenditures will come from general fund dollars - now a pie of around $3 billion, or less than half the city's total budget. That portion of the budget represents most of what can be easily shifted around as the supervisors and the mayor wrangle over for economic and social priorities.
The trend lines laid out by city economists describe a government with a shrinking capacity to deliver vital services or underwrite new initiatives, particularly if pension obligations keep expanding. And then there is the immediate problem of the near-record $522 million deficit for the coming fiscal year.
"This is the toughest year that anyone has seen in recent history," said David Chiu, the president of the Board of Supervisors, "in large part because last year we cut to the bone, and this year, we're cutting bone."
Yet city management and labor leaders alike say that at this critical time, with so many jobs at stake, bargaining efforts have by been hindered by a labor movement dogged by infighting.
"Hopefully with the outcome of the elections in the next month we'll see some unity that will allow them to speak with one voice," said Mike Casey, the president of the city's labor council. "Right now, that kind of unity doesn't exist. It's not even close."
The mayor's office says the city is seeking $70 million from wage givebacks alone, excluding additional savings from layoffs or reconfigurations of the workweek. Mayor Gavin Newsom's spokesman, Tony Winnicker, said the city could lay off 10,000 of the 26,000 city workers -who now work a 40-hour week - and then rehire most of them to work for 37.5 hours. This would be an effective 6.5 percent pay cut and would save $50 million.
Damita Davis-Howard, the interim director of Local 1021 of the S.E.I.U., has told reporters that Mr. Newsom's plan was "not the right track; it's the next step in a downward spiral for the city and its citizens." Through a spokesman, she declined to be interviewed for this article.
The fight over pensions is just as barbed. Ben Rosenfield, city budget director, said in an interview, "Every dollar we are spending on benefits is a dollar not available to solve deficits or fund city services. The challenge at the moment is that our cost increases are expected to consume the vast majority, if not all, of our expected revenue growth. What that means is while we are dealing larger macroeconomic issues like declining revenues from the state, we really don't have the benefit of local tax revenues to help us."
Most city unions already contribute 7.5 percent of their wages toward pensions, except for the S.E.I.U., which argues that its members are paid less than any other union workers on the payroll. The city has picked up S.E.I.U. members' contributions for the past decade as part of an arrangement made years ago when the union gave up a 7.5 percent raise.
In December, Supervisor Sean Elsbernd introduced a well-received measure that would require all city employees to contribute 7.5 percent of their annual pension payments. The labor council made a counterproposal with relatively minor changes.
Mr. Elsbernd's bill originally calculated the pension payouts based on an average of worker's salary over the final three years. The council wanted to average the last two years.
But this month, Supervisors Mar and Campos, who represent two labor-heavy districts, introduced a further amendment to Mr. Elsbernd's bill that would negate the pension contributions with a pay raise for the S.E.I.U., a move that would in fact increase costs to the city, according to the city controller.
The internal battles within the service employees union have also created confusion in the negotiations.
"When I meet with the other unions," Mr. Elsbernd said, "they all send their president or attorney or two or three people. I have to sit down with 65 to 85 people from the S.E.I.U. bargaining team every time because they're simply unable to delegate the responsibility of conferring."
This chaotic approach is the result of lingering distrust between the factions vying for control of the union, city official and representatives of other unions said.
One source of bitterness revolved around accusations of skullduggery over the union's response last year to the city's effort to have S.E.I.U. members give up a 3.75 percent raise that had been promised for years.
Brenda Barros, a union activist who supports the existing leadership under Ms. Davis-Howard, accused allies of Sin Yee Poon, the head of the rival faction, of altering the agreement while key negotiators were on vacation. The revisions were later disavowed at a rowdy membership meeting. Union members said it was not clear whether Ms. Davis-Howard or Ms. Poon would prevail in the contest for control of the union. But Ms. Poon said the election had one clear result already: "It's moved us closer to directing our resources and focusing our energies to get what we need to stand up against the attacks on pensions and other unfair demands."
The negotiations between the unions and the city are expected to continue until June, the deadline for passing next year's budget.
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2) 8.8-Magnitude Earthquake Strikes Chile
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
February 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/world/americas/28chile.html?hp
RIO DE JANEIRO - A powerful 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck Chile early Saturday, shaking the capital of Santiago for 90 seconds and sending tsunami warnings along much of the Pacific basin.
Chile's TVN cable news channel was reporting 122 deaths, with the toll expected to rise, as communications were still spotty around the center of quake, near the city of Concepción in the south. Chile President Michelle Bachelet declared a "state of catastrophe."
The Associated Press quoted Mrs. Bachelet as saying that a huge wave had swept into a populated area in the Robinson Crusoe Islands, 410 miles off the Chilean coast, but there were no immediate reports of major damage there. Those reports bore out early fears that a major tsunami was on its way across the Pacific.
A Department of Homeland Security official said early Saturday that FEMA was monitoring the situation and was in contact with state emergency personnel in Hawaii, which is under a tsunami warning. But the decision to evacuate coastal areas and handling this evacuation is the responsibility of state and local officials in Hawaii, the Homeland Security official said.
The quake downed buildings and houses in Santiago and knocked out a major bridge connecting the northern and southern sections of the country.
It struck at 3:34 a.m. local time and was centered about 200 miles southwest of Santiago, at a depth of 22 miles, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. The epicenter was some 70 miles from Concepcion, Chile's second-largest city, where more than 200,000 people live.
Phone lines were down in Concepcion as of 7:30 a.m. and no reports were coming out of that area. The quake in Chile was more powerful than the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that caused widespread damage in Haiti on Jan 12, killing at least 230,000, earthquake experts reported on CNN International.
The U.S. Geological Survey and eyewitnesses reported more than two dozen aftershocks, including two measuring magnitude 6.2 and 6.9.
"We have had a huge earthquake," Mrs. Bachelet said from an emergency response center in an appeal for Chileans to remain calm. "We're doing everything we can with all the resources we have."
Mrs. Bachelet said that the government had dispatched three emergency response teams to coastal areas. "Without a doubt, with a quake of this kind, of this size, of this magnitude, we can't rule out that there are other deaths and probably injuries," Mrs. Bachelet told reporters.
Witnesses on Facebook and Twitter reported that the quake was felt from Japan to Argentina. The quake struck at the end of the Chilean summer vacation, with hundreds of thousands of people expected to be traveling back home this weekend.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued a warning for Chile and Peru, and a less-urgent tsunami watch for Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica and Antarctica. The White House said Saturday morning that it was closely monitoring the situation, "including the potential for a tsunami," said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.
"We are closely monitoring the situation, including the potential for a tsunami. Our thoughts and prayers are with the people of Chile, and we stand ready to help in this hour of need."
Evacuation alarms sounded at 6 a.m. Saturday in vulnerable coastal areas in Hawaii, as the region prepares for what federal officials say could be a dangerous, but most likely not catastrophic tsunami to hit the islands in the aftermath of the earthquake in Chile.
Statewide television news was reporting that the southeast areas of all the islands would likely be the most impacted, which include the heavy tourist zones of Waikiki, and Poipu on Kauai. News reports said that a corridor to the airport on Oahu was being established, and that visitors should go to at least the third floor of their hotels
Brian R. Shiro, a geophysicist at NOAA Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Ewa Beach, Hawaii, said that computer models show that the impact will be greatest in spots such as Hilo Bay on Hawaii Island and Kahului Harbor in Maui.
In those areas, the tsunami waves could reach as high as 6 to 10 feet, Mr. Shiro said. Elsewhere in Hawaii, the waves will likely be only about two to three feet.
Already, some boat owners were moving their boats away from the coast, to avoid damage when the waves arrive. Beaches will be closed and pre-determined evacuation zones in certain coastal areas will be cleared.
Tourists saying in modern, high-rise resort hotels will be safe, Mr. Shiro said, as long as they are above the third floor. Anyone in the coastal areas should listen to directions offered from local authorities.
"Get off the shore line. We are closing all the beaches and telling people to drive out of the area," John Cummings, Oahu Civil Defense spokesman, told Reuters. Buses will patrol beaches and take people to parks in a voluntary process expected to last five hours, Reuters reported, adding that more than an hour before sirens were due to sound lines of cars snaked for blocks from gas stations in Honolulu.
Overall, the event should pass in Hawaii without widespread, catastrophic damage or major loss of life, Mr. Shiro predicted.
"We are taking it very seriously," Mr. Shiro said. "But this is not a big one."
But particularly in certain vulnerable harbor areas, he warned that area residents should take the warning seriously.
The tsunami was expected to arrive in Hawaii at 11:20 a.m., or 4:20 p.m. Eastern time.
A tsunami is essentially a wave. But it will look like a rise in sea level, or more like a flood, he said, and takes place very quickly. An initial wave will come in and then follow up waves will arrive, most likely 20 or so minutes later, in a pattern that could continue for several hours.
"The waves are so big that to the observer it looks like a very big tide," he said.
The last time there was a Pacific wide tsunami warning-as has now taken place-was in 1964, Mr. Shiro said.
There have been past regional warnings in Hawaii, such as in 1964, that passed with no tsunami impact at all. But tsunamis historically have caused major damage and loss of life in Hawaii, most recently in 1975, when two people were killed in one event, Mr. Shiro said.
"So far, the models and based on the information we have, in Hawaii, most shores will experience two to three feet, which is not that big," he said. "But you should still avoid swimming or surfing."
Lying along the mountainous Andean coast, Chile is accustomed to earthquakes. The largest earthquake ever recorded struck the same area as Saturday's quake on May 22, 1960. That quake, which registered a magnitude 9.5, killed 1,655 people and left 2 million homeless. The tsunami that it caused killed people in Hawaii, Japan and the Philippines and caused damage to the West Coast of the United States.
Eric Lipton contributed reporting from Washington, and Charles Newbery from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Alexei Barrionuevo reported from Rio de Janeiro, and Liz Robbins from New York.
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3) California Campus Sees Uneasy Race Relations
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
February 26, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/27/education/27sandiego.html?ref=us
SAN DIEGO - It began, as so many racial flare-ups on campus do, with a prank that some called malicious, others insensitive.
Students at the University of California, San Diego, held an off-campus "Compton Cookout" Feb. 15 to mock Black History Month, with guests invited to don gold teeth in the style of rappers from the Los Angeles suburb of Compton, eat watermelon, and dress in baggy athletic wear.
Outrage ensued from the relatively small black student population here and their supporters, who grew more inflamed when a satirical campus television program broadcast a segment on the party and used a racial epithet to denounce black students.
On Thursday night, a third incident, a student's hanging a noose from a bookcase in the main library, spurred a large, multicultural mass of chanting and drumming students to occupy the chancellor's office for several hours on Friday and fed a simmering, some say much-needed, debate over race relations.
"The campus has been pretty silent about racism and nobody, until now, says anything," said Aaron Gurlly, 30, an African-American graduate student who was among those occupying the administration building. The fallout from the incidents has jolted this campus in an era when many students and faculty believed that the progress of African-Americans nationwide have made such discussions passé.
But more than a decade after a state ballot proposition barred the use of race and ethnicity in admissions decisions, the University of California continues to struggle to diversify its campuses. Black and Latino undergraduate enrollment systemwide plummeted and, although gains have been made in the numbers of minority students since then, the proportion of white (30.5 percent) and Asian (39.8 percent) students enrolled last year far exceeded that of blacks (3.8 percent) and Latinos (20.4 percent).
Just a few years ago, the Los Angeles campus, one of the system's most prestigious, was shaken with the news that only 103 black freshmen had enrolled, 2.2 percent of the class in a county that is 9.4 percent black. (The numbers have since ticked up to about 4.5 percent of the class.)
"We are constantly examining admissions practices, and there are no easy answers here," said Nina Robinson, the university's director of policy.
The San Diego campus, set on a bluff along the Pacific Ocean, has long struggled with attracting what the university calls "underrepresented minorities." Black students make up fewer than 2 percent of undergraduates, among the lowest representation in the 10-campus, 220,000-student system.
The contours of the discussion were drawn starkly on social media sites, including rival Facebook pages. One declares "Solidarity Against Racism and Compton Cookout" (nearly 600 members) and another deplores what it considers political correctness with the title "U.C.S.D. Students Outraged That People Are Outraged About the Compton Cookout" (more than 440 members).
Some students believe what their peers perceive as an unwelcoming climate comes more from the campus's reputation for scientific research than socializing and the fact that only 38 percent of students live on campus.
Inez Feltscher, a white senior who attended a teach-in Wednesday on race relations at the school that prompted hundreds of students of various races and ethnicities to walk out in protest, called the racial incidents disgusting. "But it's not representative of the larger community at U.C.S.D.," she said, "and people are afraid of getting labeled with that."
The school's chancellor, Marye Anne Fox, lamented the episode and has responded with a Web site, outlining a number of steps to improve the campus atmosphere. "I think we would all like to believe that racism was a thing of the '60s, that it's now passed us," Ms. Fox said. "These incidents suggest it's not."
Students have accused her of responding slowly and maintaining a low profile - she sat taking notes at the teach-in. But on Friday she, uncharacteristically by all accounts, held a bullhorn and addressed protesters in a courtyard just outside her office before it was overtaken.
"We will not tolerate hate on our campus," she said, reading from a statement in a voice still soft despite the bullhorn.
Later, Ms. Fox met with protest leaders, promising more attention to their concerns.
The administration is still investigating the Compton Cookout, and whether students can or should be sanctioned. The student association has suspended financing to all campus media while it studies what to do about the program about the party. And the police have not identified the student who admitted to the noose incident nor said whether charges would be filed.
Richard Louis Kizzee, 21, an African-American junior hanging out on the chancellor's balcony at the office occupation, said he took heart at the protest's cross-cultural flavor. "I knew the minority population was low here, but I didn't think racism was so high or rampant," he said. "But now, in response to what happened, this is what we should see."
Rob Davis contributed reporting.
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4) Troubled Iraq vet charged with murder dies
Carmen Duarte
Arizona Daily Star
February 27, 2010
http://www.azstarnet.com/news/local/article_65251ae3-6949-5e7c-9ecc-c6eb65fcd620.html
The tragic story of a decorated soldier accused of a brutal murder came to an end in Sahuarita last week.
John Wylie Needham, 26, was free on $1 million bail in connection with the September 2008 beating death of his girlfriend, aspiring model Jacqwelyn Villagomez, in California.
He died at his mother's home in Sahuarita where he had been recovering from surgery for wounds received in battle.
"I have been through hell," his mother, Cynthia Northcross, said Friday. "I haven't even had a chance to grieve."
On Thursday, the family held a private ceremony for Needham in Tucson.
Northcross said her son had surgery at a Tucson hospital recently and a visiting nurse was providing care for him at her home.
The mother said she found her son unconscious on Feb. 19 and began cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but could not revive him.
A cause of death has not been determined.
Needham was a member of an infantry special-operations unit - nicknamed the Lethal Warriors - and was deployed to Iraq in 2006.
That unit was documented by journalists, including those for the Web site Salon.com and The Gazette of Colorado Springs, after soldiers returned to Fort Carson near Colorado Springs and some were charged with committing violent crimes. The Army at that time was accused of failing to treat their combat stress.
The crimes included robberies, stabbings, beatings, domestic violence, shootings, attempted murders and homicides, The Gazette reported.
The unit suffered heavy casualties in Iraq and soldiers' lives were filled with roadside bombs and carnage, according to the series.
Needham, who received a Purple Heart, was wounded by a grenade and suffered a brain injury, and shrapnel in his legs and back, says a Salon.com piece. The article also says Needham suffered mentally and tried to commit suicide. He was sent home and received treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and when he arrived at Fort Carson Needham was punished, rather than treated for his mental issues, news accounts say.
In July 2008, Needham received an honorable discharge and partial disability, but his benefits did not provide for full access to mental-health treatment, according to news reports.
He moved to California, and on Sept. 1, 2008, Orange County sheriff's deputies responded to his home after a 911 report of a fight.
When deputies arrived at the condominium they found Needham naked and combative, a news release from the Orange County District Attorney's Office said.
Deputies zapped Needham with a Taser and found Villagomez severely beaten and barely breathing. She was transported by paramedics to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead, according to deputies.
A pretrial hearing was set for March 19 on the murder case in Orange County Superior Court, but now the case will be dismissed, said Susan Schroeder, public affairs counsel for the District Attorney's Office.
"My life has changed from all this tragedy," said Sarah Sevino, 23, Villagomez's foster sister who lives in Lake Forest, Calif. "We have to use this as an experience to change our lives, better our lives," she said, explaining that she and other family members are turning their anger into positive actions.
She and her younger sister both speak out against domestic violence and volunteer for a support group that works with abused women and children.
Villagomez was a high-school track star in hurdles, loved to act, sing and dance, and her goal was to become a model. After high school, she moved out to pursue her dreams, and she worked as a waitress and landed some modeling jobs, Sevino said.
She said her family lost close contact with Villagomez months before her death, but said Villagomez and Needham met at a party three months before she died.
"This horrible tragedy has made me such an angry person. This is not me. I need to let go of this anger," Sevino said. "His (Needham's) family also has lost a son. I don't know how I feel about his death.
"But my heart goes out to his family," she said. "We are all victims in this situation."
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5) 2 Million Displaced After Chile Quake
By MARC LACEY and ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
February 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/world/americas/01chile.html?hp
LIMA, Peru - The ground underneath Chile continued shaking on Sunday as jittery residents took stock of the devastating magnitude 8.8 earthquake that flattened homes, toppled bridges and took more than 300 lives over the weekend.
Among the dead were Lurde Margarita Arias Dias, 24, and her infant child, who were crushed as a wall toppled in their Santiago home. "I tried to save them," Adan Noe Saavedra Rios, Lurde's husband and a member of Chile's Peruvian community, told local reporters. He described his frantic wife rushing from the house with their daughter in her arms after the ground started moving. Before he knew it, they were covered in rubble.
More than 2 million people have been displaced by the quake, according to the National Office of Emergency. Sunday morning's aftershock was measured at a magnitude of 6.1, the strongest of about 60 to reverberate since the quake.
The death toll was expected to rise. In Concepción, Chile's second-largest metropolitan area, which appeared to be especially hard hit, the mayor said Sunday morning that 100 people were trapped under the rubble of a building that had collapsed, according to Reuters. Power and communications networks were still largely out of operation on Sunday, hampering search and rescue efforts.
Images from Chile of toppled buildings, upturned cars and bodies being hauled from rubble resembled those of Haiti just over a month ago. But because of better building standards and an epicenter farther from populated areas, the scale of the damage from Chile's significantly more powerful earthquake was nowhere near the devastation that Haiti suffered.
Televised images from Concepción on Sunday showed looters being detained by police as they sprinted out of a damaged supermarket carrying armloads of merchandise. But authorities said that calmness prevailed in most of the country.
The earthquake hit during Chile's summer vacation, and that left thousands of Chileans stranded overseas. There were frantic scenes at airports throughout the region as the closing of the damaged Santiago airport prompted airlines to cancel or reroute flights away from the Chilean capital.
In Concepción, which is roughly 70 miles from the quake's center, cars lay mangled and upended on streets littered with telephone wires and power cables. A new 14-story apartment building fell, while an older, biochemical lab at the University of Concepción caught fire.
In the nearby port of Talcahuano, a giant wave flooded the main square before receding and leaving behind a large fishing boat on the city streets.
"It was terrible, terrible," said Adela Galaz, a 59-year-old cosmetologist who said glasses and paintings fell to the floor of her 22nd-floor apartment in Santiago, 200 miles from the quake's center. "We are grateful to be alive."
President Michelle Bachelet, speaking at a news conference on Saturday night, called the quake "one of the worst tragedies in the last 50 years" and declared a "state of catastrophe."
While this earthquake was far stronger than the 7.0-magnitude one that ravaged Haiti six weeks ago, the damage and death toll in Chile are likely to be far less extensive, in part because of strict building codes put in place after devastating earthquakes.
The quake Saturday, tied for the fifth largest in the world since 1900, set off tsunami waves that swamped some nearby islands before moving across the Pacific. Hawaii began evacuations before dawn, but by early afternoon there - more than 15 hours after the earthquake first struck 6,500 miles away - the fears of a destructive wave had passed..
Chileans were only just beginning to grapple with the devastation before them, even as more than two dozen significant aftershocks struck the country.
In Santiago, the capital, residents reported having been terrified as the city shook for about 90 seconds.
Some people ran screaming from their downtown apartments, while car alarms and sirens wailed during the middle of the night.
"We are in panic because it has been trembling all day," said Cecilia Vial, 65, an interior decorator in Santiago, who dashed out of her apartment only to return at night because she had nowhere else to go.
"We cannot go against nature," she said. "This is something that nature did."
Paul E. Simons, the United States ambassador to Chile, said in a telephone interview from Santiago that people he spoke with at the embassy said those 90 seconds "felt like five minutes." He added: "It was definitely an emotional experience."
Mr. Simons said that although the United States had offered aid, Chile's government had not yet requested assistance. All international relief groups were on standby, and the International Federation of Red Crosses and Red Crescents said the Chilean Red Cross indicated that it did not need external assistance at this point.
Although there were long lines at supermarkets and gas stations, the capital city, according to residents there, was mostly calm by the late afternoon Saturday. But the scene was grimmer in Concepción and surrounding areas to the south.
In Talca, 167 miles south of Santiago, almost every home in the center of the city was severely damaged, and on Saturday night, people slept on the streets in the balmy night air near fires built with wood from destroyed homes. All but two of the local hospital's 13 wings were in ruins, said Claudio Martínez, a doctor at the hospital. "We're only keeping the people in danger of dying," he said.
Dr. Martínez said the hospital staff had tried to take some people to Santiago for treatment in the morning, but the roads were blocked at the time.
Eduardo Martínez, 57, a local resident, said many people on his street had died and that he and his five brothers all lost their homes.
In Chillán, 69 miles from Concepción, a crumbling wall allowed 300 prisoners to escape and incite a riot, according to La Tercera, the nation's largest newspaper. The police captured 60 inmates, but more than 200 were still at large, the newspaper reported on its Web site. With major highways and bridges destroyed, and slabs of concrete jabbing diagonally into the air, transportation slowed or was halted altogether.
Major seaports and airports, including the main airport in Santiago, were out of operation across the central region, Chilean officials said. TV Chile reported that part of the ceiling at the airport had collapsed, but that runways appeared intact. Cellphone and Internet service was sporadic throughout the country, considered one of the most wired in Latin America, complicating rescue efforts.
On Robinson Crusoe, one of the coastal islands hit by early waves, authorities said at least four people had been killed.
President Obama spoke briefly outside the White House on Saturday afternoon, expressing concern for the country and saying the United States would offer aid in rescue and recovery efforts.
"Early indications are that hundreds of lives have been lost in Chile and the damage has been severe," Mr. Obama said.
He told Mrs. Bachelet that the United States was ready to help if needed. "We will be there for her should the Chilean people need assistance," he said
State Department officials said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who had been planning a trip to South America beginning on Monday, was also contacting Mrs. Bachelet, with whom she has long had warm personal relations.
Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, also offered his condolences, as well as longer-term aid should Chilean officials signal the need for it.
The earthquake struck at 3:34 a.m. in central Chile, centered roughly 200 miles southwest of Santiago at a depth of 22 miles, the United States Geological Survey reported.
The Geological Survey said that another earthquake on Saturday, a 6.3-magnitude quake in northern Argentina, was unrelated. In Salta, Argentina, an 8-year-old boy was killed and two of his friends were injured when a wall collapsed, The Associated Press reported.
The most powerful earthquake ever recorded was also in Chile: a 9.5-magnitude quake struck in the spring of 1960 that struck near Concepción and set off a series of deadly tsunamis that killed people as far away as Hawaii and Japan.
But that earthquake, which killed nearly 2,000 people and left more than two million homeless at the time, prepared officials and residents in the region for future devastating effects.
Shortly after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck in Valparaíso in 1985, the country established strict building codes, according to Andre Filiatrault, the director of the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research at the University at Buffalo.
"There is a lot of reinforced concrete in Chile, which is normal in Latin America," Professor Filiatrault said. "The only issue in this, like any earthquakes, are the older buildings and residential construction that might not have been designed according to these codes."
This was in direct contrast to Haiti, which was unprepared for the Jan. 12 earthquake, Professor Filiatrault added.
"If you are considering this magnitude is 8.8, I would be very surprised if the death tolls come close," Professor Filiatrault said.
Marc Lacey reported from Lima, Peru, and Alexei Barrionuevo from Rio de Janeiro. Reporting was contributed by Eric Lipton and Ginger Thompson from Washington; Charles Newbery and Vinod Sreeharsha from Buenos Aires; Charles E. Roessler from Kauai, Hawaii; Tomás Munita from Santiago and Talca, Chile; Andres Schipani from La Paz, Bolivia; Maria Eugenia Diaz from Caracas, Venezuela; and Liz Robbins and Sarah Wheaton from New York.
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6) Jails Hope Eye Scanners Can Provide Foolproof Identification System for Inmates
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/us/28eyes.html?ref=us
DES MOINES (AP) - A Baltimore inmate who bluffed his way out of prison last week probably would not have been able to trick guards if they had eye scanners like the ones being installed at dozens of jails nationwide.
The federal government is paying for the scanners as part of an effort to build a nearly foolproof identification system to put a stop to such escapes.
"After this occurrence, we will be studying whatever we can do to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen again," said Mark Vernarelli, a spokesman for the Maryland corrections department, which oversees the facility that mistakenly released the Baltimore inmate, Raymond Taylor.
Mr. Taylor was serving three life sentences for shooting his former girlfriend and her two teenage daughters. He impersonated his cellmate on Thursday and was released. He was arrested the following day in West Virginia.
The eye-scanning program is intended to put an end to such deception. The Justice Department has given a $500,000 grant to the National Sheriff's Association, which is doling out the money in $10,000 grants to about 45 agencies across the country. That will create a national database that better identifies, registers and tracks inmates, said Fred Wilson, who is leading the association's effort.
Eye scanners have been used for years by a few jails, the military, some European airports and private companies, but they remain rare, primarily because of the cost.
"While this technology has been around generally for 10 to 15 years, it just hasn't gotten into the mainstream yet," Mr. Wilson said. "You have to remember that the average law enforcement agency is very small, and they can't afford this stuff."
Most of the $10,000 grants paid for the equipment, and a small part went toward training.
The sheriff's association teamed with Biometric Intelligence and Identification Technologies, a scanner company based in Plymouth, Mass., and selected agencies nationwide from more than 400 that had expressed interest. In choosing jails, officials looked to spread machines across the country and put them in spots with the technological experience to use them.
The chosen agencies ranged from big operations like the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department to small departments in Story County, Iowa, and Rutland County, Vt.
Officers at the Story County Jail will start using their scanner soon. "If we can get every state involved in this," Sheriff Paul Fitzgerald said, "that would be tremendous, just like the fingerprint databases." For law enforcement, speed is the biggest advantage that eye scanning has over fingerprints.
The F.B.I. has the fingerprints and criminal history of about 65 million people in its database. Sheriffs complain that fingerprint search results can take hours or even days, but results with an iris scan are nearly instant.
"Within 15 seconds you can get an identification back on who this is," Sheriff Fitzgerald said.
Scanning inmates is quick, too. A person simply looks into a camera, which uses infrared light to illuminate and map the iris. Each iris is unique and contains about six times more features than a fingerprint.
Despite its advantages, creating an iris database could raise privacy concerns, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest research group in Washington.
Mr. Rotenberg said prisons were often testing grounds for new technologies later used in the general public. What might make sense behind barbed wire could be seen as intrusive in the free world, and it is hard to foresee what those problems could be, he said.
Fingerprints, though, will remain an important tool for agencies because scans have limitations. One is that only the living can use the system because irises immediately break down when people die, and fingerprints will remain essential for investigators as evidence at crime scenes, said Patricia Lawton, senior development officer at Biometric Intelligence and Identification Technologies.
One person sold on the technology is Vincent Guarini, the warden at the Lancaster County Prison in Pennsylvania.
In 1996, the prison became the first in the nation to install an iris scanner after, like in Maryland, an inmate claimed to be his cellmate and was released. He, too, was later caught.
"From then on, I said we would never, ever do this again," Mr. Guarini said. "And I want some kind of mechanism, technology, device, whatever and take the human element out of it."
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7) Buffett's Bargain Shopping Spree
By GRAHAM BOWLEY
February 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/business/economy/28buffett.html?ref=us
America's most famous investor, Warren E. Buffett, struck a confident note in his annual letter to the shareholders of his holding company on Saturday, as he described in characteristically colorful terms how his businesses had largely ridden out the calamity of the financial crisis.
The tone of the letter contrasted sharply with Mr. Buffett's report last year, in which he took himself to task for the company's decline in book value, only the second such decline since he took control in 1965. This time he described how he had used the last 18 months to scoop up a string of assets - a buying spree that culminated at the end of last year with the agreement to buy the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway, his biggest bet yet.
Mr. Buffett wrote that his company, Berkshire Hathaway, had net income of $8.1 billion last year, or about $5,200 a share, 61 percent higher than in 2008. The company also reported a 19.8 percent rise in book value.
The crisis of 2007-8 led to the company's first operating loss in the first quarter of last year, raising questions about Mr. Buffett's exposure to consumer spending and the housing market. The company recovered strongly later in the year, however, helped by the rebound in the stock market, which strengthened his derivatives holdings.
In his letter, which accompanied the company's annual report, Mr. Buffett laid out in detail how many of his holdings still depended on the vagaries of housing demand and consumer spending. But shares of the company, which peaked late in 2007 around $148,220 and fell to lows of around $73,195, have since rallied to close at $119,800 on Friday.
"We've put a lot of money to work during the chaos of the last two years," he wrote. "It's been an ideal period for investors: A climate of fear is their best friend."
Mr. Buffett used his letter to crack jokes and issue more of his trademark aphorisms. The so-called Sage of Omaha, he is America's most listened-to investor, and his annual letter is watched closely by investors for his assessment of his businesses and of the economy.
It has, however, taken on somewhat less importance in recent years as Mr. Buffett, 79, has raised his profile with more public speaking and interviews.
In characteristically blunt terms, he had harsh words for unnamed chief executives and directors who oversaw disasters at their companies during the crisis but "still live in a grand style."
He said, "They should pay a heavy price," and that there must be a reform of the way executives are rewarded for their performance. "C.E.O.'s, and in many cases, directors, have long benefited from oversized financial carrots; some meaningful sticks now need to be part of their employment picture as well."
He also admitted mistakes of his own, saying he had closed a troubled credit card business, which had been his idea, and had given too much time to turn around the NetJets business, long a burden.
But he dwelt also on the lucrative positions he took in a string of companies over the last year and a half, pouring $15.5 billion into shares of companies like Goldman Sachs, General Electric and Wm. Wrigley Jr. Wishing he had taken greater advantage of the opportunities offered, he said, "When it's raining gold, reach for a bucket, not a thimble."
Burlington Northern Santa Fe was Mr. Buffett's biggest purchase to date. Addressing that company's 65,000 shareholders, he offered them a primer in his investment rules. But he warned all shareholders that the bigger size of Berkshire Hathaway would probably mean slower growth in the future.
"Huge sums forge their own anchor and our future advantage, if any, will be a small fraction of our historical edge," he said.
Justin Fuller, the author of a blog about Mr. Buffett and a principal at Midway Capital Research in Chicago, said this company size was an important theme of the letter: "There was a lot of talk about size and maintaining a business and how size and bureaucracy can really hurt a business over time."
Mr. Fuller said Mr. Buffett had also given insights into his investing strategy - many of his businesses are now in monopoly or near-monopoly industries like railroads and utilities.
Mr. Buffett told a long story about the wisdom of using a company's own shares to buy another company - which was a veiled criticism of Kraft's takeover of Cadbury, Mr. Fuller said, but also a justification of Mr. Buffett's decision to issue shares to buy Burlington Northern Santa Fe. Mr. Buffett is a major investor in Kraft but has opposed its pending acquisition of Cadbury.
Mr. Buffett's letter is watched closely for hints about when he may retire, but this year's offered none. Talking of a time when he would be long gone, he said he was still tap-dancing to work at the end of his eighth decade.
He said he had sold shares in ConocoPhillips, Moody's, Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson, mainly to finance his railroad purchase. The shares of these companies were still likely to trade higher, he said.
Closing the letter, Mr. Buffett, ever the cheeky salesman, invited shareholders to his company's annual meeting on May 1 in Omaha - promising to play table tennis for spectators and urging them to buy goods and services from his companies, and ending, "P.S. Come by rail."
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8) Protests and Promises of Improvements at Schools
"If we stop this reform at flipping the adults and hiring a bunch of new teachers and leaders and that's the extent of the new support," Mr. Knowles said, "the likelihood is this will repeat failed experiments of the past."
By CRYSTAL YEDNAK
February 26, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/us/28cncreform.html?ref=education
Photo of audience members holding signs with the word NO in big black letters in response to proposed school closings: Members of the audience opposed the closing of more schools Wednesday at a meeting of the Chicago Board of Education.
Josephine Norwood, a Bronzeville mother of three Chicago public school students, has rebounded from two rounds of school closings that displaced her children from their schools. As she watched the Board of Education approve another set of schools for closing or turnaround last week, Mrs. Norwood had a simple question: Can Chicago Public Schools officials promise that the new schools will be better?
"If this process could guarantee the child the best and they would benefit from the school closing, then maybe it is a positive thing," Mrs. Norwood said. But she spoke out last week, along with many others, about the need for more transparency and proof that the disruptions are warranted.
As the public schools system entered its annual process of selecting schools for closing or turnarounds, parents, teachers and community groups leveled criticism at school officials for the lack of communication with the communities involved and questioned data from the central office that does not match the reality in the schools. Some also pleaded for the district to delay any action until the corrective measures taken at the lowest-performing schools - the wholesale turnover of administrators and teachers - could be better evaluated and a comprehensive plan for school facilities could be developed by a new task force.
In the end, few seemed satisfied. Parents, reform organizations and others expressed concerns that the school district has embarked on yet another failed reform effort. But school officials remained committed to the district's turnaround strategy.
Ron Huberman, the public schools chief executive, acknowledged that the process was imperfect, but remained committed to it. He said the alternative - tolerating schools that clearly have failed both the system and the children in it - was not acceptable either.
"Turnaround is not for average performing schools or for poor performing schools; turnaround is really about failing schools," Mr. Huberman told the Chicago News Cooperative in an interview Thursday. In a turnaround, the students stay in place, but the teachers and the principal are replaced to radically alter the school's culture of teaching and learning.
Mr. Huberman added that some schools recommended for turnaround had just 2 percent to 3 percent of their students meeting state standards. Ten of the district's 12 turnaround schools show gains that are "much more promising results than I believe we could have achieved through any other methodology," he said.
The debate is drawing attention because a national program to restructure the worst-performing schools encourages states to use the same strategies that Arne Duncan, the federal education secretary, introduced as chief executive of the Chicago Public Schools.
"Duncan is using Chicago as an example of how this can be done successfully, and people are looking to Chicago to see whether, in fact, it is successful," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy in Washington.
This was the first round of closings and turnover proposals that Mr. Duncan's successor, Mr. Huberman, owned from beginning to end. He was appointed after the process began last year.
Mr. Huberman made a change to require that every child displaced in a closing be assigned to a higher performing school - something that did not always happen in the past.
The action came in response to an October study by the Consortium on Chicago School Research showing that most students affected by closings were transferred into schools that also were academically weak. Mr. Huberman promised that a transferred student's new school would rank 20 percent higher than the old one on a list of performance criteria, and promised extra resources to help the students' transition.
The district works with the nonprofit Academy for Urban School Leadership to manage some turnarounds. (Martin Koldyke, founder of the academy, also serves on an advisory board of the Chicago News Cooperative.)
The involvement of an outside agency has been criticized by union teachers and some parents and aldermen, who say the district is outsourcing education.
Mr. Huberman said Thursday that he wanted to bring in more outside organizations to manage turnarounds. "We want the turnaround space to be a competitive landscape," he said.
People began lining up at 6:15 a.m. Wednesday to get on a list to speak at the daylong school board meeting, which concluded with a decision to use the turnaround approach at Curtis, Bradwell and Deneen Elementary Schools and at Phillips and Marshall High Schools because of low academic performance. The Academy for Urban School Leadership will manage the turnaround for the first four schools, while the public schools administration will lead it at Marshall.
The board decided to close Las Casas Occupational High School, consolidate McCorkle Elementary and phase out Schneider Elementary because of substandard facilities or low enrollment.
Before the meeting opened, Mr. Huberman announced reprieves from closing or consolidation at six schools, saying community members had convinced him they were warranted.
In addition to protests at the meeting of the school board - whose members are appointed - parents, teachers and community groups vented their frustration at elected officials.
Though it has no direct authority in the matter, the City Council's Education Committee held a hearing last week on the school system's reform process and on a proposed resolution for a one-year moratorium on any further action by the Chicago Public Schools administration. Aldermen scolded officials for the lack of community involvement, but did not vote on the resolution.
The Chicago Educational Facilities Task Force, established last spring by the state legislature, will meet next week to scrutinize the system's policies.
"School closing is not a state issue, but because no one is responding to these parents, they came to me," said State Representative Cynthia Soto, Democrat of Chicago, a sponsor of the bill establishing the task force.
In response to the outcry over community involvement, Mr. Huberman promised last week to hold hearings on the process of closings and turnarounds, and to give parents earlier notification and to help them understand how a particular school is failing to educate their children.
"Very often, we've not done the legwork on the front end to inform parents," he said.
Timothy Knowles, director of the Urban Education Institute at the University of Chicago, said the research on the turnaround approach was mixed so far. The Consortium on Chicago School Research is working on a turnaround study to be released later this year. Work done by the Academy for Urban School Leadership shows promise, but it is still early, Mr. Knowles said.
For substantial progress to be made, he said, the strategy must involve bringing in high-quality teachers and leaders, improving the school culture - including investments in academic and social supports for students - and engaging parents.
"If we stop this reform at flipping the adults and hiring a bunch of new teachers and leaders and that's the extent of the new support," Mr. Knowles said, "the likelihood is this will repeat failed experiments of the past."
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9) As U.S. Aid Grows, Oversight Is Urged for Charter Schools
By SAM DILLON
February 24, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/education/25educ.html?ref=education
WASHINGTON - The Obama administration plans to significantly expand the flow of federal aid to charter schools, money that has driven a 15-year expansion of their numbers, from just a few dozen in the early 1990s to some 5,000 today.
But in the first Congressional hearing on rewriting the No Child Left Behind law, lawmakers on Wednesday heard experts, all of them charter school advocates, testify that Washington should also make sure charter schools are properly monitored for their admissions procedures, academic standards and financial stewardship.
The president of one influential charter group told the House Education and Labor Committee that the federal government had spent $2 billion since the mid-1990s to finance new charter schools but less than $2 million, about one-tenth of 1 percent, to ensure that they were held to high standards.
"It's as if the federal government had spent billions for new highway construction, but nothing to put up guardrails along the sides of those highways," said Greg Richmond, president of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers.
Charter schools operate mainly with state financing, and with less regulation than traditional public schools. A provision of the No Child law offers federal startup grants, usually in the range of $150,000 per school, to charter organizers to help them plan and staff a new school until they can begin classes and obtain state per-pupil financing.
The federal money has provided crucial early support to many successful charter schools, but has also attracted many people with little education experience who have opened chaotic schools that have floundered.
The administration's proposal for rewriting the law would increase federal financing for charter schools to $490 million in 2011 from about $256 million in 2010. It would also, for the first time, allow the funds to be used to finance additional schools opened by a charter operator, if the original school has been successful.
Representative George Miller, the California Democrat who is the committee chairman and helped write the No Child law, said in opening the hearing that the law's requirements for annual testing had placed a spotlight on students across the nation who were falling behind.
"But we also know the law didn't get everything right," he said, "and we cannot afford to wait to fix it."
Much debate on Wednesday focused on whether charter schools educate disabled children in the same proportion as regular public schools.
Thomas Hehir, a Harvard education professor, said that national research on that question had been inadequate, but that his work in the San Diego, Los Angeles, Boston and other school systems had shown that "charters generally serve fewer children with disabilities than traditional public schools."
Furthermore, Mr. Hehir said, charters in some cities educate only a minuscule proportion of students with severe disabilities like mental retardation, in comparison with regular public schools. That, he said, undercuts the assertions by some that charters are outperforming regular schools.
Eileen Ahearn, a project director of the National Association of State Directors of Special Education, said that charter schools faced unique challenges in educating disabled students but that many nonetheless do so successfully.
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10) Letters: The Task for Unions
Letters To the Editor
February 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/business/28backpage-THETASKFORUN_LETTERS.html?ref=business
To the Editor:
Re "A Long Slide in Union Membership" (The Count, Feb. 14), which said that union members accounted for 12 percent of wage and salary workers in 2009, down from 20 percent in 1983:
But the decline's severity becomes even clearer when we consider the downward spiral of private-sector union membership, to about 7 percent from 17 percent. This is largely the result of unions' failure to organize new members sufficiently to offset losses as unionized plants closed and employers opposed new union inroads.
Research shows that unions would have to organize at least one million new members a year just to increase the proportion by a single percentage point. The question that the unions must face is whether they have the will and the way to accomplish this task and reverse the decline.
Gary Chaison
Worcester, Mass., Feb. 14
The writer is a professor of industrial relations at the Graduate School of Management at Clark University.
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11) For Buyout Kingpins, the TXU Utility Deal Gets Tricky
By JENNY ANDERSON and JULIE CRESWELL
"'When I started hearing certain legislative members - members who would naturally otherwise be allies to us - parrot the bullet points that were being made by the company, I knew we were in trouble,' recalls Tim Morstad, who represented AARP and who was an advocate for significant electricity rate cuts. The buyout group also sought friends in high places. It signed on several powerful Texas politicos as lobbyists, directors or advisers, including Ronald Kirk, the former mayor of Dallas who is now the Obama administration's trade representative; James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state and Bush family confidant, who was given a million shares as part of the buyout; Donald L. Evans, the former secretary of commerce; and Lyndon L. Olson Jr., a former Texas state representative. 'They were hiring Democrats and Republicans alike," says Tom Smith, director of the Texas division of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group. "They would have hired a socialist if we had any in Texas.'"
February 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/business/energy-environment/28txu.html?ref=business
IN the fall of 2007, nerves were fraying on Wall Street. Billions of dollars promised to private equity firms to finance an epic acquisition spree were threatened, and banks wanted dealmakers to share the pain. Renegotiate the loans, the banks said. The private equity firms disagreed: a deal, they argued, is a deal.
As such disputes heated up, senior deal makers at Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts, the powerful buyout shop, complained that Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, was fanning the flames by openly criticizing the private equity industry.
Trying to smooth things over, Henry Kravis, one of the firm's founders, met with Mr. Dimon and others for dinner. Things quickly turned tense. Mr. Dimon, whose bank was a major lender to K.K.R. and potentially on the hook for losses, explained that their relationship needed to work for both parties.
"This relationship feels a bit one-way to me," he told Mr. Kravis, according to someone briefed on the dinner who requested anonymity because it was private.
One thing that caused strain was the 2007 buyout of TXU, an energy giant based in Dallas. The TXU deal was Texas-sized in every way: valued at $48 billion, it was the largest private equity deal in history, and it involved the country's fifth-largest energy concern - one that served about two million customers.
A group of high-powered buyout barons, including K.K.R., the Texas Pacific Group and the private equity arm of Goldman Sachs, orchestrated the deal. To push it through, the deal makers pulled out all the stops. They courted environmental groups, heavily lobbied the Texas Legislature and tempted banks with the prospect of hundreds of millions of dollars in fees.
Today, the TXU deal is unwieldy and unpredictable. The buyout was, in effect, a gargantuan bet that natural gas prices would keep climbing; instead, plunging prices coupled with a hobbled national economy have cut into the cash the company generates.
Investors who bought $40 billion of TXU's bonds and loans - including legendary wise men like Warren E. Buffett - have seen huge losses as most of the bonds trade between 70 and 80 cents on the dollar. The other $8 billion used to finance the buyout came from the private equity investors themselves, along with banks like JPMorgan and Citigroup and large institutional investors like the Canadian Pension Plan. Several analysts and energy bankers say that this latter stake currently has little value.
TXU, rechristened as Energy Future Holdings when the deal closed in October 2007, is hardly the only private equity bet suffering these days. Many other deals from the height of the buyout boom are mired in problems, as companies buffeted by the weak economy or overwhelmed by once-plentiful and oh-so-cheap debt are struggling to stay upright.
"There is no doubt that these are good companies with bad balance sheets," says Colin C. Blaydon, a professor at Dartmouth's business school who specializes in private equity. But some of the companies, he says, are so deeply buried that an economic rebound might not be enough to let them pay their debt.
"The cash flows are not going to be strong enough to let them fully recover and dig their way out," he says.
Among all the private equity deals, the TXU experiment stands out for its startling scale. Could a big utility - especially one so larded with debt - offer the sort of outsize returns that private equity investors typically seek? More to the point, could private equity firms take over an important, sprawling electric utility and run it in a way that would benefit the company and consumers as well as themselves and their investors?
In an e-mailed statement, K.K.R. and T.P.G. said that "we believe strongly in the fundamentals of this business" and noted that they have promised to remain the company's owners for at least five years. The firms acknowledged that the economic environment is challenging, but noted that their company has provided affordable power and new jobs and that it continues to make significant investments in Texas.
Goldman Sachs declined to comment.
To a large degree, the prospects of Energy Future Holdings hinge on something it and its owners can't control: the price of natural gas. While it has insulated itself somewhat, through financial hedges that protect it from price swings, it still needs the prices to rise sharply to have any hope of paying off its staggering debt load.
Indeed, while the company met its roughly $3.6 billion in interest payments on its debt last year, it still faces a $20 billion balloon payment coming due in 2014. To leap that hurdle, the private equity owners have a handful of options: persuade bondholders to swap their debt at a discount for debt that matures later; sell a stake of the company in an I.P.O.; or sell assets.
There is, of course, another option. K.K.R., T.P.G. and Goldman could put up more of their own money to shore up a company that, according to public filings, has already funneled at least $370 million in fees to the buyout team and their investors. (Investors in the buyout firms' funds, which own Energy Future Holdings, also pay the private equity firms separate management fees.)
A rival buyout firm, the Blackstone Group, recently chose such an option by injecting $800 million to reduce debt of one of its acquisitions, Hilton Hotels. While Paul Keglevic, chief financial officer of Energy Future Holdings, says such a move might occur at his company, it's not first on his list. "Right now," he says, "we're considering other alternatives."
TEXAS may be famous for big personalities, but C. John Wilder tested even those standards.
In 2006, Mr. Wilder, then the chief executive of TXU, was one of the most controversial men in the state. First, he angered consumers and legislators when he refused to lower electricity prices after hurricanes led to a price spike. In the same year - just days before Earth Day - he announced plans for TXU to build 11 coal-fueled power plants, which set off a wave of protests statewide.
Coal plants are notorious for coughing out pollutants into the air and water, and the announcement caused a powerful and unlikely alliance of environmentalists, mayors, chief executives, consumer advocates and state legislators to battle the company's plans.
At the same time, Mr. Wilder was also in talks with various private equity firms, including K.K.R. and T.P.G., about a possible investment in the business. But by November 2006, at the zenith of the buyout binge, K.K.R. and T.P.G. had decided they wanted to buy the entire company. (Mr. Wilder, who stepped down as C.E.O. when TXU was sold, did not return calls requesting an interview.)
After all, in 2004 a group of four buyout firms, including T.P.G. and K.K.R., had bought an electricity company, Texas Genco, and flipped it about a year later for a tidy profit of $4.9 billion.
For its part, TXU was hardly a company that needed rescuing by the brightest minds on Wall Street. It was minting money in the partially deregulated Texas energy market, and in 2006 alone it generated about $2 billion in cash, after it paid interest on its debt and other bills, according to Moody's.
That a buyout was even a possibility was a sign of the times. Just a few years earlier, a large private equity fund might have had $5 billion to invest. Now, firms were amassing funds of $15 billion or even $20 billion to play with.
In 2005, the $11.3 billion acquisition of a technology company, SunGard, ranked as one of the biggest buyouts ever. That deal required the participation of seven firms. In late 2006, just two private equity firms banded together for the $28 billion takeover of Harrah's Entertainment.
But in the TXU quest, K.K.R. (run by Mr. Kravis), T.P.G. (run by another storied dealmaker, David Bonderman) and Goldman needed more than just cheap and easy bank loans. Because it was an influential utility, TXU was a political hot potato. Snaring it would require an elaborate charm offensive.
To that end, the K.K.R. group spent at least $17 million on lobbying (including 2,400 breakfast tacos on the Legislature's opening day and San Antonio Spurs tickets for certain state representatives), according to Texans for Public Justice, a watchdog group. According to the group and others, the lobbying money was used to win over opponents in the Texas Legislature and fend off legislation that would have given regulators power to veto the deal.
"When I started hearing certain legislative members - members who would naturally otherwise be allies to us - parrot the bullet points that were being made by the company, I knew we were in trouble," recalls Tim Morstad, who represented AARP and who was an advocate for significant electricity rate cuts.
The buyout group also sought friends in high places. It signed on several powerful Texas politicos as lobbyists, directors or advisers, including Ronald Kirk, the former mayor of Dallas who is now the Obama administration's trade representative; James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state and Bush family confidant, who was given a million shares as part of the buyout; Donald L. Evans, the former secretary of commerce; and Lyndon L. Olson Jr., a former Texas state representative.
"They were hiring Democrats and Republicans alike," says Tom Smith, director of the Texas division of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group. "They would have hired a socialist if we had any in Texas."
Other advisers for the buyout team approached environmentalists, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and James D. Marston and Fred Krupp, two leaders of the Environmental Defense Fund, to support the deal. The buyout team offered to cut the number of proposed coal-fueled plants to 3 from 11.
When the deal was announced on Feb. 26, 2007, Mr. Krupp heralded it as "one of the most significant developments in America's fight against global warming" and commended K.K.R. and T.P.G. for dropping 8 of the 11 proposed coal plants, along with other commitments.
But TXU had already faced challenges to its permits, and many people say they believed that it was never going to build all 11 plants anyway.
"We knew we could do three," says Kerney Laday, a former TXU director. "We thought that was absolutely possible."
For consumer advocates, "the critical question was with the amount of debt required to do this deal, whether or not that would find its way into the cost of electricity," recalls Sylvester Turner, a Democratic state representative from Houston. "Would consumers and small businesses end up having to pay much more?"
Ultimately, the buyout group agreed to hold a majority stake in the company for at least five years and to reduce consumer electricity rates, which have remained low to this date.
When Mr. Turner hauled Mr. Marston into his office to voice his displeasure over the Environmental Defense Fund's support of the buyout, Mr. Marston stood his ground.
"Look, TXU has a much lower carbon footprint because of the deal," says Mr. Marston, noting that the group has a partnership with K.K.R. to "green" other companies the buyout firm controls.
Despite fears that consumers would pay for the deal, the opposite has occurred. Consumer electricity prices have fallen in Texas as competition has heated up and demand has slipped in the weak economy. But falling prices have created enormous headwinds for a company as debt-choked as Energy Future Holdings.
IN the buyout boom, Wall Street banks, eager to outdeal one another, bowed to increasing demands from their lucrative private equity clients: more loans, looser terms, more skin in the game. Some of the Wall Street banks that were arranging the $40 billion in debt for the TXU deal also put in as much as $500 million of the their own cash for an equity stake in the company.
In the fall of 2007, as the deal was closing, a group of bankers met at K.K.R.'s New York headquarters, worried that their billions were at risk. Led by Steve Black, JPMorgan's co-head of investment banking, and Chad Leat, co-head of global credit at Citigroup, the bankers asked the private equity firms to share the pain by ponying up more fees or sweetening the loan terms.
Mr. Kravis said the buyout group wasn't interested in renegotiating the deal. In fact, he said he was "morally outraged" by the request, according to five participants in the meeting.
"A contract is a contract," Mr. Kravis said repeatedly, according to several individuals present, who asked that their names not be used because they still work with the buyout firms. After offering the banks an additional $100 million in fees, Mr. Kravis abruptly left the meeting. When he returned a few minutes later, the banks turned down his offer and the meeting disbanded without an agreement.
Behind the scenes, K.K.R. and T.P.G. pressured the banks, suggesting that their banking relationships (and future fees) would be threatened if they kept fighting, according to bankers involved in the deal.
Goldman Sachs had representatives sitting on both sides of the table: the firm was one of the large private equity investors but had also acted as investment banker and lender and would, ultimately, nab a big piece of TXU's huge commodity hedging business. The bank's representatives sat quietly during the talks, according to participants.
Goldman was on so many sides of the TXU deal that its representatives made other lenders nervous, according to participants, because it was hard to ascertain whose interests the bank was serving.
Concerned that the Street would back out on its commitment to finance the deal, the private equity firms ultimately agreed to more generous terms on the loans, according to a person briefed on the negotiations. The move spared the lenders hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.
Such high-stakes battles, which occurred in a number of private equity deals, strained relationships among several banks involved in the transactions - as evidenced by Mr. Dimon's contentious dinner with Mr. Kravis.
In the wake of these fights, K.K.R. conducted a survey to assess its reputation on Wall Street, according to multiple bankers.
Despite such internecine brawls, the TXU deal was lucrative for many behind it. The utility's former chief executive, Mr. Wilder, walked away with a payday of $226 million, according to the research firm Equilar. The Wall Street banks divvied up fees totaling nearly $1.1 billion. And the private equity firms paid themselves $300 million in fees for arranging their own deal. (The buyout group receives an extra $35 million each year in management fees.)
ONE morning early last year, Jim Hempstead's phone started ringing off the hook. Mr. Hempstead, a Moody's analyst who had spent years watching the utility sector and had been wary of the debt since the buyout, had just told investors that he might downgrade the ratings for Energy Future Holdings' bonds and loans.
Questioning the ability of Energy Future Holdings to remain solvent over the next few years, Mr. Hempstead predicted that the company might ask bondholders to trade in their debt at a steep discount and under new terms.
Suddenly, bondholders were frantically calling Mr. Hempstead. Were the sponsors planning a debt exchange? Was TXU, the biggest buyout of private equity's "golden era," going bust?
In 2008, Energy Future Holdings was able to make interest payments - which totaled nearly $10 million a day - and cough up $3 billion to expand and maintain its infrastructure. But its A.T.M.-like ability to spit out cash, which had attracted the buyout barons, was sputtering because of collapsing natural gas prices and a weak economy that had cut electricity demand.
In the deregulated Texas market, electricity prices are strongly related to those of natural gas. Companies like Energy Future Holdings that can generate electricity through cheaper fuels like coal can pocket the difference.
Last fall, Mr. Hempstead's prediction came true. Energy Future Holdings asked debtholders, whose debt was trading at a steep discount, to consider swapping some of their loans and bonds for new ones. The offer required bondholders to take a major hit - 25 to 50 percent - without K.K.R., T.P.G. and Goldman sharing the pain. The private equity firms, of course, are still hurting from the loss in value of their own investment in the company.
"It's a coercive exchange if ever we've seen one," wrote Tim Doherty, a bond analyst at KDP Asset Management. Predictably, few investors accepted the offer.
Last month, Energy Future Holdings raised even more debt in a deal that was very attractive to buyers. The company has the ability to raise an additional $3.5 billion. One possibility for the company is to raise new debt to pay down old debt.
For now, the company can get by until the big bills come due. Hedges are in place that will protect it somewhat from further declines in natural gas prices. It has plenty of cash, and new plants will add future capacity. The big tower of debt doesn't come due until 2014, and natural gas prices could always rise.
But judging from how futures are trading on natural gas markets, prices may not climb high enough for K.K.R., T.P.G. and Goldman to make anything close to the returns they had once hoped for on the TXU deal.
The company hopes that power prices will rise to meet the projections the private equity buyers had in 2007. Mr. Keglevic, the C.F.O., said the owners' "original thesis" had power prices in the mid-$60s per megawatt hour. In January 2010, the price in North Texas was $42.96. "The difference is the economic dislocation pushed the mid-60s into 2016 rather than 2014," he said. But Energy Future Holdings has more than $20 billion in debt due in 2014, not 2016.
What's clear is that a showdown will come as private equity investors try to salvage some sort of return for their trouble and debtholders try to protect what they can still hang on to.
But recent history suggests that when it comes to troubled megadeals of the golden age of private equity, debt investors often come up short. TXU is not likely to be an exception.
In these deals, says Mr. Blaydon of Dartmouth, "the debtholders are going to get hosed."
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12) Another Foreclosure Alternative
By BOB TEDESCHI
February 24, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/realestate/28mort.html?ref=business
HOMEOWNERS on the verge of foreclosure will often seek a short sale as a graceful exit from an otherwise calamitous financial situation. Their homes are sold for less than the mortgage amount, and the remaining loan balance is usually forgiven by the lender.
But with short sales beyond the reach of some homeowners - they typically won't qualify if they have a second mortgage on the home - another foreclosure alternative is emerging: "deeds in lieu of foreclosure."
In this transaction, a homeowner simply relinquishes the property, turning over the deed to the bank, in exchange for the lender's promise not to foreclose. In a straight foreclosure, a lender takes legal control of the property and evicts the occupants; in deeds-in-lieu transactions, the homeowner is typically allowed to remain in the home for a short period of time after the agreement.
More borrowers will at least have the chance to consider this strategy in the coming months, as CitiMortgage, one of the nation's biggest mortgage lenders, tests a new program in New Jersey, Texas, Florida, Illinois, Michigan and Ohio.
Citi recently agreed to give qualified borrowers six months in their homes before it takes them over. It will offer these homeowners $1,000 or more in relocation assistance, provided the property is in good condition. Previously, the bank had no formal process for serving borrowers who failed to qualify for Citi's other foreclosure-avoidance programs like loan modification.
Citi's new policy is similar to one announced last fall by Fannie Mae, the government-controlled mortgage company. Fannie is allowing homeowners to return the deed to their properties, then rent them back at market rates.
To qualify for the new program, Citi's borrowers must be at least 90 days late on their mortgages and must not have a second lien on the home.
That policy may be a significant obstacle for borrowers, since many of the people facing foreclosure originally financed their homes with second mortgages - called "piggyback loans" - or borrowed against the homes' equity after buying them.
Partly for that reason, Elizabeth Fogarty, a spokeswoman for Citi, said that the bank had only modest expectations for the test. Roughly 20,000 Citi mortgage customers in the pilot states will be eligible for a deed-in-lieu agreement, she said, and of those, about 1,000 will most likely complete the process.
As is often the case with deed-in-lieu settlements, Citi will release the borrower from all legal obligations to repay the loan.
In some states, like New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, banks can legally retain the right to pursue borrowers for the balance of the loan after a foreclosure, a short sale or a deed-in-lieu of foreclosure. That is one reason why housing advocates say borrowers should carefully weigh these transactions with the help of a lawyer or nonprofit housing counselor before proceeding.
Ms. Fogarty said Citi had no specific timetable for rolling out the program nationally.
Among the other major lenders, there is no formalized program for deeds-in-lieu. Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, for instance, generally require borrowers to try a short sale before considering a deed-in-lieu transaction.
A deed-in-lieu is better for banks than a foreclosure because it reduces the company's legal costs, and it is better for the homeowners because it is less damaging to their credit score.
Banks may also end up with homes in better condition.
J. K. Huey, a senior vice president at Wells Fargo, says her bank usually offers relocation assistance - often $1,000 to $2,500 - as long as the borrower leaves the property in move-in condition after a deed-in-lieu transaction.
"The idea is to help them transition in a way where they can keep their family intact while looking for another place to live," Ms. Huey said. "This way, they only have to move once, as opposed to getting evicted."
A previous version of this column misstated the gender of a senior vice president at Wells Fargo. J.K. Huey is a woman.
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13) Haiti's Futile Race Against the Rain
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
Editorial Observer
March 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/opinion/01mon4.html?hp
There were floods on Saturday in Les Cayes, in southwestern Haiti. It rained in Port-au-Prince on Thursday, and again on Saturday and Sunday night, long enough to slick the streets and make a slurry of the dirt and concrete dust. Long enough, too, to give a sense of what will happen across the country in a few weeks, when the real storms start.
Mud will wash down the mountains, and rain will overflow gutters choked with rubble and waste, turning streets into filthy rivers. Life will get even more difficult for more than a million people.
New misery and sickness will drench the displaced survivors of the Jan. 12 earthquake - like the 16,000 or so whose tents and flimsy shacks fill every available inch of the Champ de Mars, the plaza in Port-au-Prince by the cracked and crumbled National Palace, or the 70,000 who have made a city of the Petionville Club, a nine-hole golf course on a mountainside above the capital.
The rainy season is the hard deadline against which Haiti's government and relief agencies in Port-au-Prince are racing as they try to solve a paralyzing riddle: how to shelter more than a million displaced people in a densely crowded country that has no good place to put them.
The plan after the quake was to move people to camps outside the city. But in a sudden shift last week, officials unveiled a new idea. They would try to send as many people as possible, tens of thousands, back to the shattered streets of Port-au-Prince before the rains come. The prime minister approved it on Friday.
If it sounds insane, insanity is relative in Haiti now. Consider the choices:
¶Let people stay in filthy, fragile settlements where no one wants to live, and pray when the hurricanes hit.
¶Build sturdy transitional housing in places like Jérémie, in the southwest, that can absorb the capital's overflow.
¶Encourage people to return to neighborhoods that are clogged with rubble and will be for years, where the smell of death persists. In areas like Bel Air and Fort National, near Champ de Mars, people whose homes still stand are sleeping outside, in fear of aftershocks. They were still pulling bodies out of Fort National over the weekend, burning them on the spot.
The first plan is intolerable. The second may come true only several years and hurricanes from now. The third is merely absurd.
Officials believe that if they clear just enough rubble from certain areas of the city and improve drainage in flood-prone areas, they can ease the pressure on the camps and save lives. It makes some sense to keep people near their neighborhoods, holding on to what remains of their lives and livelihoods.
But when what remains is nothing, it's hard to make sense of that idea. Harder still when you realize that the Haitian government and aid agencies are still overwhelmed by the crisis. The government hasn't even figured out where to put the rubble, and doesn't seem to know who is living where.
Official word was that 80 percent of refugees in Champ de Mars were from Turgeau, where debris-clearing is to begin. I talked with about 40 people throughout the Champ de Mars. They were from Bel Air, Fort National, St. Martin. Nobody was from Turgeau. Several knew of the plan and a few had registered for it. But nobody had been told where, when and how they would leave.
Pascal Benjamin, a 29-year-old huddled with family on the edge of the Champ de Mars, is from Bel Air. "I heard they were going to find a place, but they never came to talk to us."
I spoke with Selondieu Marcelus, his brother, Sony, and nephew, Ricardo. They were standing beside a yellow tent marked with sardonic graffiti. "Donnons le pays aux Français," it said. "Let's give the country to the French."
Mr. Marcelus once lived on Rue Macajoux in Bel Air. He lost his wife there. He didn't know where he would end up. As long as the place has work, jobs, electricity, I don't mind, he said. He was unusual. Most of those I met, in Champ de Mars and in the vast blue-and-orange tarpscape blanketing the Petionville Club, said they dearly wanted to go home.
It seems certain that this plan for Haiti's displaced is going to be ineffective, and that people will suffer and die for lack of anything better. The only rational plan for Haiti is to disperse the population of a city that filled to bursting years ago. Making it easier for people to shoehorn back into Port-au-Prince, looking for jobs and space that don't exist, is ludicrous.
It's a sign of the scale and perplexing nature of this disaster - and the fix faced by the government that is too slowly confronting it - that the ludicrous option is the only one available.
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14) Doctors Without Morals
By LEONARD S. RUBENSTEIN and STEPHEN N. XENAKIS
Op-Ed Contributors
March 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/opinion/01xenakis.html?hp
AFTER five years of investigation, the Justice Department has released its findings regarding the government lawyers who authorized waterboarding and other forms of torture during the interrogation of suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere. The report's conclusion, that the lawyers exercised poor judgment but were not guilty of professional misconduct, is questionable at best. Still, the review reflects a commitment to a transparent investigation of professional behavior.
In contrast, the government doctors and psychologists who participated in and authorized the torture of detainees have escaped discipline, accountability or even internal investigation.
It is hardly news that medical staff at the C.I.A. and the Pentagon played a critical role in developing and carrying out torture procedures. Psychologists and at least one doctor designed or recommended coercive interrogation methods including sleep deprivation, stress positions, isolation and waterboarding. The military's Behavioral Science Consultation Teams evaluated detainees, consulted their medical records to ascertain vulnerabilities and advised interrogators when to push harder for intelligence information.
Psychologists designed a program for new arrivals at Guantánamo that kept them in isolation to "enhance and exploit" their "disorientation and disorganization." Medical officials monitored interrogations and ordered medical interventions so they could continue even when the detainee was in obvious distress. In one case, an interrogation log obtained by Time magazine shows, a medical corpsman ordered intravenous fluids to be administered to a dehydrated detainee even as loud music was played to deprive him of sleep.
When the C.I.A.'s inspector general challenged these "enhanced interrogation" methods, the agency's Office of Medical Services was brought in to determine, in consultation with the Justice Department, whether the techniques inflicted severe mental pain or suffering, the legal definition of torture. Once again, doctors played a critical role, providing professional opinions that no severe pain or suffering was being inflicted.
According to Justice Department memos released last year, the medical service opined that sleep deprivation up to 180 hours didn't qualify as torture. It determined that confinement in a dark, small space for 18 hours a day was acceptable. It said detainees could be exposed to cold air or hosed down with cold water for up to two-thirds of the time it takes for hypothermia to set in. And it advised that placing a detainee in handcuffs attached by a chain to a ceiling, then forcing him to stand with his feet shackled to a bolt in the floor, "does not result in significant pain for the subject."
The service did allow that waterboarding could be dangerous, and that the experience of feeling unable to breathe is extremely frightening. But it noted that the C.I.A. had limited its use to 12 applications over two sessions within 24 hours, and to five days in any 30-day period. As a result, the lawyers noted the office's "professional judgment that the use of the waterboard on a healthy individual subject to these limitations would be 'medically acceptable.'"
The medical basis for these opinions was nonexistent. The Office of Medical Services cited no studies of individuals who had been subjected to these techniques. Its sources included a wilderness medical manual, the National Institute of Mental Health Web site and guidelines from the World Health Organization.
The only medical source cited by the service was a book by Dr. James Horne, a sleep expert at Loughborough University in Britain; when Dr. Horne learned that his book had been used as a reference, he said the C.I.A. had distorted his findings and misrepresented his research, and that its conclusions on sleep deprivation were nonsense.
Dr. Horne had used healthy volunteers who were subject to no other stresses and could withdraw at any time, while C.I.A. and Pentagon interrogators used a broad array of stresses in combination on the detainees. Sleep deprivation, he said, mixed with pain-inducing positioning, intimidation and a host of other stresses, would probably exhaust the body's defense mechanisms, cause physical collapse and worsen existing illness. And that doesn't begin to acknowledge the dire psychological consequences.
The shabbiness of the medical judgments, though, pales in comparison to the ethical breaches by the doctors and psychologists involved. Health professionals have a responsibility extending well beyond nonparticipation in torture; the historic maxim is, after all, "First do no harm." These health professionals did the polar opposite.
Nevertheless, no agency - not the Pentagon, the C.I.A., state licensing boards or professional medical societies - has initiated any action to investigate, much less discipline, these individuals. They have ignored the gross and appalling violations by medical personnel. This is an unconscionable disservice to the thousands of ethical doctors and psychologists in the country's service. It is not too late to begin investigations. They should start now.
Leonard S. Rubenstein is a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Stephen N. Xenakis is a psychiatrist and a retired Army brigadier general.
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15) Aftershocks Jolt Chile as Troops Seek to Keep Order
By MARC LACEY
March 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/world/americas/02chile.html?hp
LIMA, Peru - As Chile grappled with a rising death toll and more reports of looting, three aftershocks struck Monday morning, complicating rescue efforts in the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated much of the country on Saturday.
Chilean officials said Monday that the death toll had reached 711 and was likely to rise. President Michelle Bachelet on Sunday issued an order that will send some 10,000 soldiers into the streets in the worst-affected areas to both keep order and speed the distribution of aid.
She called the magnitude-8.8 earthquake "an emergency unparalleled in the history of Chile."
But residents of the hardest-hit parts of the country complained on Chilean radio that government provisions had been slow to arrive and said that almost all markets and stores had been stripped bare of food, water and other supplies. There were scattered reports of burglaries at abandoned homes in the earthquake zone. The United Nations said Monday that Chile had made an emergency request for mobile bridges, generators, water filtration equipment, field hospitals and surgical centers to cope with the toll from the quake.
"Everything is now moving," said Elisabeth Byrs, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. "We are looking immediately to match the needs. We need to see what we have in our stock to respond to this request."
In the devastated southern city of Concepción, 55 people were arrested for violating an emergency curfew, Chile's deputy secretary of the interior told La Tercera newspaper. Otherwise, he said, the city had been quiet overnight.
A day earlier in Concepción, the police fired water cannons and tear gas to disperse hundreds of people who forced their way into shuttered shops . But law enforcement authorities, heeding the cries of residents that they lacked food and water, eventually settled on a system that allowed staples to be taken but not televisions and other electronic goods. Ms. Bachelet announced that the government had reached a deal with supermarket chains to give away food to needy residents. Her aides also called on residents not to hoard gas or food, both of which were being bought up in huge amounts by residents fearful of shortages.
Using power saws and their bare hands, rescue workers atop the rubble of collapsed buildings tried to pull out those caught inside. Although there were successes - like Julio Beliz, who managed to free his neighbor from the rubble in Santiago, the capital, after hearing him yell out, "Julio, help me!" - the search for survivors was frustratingly slow.
"It's very slow, dangerous work, because on top of it all, it's still shaking there," said Victoria Viteri, a spokeswoman with the national emergency office in Santiago, referring to rescue efforts in the country's hardest-hit areas.
The earthquake, one of the strongest in recorded history, left a devastating footprint on a country that knows quakes well.
Residents of a collapsed 15-story apartment building in Concepción, opened just months ago, were outraged that it had been so badly damaged and were convinced that contractors had not complied with building codes that require buildings to be able to withstand temblors. Already, there was talk among residents of taking builders to court once the emergency is over.
In Cobquecura, 50 miles north of Concepción, state television showed collapsed bridges, crashed buses and sunken pavement. Residents had fled to the hills, prompting local journalists to declare it a virtual ghost town.
In remote coastal towns, waves had obliterated homes, and boats were found on land next to overturned cars. The authorities acknowledged that the damage was spread over such a vast area that they were just beginning to get a grasp on it.
Early Sunday, a 6.1-magnitude aftershock, one of more than 100 that have followed the original quake, sent residents scrambling again for cover. With the earth still unsettled, many Chileans have opted to camp outside.
The first of the three temblors on Monday occurred at 3:24 a.m., with a magnitude of 4.8, according to seismologists at the United States Geological Survey who placed the epicenter 105 miles south of the city of Valparaíiso.
Within the next 90 minutes, two more shocks hit the Maule region, south of Santiago. The first registered 4.9, and the second, with an epicenter offshore, was recorded at 5.3.
In Maipú, outside Santiago, the authorities inspected an apartment building, found it relatively stable and allowed residents half an hour each to hustle inside and remove any personal belongings, local media reported. At another building nearby, however, the damages were considered too severe and the city told residents to stay out.
The National Office of Emergency raised the number of displaced people on Sunday to two million.
Among the quake's victims were Lurde Margarita Arias Dias, 24, and her infant child, Peruvian immigrants who were crushed as a wall toppled in their Santiago home.
"I tried to save them," Adán Noé Saavedra Ríos, Lurde's husband, told local reporters with tears in his eyes. He described his frantic wife trying to rush from the house with their daughter in her arms after the ground started moving. Before he knew it, he recounted, they were covered in rubble.
At the hospital in Talca, near the epicenter, personnel were treating victims in the parking lot because the hospital building was considered structurally unsound. Other hospitals were also damaged, and Ms. Bachelet said the military would set up field hospitals to treat the injured.
Speaking at a midday news conference, Ms. Bachelet called on power companies to work quickly to repair their networks so that services could be restored and the country could begin to get back on its feet. "We need energy first," she said, pointing out that cellphone communications, medical care and water distribution depended on it.
Ms. Bachelet said that the bulk of the known deaths, 541 of 708, took place in the Maule region, which is the country's leading wine-growing area along the coast, followed by Bío-Bío, where at least 64 people died. The military will take charge of emergency operations in those two areas for the next month, she said.
The government has imposed a limited curfew in those areas that forbids people from wandering the streets at night, but will not force them inside damaged buildings. Many people huddled by fires and slept outside Saturday night out of fear that more buildings would collapse.
Responding to outbreaks of looting in Concepción, the mayor, Jacqueline van Rysselberghe, had earlier called on national officials to bring in the military to keep the tense situation from spinning out of control. She said it was not just desperate people who were cleaning out the stores but opportunists who were trying to enrich themselves.
Despite images of confrontation between the police and residents, officials said that the traumatized country remained mostly calm. Ms. Bachelet's order will mean 10,000 soldiers will help in the relief effort, Defense Minister Francisco Vidal said.
The scenes of toppled buildings, overturned cars and bodies being hauled from rubble resembled those from Haiti a month and a half ago. But because of better building standards and because the epicenter was farther from populated areas, the scale of the damage from Chile's significantly more powerful earthquake was nowhere near that suffered in Haiti, where more than 200,000 people are believed to have died.
The comparison with Haiti did little to soothe the suffering of Chileans, some of whom tearfully recounted how their children were crying for food and how their families were now living outside in the elements.
Still, many felt lucky to have survived.
"It was like God said, 'No, run out the back,' " said Carmen Peña, 48, a grandmother whose home in Santiago was in shambles. "If we'd gone out the front, we'd be dead."
The quake hit during Chile's summer vacation, which left thousands of Chileans stranded overseas. There were frantic scenes at airports throughout the region as the closing of the damaged Santiago airport prompted airlines to cancel or reroute flights away from the Chilean capital.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who had a previously scheduled visit to Chile this week as part of a tour of Latin America, will go ahead with the stop despite the quake. Mrs. Clinton is scheduled to meet with both Ms. Bachelet, who leaves office this month, and her successor, President-elect Sebastián Piñera.
Reporting was contributed by Charles Newbery from Buenos Aires; Aaron Nelsen and Pascale Bonnefoy from Santiago, Chile; Catrin Einhorn and Jack Healy from New York; and Mark McDonald from Hong Kong.
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16) Rulings Restrict Clean Water Act, Foiling E.P.A.
By CHARLES DUHIGG and JANET ROBERTS
February 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/us/01water.html?hp
Thousands of the nation's largest water polluters are outside the Clean Water Act's reach because the Supreme Court has left uncertain which waterways are protected by that law, according to interviews with regulators.
As a result, some businesses are declaring that the law no longer applies to them. And pollution rates are rising.
Companies that have spilled oil, carcinogens and dangerous bacteria into lakes, rivers and other waters are not being prosecuted, according to Environmental Protection Agency regulators working on those cases, who estimate that more than 1,500 major pollution investigations have been discontinued or shelved in the last four years.
The Clean Water Act was intended to end dangerous water pollution by regulating every major polluter. But today, regulators may be unable to prosecute as many as half of the nation's largest known polluters because officials lack jurisdiction or because proving jurisdiction would be overwhelmingly difficult or time consuming, according to midlevel officials.
"We are, in essence, shutting down our Clean Water programs in some states," said Douglas F. Mundrick, an E.P.A. lawyer in Atlanta. "This is a huge step backward. When companies figure out the cops can't operate, they start remembering how much cheaper it is to just dump stuff in a nearby creek."
"This is a huge deal," James M. Tierney, the New York State assistant commissioner for water resources, said of the new constraints. "There are whole watersheds that feed into New York's drinking water supply that are, as of now, unprotected."
The court rulings causing these problems focused on language in the Clean Water Act that limited it to "the discharge of pollutants into the navigable waters" of the United States. For decades, "navigable waters" was broadly interpreted by regulators to include many large wetlands and streams that connected to major rivers.
But the two decisions suggested that waterways that are entirely within one state, creeks that sometimes go dry, and lakes unconnected to larger water systems may not be "navigable waters" and are therefore not covered by the act - even though pollution from such waterways can make its way into sources of drinking water.
Some argue that such decisions help limit overreaching regulatory efforts.
"There is no doubt in my mind that when Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972 they intended it to have broad regulatory reach, but they did not intend it to be unlimited," said Don Parrish, the American Farm Bureau Federation's senior director of regulatory relations, who has lobbied on Clean Water issues.
But for E.P.A. and state regulators, the decisions have created widespread uncertainty. The court did not define which waterways are regulated, and judicial districts have interpreted the court's decisions differently. As regulators have struggled to guess how various courts will rule, some E.P.A. lawyers have established unwritten internal guidelines to avoid cases in which proving jurisdiction is too difficult, according to interviews with more than two dozen current and former E.P.A. officials.
The decisions "reduce E.P.A.'s ability to do what the law intends - to protect water quality, the environment and public health," wrote Peter S. Silva, the E.P.A.'s assistant administrator for the Office of Water, in response to questions.
About 117 million Americans get their drinking water from sources fed by waters that are vulnerable to exclusion from the Clean Water Act, according to E.P.A. reports.
The E.P.A. said in a statement that it did not automatically concede that any significant water body was outside the authority of the Clean Water Act. "Jurisdictional determinations must be made on a case-by-case basis," the agency wrote. Officials added that they believed that even many streams that go dry for long periods were within the act's jurisdiction.
But midlevel E.P.A. officials said that internal studies indicated that as many as 45 percent of major polluters might be either outside regulatory reach or in areas where proving jurisdiction is overwhelmingly difficult.
And even in situations in which regulators believe they still have jurisdiction, companies have delayed cases for years by arguing that the ambiguity precludes prosecution. In some instances, regulators have simply dropped enforcement actions.
In the last two years, some members of Congress have tried to limit the impact of the court decisions by introducing legislation known as the Clean Water Restoration Act. It has been approved by a Senate committee but not yet introduced this session in the House. The legislation tries to resolve these problems by, in part, removing the word "navigable" from the law and restoring regulators' authority over all waters that were regulated before the Supreme Court decisions.
But a broad coalition of industries has often successfully lobbied to prevent the full Congress from voting on such proposals by telling farmers and small-business owners that the new legislation would permit the government to regulate rain puddles and small ponds and layer new regulations on how they dispose of waste.
"The game plan is to emphasize the scary possibilities," said one member of the Waters Advocacy Coalition, which has fought the legislation and is supported by the American Farm Bureau Federation, the National Association of Home Builders and other groups representing industries affected by the Clean Water Act.
"If you can get Glenn Beck to say that government storm troopers are going to invade your property, farmers in the Midwest will light up their congressmen's switchboards," said the coalition member, who asked not to be identified because he thought his descriptions would anger other coalition participants. Mr. Beck, a conservative commentator on Fox News, spoke at length against the Clean Water Restoration Act in December.
The American Land Rights Association, another organization opposed to legislation, wrote last June that people should "Deluge your senators with calls, faxes and e-mails." A news release the same month from the American Farm Bureau Federation warned that "even rainwater would be regulated."
"If you erase the word 'navigable' from the law, it erases any limitation on the federal government's reach," said Mr. Parrish of the American Farm Bureau Federation. "It could be a gutter, a roadside ditch or a rain puddle. But under the new law, the government gets control over it."
Legislators say these statements are misleading and intended to create panic.
"These claims just aren't true," said Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland. He helped push the bill through the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. "This bill," he said, "is solely aimed at restoring the law to what it covered before the Supreme Court decisions."
The consequences of the Supreme Court decisions are stark. In drier states, some polluters say the act no longer applies to them and are therefore refusing to renew or apply for permits, making it impossible to monitor what they are dumping, say officials.
Cannon Air Force Base near Clovis, N.M., for instance, recently informed E.P.A. officials that it no longer considered itself subject to the act. It dumps wastewater - containing bacteria and human sewage - into a lake on the base.
More than 200 oil spill cases were delayed as of 2008, according to a memorandum written by an E.P.A. official and collected by Congressional investigators. And even as the number of facilities violating the Clean Water Act has steadily increased each year, E.P.A. judicial actions against major polluters have fallen by almost half since the Supreme Court rulings, according to an analysis of E.P.A. data by The New York Times.
The Clean Water Act does not directly deal with drinking water. Rather, it was meant to regulate the polluters that contaminated the waterways that supplied many towns and cities with tap water.
The two Supreme Court decisions at issue - Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. United States Army Corps of Engineers in 2001 and Rapanos v. United States in 2006 - focused on the federal government's jurisdiction over various wetlands. In both cases, dissenting justices warned that limiting the power of the federal government would weaken its ability to combat water pollution.
"Cases now are lost because the company is discharging into a stream that flows into a river, rather than the river itself," said David M. Uhlmann, a law professor at the University of Michigan who led the environmental crimes section of the Justice Department during the last administration.
In 2007, for instance, after a pipe manufacturer in Alabama, a division of McWane Inc., was convicted and fined millions of dollars for dumping oil, lead, zinc and other chemicals into a large creek, an appellate court overturned that conviction and fine, ruling that the Supreme Court precedent exempted the waterway from the Clean Water Act. The company eventually settled by agreeing to pay a smaller amount and submit to probation.
Some E.P.A. officials say solutions beyond the Clean Water Restoration Act are available. They argue that the agency's chief, Lisa P. Jackson, could issue regulations that seek to clarify jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act.
Mrs. Jackson has urged Congress to resolve these issues. But she has not issued new regulations.
"E.P.A., with our federal partners, emphasized to Congress in a May 2009 letter that legislation is the best way to restore the Clean Water Act's effectiveness," wrote Mr. Silva in a statement to The Times. "E.P.A. and the Army Corps of Engineers will continue to implement our water programs to protect the nation's waters and the environment as effectively as possible, including consideration of administrative actions to restore the scope of waters protected under the Clean Water Act."
In the meantime, both state and federal regulators say they are prevented from protecting important waterways.
"We need something to fix these gaps," said Mr. Tierney, the New York official. "The Clean Water Act worked for over 30 years, and we're at risk of losing that if we can't get a new law."
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17) Slain Hamas Operative Was Drugged, Dubai Police Say
By ROBERT F. WORTH
February 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/world/middleeast/01dubai.html?ref=world
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - A Hamas official who was killed in his hotel room here in January was first injected with a fast-acting muscle relaxant and then suffocated, Dubai police officials said Sunday.
The disclosure was the latest in a near-daily drip of information about the killing, which has riveted people across the Middle East and provided a rare level of detail about a political assassination widely believed to have been carried out by Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad.
The drug, succinylcholine, is often used by doctors to administer a breathing tube, but it has also been used in killings and as a paralyzing agent before lethal injection. Investigators discovered the relaxant in the body of the Hamas operative, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, after noticing an injection mark on his thigh, according to a forensic specialist who spoke at a news conference alongside Dubai's deputy police chief, Khamis al-Mazeina.
"After using this drug to gain control of him, they killed him," Mr. Mazeina said.
The Dubai police have identified 26 suspects in the case, providing an extensive array of evidence that includes passport numbers and photographs, video surveillance, and a narrative of the suspects' travel to and from Dubai.
Many of the suspects did reconnaissance work for the killing, arriving as early as March 2009, the police here have said. Video surveillance during the final hours before Mr. Mabhouh was killed, late on Jan. 19, show the suspects tracking him to his hotel and even riding the elevator with him to be sure he arrived as expected. Some can be seen disguised in wigs and fake beards, or dressed as tennis-playing tourists.
The case has also become a diplomatic embarrassment for Israel. The names used by at least 15 of the suspects correspond to real people living in Israel and bearing European or Australian passports, whose identities were apparently stolen by the suspects. European officials have called in Israeli diplomats to demand answers, and have opened investigations.
Israel has declined to comment, as is its custom in cases involving accusations against the Mossad.
There is also financial evidence that suggests an Israeli link. The Dubai police have said a company called Payoneer played a role in issuing credit cards for a number of the suspects. Payoneer is based in New York but has offices in Tel Aviv. Its chief executive, Yuval Tal, appeared in 2006 as a commentator on the war between Israel and Hezbollah, identifying himself as a former Israeli special forces soldier.
Mr. Mabhouh played a role in the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers in 1989, and was also involved in smuggling weapons into the Gaza Strip, which Hamas has controlled since 2007, Israel and Hamas have said. Israel has said the weapons came from Iran.
Hamas has accused Israel of the assassination and has sworn to retaliate.
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18) Community, Labor Unite with IUE-CWA at Whirlpool Rally
by James Parks
February 28, 2010
http://blog.aflcio.org/2010/02/28/community-labor-unite-with-iue-cwa-at-whirlpool-rally/
When more than 5,500 workers and community and religious activists from at least six states converged in front of the Whirlpool plant in Evansville, Ind., members of IUE-CWA led the way to deliver the message to "Keep It Made in America."
Local 808 President Darrell Collins said:
We have had small rallies before and Whirlpool ignored us! They will not ignore us today! This is just the beginning of something big. We will carry this fight on till it changes. There is no limit to what we can accomplish as long as we work together.
One of the Whirlpool workers who stands to lose her job is Natalie Ford. A member of Local 808, Ford told the rally:
This doesn't just affect us, it affects everyone in our families....This is the only life we've known-now it's gone. The questions run through my mind: Am I going to lose everything I've worked my entire life for? I try to be strong for my family, but deep down I'm scared to death, not knowing what the future holds for us.
Speaking amid an increasing crescendo of cheers and applause, Communications Workers of America (CWA) Vice President Seth Rosen told the energized crowd that although some people "blame us for what they call 'legacy costs': union wages, health care, pension for retirees":
There is a legacy from those things. You know what that legacy is? Every firehouse in Evansville, Ind., is a legacy of the tax dollars of union workers making a middle-class wage. Every school house is a legacy of the people who work in this plant.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, along with 40 people, including children and grandchildren of workers, clergy and retirees, used a Whirlpool refrigerator to wheel petitions with 70,000 signatures to the plant's locked front gate. At the same time, as coordinated with the Michigan AFL-CIO, the Machinists delivered more than 40,000 signatures on petitions to the Whirlpool headquarters in Michigan. The petitions urged Whirlpool executives to reconsider their decision to shutter the Evansville plant, laying off 1,100 people and moving jobs to Mexico. Union members also made more than 1,700 phone calls in one day to Whirlpool headquarters in Benton Harbor, Mich., and the Evansville offices with the same message. IUE-CWA Local 808 represents 900 of the 1,100 workers.
The fight for jobs at Whirlpool is part of the union movement's nationwide jobs campaign. The AFL-CIO is calling on Congress and the Obama administration to take five steps now to care for jobless workers and put America back to work.
Recognizing the broad spectrum of unions who traveled to Evansville to support the workers at Whirlpool, including workers from the General Electric plant in Louisville, Ky., IUE-CWA President Jim Clark said:
We've had some bad weather, and in this weather here for union people to come from all the different states on a Friday evening, that means they're ready to fight and they're ready to fight for you.
Tom Vinnedge, a local restaurant owner, said:
More unemployed neighbors means less customers who can afford to enjoy a meal out, plain and simple. It's just madness that Whirlpool is abandoning our community like this, and nobody has the courage to stand up to them and other greedy corporations and say it's got to stop.
The Rev. Phil Hoy, a longtime local minister and former state legislator, said the workers and the region deserve better:
I am appalled by Whirlpool's disregard for the community that has done so much for them throughout the years and by the apathy and disdain that many politicians show toward our nation's working families. We deserve better.
As Trumka said:
American workers should not be reduced to stocking shelves down at Wal-Mart with stuff made in Mexico and China. We don't have to accept second class status for America. We can lead the world economy again if the leaders we elect step up and insist that we invest in America again.
You can check out photos from the rally here, including speakers such as Rosen, Clark, Collins and Hoy.
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19) Tomgram: Jo Comerford, A Budgetary SOS for 2011
By Jo Comerford
Posted on February 28, 2010, Printed on March 1, 2010
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175212/
If there were a prize for worst headline of the week, even the month, it would surely go to a February 23rd piece in the New York Times headlined online: "Gates Calls European Mood a Danger to Peace." The bellicose "mood," so undermining of global peace that our secretary of defense had to go after it, was (according to Brian Knowlton of the Times) the "public and political opposition to the military" spreading across Europe. Who wouldn't react similarly in the face of such an unnerving phenomenon? After all, should it grow stronger, peace on Earth will surely prove a chimera.
European publics are now, it seems, so totally peaceable that, while the thousandth American died "in and around Afghanistan" in Operation Enduring Freedom last week to next to no notice here, they continued to exhibit extraordinary "weakness." After all, this was also the week in which -- speak of the devil -- the Dutch coalition government collapsed over a dispute about the public's desire to get Dutch troops out of Afghanistan. What an example of that anti-peace bogeyman run riot! No wonder Gates was warning that the perception of weakness could lead hostile powers (unnamed) to a "temptation to miscalculate and aggression."
Fortunately, one country is still willing to sink its money (and lives) into the armed enhancement of peace globally: the United States. As Jo Comerford of the National Priorities Project points out, the latest federal budget opens the American public to yet more pain, while shielding the military and the rest of the national security establishment from the same. Fortunately, that "antiwar mood" seems not to have jumped the wide Atlantic, which means, for the time being, peace is safe in America. Tom
A Titanic Budget in an Ocean of Icebergs
Will the USS Budget Go Down?
By Jo Comerford
Send up a flare! The 2011 federal budget has sprung some leaks in the midst of a storm. Not sure there's enough money for life rafts! Forget women and children first!
Buffeted by economic hard times, the 2,585-page, $3.8 trillion document is already taking on water, though this won't be obvious to you if you're reading the mainstream media. Let's start with the absolute basics: 59% of the budget's spending is dedicated to mandatory programs like Medicaid, Medicare, Unemployment Insurance, Social Security, and now Pell Grants; 34% is to be spent on "discretionary programs," including education, transportation, housing, and the military; 7% will be used to service the national debt.
A serious look at this budget document reveals some "leaks" -- two in actual spending practices and two in the basic assumptions that undergird the budget itself. Ship-shape as it may look on the surface, this is a budget perilously close to an iceberg, and it's not clear whether the captain of the ship will heed the obvious warning signs.
Whose Security Is This Anyway?
In his State of the Union Address, given several days before the 2011 budget was released, President Obama announced a three-year freeze on "non-security discretionary spending." This was meant as a gesture toward paying down the looming national debt, but it should also be considered an early warning sign for leak number one. After all, the president exempted all national-security-related spending from the cutting process. Practically speaking, according to the National Priorities Project (NPP), national security spending makes up about 67% of that discretionary 34% slice of the budget. In 2011, that will include an as-yet-untouchable $737 billion for the Pentagon alone.
Within the context of the total budget, then, so-called non-security discretionary spending represents a mere 11% of proposed 2011 spending. In other words, Obama's present plans to chip away at the debt involve leaving 89% of the budget untouched. Only the $370 billion going to myriad domestic social programs will be on the chopping block.
What's in that $370 billion? Well, for starters, programs that focus on the environment, energy, and science. In the 2011 budget, these categories combined are projected to receive $79 billion or 6% of total domestic discretionary spending. Though each of these areas could actually use a significant boost in funds, that's obviously not in the cards -- and this will translate into less money at the state level. New York, for example, is projected to receive $247 million in home energy assistance for low-income folks, down more than $230 million from 2010. These funds mean an energy safety net for our communities, and also warmth and jobs in a cold winter, which looks like "security" to most of us, no matter what our captain says.
Asking for disproportionate cuts and efficiencies in programs in only 11% percent of the overall budget might perhaps be slightly easier to stomach if military spending wasn't allowed relatively free rein in 2011 (and thereafter). The NPP estimates, in fact, that aggregated increases in military spending over the next decade will exceed $500 billion, drowning twice-over the projected $250 billion in non-security discretionary savings from the president's cuts over the same time period. Consider this visible unwillingness to control military-related spending leak two in our budgetary Titanic.
By now, danger flags should be going up in profusion because the second leak is so familiar, so George W. Bush. With each new bit of information, in fact, it sounds more and more like the same old song, the last guy's tune. It's clear that, as soon as the stimulus bump wears off later this year, we're in danger of falling back into exactly the same more-money-for-the-military, less-federal-aid-to-the-states rut we've been in for years, despite strong statements from both President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates decrying Pentagon waste.
And speaking of waste, the Department of Defense is currently carrying weapons-program cost overruns for 96 of its major weapons programs totaling $295 billion, which alone are guaranteed to wipe out any proposed savings from President Obama's non-security discretionary freeze, with $45 billion to spare. That's only to be expected, since neither the Pentagon nor any of the armed services have ever been able to pass a proper audit. Ever.
If they had, what would have become of the C-17, the Air Force's giant cargo plane? With a price tag now approaching $330 million per plane and a total program cost of well over $65 billion, the C-17, produced by weapons-maker Boeing, has miraculously evaded every attempt to squash it. In fact, Congress even included $2.5 billion in the 2010 budget for ten C-17s that the Pentagon hadn't requested.
Keep in mind that $2.5 billion is a lot of money, especially when cuts to domestic spending are threatened. It could, for instance, provide an estimated 141,681 children and adults with health care for one year and pay the salaries of 6,138 public safety officers, 4,649 music and art teachers, and 4,568 elementary school teachers for that same year. Having done that, it could still fund 22,610 scholarships for university students, provide 46,130 students the maximum Pell Grant of $5,550 for the college of their choice, allow for the building of 1,877 affordable housing units, and provide 382,879 homes with renewable electricity -- again for that same year -- and enough money would be left over to carve out 29,630 free Head Start places for kids. That's for ten giant transport planes that the military isn't even asking for.
Domestic-spending freeze proponents demand that our $13 trillion national debt, accumulated over seven decades, be turned back starting now. Critics of Obama's freeze remind us that, while the C-17 flourishes, cutting into that domestic 11% is like trying to get blood from a stone. They argue that what we need in recessionary times is an infusion of strategic domestic spending. They tend to cite Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Economy.com, who has noted that, for every dollar in stimulus aid directed toward the states, $1.40 returns to the economy, while every dollar invested in infrastructure spending yields $1.60.
Freeze critics are acutely aware that, by December 31, 2010, most of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), that Obama stimulus package, will expire and states will face a remarkably bleak future. By then, they will also have spent the bulk of their education-relief funds, even as they grapple with a projected 48-state 2011 budget gap of $180 billion. Last year, despite the infusion of stimulus money, the same 48 states were already experiencing significant budget gaps and so cut a cumulative $194 billion or 28% of their total 2010 budgets.
Having already imposed deep program cuts, governors in almost every state will have to make even more excruciating choices before July 1st, the beginning of their next fiscal year. In Massachusetts, officials are considering eliminating funding for a program providing housing vouchers to homeless families. California is facing $1.5 billion in reductions to kindergarten through 12th grade education and community college funding, while New York State may have to reduce payments to health-care providers by $400 million.
On the eve of the annual gathering of governors in Washington D.C., Ray Scheppach, executive director of the National Governors Association, told a Washington Post columnist that he anticipates states needing to do far more than just institute program cuts, layoffs, and benefit cuts. Governors will have to permanently sell off assets like roads and office buildings, or implement a host of other previously "off-limits" changes.
Afloat in an Ever Harsher World
Having looked at two obvious leaks in the upper hull of our budgetary ship of state, it's time to move deep underwater and examine the weak spots in two of the basic assumptions that undergird the new budget. The first deals with an issue on everyone's mind: unemployment.
The 2011 budget numbers are based on a crucial projection: just where the unemployment rate will be in 2012. Revenues available at the federal and state levels will depend, in part, on how many people go back to work and once again begin paying taxes on their wages. For the pending and projected federal budgets to have a shot at panning out, unemployment must decline, as the budget predicts it will, from the present official rate of 9.7% to 8.5% by 2012. That doesn't sound like much of a drop, especially when Americans are in job pain. But there's a strong likelihood that even this goal is unattainable.
In reality, the U.S. needs to generate an estimated 1.5 million new jobs each year simply to keep pace with the arrival of newcomers on the job market. That's before we talk about knocking down the present staggering unemployment rate. In this case, however, one set of budget projections (that three-year domestic spending freeze) might work against the other (that modest decline in unemployment). Fewer federal stimulus dollars will be available to offset onrushing shortfall disasters at the state budgetary level, which means a potential drop in jobs. And, thanks to that domestic freeze, more pain is in the offing, with fewer services available, for those out of work. Even if the new Senate jobs bill makes it to the president's desk, it's unlikely to go far enough to make a real difference. All of this means that an 8.5% unemployment rate in two years is, at best, an optimistic projection.
Even if that figure were hit, however, Americans still wouldn't be celebrating, in budgetary terms or otherwise. At 8.5%, we're only back to an unemployment rate not seen in more than a quarter of a century, and keep in mind that a one-dimensional unemployment figure can't begin to capture the complexity of what the Bureau of Labor Statistics describes as "alternate measures of labor underutilization." In other words, it doesn't count everyone who is underemployed, employed only part-time, or discouraged and so considered out of the job market. At 16.5% as of January 2010, this measure tells a very different story.
Nor does that 8.5% figure capture the disproportionately terrible employment situation faced by young people or people of color who are distinctly over-represented on the unemployment rolls. And if you happen to live in certain metropolitan areas, 50% of you can kiss your chances of a quick recovery goodbye. According to the projections of a U.S. Conference of Mayors study titled U.S. Metro Economics, Dayton, Ohio, is not expected to see a significant employment bounce until 2015; Hartford, Connecticut, not until 2018, and Detroit, Michigan, not until after 2039.
As Atlantic magazine Deputy Managing Editor Don Peck noted recently, it will be a long time before we dig ourselves out of this current job crisis. "We are living through a slow motion catastrophe," he writes, "one that could stain our culture and weaken our nation for many, many years to come."
That projected 8.5% figure and all the projected freezes and cuts that go with it, don't begin to address this reality. Think of that as leak three.
Then, consider this little tidbit from the 2011 budget, hardly noted or discussed in the news, even though it has the potential to punch a hole in the budgetary hull: the document projects a zero percent cost of living adjustment (COLA) for Food Stamps through 2019.
To understand just what this means, it's necessary to step back for a moment. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), food stamp usage is remarkably widespread and growing. Thirty-six million Americans, including one out of every four children, are currently on Food Stamps. An estimated monthly Food Stamp benefit for a family of four is $321 (approximately 89 cents per person per meal), which already falls significantly short of what the USDA considers a "thrifty" family's grocery receipts, estimated at roughly $513 per month.
If the COLA for food stamps is frozen over the next eight years, NPP analysts project a 19% erosion in the buying power of those stamps due to inflation. This means that, by the end of 2019, a similar family of four, eating at exactly the same level, would be paying $611 a month for its food, or $100 more, while still receiving that same $321.
In other words, if the 2011 budget and its projections proceed as planned, a great many Americans will be hungrier and still jobless in a harsher, meaner world, while what budgetary savings are achieved on the backs of the poorest Americans will be gobbled up by wars, weapons, and other "security" needs. Ordinary Americans will largely be left in a sink or swim world and the waters will be very, very cold.
Tell the radio operator. It's none too soon. Start sending out the signals. SOS... SOS... SOS...
Jo Comerford is the executive director of the National Priorities Project. Previously, she served as director of programs at the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts and directed the American Friends Service Committee's justice and peace-related community organizing efforts in western Massachusetts.
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20) Watching Certain People
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
March 2, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/opinion/02herbert.html?hp
From 2004 through 2009, in a policy that has gotten completely out of control, New York City police officers stopped people on the street and checked them out nearly three million times, frisking and otherwise humiliating many of them.
Upward of 90 percent of the people stopped are completely innocent of any wrongdoing. And yet the New York Police Department is compounding this intolerable indignity by compiling an enormous and permanent computerized database of these encounters between innocent New Yorkers and the police.
Not only are most of the people innocent, but a vast majority are either black or Hispanic. There is no defense for this policy. It's a gruesome, racist practice that should offend all New Yorkers, and it should cease.
Police Department statistics show that 2,798,461 stops were made in that six-year period. In 2,467,150 of those instances, the people stopped had done nothing wrong. That's 88.2 percent of all stops over six years. Black people were stopped during that period a staggering 1,444,559 times. Hispanics accounted for 843,817 of the stops and whites 287,218.
While crime has been going down, the number of people getting stopped by the police is going up. Last year, more than 575,000 stops were made - a record. But 504,594 of those stops were of people who had done nothing wrong. They had committed no crime, were issued no summonses and were carrying no weapons or illegal substances.
Still, day after day, the cops continue harassing and degrading these innocent New Yorkers, often making them line up against walls, or lean spread-eagled on the hoods of cars, or sprawl face down in the street to be searched like criminals in front of curious, sometimes frightened, sometimes giggling, sometimes outraged onlookers.
If the police officers were treating white middle-class or wealthy individuals this way, the movers and shakers in this town would be apoplectic. The mayor would be called to account in an atmosphere of thunderous outrage, and the police commissioner would be gone.
But the people getting stopped and frisked are mostly young, and most of them are black or brown and poor. So Police Commissioner Ray Kelly could feel completely comfortable with his department issuing the order in 2006 that reports of all stops and frisks be forwarded and compiled "for input into the Department's database."
"They have been collecting the names and all sorts of other information about everybody who is stopped and frisked on the streets," said Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which is fighting the department's stop-and-frisk policy and its compiling of data on people who are innocent. "This is a massive database of innocent, overwhelmingly black and Latino people," she said.
Police Commissioner Kelly has made it clear that this monstrous database, growing by a half-million or so stops each year, is to be a permanent feature of the department's operations. In a letter last summer to Peter Vallone Jr., the chairman of the City Council's Public Safety Committee, the commissioner said:
"Information contained in the stop, question and frisk database remains there indefinitely, for use in future investigations. Therefore, there are no existing Police Department guidelines that mandate the removal of information once it has been entered into the database."
He added, "Information contained within the stop, question and frisk database is used primarily by department investigators during the course of a criminal investigation."
So the department is collecting random information on innocent, primarily poor, black and brown New Yorkers for use in some anticipated future criminal investigation. But it is not collecting and storing massive amounts of information on innocent middle-class or wealthy white people. Why is that, exactly?
Councilman Vallone is a supporter of the stop-and-frisk policy, but he is concerned about the innocent people in the database. As he told me on Monday, "I don't support the indefinite keeping of this information regarding people who were not arrested or charged with any crime."
The Police Department has no intention of changing its policy. A spokesman for Commissioner Kelly told me that information collected when the police stop an innocent individual "may be useful" in future investigations. The stored data may become useful "in the same way" that license plate information is useful, he said.
He cited the hypothetical example of someone in the course of a criminal investigation saying that he or she was at "a certain place at a certain time." The information permanently stored in the stop-and-frisk database, he said, could help the police determine if "they were or they weren't."
His example would suggest that the innocent people stopped are nevertheless permanently under suspicion, which is, of course, the case.
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21) Greece Expected to Release New Austerity Plan
By NIKI KITSANTONIS
March 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/business/global/03greece.html
ATHENS - The Greek government is expected to announce on Wednesday a new raft of austerity measures aimed at raising an additional 3.5 billion euros, or $4.8 billion, in much-needed revenue and convincing global financial markets that it is serious about curbing its bloated budget deficit and averting a debt crisis in the euro zone.
After a day of talks with the European Union commissioner for monetary affairs, Olli Rehn, the prime minister George Papandreou, released a statement on Tuesday that said a cabinet meeting would be held on Wednesday "to take decisions about the economy."
Mr. Papandreou, who was to brief the parliamentary group of his ruling Socialist party on the proposed changes on Tuesday afternoon, is expected to announce the new measures after Wednesday's cabinet meeting. They are widely expected to include a 2 percent increase to value-added tax, which now stands at 19 percent, an additional increase in fuel tax and a new tax on luxury goods.
Also on the cards is the controversial abolition, or reduction, of the so-called 14th salary - one of two additional salaries paid to public sector workers and to many private employees as holiday pay.
The new measures would come on top of wage freezes and tax increases that were heralded by the government a month ago with the aim of raising 5 billion euros or $6.8 billion. Mr. Rehn said on Tuesday that these original measures would not be enough to curb Greece's budget deficit by 4 percentage points, in line with European Union targets, and stressed that financial markets would be reassured about Greece only once they see "precise new measures."
A government spokesman, Giorgos Petalotis, said authorities would wait to see how the markets respond to the new measures before issuing bonds in a bid to raise the 20 billion euros needed to refinance debt maturing in April.
Mr. Papandreou is to travel to Germany on Friday to meet Chancellor Angela Merkel; talks are expected to focus on Greece's fiscal problems.
Reacting to heightened speculation about the salary cut on Tuesday, the country's civil servants' union called a 24-hour strike for March 16, the deadline that European finance ministers have given Greece to show progress in curbing its budget deficit which stands at 12.7 percent of gross domestic product.
The union, which staged two strikes last month, has described the additional salary as "a historic conquest" that it will fight to protect.
Left-wing party leaders, who have been lambasting the government for heralding "painful and socially unjust" measures despite being elected last October on a platform of social welfare pledges, on Tuesday appealed to workers to resist the proposed cuts.
"The best form of defense is attack," said Aleka Papariga, a Communist party leader, who represents about 8 percent of the electorate.
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22) PA Security Forces Arrest PFLP Comrades in Nablus
by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
[Let's not forget this repression is financed by the US and is done by troops trained by US military personnel who are in Palestine right now.]
US Out of Palestine!
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/pflp010310.html
For more information, go to
Nablus ArrestPalestinian Authority security forces arrested a group of comrades in Nablus, on February 25, 2010, as part of their "security cooperation" with the Israeli occupation. Comrade Khalida Jarrar, member of the Political Bureau of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, strongly denounced the arrests, saying that this action serves only the interests of the Zionist occupier and demanding the immediate release of the arrested comrades. Comrade Jarrar demanded a complete prohibition of political arrests and an end to the policy of security cooperation with the occupier and participation in its aggression toward our people.
Comrades Muhammad At-Teriaqi, 17, Muhammad Jihad An-Natur, 18, Omer Tayseer Abdul Haq, 18, and Muhammad Al-Madani, 17 were arrested by the PA forces in the early morning of the 25th in Nablus. Comrade Jarrar said that "the policy of political arrests is rejected by the Palestinian people," noting that the security agencies have persisted in ignoring all calls to stop the arrests and persecution of activists.
Comrade Jarrar also noted that this group of arrests comes alongside occupation arrests in the city and throughout the West Bank, targeting the PFLP and other resistance factions, particularly in the face of increased Zionist attacks on the land, Jerusalem, and the holy places of Palestine.
The PFLP issued a statement strongly condemning the arrests, demanding their release and a complete end to security cooperation with the occupation, noting that these activists were arrested at the requests of the occupation forces. It demanded that all forces in the PLO and PA must end their reliance on the utterly discredited path of "negotiations," Oslo and the roadmap, saying that this path is destructive to the Palestinian people and cause and ends up only with Palestinian forces acting as agents of the occupation.
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23) Clinton Arrives as Chile Sends Troops to Hard-Hit City
[As in Haiti, they accuse starving people who have lost everything including access to food and water as "looters." Instead of distributing all that food in supermarkets to those who need it, they send troops with guns!...bw]
By GINGER THOMPSON and ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
March 2, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/world/americas/03chile.html?hp
SANTIAGO, Chile - As smaller tremors continued to jolt this earthquake-ravaged country, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton flew into Chile's damaged main airport on Tuesday morning, bearing a handful of satellite phones and promises of more help.
Mrs. Clinton and the Chilean president, Michelle Bachelet, embraced as they met and later held a news conference to outline Chile's needs and American assistance three days after one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded toppled homes and knocked out roads and power throughout the country.
President Bachelet said her list of requests included field hospitals, portable dialysis machines, temporary bridges to plastic tarps that can be used to build tents, water desalination systems and communications equipment.
Mrs. Clinton said the United States was already preparing to send eight water-purification units, temporary bridges, a field hospital and other medical supplies.
Mrs. Clinton brought 25 satellite telephones and handed one to Ms. Bachelet during the news conference. "We'll be here to help when others leave," she said, "because we are committed to this partnership and this friendship with Chile."
President Bachelet's public outreach for assistance comes in the face of growing criticism that her government was slow in responding and asking for help. Ms. Bachelet has said her government needed time to assess its needs, but the delay came at a cost.
Tens of thousands of people remain without supplies of food, drinking water and shelter, and reports of looting and other lawlessness are increasing. In Concepción, one of the hardest-hit cities, thousands of government troops were sent to restore order, extending an overnight curfew until midday.
Ms. Bachelet said that she still was not able to give specific figures on the scope of the damage, but that projections have gone as high as $30 billion. She said an estimated 500,000 houses had been destroyed, and serious damage had been done to numerous bridges, roads, ports and public transportation stations.
When pressed for a dollar amount, Ms. Bachelet sighed. "All I can say is it's going to be a lot," she said.
"Chile has the capacity," she said, "but I think it's going to take a long time, and it will mean a whole lot of money."
Ms. Bachelet has just 10 days left in office as president, leaving her successor, Sebastián Piñera, little time to get up to speed on governing. One official in the current administration, who did not have authorization to speak on the record, suggested that the looming transition was already complicating the response.
Residents also feared that the transition would make the aid effort bumpy.
"Soon, people are going to start organizing and demanding that they fulfill the many promises they have made on television and the radio," said Jesse Salazar, 49, who watched over his sister-in-law's belongings as she packed up boxes to move from her damaged home.
The powerful quake that jolted Chileans awake on Saturday has left the country reeling. Collapsed bridges and damaged roadways have made it difficult to even get to some areas. Downed phone lines and cellular towers have made it impossible to communicate. And many residents in the most damaged areas have not only taken food from supermarkets, but also robbed banks, set fires and engaged in other forms of lawlessness.
Chilean newspapers quoted Ms. Bachelet on Tuesday as saying that the situation in Concepción was "under control," even though reports indicated that most of the city was still without electricity, phone service or running water.
The reported death toll from the quake rose slightly to 723, but officials say Chile will need weeks to determine a more accurate number. Witnesses have said that entire fishing communities hugging the coast were wiped away by pummeling waves that followed the initial shock, with houses and boats piled atop one another and some homes swept out to sea like driftwood.
"The villages have almost disappeared," said Paula Saez of the aid group World Vision, who toured part of the area by helicopter. "There's nothing. I cannot believe this is happening." The quake has also exposed the fact, experts say, that although Chile is one of the most developed countries in the region, it is also one of the most unequal, with huge pockets of urban and rural poor, who suffered most in the quake.
"It's the poorest Chileans who live near the epicenter," said Carolina Bank, a Chilean-born sociology professor at Brooklyn College.
It was not just the violent shaking that tore Chile apart, but also the surge of waves that swept in along the coast, damaging homes like that of Edmundo Muñoz, 44, and his family, in Constitución. "Everything was destroyed," he said.
A growing perception has begun to set in among many residents that the country - considered Latin America's most earthquake-ready - was not as well prepared as it had thought.
In Santiago, the capital, those left homeless after their brand-new and supposedly earthquake-resistant apartments suffered severe structural damage were furious. Chileans are wondering aloud why food is not getting to the hungry faster and why the politicians and soldiers seem to have been caught flatfooted.
"The government has been very slow to respond," complained Victor Pérez, 48, who was sleeping in a tent with his girlfriend outside their ruined Santiago apartment building. "We have no water or lights, and most of the stores nearby are out of food."
The frustration could be heard on Chilean radio, where residents called in to complain that government provisions had been slow to arrive and that almost all markets and stores had been stripped bare of food, water and other supplies.
The government, which declared a state of emergency Sunday, said it never dismissed outside assistance but wanted to see how bad things were first.
"Experience over the years and in prior earthquakes, as well as from international cooperation efforts like in Haiti, have left us lessons," Foreign Minister Mariano Fernández told reporters. "We have to be very precise about what our needs are in order for the assistance to be of any use."
As each day passes, it becomes clearer in Chile that those needs are huge.
While the effects of the earthquake appear worst in outlying areas, the capital itself received a significant jolt, as Mirko Boskovic, 43, a postal worker, could attest. "It looks like the Tower of Pisa," Mr. Boskovic said, gazing at his teetering apartment building, supposedly seismically secure, which leaned precariously at a 45-degree angle and was ringed by police tape.
On Monday, the United Nations said that the government had asked for generators, water filtration equipment and field hospitals, as well as experts to assess just how much damage was caused by Saturday's earthquake, which with a magnitude of 8.8 is one of the largest ever measured.
"Everything is now moving," said Elisabeth Byrs, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. "We are looking immediately to match the needs."Just weeks ago, it was Chile that was giving aid, not getting it.
Chilean rescue personnel, soldiers and aid workers played a significant role in Haiti. In fact, some officials said that had left the government short of the plastic sheeting and tents it needed for the nearly 2 million Chileans displaced or otherwise affected by the quake this week.
Still, Chile's earthquake preparedness clearly saved lives. Laura Torres, 62, and her husband, Víctor Campos, 66, live in Constitución, a city flanked by the ocean and a river. When they quake struck, the earth shook so violently they could not stand.
They crawled to assist their son, who is severely brain damaged; Mr. Campos picked him up, trying to walk as the earth heaved. They ran up into the hills, amid wails from others around.
In the tsunami-prone region, earthquake training had taught them that they had about 20 minutes to make it to high ground, Ms. Torres said, but the roaring of the water, a strange sound like a plane's motor, suggested that it was barreling in much sooner.
Still, they made it to the hills and are now staying with one of their daughters and about 30 other people, rationing what little food they have. Other survivors are camping in the hills, making fires and sharing food. Naked or partially naked people have streamed by the house, Ms. Torres said, asking for clothes.
Some homes not far from hers have vanished. The water left fishing boats in the plaza, Ms. Torres said, carrying away train cars and replacing businesses with "mud, debris, destruction."
"It's a ghost town," she said.
Ginger Thompson reported from Santiago, and Alexei Barrionuevo from Angol, Chile. Reporting was contributed by Marc Lacey from Lima, Peru, and Charles Newbery from Buenos Aires; Aaron Nelsen and Pascale Bonnefoy from Santiago, Chile; Tomás Munita from Constitución, Chile; and Catrin Einhorn and Jack Healy from New York.
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24) An appeal to anti-war organizations & activists
to oppose the increasing threats against Iran
Press Release from the
Campaign Against Sanctions & Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII)
Feb. 20, 2010
This appeal has been initiated by the
Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII)
For more information or to contact CASMII please visit:
http://www.campaigniran.org
Around the world, anti-war activists are preparing for major protests this spring to oppose the continuing U.S.-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, a storm of developments is dramatically increasing tensions between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran. In response, the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII) is issuing this appeal to the anti-war movements in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries to raise the demands of "No war, no sanctions, no internal interference in Iran!"
Iran is a country that hasn't attacked a neighbor in more than 200 years. Even when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran after the 1979 Revolution and, with support from the West, used chemical weapons against both civilians and combatants, the Islamic Republic did not retaliate in kind. And yet the U.S. government claims that Iran represents a serious threat to the Middle East region and the entire world. Without a shred of evidence, the U.S. charges that Iran's program to develop nuclear power for peaceful energy purposes is just a cover to develop nuclear weapons. Never mentioned is the fact that, as a signatory to the U.N.'s Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran's right to develop nuclear energy is enshrined in international law. Just a few months ago, the U.N's International Atomic Energy Chief, Mohammed ElBardai, the person responsible for monitoring compliance with that treaty, stated that "Nobody is sitting in Iran today developing nuclear weapons. Tehran doesn't have an ongoing nuclear weapons program. But somehow, everyone in the West is talking about how Iran's nuclear program is the greatest threat to the world." (Interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Sept. 2009) Instead, warning of world disaster if Iran should succeed in its imaginary goal of obtaining nuclear arms, Washington argues that Iran must be forcefully brought to its knees, through a combination of increasingly crippling sanctions, taking advantage of Iran's internal divisions and preparing for a possible military attack.
Consider these recent developments:
• The U.S has been pressuring the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council to impose a fourth and more severe round of sanctions against Iran. The only real holdout has been the People's Republic of China, which in January held the council's revolving presidency. On Feb. 1, however, the president's seat passed to France, which is nearly as hostile to Iran's nuclear program as is the U.S. (France itself, by the way, relies on nuclear power for 80 percent of its own energy needs.) The Security Council's permanent members, including China and Russia, have never been a real barrier for the US. Not only has the council already approved three rounds of sanctions against Iran, but the Obama Administration is now talking of "bypassing" the U.N. in its latest push for sanctions. While sanctions are often promoted as an alternative to war, the world now knows that the sanctions imposed by the U.N. against Iraq during the first Persian Gulf War resulted in the deaths of up to 1.5 million Iraqis, a third of them children.
• Not content with just pressuring the U.N., the U.S. is pushing ahead with plans for more of its own unilateral sanctions. Congress is getting close to passing the Dodd-Shelby Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act. Among other provisions, this bipartisan bill would "impose new sanctions on entities involved in exporting certain refined petroleum products to Iran or building Iran's domestic refining capacity." This provision starkly exposes the real U.S. goal: to economically cripple Iran in an attempt to so complicate life for the Iranian people that they might demand a "regime change." In the past, the U.S. has argued that Iran doesn't need to develop nuclear power because of its vast oil reserves, while conveniently omitting the fact that Iran doesn't have sufficient refinery capacity to meet its energy needs through oil alone. Targeting companies and countries that sell refined petroleum products to Iran, or that help Iran expand its own refining capacity, shows that the real goal has nothing to do with countering nuclear proliferation. (The U.S. even pressures European countries not to provide Iran with the means to develop wind energy!) Those who desire hegemony over the oil-rich Middle East can tolerate no independent regional powers, whether or not they present a threat to any other country. This reality was dramatically demonstrated in 1953, when the CIA toppled Iran's democratically elected prime minister, Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh, for the "crime" of nationalizing Iran's oil industry.
• Meanwhile, these threats of new sanctions are being accompanied by a military build-up in the Persian Gulf region. On Jan. 31, The Wall Street Journal reported that, in recent months, the U.S. and its Persian Gulf allies have stepped up their military defenses "in response to Iranian missile tests and Tehran's continued defiance of international efforts to curtail its nuclear program." The moves have included "upgrades, new purchases of American-made Patriot antimissile batteries and the addition of advanced air- and missile-defense radars ...." The Journal reported that, although "some of the buildup has been going on for years ... the heightened profile of the moves comes as the Obama administration has toughened its rhetoric against Tehran."
• And, according to a Feb. 1 Reuters report, "The United States has expanded land- and sea-based missile defense systems in and around the Gulf to counter what it sees as Iran's growing missile threat .... The deployments include expanded land-based Patriot defensive missile installations in Kuwait, Qatar, UAE and Bahrain, as well as Navy ships with missile defense systems in and around the Mediterranean, officials said. ... The chairman of the U.S. military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said last month the Pentagon must have military options ready to counter Iran should Obama call for them."
• Finally, Iran's ongoing internal political crisis has apparently led some Western anti-war organizations and activists to be ambivalent about the need to stand against Western aggression against Iran. Regardless of how activists view Iran's internal situation, we all must agree that outside pressure and interference must be opposed. Recognizing this, Iran's political opposition has urged Western countries to stay out of Iran's internal affairs. As presidential opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, has put it, "We are opposed to any types of sanctions against our nation. This is what living the Green Path means." (Statement No. 13, Sept. 28, 2009) No truly progressive democracy activist in a country targeted by the U.S. would appeal to the U.S. for support.
The political positions taken by anti-war activists in the West can become a real factor in strategic decisions made by the U.S. government and its allies. Because of this, we are heartened to see that in the United States the National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations and the ANSWER Coalition have added the demand of "No War or Sanctions Against Iran!" to their fliers promoting national anti-war protests on March 20. We call on all other coalitions, organizations and individual activists to do the same, and to further demand "No Outside Interference in Iran's Internal Affairs! Self-determination for the Iranian People!"
Regardless of differences in our political analyses and views, these demands should be acceptable to all who struggle for peace, justice and a better world for all.
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25) Two Suspects Entered U.S. After Killing in Dubai
By ROBERT F. WORTH
March 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/world/middleeast/02dubai.html?ref=world
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - At least two suspects in the killing of a Hamas official in a hotel here in January traveled to the United States afterward, according to a person familiar with the investigation.
That disclosure broadened the scope of an international investigation that has fostered diplomatic tensions and cast a harsh light on the methods of Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad, which police officials here accuse of ordering the killing.
One suspect traveling on a British passport arrived in the United States on Feb. 14; the other used an Irish passport and arrived on Jan. 21, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case. He did not say where the men entered the country, and added that there was no known record of their leaving.
Many of the 26 suspects identified in the case used stolen identities - most of them taken from people with dual citizenship living in Israel - and that appeared to be true of the two men who traveled to the United States, who used the names Roy Allan Cannon and Evan Dennings. On Friday, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz identified the real Mr. Cannon as "a 62-year-old, ultra-Orthodox father of six" who moved to Israel in 1983. Irish officials said last week that they believed that Mr. Dennings was also a victim of identity theft.
As foreign citizens, the two suspects would have been photographed and fingerprinted on arrival in the United States, and could therefore presumably be tracked. But in light of the identity theft practiced in the case, it seems possible that the men could have left the United States under false travel documents.
Although Interpol is assisting in the investigation and has put out alert notices about the suspects, United States officials have been silent about it. On Monday, the State Department again refused to comment on the case.
Dubai police officials have already identified two American financial companies that they say issued credit cards to 14 suspects: MetaBank, based in Storm Lake, Iowa; and Payoneer, based in New York, with an Israeli office in Petah Tikva, near Tel Aviv.
The 26 suspects traveled on British, Irish, Australian, French and German passports, and the five countries have summoned Israeli ambassadors to ask how the documents were misused. Australia's prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was quoted in Australian newspapers as saying that his nation was "not satisfied" with the Israeli explanation so far. At least 16 suspects appear to have used the names of people with dual citizenship living in Israel.
On Monday, the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, expressed suspicion about the use of European passports during a speech to a United Nations gathering in Geneva, saying Western "security services, intelligence people, or a part of their government may have been involved" in the killing.
The Dubai police chief, Dahi Khalfan al-Tamim, said last week that he was "99 percent, if not 100 percent" sure that the Mossad was behind the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the Hamas official, on Jan. 19. Israeli officials have refused to comment on the matter, in keeping with their longstanding practice with accusations against the Mossad.
Mr. Mabhouh had a role in the 1989 abduction and murder of two Israeli soldiers, and in smuggling arms into Gaza, according to Israel and Hamas.
The Dubai police have released an array of evidence in the case, including high-quality surveillance video. On Sunday police officials said forensic tests showed that the killers had injected Mr. Mabhouh with a muscle relaxant to immobilize him before suffocating him in his hotel room.
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26) Immigrants Rally for a Nationwide Strike in Italy
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO
March 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/world/europe/02iht-italy.html?ref=world
MILAN - In an effort to heighten awareness about the contributions made by foreign workers to the Italian economy, the promoters of the first strike by immigrants in the country invited workers to stay home and to boycott shopping for one day.
Similar protests took place in other European countries on Monday (the initiative started in France and found supporters in Spain and Greece, as well). A comparable boycott, "A Day Without Immigrants," championing full rights for immigrants living in the United States, took place in 2006.
But demonstrations Monday had a particular resonance in Italy, where anti-immigrant rhetoric has increased recently in anticipation of regional elections at the end of the month, and where foreign labor makes up nearly 10 percent of the work force.
While introducing one electoral initiative last week, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi accused the left of "wanting an invasion of immigrants," only to strengthen the opposition's electoral basis.
Around Milan, electoral posters for the anti-immigrant Northern League party depicted a Native American Indian chieftain with the slogan: "They put up with immigration, now they live on reserves."
But various studies suggest that immigrant labor has become a fundamental component of the Italian economy.
"Many Italians are convinced that immigrants are a burden, but in fact they have a very positive effect on our welfare system," said Maurizio Ambrosini, a professor of the sociology of migration at the University of Milan, pointing out that Italian families have become increasingly dependant on foreign caregivers to look after their children and elderly parents. The construction industry, too, is heavily dependant on foreigners, particularly from East European countries, he added. "If anything, Italy constantly needs new waves of immigrants," he said.
Statistics published last autumn by the Catholic Caritas Migrants foundation suggested that the 4.5 million legal immigrants in Italy (about 7.2 percent of the population) contribute about 10 percent of the country's gross domestic product, often in jobs snubbed by Italians.
In its most recent annual report, issued last May, the Bank of Italy estimated that in 2006 foreigners "contributed about 4 percent to revenue from personal income tax, V.A.T. and excise duties, social security contributions, and the regional tax on productive activities." More specifically, foreign residents contributed "around €4.5 billion in personal income tax and just under €10 billion in social security contributions, equivalent to 3 and 5 percent respectively of revenue from these two items," according to the bank's report, which also found that "the increase in the supply of labor resulting from immigration does not seem, on average, to have had negative effects on the wages or job prospects of the native population."
"Immigrants come here to work, they're funding our pensions, it makes sense to integrate them," said Ciro Piscelli, a left-leaning municipal councilman for the town of Rozzano, in the Milanese hinterland. He was one of several hundred people who met in front of Milan City Hall on Monday morning in support of the strike. Like many other southern Italians, Mr. Piscelli emigrated to Lombardy from his native Naples in the 1970s, so he said he "spoke from experience." Immigrants, he said, "are a resource."
But such considerations seem to take a back seat whenever trouble involving immigrants arises. Calls to toughen up immigration policies multiplied last month, after rioting between immigrant groups disrupted a Milanese neighborhood last month.
And studies suggest that racist sentiments are rising in Italy, especially among the young. Research commissioned by the national and regional governments and presented to the lower house last month found that nearly half of Italians between the ages 18 and 29 express varying degrees of xenophobic or racist sentiments. "Young people themselves say that they perceive racism as increasing," said Enzo Risso, the director of the SWG research institute that carried out the survey.
Jorge Carazas, one of the speakers at the rally Monday, came to Italy from Argentina 10 years ago. "We are the country's new citizens and we want to send politicians a clear message," he said. "No matter what racist tones the government chooses to adopt, we're not going anywhere. This is our home."
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27) For Pennies, a Disposable Toilet That Could Help Grow Crops
By SINDYA N. BHANOO
March 2, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/science/02bag.html?ref=world
A Swedish entrepreneur is trying to market and sell a biodegradable plastic bag that acts as a single-use toilet for urban slums in the developing world.
Once used, the bag can be knotted and buried, and a layer of urea crystals breaks down the waste into fertilizer, killing off disease-producing pathogens found in feces.
The bag, called the Peepoo, is the brainchild of Anders Wilhelmson, an architect and professor in Stockholm.
"Not only is it sanitary," said Mr. Wilhelmson, who has patented the bag, "they can reuse this to grow crops."
In his research, he found that urban slums in Kenya, despite being densely populated, had open spaces where waste could be buried.
He also found that slum dwellers there collected their excrement in a plastic bag and disposed of it by flinging it, calling it a "flyaway toilet" or a "helicopter toilet."
This inspired Mr. Wilhelmson to design the Peepoo, an environmentally friendly alternative that he is confident will turn a profit.
"People will say, 'It's valuable to me, but well priced,' " he said.
He plans to sell it for about 2 or 3 cents - comparable to the cost of an ordinary plastic bag.
In the developing world, an estimated 2.6 billion people, or about 40 percent of the earth's population, do not have access to a toilet, according to United Nations figures.
It is a public health crisis: open defecation can contaminate drinking water, and an estimated 1.5 million children worldwide die yearly from diarrhea, largely because of poor sanitation and hygiene.
To mitigate this, the United Nations has a goal to reduce by half the number of people without access to toilets by 2015.
The market for low-cost toilets in the developing world is about a trillion dollars, according to Jack Sim, founder of the World Toilet Organization, a sanitation advocacy group.
As far as toilets go, "the people in the middle class have reached saturation in consumption," said Mr. Sim, who calls himself a fan of the Peepoo. "This has created a new need, urgently, of looking for a new customer."
Since 2001, his organization has held an annual World Toilet Summit, and Mr. Sims said he was excited that in recent years there had been an emergence of entrepreneurs devising low-cost solutions.
At the 2009 meeting, Rigel Technology of Singapore unveiled a $30 toilet that separates solid and liquid waste, turning solid waste into compost. Sulabh International, an Indian nonprofit and the host of the World Toilet Summit in 2007, is promoting several low-cost toilets, including one that produces biogas from excrement. The gas can then be used in cooking.
But Therese Dooley, senior adviser on sanitation and hygiene for Unicef, said that inculcating sanitation habits was no easy task.
"It will take a large amount of behavior change," Ms. Dooley said.
She added that while "the private sector can play a major role, it will never get to the bottom of the pyramid."
A sizable population, poor and uneducated, will still be left without toilets, Ms. Dooley said, and nonprofits and governments will have to play a large role in distribution and education.
Meanwhile, Mr. Wilhelmson is pushing ahead with the Peepoo.
After successfully testing it for a year in Kenya and India, he said he planned to mass produce the bag this summer.
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28) New Evidence Surfaces in New Orleans Killings
"The Orleans Parish District Attorney's Office has had a problematic history with capital cases. Of the 36 people sentenced to death in the parish since 1976, more have been exonerated than have been executed - five compared with four - two have been retried and acquitted, and more than half are no longer on death row after their cases were reviewed by the Louisiana Supreme Court..."
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
March 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/us/02orleans.html?ref=us
NEW ORLEANS - Early one morning in June 2006, when this city was only half full and in many areas still desolate from the flooding after Hurricane Katrina, five men were shot to death in an S.U.V. in the Central City neighborhood.
The killings sent the city into an uproar, galvanizing politicians, who spoke of "Hurricane Crime," and adding urgency to the city's request for hundreds of Louisiana National Guard soldiers to return and patrol the streets.
The criminal case that followed was just as incendiary in many ways, and it ended this past August with a death penalty verdict, the first in a dozen years in a New Orleans murder case, against a 23-year-old man named Michael Anderson. It was a trophy verdict for the district attorney's office, a sign that law and order had triumphed in one of the city's most heinous and high-profile crimes.
But there is a problem. New evidence from the state's key witness released in early January by the district attorney's office - evidence that the office had for over two years - could put a hole right in the middle of the case against Mr. Anderson.
Richard Bourke of the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center, a nonprofit organization that represents Mr. Anderson and others facing the death penalty, routinely pushes for new trials in capital cases. But while these motions are standard practice, and sometimes take up a single page, this one is different, Mr. Bourke said.
Mr. Bourke cited crucial evidence that was never handed over to the defense during the trial, including a videotaped interview with prosecutors in which the state's central witness contradicts her testimony on significant points.
"We've done some meritorious motions for new trial cases," he said. "But I've never seen a case like this. Nobody has."
On Monday, the first day of the hearing for a possible new trial, prosecutors said that none of the evidence now available was significant enough to have changed the outcome of the jury trial, and said efforts to get current and former prosecutors to testify were little more than a "witch hunt."
The Orleans Parish District Attorney's Office has had a problematic history with capital cases. Of the 36 people sentenced to death in the parish since 1976, more have been exonerated than have been executed - five compared with four - two have been retried and acquitted, and more than half are no longer on death row after their cases were reviewed by the Louisiana Supreme Court, according to an article in the Southern University Law Review by Bidish Sarma, a New Orleans lawyer.
The prosecution of Mr. Anderson has been a trial, in many ways, of the district attorney's office itself.
At the time of the murders, Mr. Anderson had a significant arrest record, on charges of extortion, armed robbery, drug possession and attempted murder. But he had only two convictions, one for a misdemeanor. The inability to turn the other arrests into convictions made him, in the words of the director of a local police watchdog organization, "the poster boy of what was wrong and what is wrong with the local criminal justice system."
Then, nearly a year after Mr. Anderson was arrested, the district attorney, Eddie Jordan, dropped the charges, citing difficulties tracking down - and believing - Torrie Williams, 33, the witness on whom the indictment depended and on whom a trial would depend.
The police department held a news conference lambasting the decision and even produced Ms. Williams, who told reporters she was willing to testify. A city councilwoman called for Mr. Jordan to resign, and the mayor called on the state attorney general to investigate.
With political pressure intensifying, Mr. Jordan reindicted Mr. Anderson several weeks later.
LaShanda Webb, an assistant district attorney initially assigned to the case who left the office last year, said she did not consider Ms. Williams to be credible. "No one wanted to touch it," she said.
"Are we prosecuting cases because of sufficient evidence or because that's what the public wants?" Ms. Webb said.
After Mr. Anderson's conviction, Leon Cannizzaro, the current district attorney, called Ms. Williams "the essence of our case," and proof that people should not be afraid to cooperate with the authorities.
Then, at a hearing in January, an assistant district attorney disclosed that a videotaped police interview with Ms. Williams had been found during an office move. The tape was made shortly before Mr. Anderson's second indictment, but was never turned over to his lawyers.
In the video, Ms. Williams, sitting at a long table in front of prosecutors and investigators, gives an account that diverges from the one she gave on the witness stand, and which lines up with the testimony of several defense witnesses.
Ms. Williams, who had come down from Baton Rouge with her boyfriend the day before the killings, said in both accounts that she saw the shooting of the five men firsthand. But at the trial, she testified that she had left her hotel room around 3:30 a.m. and had seen the killings by streetlight.
On the tape, Ms. Williams said she stayed in her hotel room late enough to watch the 5 a.m. news, a timeline corroborated by two defense witnesses, including her boyfriend at the time. When she saw the shooting, she said on the tape, there was just enough daylight to see without any streetlights. Given that the murders took place around 4 a.m., this would have been impossible.
Prosecutors at Monday's hearing argued that the trial jury knew of other occasions on which Ms. Williams had contradicted herself, but that they had nevertheless found her believable enough to convict Mr. Anderson.
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29) Defense files motion for new trial for man convicted of killing 5
by Mike Hoss and Mike Perlstein / Eyewitness News
[There's a very informtive video with this article...bw]
Posted on March 1, 2010 at 5:51 PM
Updated yesterday at 11:01 PM
http://www.wwltv.com/news/Defense-files-motion-for-new-trial-for-man-convicted-of-killing-5-85866427.html
NEW ORLEANS -- Defense attorneys went to court Monday to seek a new trial for Michael Anderson, convicted late last year and sentenced to death in the massacre of five teenagers in 2006, trying to show conflicting testimony by the state's key witness and introducing two new witnesses who were not heard by the jury heard at the trial.
Anderson's defense team introduced evidence at Monday's daylong hearing pointing to another person as the alleged triggerman: Telly Hankton.
Hankton is in jail awaiting trial on two unrelated murder cases. He was brielfy brought into court at Monday's hearing, but the defense team objected to his presence as intimidating to its witnesses.
"Your honor, the state is going to get one of our witnesses killed," argued lead defense attorney Richard Bourke.
With Hankton ushered away to a holding cell, Bourke proceeded to introduce an affidavit that alleged eyewitness, Herman McMillan, provided the FBI in November 2007 -- a statement the jury never heard.
McMillan said in the interview he saw Hankton kill the five teenagers on the night of the murder. McMillan said he brandished a .357-magnum handgun and shot at Hankton. But because McMillan feared incriminating himself, the interview was never used in the trial. When he took the stand, the prosecution said if he testified and confirmed his statement is correct, he could be prosecuted for being a felon with a handgun. McMillan chose not to, pleading the Fifth Amendment.
Later in the afternoon, the defense called a second witness who signed a statement alleging that Hankton confessed to the killings in a jailhouse conversation after Anderson had been convicted. Steve Givens, who himself is awaiting trial for murder, refused to discuss his conversation with Hankton once he was on the witness stand, but he vouched for the signed statement he gave to defense investigators.
Givens' statement said, "Hankton admitted that Michael Anderson was not responsible for the killings and that it was (Telly Hankton's) work," according to the defense's 90-page motion for a new trial.
Another issue brought up by defense attorneys was the focus of a 4 Investigates report last week. A July 2007 tape of an interview with Torrie Williams, the prosecution's star witness during the Anderson trial, was released to defense attornies last month. In this new tape, which the jury didn't see because it was never given to the defense, Williams said she was watching the news at 5 a.m. and she left the hotel at 6 a.m. Because the shooting happened at 4 a.m., the defense believes she could not have been outside during the shooting, leading them to believe that renders her key testimony invalid.
The hearing ended at about 6 p.m. Monday and will continue 9 a.m. Tuesday. Criminal Court Judge Lynda Van Davis, who presided over Anderson's August 2009 trial, may decide then if Anderson should be granted a new trial.
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