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Flotilla Emergency Response: San Francisco
Emergency Protest at 12noon. Israeli Consulate and march to Union Square, Memorial Day. Please be there! Bring your own sign!
Israeli Consulate
456 Montgomery St.
San Francisco, CA 94104
Six ships with the Free Gaza Freedom Flotilla en route to Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid was attacked by IDF commandos, killing at least 10 people and injuring 50. The Flotilla carried 700 passengers from 50 different countries along with reconstruction, medical and school supplies. Protests are planned in Istanbul, New York, Cairo, Toronto, Belfast, Houston, Chicago and Dublin.
For more info:
http://www.freegaza.org/
http://gazafreedommarch.org/cms/en/Solidarity.aspx
Nancy L. Mancias
CODEPINK Women for Peace
2017 Mission Street, #200
San Francisco, CA 94110
www.codepinkalert.org
PINKTank :: http://codepink4peace.org/blog/
Facebook :: http://www.facebook.com/nancymancias
Twitter :: nancymancias
Emergency protests today against Israel in New York, Chicago and San Francisco:
NY: 3 PM Monday, Times Square. Assemble at 47th St. and 7th Ave.
SAN FRANCISCO: 1 pm rally (Powell and Market)
CHICAGO: 4.30 pm Tuesday, Israeli Consulate (111 E. Wacker Drive)
http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/
CALL FROM GAZA FOR GLOBAL RESPONSE TO KILLINGS ON THE FREEDOM FLOTILLA
PRESS RELEASE
GAZA, PALESTINE
MAY 31, 2010
The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) is a Palestinian-led
non-violent resistance movement committed to ending Israel's illegal
occupation of Palestinian land. We call for full compliance with all
relevant UN resolutions and international law. For specific media
inquires such as interview requests, photo usage, etc. please email the
ISM Media Office at media@palsolidarity.org
www.freegaza.org
witnessgaza.com
www.freegaza.org
[See full news release in "Articles in Full" section below.
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Dear Readers,
If you are wondering why an antiwar newsletter is giving full coverage to the oil spill, it's because:
(1) "Supplying the US army with oil is one of BP's biggest markets, and further exploration in the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico is part of its long-term strategy."*
(2) "The Senate on Thursday, [May 27, 2010] approved a nearly $60 billion measure to pay for continuing military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq..."**
The two are inextricably entwined and interdependent.
--Bonnie Weinstein
*The black hole at the bottom of the Gulf
No one seems to know the extent of the BP disaster
By David Randall and Margareta Pagano
Sunday, 23 May 2010
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-black-hole-at-the-bottom-of-the-gulf-1980693.html
**Senate Approves Nearly $60 Billion for Wars
By CARL HULSE
May 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/us/politics/28cong.html?ref=us
Watch BP Live Video Webcam Camera Feed of Gulf Oil Spill Here! (Update 7)
http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2010/05/20/live-video-feed-webcam-gulf-oil-spill/
What BP does not want you to see:
ABC News went underwater in the Gulf with Philippe Cousteau Jr., grandson of famous explorer Jacques Cousteau, and he described what he saw as "one of the most horrible things I've ever seen underwater."
Check out what BP does not want you to see. And please share this widely -- every American should see what's happening under the surface in the Gulf.
http://acp.repoweramerica.org/page/invite/oilspillvideo?source=sprd-fwd&utm_source=crm_email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=oilspillvideo20100527&utm_content=link1
Live BP Gulf Oil Spill Webcam Video Reveals 5 Leaks
http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2010/05/24/live-bp-gulf-oil-spill-webcam-video-reveals-5-leaks/
Stop Shell Oil's Offshore Drilling Plans in the Arctic
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/308597489?z00m=19844689
Sign the Petition to Ban Offshore Drilling Now!
http://na.oceana.org/en/stopthedrill?key=31522015
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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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YES ON F, GIVE RENTERS A BREAK!
Just two weeks before the June 8 election and if we are going to give renters a break from rent increases we need your help now!
Thousands of San Francisco renters are unemployed and at risk of losing their homes--Prop F will let them delay any new rent increases and give them a chance to stay housed. Here's how you can help pass Prop F:
Phonebanking, 5-7pm, Mon and Wed at SOMCAN, 1070 Howard Street
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Lynne Stewart and the Guantanamo Lawyers: Same Fact Patterns, Same Opponent, Different Endings?
Lynne Stewart will be re-sentenced sometime in July, in NYC.
By Ralph Poynter
(Ralph Poynter is the Life partner of Lynne Stewart. He is presently dedicated 24/7 to her defense, as well as other causes.)
Ralph.Poynter@yahoo.com
In the Spring of 2002, Lynne Stewart was arrested by the FBI, at her home in Brooklyn, for materially aiding terrorism by virtue of making a public press release to Reuters on behalf of her client, Sheik Abdel Omar Rahman of Egypt. This was done after she had signed a Special Administrative Measure issued by the Bureau of Prisons not permitting her to communicate with the media, on his behalf.
In 2006, a number of attorneys appointed and working pro bono for detainees at Guantanamo were discovered to be acting in a manner that disobeyed a Federal Judge's protective court order. The adversary in both cases was the United States Department of Justice. The results in each case were very different.
In March of 2010, a right wing group "Keep America Safe" led by Lynne Cheney, hoping to dilute Guantanamo representation and impugn the reputations and careers of the volunteer lawyers, launched a campaign. Initially they attacked the right of the detainees to be represented at all. This was met with a massive denouncement by Press, other media, Civil rights organizations ,and rightly so, as being a threat to the Constitution and particularly the Sixth Amendment right to counsel.
A second attack on the Gitmo lawyers was made in the Wall Street Journal of March 16. This has been totally ignored in the media and by civil and human rights groups. This latter revelation about the violations, by these lawyers, of the Judge's protective orders and was revealed via litigation and the Freedom of Information Act. These pro bono lawyers serving clients assigned to them at Gitmo used privileged attorney client mail to send banned materials. They carried in news report of US failures in Afghanistan and Iraq . One lawyer drew a map of the prison. Another delivered lists to his client of all the suspects held there. They placed on the internet a facsimile of the badges worn by the Guards. Some lawyers "provided news outlets with 'interviews' of their clients using questions provided in advance by the news organizations." When a partner at one of the large Wall Street law firms sent in multiple copies of an Amnesty International brochure, which her client was to distribute to other prisoners, she was relieved from her representation and barred by the Military Commander from visiting her client.
This case is significant to interpret not because of the right wing line to punish these lawyers and manipulate their corporate clients to stop patronizing such "wayward" firms. Instead it is significant because, Lynne Stewart, a left wing progressive lawyer who had dedicated her thirty year career to defending the poor, the despised, the political prisoner and those ensnared by reason of race, gender, ethnicity, religion , who was dealt with by the same Department of Justice, in such a draconian fashion, confirms our deepest suspicions that she was targeted for prosecution and punishment because of who she is and who she represented so ably and not because of any misdeed.
Let me be very clear, I am not saying that the Gitmo lawyers acted in any "criminal" manner. The great tradition of the defense bar is to be able to make crucial decisions for and with the client without interference by the adversary Government.
I believe that they were acting as zealous attorneys trying to establish rapport and trust with their clients. That said, the moment the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice tried to remove Julia Tarver Mason from her client, the playing field tilted. Ms Tarver Mason was not led out of her home in handcuffs to the full glare of publicity. There was no press conference. The Attorney General did not go on the David Letterman show to gloat about the latest strike in the War on Terror, the purge of the Gitmo lawyer...NO.
Instead an "armada" of corporate lawyers went to Court against the Government. They, in the terms of the litigation trade, papered the US District Courthouse in Washington D.C. They brought to bear the full force of their Money and Power-- derived from the corporate world--and in 2006 "settled" the case with the government, restoring their clients to Guantanamo without any punishment at all, not to say any Indictment. Lynne Stewart, without corporate connections and coming from a working class background, was tried and convicted for issuing, on behalf of her client, a public press release to Reuters. There was no injury, no harm, no attacks, no deaths.
Yet that same Department of Justice that dealt so favorably and capitulated to the Gitmo corporate lawyers, wants to sentence Lynne Stewart to thirty (30) YEARS in prison. It is the equivalent of asking for a death sentence since she is 70 years old.
This vast disparity in treatment between Lynne and the Gitmo lawyers reveals the deep contradictions of the system ---those who derive power from rich and potent corporations, those whose day to day work maintains and increases that power--are treated differently. Is it because the Corporate Power is intertwined with Government Power???
Lynne Stewart deserves Justice... equal justice under law. Her present sentence of 28 months incarceration (she is in Federal Prison) should at least be maintained, if not made equal to the punishment that was meted out to the Gitmo lawyers. The thirty year sentence, assiduously pursued by DOJ under both Bush and Obama, is an obscenity and an affront to fundamental fairness. They wanted to make her career and dedication to individual clients, a warning, to the defense bar that the Government can arrest any lawyer on any pretext. The sharp contrasts between the cases of Lynne and the Gitmo lawyers just confirm that she is getting a raw deal--one that should be protested actively, visibly and with the full force of our righteous resistance.
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INVITATION TO A NATIONAL CONFERENCE TO BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
United National Peace Conference
July 23 - 25, 2010, Albany , NY
Unac2010@aol.com
UNAC, P.O. Box 21675
Cleveland, OH 44121
518-227-6947
www.nationalpeaceconference.org
Greetings:
Twenty co-sponsoring national organizations urge you to attend this conference scheduled for Albany , New York July 23-25, 2010. They are After Downing Street, Arab American Union Members Council, Bailout the People Movement, Black Agenda Report, Campaign for Peace and Democracy, Campus Antiwar Network, Code Pink, International Action Center, Iraq Veterans Against the War, National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations, National Lawyers Guild, Peace Action, Peace of the Action, Progressive Democrats of America, The Fellowship of Reconciliation, U.S. Labor Against the War, Veterans for Peace, Voices for Creative Nonviolence, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and World Can't Wait.
The purpose of the conference is to plan united actions in the months ahead in support of demands for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. military forces and contractors from Afghanistan and Iraq , and money for human needs, not for wars, occupations, and bail-outs. The peace movement is strongest and most effective when plans for united actions are made by the whole range of antiwar and social justice organizations meeting together and deciding together dates and places for national mobilizations.
Each person attending the conference will have voice and vote. Attendees will have the opportunity to amend the action proposal submitted by conference co-sponsors, add demands, and submit resolutions for consideration by the conference.
Keynoters will be NOAM CHOMSKY, internationally renowned political activist, author, and critic of U.S. foreign and domestic policies, MIT Professor Emeritus of Linguistics; and DONNA DEWITT, President, South Carolina AFL-CIO; Co-Chair, South Carolina Progressive Network; Steering Committee, U.S. Labor Against the War; Administrative Body, National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations.
The conference's website is www.nationalpeaceconference.org and you will find there details regarding other speakers, workshops, registration, hotel and travel information, and how to submit amendments, demands, and resolutions. The action proposal has also been published on the website.
Please write us at UNAC2010@aol.com for further information or call 518-227-6947. We can fill orders for copies of the conference brochure. Tables for display and sale of materials can be reserved.
We look forward to seeing you in Albany on July 23-25.
In peace,
Jerry Gordon
Secretary, National Peace Conference
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B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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Cointelpro (Counter Intelligence Program) and the Murder of Black Panther Leaders
http://www.averdade.org.br/modules/news/article.php?storyid=451
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From Gary Bledsoe, Texas President of the NAACP:
Have you heard about what's going on here in Texas? History is being rewritten. And not in a good way.
The state of Texas sets national standards for school textbooks -- and on Friday, the State Board of Education is casting its vote on updated social studies and history textbooks.
Those books are changing the record on slavery, celebrating the Confederacy and shedding a positive light on Jim Crow laws. And the Texas NAACP has spent the past several months fighting back. We've written thousands of emails, placed hundreds of calls, and people are starting to notice.
I'm writing because we need your help. No matter the result of tomorrow's vote, make sure these bad ideas don't spread into your state. Sign the Not in My State Pledge:
http://action.naacp.org/NotInMyState
The civil rights era was, and remains, one of the most significant and defining moments in U.S. history. Its leaders were true patriots -- fighting against oppression and for equality.
But if the proposed textbook changes happen, our children won't learn about them. They won't learn about brave men like Sam McCollough, who gave his life for Texas independence. And they won't learn that Texas seceded from the Union to fight for the Confederacy in the Civil War.
Rewriting history in the name of national pride isn't patriotic. It's ignorant.
Make it known throughout your state that if Texas textbook standards pass, they won't be coming into your classrooms. Sign the Not in My State Pledge to stop history from being rewritten:
http://action.naacp.org/NotInMyState
American history -- the good, the bad and the ugly -- is what makes our country what it is today. A reminder of that past helps ensure a better future for all of us.
Thank you for speaking out,
Gary Bledsoe
Texas President
NAACP
P.S. To find out the voting results and watch an interview with NAACP President, Benjamin Todd Jealous, tune in to NBC Nightly News tomorrow (Friday) at 6:30/5:30 p.m. ET/CT.
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This is just inspiring! You have to watch it! ...bw
Don't Get Caught in a Bad Hotel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-79pX1IOqPU
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SEIZE BP!
[While this is a good beginning to a fight to put safety first--for workers and the planet--we must recognize that the whole thrust of capitalism is to get the job done quicker and cheaper, workers and the world be damned!
It is workers who are intimately aware of the dangers of production and the ways those dangers could be eliminated. And, if, say, a particular mine, factory, industry can't be made to be safe, then it should be abandoned. Those workers effected should simply be "retired" with full pay and benefits. They have already been subjected to the toxins, dangers, etc., on the job.
Basically, safety must be under worker's control. Workers must have first dibs on profits to insure safety first.
It not only means nationalizing industry--but internationalizing industry--and placing it under the control and operation of the workers themselves. Governmental controls of safety regulations are notoriously ineffectual because the politicians themselves are the corporation's paid defenders. It only makes sense that corporate profits should be utilized--under the worker's control--to put safety first or stop production altogether. Safety first has to be interpreted as "safety before profits and profits for safety first!" We can only hope it is not too late! ...bw]
SEIZE BP!
The government of the United States must seize BP and freeze its assets, and place those funds in trust to begin providing immediate relief to the working people throughout the Gulf states whose jobs, communities, homes and businesses are being harmed or destroyed by the criminally negligent actions of the CEO, Board of Directors and senior management of BP.
Take action now! Sign the Seize BP petition to demand the seizure of BP!
200,000 gallons of oil a day, or more, are gushing into the Gulf of Mexico with the flow of oil growing. The poisonous devastation to human beings, wildlife, natural habitat and fragile ecosystems will go on for decades. It constitutes an act of environmental violence, the consequences of which will be catastrophic.
BP's Unmitigated Greed
This was a manufactured disaster. It was neither an "Act of God" nor Nature that caused this devastation, but rather the unmitigated greed of Big Oil's most powerful executives in their reckless search for ever-greater profits.
Under BP's CEO Tony Hayward's aggressive leadership, BP made a record $5.6 billion in pure profits just in the first three months of 2010. BP made $163 billion in profits from 2001-09. It has a long history of safety violations and slap-on-the-wrist fines.
BP's Materially False and Misleading Statements
BP filed a 52-page exploration plan and environmental impact analysis with the U.S. Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service for the Deepwater Horizon well, dated February 2009, which repeatedly assured the government that it was "unlikely that an accidental surface or subsurface oil spill would occur from the proposed activities." In the filing, BP stated over and over that it was unlikely for an accident to occur that would lead to a giant crude oil spill causing serious damage to beaches, mammals and fisheries and that as such it did not require a response plan for such an event.
BP's executives are thus either guilty of making materially false statements to the government to obtain the license, of consciously misleading a government that was all too ready to be misled, and/or they are guilty of criminal negligence. At a bare minimum, their representations constitute gross negligence. Whichever the case, BP must be held accountable for its criminal actions that have harmed so many.
Protecting BP's Super-Profits
BP executives are banking that they can ride out the storm of bad publicity and still come out far ahead in terms of the billions in profit that BP will pocket. In 1990, in response to the Exxon Valdez disaster, Congress passed and President Bush signed into law the Oil Pollution Act, which immunizes oil companies for the damages they cause beyond immediate cleanup costs.
Under the Oil Pollution Act, oil companies are responsible for oil removal and cleanup costs for massive spills, and their liability for all other forms of damages is capped at $75 million-a pittance for a company that made $5.6 billion in profits in just the last three months, and is expected to make $23 billion in pure profit this year. Some in Congress suggest the cap should be set at $10 billion, still less than the potential cost of this devastation-but why should the oil companies have any immunity from responsibility for the damage they cause?
The Oil Pollution Act is an outrage, and it will be used by BP to keep on doing business as usual.
People are up in arms because thousands of workers who have lost their jobs and livelihoods as a result of BP's actions have to wait in line to compete for lower wage and hazardous clean-up jobs from BP. BP's multi-millionaire executives are not asked to sacrifice one penny while working people have to plead for clean-up jobs.
Take Action Now
It is imperative that the government seize BP's assets now for their criminal negligence and begin providing immediate relief for the immense suffering and harm they have caused.
Seize BP Petition button*: http://www.seizebp.org/
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Neil Young - Ohio - Live at Massey Hall
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV0rAwk4lFE&feature=player_embedded#
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Rachel Carson's Warnings in "The Sea Around Us":
"It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself. . ." http://www.savethesea.org/quotes
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Operation Small Axe - Trailer
http://www.blockreportradio.com/news-mainmenu-26/820-us-school-district-to-begin-microchipping-students.html
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Shame on Arizona
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer just signed a law that will authorize officers to pull over, question, and detain anyone they have a "reasonable suspicion" to believe is in this country without proper documentation. It's legalized racial profiling, and it's an affront on all of our civil rights, especially Latinos. It's completely unacceptable.
Join us in letting Arizona's leaders know how we feel, and that there will be consequences. A state that dehumanizes its own people does not deserve our economic support
"As long as racial profiling is legal in Arizona, I will do what I can to not visit the state and to avoid spending dollars there."
Sign Petition Here:
http://presente.org/campaigns/shame?populate=1
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Please sign the petition to stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal and
and forward it to all your lists.
"Mumia Abu-Jamal and The Global Abolition of the Death Penalty"
http://www.petitiononline.com/Mumialaw/petition.html
(A Life In the Balance - The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, at 34, Amnesty Int'l, 2000; www. Amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/001/2000.)
[Note: This petition is approved by Mumia Abu-Jamal and his lead attorney, Robert R. Bryan, San Francisco (E-mail: MumiaLegalDefense@gmail.com; Website: www.MumiaLegalDefense.org).]
Committee To Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 2012
New York, NY 10159-2012
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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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Collateral Murder
[COLD-BLOODED, OUTRIGHT MURDER OF UNARMED CIVILIANS--AND THEY LAUGH ABOUT IT AS THEY SHOOT! THIS IS A BLOOD-CURTLING, VIOLENT AND BRUTAL VIDEO THAT SHOULD BE VIEWED BY EVERYONE! IT EXPOSES, AS MARTIN LUTHER KING SAID, "THE BIGGEST PURVEYORS OF VIOLENCE IN THE WORLD," THE U.S. BI-PARTISAN GOVERNMENT AND THE MILITARY THEY COMMAND. --BW]
Overview
5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff.
Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.
http://www.collateralmurder.com/
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San Francisco City and County Tramples on Civil Liberties
A Letter to Antiwar Activists
Dear Activists:
On Saturday, March 20, the San Francisco City and County Recreation and Parks Department's Park Rangers patrolled a large public antiwar demonstration, shutting down the distribution of Socialist Viewpoint magazine. The rally in Civic Center Plaza was held in protest of the illegal and immoral U.S. wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, and to commemorate the 7th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The Park Rangers went table-to-table examining each one. They photographed the Socialist Viewpoint table and the person attending it-me. My sister, Debbie and I, had set up the table. We had a sign on the table that asked for a donation of $1.25 for the magazine. The Park Rangers demanded that I "pack it up" and go, because selling or even asking for donations for newspapers or magazines is no longer permitted without the purchase of a new and expensive "vendors license." Their rationale for this denial of free speech is that the distribution of newspapers, magazines, T-shirts-and even food-would make the political protest a "festival" and not a political protest demonstration!
This City's action is clearly a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution-the right to free speech and freedom of the press-and can't be tolerated.
While they are firing teachers and other San Francisco workers, closing schools, cutting back healthcare access, cutting services to the disabled and elderly, it is outrageous that the Mayor and City Government chose to spend thousands of dollars to police tables at an antiwar rally-a protest demonstration by the people!
We can't let this become the norm. It is so fundamentally anti-democratic. The costs of the permits for the rally, the march, the amplified sound, is already prohibitive. Protest is not a privilege we should have to pay for. It's a basic right in this country and we should reclaim it!
Personally, I experienced a deep feeling of alienation as the crisply-uniformed Park Ranger told me I had to "pack it up"-especially when I knew that they were being paid by the City to do this at this demonstration!
I hope you will join this protest of the violation of the right to distribute and, therefore, the right to read Socialist Viewpoint, by writing or emailing the City officials who are listed below.1
In solidarity,
Bonnie Weinstein, Editorial Board Member, Socialist Viewpoint
www.socialistviewpoint.org
60 - 29th Street, #429
San Francisco, CA 94110
415-824-8730
1 Mayor Gavin Newsom
City Hall, Room 200
1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place
San Francisco, CA 94102
gavin.newsom@sfgov.org
Board of Supervisors
City Hall
1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, Room 244
San Francisco, Ca 94102-4689
Board.of.supervisors@sfgov.org
San Francisco Recreation & Parks Department Park Rangers
McLaren Lodge & Annex
501 Stanyan Street
San Francisco, CA 94117
Park.patrol@sfgov.org
San Francisco Recreation and Park Commission
501 Stanyan Street
San Francisco, CA 94117
recpark.commission@sfgov.org
Chief of Police George Gascón
850 Bryant Street, #525
San Francisco, CA 94103
(I could not find an email address for him.).
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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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On June 30, an innocent man will be given a second chance.
In 1991, Troy Davis was sentenced to death for allegedly killing a police officer in Savannah, Georgia. There was no physical evidence tying him to the crime, and seven out of nine witnesses recanted or contradicted their testimony.
He was sentenced to death for a crime he didn't commit. But it's not too late to change Troy's fate.
We just learned today that Troy has been granted an evidentiary hearing -- an opportunity to right this wrong. Help give him a second chance by telling your friends to pledge their support for Troy:
http://www.iamtroy.com/
Troy Davis may just be one man, but his situation represents an injustice experienced by thousands. And suffering this kind of injustice, by even one man, is one person too many.
Thanks to you and 35,000 other NAACP members and supporters who spoke out last August, the U.S. Supreme Court is granting Troy Davis his day in court--and a chance to make his case after 19 years on death row.
This hearing is the first step.
We appreciate your continued support of Troy. If you have not yet done so, please visit our website, sign the petition, then tell your friends to do the same.
http://www.iamtroy.com
I will be in touch soon to let you know how else you can help.
Sincerely,
Benjamin Todd Jealous
President and CEO
NAACP
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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) At Least 10 Are Killed as Israel Halts Flotilla With Gaza Aid
By ISABEL KERSHNER
May 31, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/world/middleeast/01flotilla.html?hp
2) The Pain Caucus
By PAUL KRUGMAN
May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/opinion/31krugman.html?hp
3) White House Tries to Regroup as Criticism Mounts Over Leak
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS, JOHN M. BRODER and JACKIE CALMES
May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/us/31spill.html?hp
4) CALL FROM GAZA FOR GLOBAL RESPONSE TO KILLINGS ON THE FREEDOM FLOTILLA
PRESS RELEASE
GAZA, PALESTINE
MAY 31, 2010
The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) is a Palestinian-led
non-violent resistance movement committed to ending Israel's illegal
occupation of Palestinian land. We call for full compliance with all
relevant UN resolutions and international law. For specific media
inquires such as interview requests, photo usage, etc. please email the
ISM Media Office at media@palsolidarity.org
5) Blacks in Memphis Lose Decades of Economic Gains
By MICHAEL POWELL
May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/business/economy/31memphis.html?hp
6) Reforms Slow to Arrive at Drilling Agency
By JOHN M. BRODER and MICHAEL LUO
May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/us/politics/31drill.html?ref=us
7) Fears Rise in Europe Over Potential for Deflation
By JACK EWING
May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/business/global/31deflation.html?ref=business
8) Questions About the Gulf
New York Times Editorial
May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/opinion/31mon1.html?hp
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1) At Least 10 Are Killed as Israel Halts Flotilla With Gaza Aid
By ISABEL KERSHNER
May 31, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/world/middleeast/01flotilla.html?hp
JERUSALEM - Israeli naval commandos raided a flotilla carrying thousands of tons of supplies for Gaza in international waters on Monday morning, killing at least 10 people, according to the Israeli military and activists traveling with the flotilla. Some Israeli news reports put the death toll higher.
The confrontation drew widespread international condemnation of Israel, with Israeli envoys summoned to explain their country's actions in several European countries.
The criticism offered a propaganda coup to Israel's foes, particularly Hamas, the militant group that holds sway in Gaza, and damaged Israel's ties to Turkey, one of its most important Muslim partners and the unofficial sponsor of the Gaza-bound convoy. Turkey recalled its ambassador to Israel, and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan cut short a visit to Latin America to return home.
The killings also coincided with preparations for a planned visit to Washington on Tuesday by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Israeli Defense Forces said more than 10 people were killed when naval personnel boarding the six ships in the aid convoy met with "live fire and light weaponry including knives and clubs." The naval forces then "employed riot dispersal means, including live fire," the military said in a statement.
Greta Berlin, a leader of the pro-Palestinian Free Gaza Movement, speaking by telephone from Cyprus, rejected the military's version.
"That is a lie," she said, adding that it was inconceivable that the civilian passengers on board would have been "waiting up to fire on the Israeli military, with all its might."
"We never thought there would be any violence," she said.
At least four Israeli soldiers were wounded in the operation, some from gunfire, according to the military. Television footage from the flotilla before communications were cut showed what appeared to be commandos sliding down ropes from helicopters onto one of the vessels in the flotilla, while Israeli high-speed naval vessels surrounded the convoy.
A military statement said two activists were later found with pistols they had taken from Israeli commandos. The activists, the military said, had apparently opened fire "as evident by the empty pistol magazines."
The warships first intercepted the convoy of cargo and passenger boats shortly before midnight on Sunday, according to activists on one vessel. Israel had vowed not to let the flotilla reach the shores of Gaza.
Named the Freedom Flotilla and led by the Free Gaza Movement and a Turkish organization, Insani Yardim Vakfi, the convoy was the most ambitious attempt yet to break Israel's three-year blockade of Gaza.
About 600 passengers were said to be aboard the vessels, including the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Mairead Corrigan-Maguire of Northern Ireland, and a Holocaust survivor, Hedy Epstein, 85.
"What we have seen this morning is a war crime," said Saeb Erakat, the chief Palestinian negotiator for the government in the West Bank. "These were civilian ships carrying civilians and civilian goods - medicine, wheelchairs, food, construction materials."
"What Israel does in Gaza is appalling," he added. "No informed and decent human can say otherwise."
At a news conference on Monday in Jerusalem, Israeli deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, said the flotilla's intent was "not to transfer humanitarian things to Gaza" but to break the Israeli blockade.
"This blockade is legal," he said, "and aimed at preventing the infiltration of terror and terrorists into Gaza."
Ms. Berlin, of the Free Gaza Movement, said, "They attacked us this morning in international waters. According to the coordinates, we were 70 miles off the Israeli coast."
Within hours, diplomatic repercussions began to spread from the Mediterranean to Europe where Catherine Ashton, the European Union's high representative for foreign affairs, called for a full inquiry into the incident and the immediate lifting of the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
Bill Burton, a deputy press secretary for the White House, said, "The United States deeply regrets the loss of life and injuries sustained and is currently working to understand the circumstances surrounding this tragedy."
A joint statement from Robert Serry and Filippo Grandi, two senior United Nations officials involved in the Middle East peace process and humanitarian aid to Gaza, condemned the raid, which they said was "apparently in international waters."
"We wish to make clear that such tragedies are entirely avoidable if Israel heeds the repeated calls of the international community to end its counterproductive and unacceptable blockade of Gaza," the officials said.
President Nicolas Sarkozy of France called Israel's use of force "disproportionate," while William Hague, the British foreign secretary, said he deplored the loss of life. Tony Blair, the representative of the so-called quartet of powers seeking a Middle East settlement, said in a statement that he expressed "deep regret and shock at the tragic loss of life."
"We need a different and better way of helping the people of Gaza and avoiding the hardship and tragedy that is inherent in the current situation," the statement said. The quartet includes the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia. In London, hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters blocked Whitehall, the broad avenue running past the prime minister's residence and office at 10 Downing Street.
Turkey strongly condemned the Israeli military action.
"Regardless of any reasoning, such actions against civilians engaged in only peaceful activities are unacceptable," said a statement on the Foreign Ministry's Web site on Monday. "Israel will be required to face the consequences of this act that involves violation of the international law."
"Israel launched this operation in international waters and to a ship flagged white, which is unacceptable under any clause of the international law," the head of the Turkish Grand National Assembly's Foreign Affairs Commission, Murat Mercan, said on the Turkish station NTV.
"We are going to see in the following days whether Israel has done it as a display of decisiveness or to commit political suicide."
Thousands of protesters gathered in Istanbul's Taksim Square, chanting anti-Israeli slogans and repeating Islamic verses while government officials called for calm and urged demonstrators to avoid retaliation against Israeli nationals.
Protesters met in front of the Israeli Consulate earlier and marched toward the square carrying a banner that read, "Zionist Embassy should close down," and chanting slogans including "Damn Israel" and "Long live global intifada."
Crowds also gathered outside the Ankara residence of Gabi Levi, the Israeli ambassador, who was summoned to the Foreign Ministry.
Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, said Israel should provide a full explanation of what happened. News reports said the authorities in Egypt and Jordan, two Arab neighbors which have peace treaties with Israel, had summoned Israeli envoys to protest the action.
The outcry from Muslim leaders was strong and immediate. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, called the incident "a massacre," according to the official Wafa news agency. Mr. Abbas is to meet with President Obama in Washington next week.
Saad Hariri, the Lebanese prime minister, denounced the raid as "a dangerous and crazy step that will exacerbate tensions in the region," while the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said it was "inhuman."
Channel 10, a private television station in Israel, quoted the Israeli trade minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, as saying 14 to 16 people had been killed. He said on Israeli Army Radio that commandos boarded the ships by sliding down on ropes from a hovering helicopter and were then struck by passengers with "batons and tools."
"The moment someone tries to snatch your weapon, to steal your weapons, that's where you begin to lose control," Mr. Ben-Eliezer said, according to Reuters.
Jamal El Shayyal, a reporter from the television broadcaster Al Jazeera, was on board the Mavi Marmara, the largest of the six ships, during the assault. He said in a video report that dozens of civilians had been injured in the fighting.
The I.D.F. said the ships from the convoy would be taken to the Israeli port of Ashdod, north of Gaza, where "naval forces will perform security checks in order to identify the people on board the ships and their equipment."
On Sunday, three Israeli Navy missile boats had left the Haifa naval base in northern Israel a few minutes after 9 p.m. local time, planning to intercept the flotilla. After asking the captains of the boats to identify themselves, the navy told them they were approaching a blockaded area and asked them either to proceed to Ashdod or return to their countries of origin.
The activists responded that they would continue toward their destination, Gaza.
Speaking by satellite phone from the Challenger 1 boat, which has foreign legislators and other high-profile figures on board, a Free Gaza Movement leader, Huwaida Arraf, said: "We communicated to them clearly that we are unarmed civilians. We asked them not to use violence."
Earlier Sunday, Ms. Arraf said the boats would keep trying to move forward "until they either disable our boats or jump on board."
Reporting was contributed by Mark McDonald in Hong Kong, Sebnem Arsu in Istanbul, Alan Cowell in London and Steven Erlanger in Paris.
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2) The Pain Caucus
By PAUL KRUGMAN
May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/opinion/31krugman.html?hp
What's the greatest threat to our still-fragile economic recovery? Dangers abound, of course. But what I currently find most ominous is the spread of a destructive idea: the view that now, less than a year into a weak recovery from the worst slump since World War II, is the time for policy makers to stop helping the jobless and start inflicting pain.
When the financial crisis first struck, most of the world's policy makers responded appropriately, cutting interest rates and allowing deficits to rise. And by doing the right thing, by applying the lessons learned from the 1930s, they managed to limit the damage: It was terrible, but it wasn't a second Great Depression.
Now, however, demands that governments switch from supporting their economies to punishing them have been proliferating in op-eds, speeches and reports from international organizations. Indeed, the idea that what depressed economies really need is even more suffering seems to be the new conventional wisdom, which John Kenneth Galbraith famously defined as "the ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability."
The extent to which inflicting economic pain has become the accepted thing was driven home to me by the latest report on the economic outlook from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an influential Paris-based think tank supported by the governments of the world's advanced economies. The O.E.C.D. is a deeply cautious organization; what it says at any given time virtually defines that moment's conventional wisdom. And what the O.E.C.D. is saying right now is that policy makers should stop promoting economic recovery and instead begin raising interest rates and slashing spending.
What's particularly remarkable about this recommendation is that it seems disconnected not only from the real needs of the world economy, but from the organization's own economic projections.
Thus, the O.E.C.D. declares that interest rates in the United States and other nations should rise sharply over the next year and a half, so as to head off inflation. Yet inflation is low and declining, and the O.E.C.D.'s own forecasts show no hint of an inflationary threat. So why raise rates?
The answer, as best I can make it out, is that the organization believes that we must worry about the chance that markets might start expecting inflation, even though they shouldn't and currently don't: We must guard against "the possibility that longer-term inflation expectations could become unanchored in the O.E.C.D. economies, contrary to what is assumed in the central projection."
A similar argument is used to justify fiscal austerity. Both textbook economics and experience say that slashing spending when you're still suffering from high unemployment is a really bad idea - not only does it deepen the slump, but it does little to improve the budget outlook, because much of what governments save by spending less they lose as a weaker economy depresses tax receipts. And the O.E.C.D. predicts that high unemployment will persist for years. Nonetheless, the organization demands both that governments cancel any further plans for economic stimulus and that they begin "fiscal consolidation" next year.
Why do this? Again, to give markets something they shouldn't want and currently don't. Right now, investors don't seem at all worried about the solvency of the U.S. government; the interest rates on federal bonds are near historic lows. And even if markets were worried about U.S. fiscal prospects, spending cuts in the face of a depressed economy would do little to improve those prospects. But cut we must, says the O.E.C.D., because inadequate consolidation efforts "would risk adverse reactions in financial markets."
The best summary I've seen of all this comes from Martin Wolf of The Financial Times, who describes the new conventional wisdom as being that "giving the markets what we think they may want in future - even though they show little sign of insisting on it now - should be the ruling idea in policy."
Put that way, it sounds crazy. And it is. Yet it's a view that's spreading. And it's already having ugly consequences. Last week conservative members of the House, invoking the new deficit fears, scaled back a bill extending aid to the long-term unemployed - and the Senate left town without acting on even the inadequate measures that remained. As a result, many American families are about to lose unemployment benefits, health insurance, or both - and as these families are forced to slash spending, they will endanger the jobs of many more.
And that's just the beginning. More and more, conventional wisdom says that the responsible thing is to make the unemployed suffer. And while the benefits from inflicting pain are an illusion, the pain itself will be all too real.
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3) White House Tries to Regroup as Criticism Mounts Over Leak
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS, JOHN M. BRODER and JACKIE CALMES
May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/us/31spill.html?hp
This article is by Clifford Krauss, John M. Broder and Jackie Calmes.
HOUSTON - The Obama administration scrambled to respond on Sunday after the failure of the latest effort to kill the gushing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. But administration officials acknowledged the possibility that tens of thousands of gallons of oil might continue pouring out until August, when two relief wells are scheduled to be completed.
"We are prepared for the worst," said Carol M. Browner, President Obama's climate change and energy policy adviser. "We have been prepared from the beginning."
Even as the White House sought to demonstrate that it was taking a more direct hand in trying to solve the problem, senior officials acknowledged that the new technique BP will use to try to cap the leak - severing the riser pipe and placing a containment dome over the cut riser - could temporarily result in as much as 20 percent more oil flowing into the water during the three days to a week before the new device could be in place.
"This is obviously a difficult situation," Ms. Browner said on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, "but it's important for people to understand that from the beginning, the government has been in charge."
"We have been directing BP to take important steps," including the drilling of a second relief well, she added.
The White House said that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar would make his eighth trip to the region and that the number of government and contract employees sent to work in areas affected by the spill would be tripled.
But despite the White House efforts, the criticism also intensified. Colin L. Powell, who served as secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told ABC's "This Week" that the administration must move in quickly with "decisive force and demonstrate that it's doing everything that it can do."
Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, appearing on "Meet the Press," again criticized the administration's efforts, saying: "We need our federal government exactly for this kind of crisis. I think there could have been a greater sense of urgency."
The administration has left to BP most decisions about how to move forward with efforts to contain the leak. But Ms. Browner made a point of saying that the administration, led by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, had told BP that the company should stop the top kill. Government officials thought it was too dangerous to keep pumping drilling mud into the well because they worried it was putting too much pressure on it. BP announced Saturday evening that it was ending that effort.
BP engineers are now working on several containment plans, with the first being implemented over the next few days.
"According to BP, the riser cutting will likely start Monday or Tuesday," the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said in a statement on Sunday.
Using submarine robots, technicians intend to sever the riser pipe on top of the blowout preventer, the five-story-high stack of pipes above the well that failed to shut off the leak when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers. A funnel-like containment device will be fitted above the cut riser to draw the escaping oil through tubing attached to a drilling ship.
But BP officials acknowledged that there was no certainty that this attempt would work. Robert Dudley, BP's managing director, appearing on "This Week," also said that if it did work, some oil would still seep out until relief wells provided "an end point" in August.
The failure of the most recent effort - known as a top kill, which BP officials expressed great optimism about before trying it - has underlined the gaps in knowledge and science about the spill and its potential remedies. Ever since the explosion and the resulting leak, estimates of how much oil is escaping have differed by thousands of barrels a day. Both government and BP officials said on Sunday that they had no accurate idea of how much oil was spilling into the gulf.
"We honestly do not know," Mr. Dudley said on "Meet the Press." "We've always found this a difficult oil to measure because of the huge amounts of gas in the oil."
"The one thing about this method that we're about to go into - it will and should measure the majority of the flow," he said.
Mr. Dudley said that the original estimates by the government and BP officials of 5,000 barrels a day were based on satellite pictures and that the current estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels was "issued without an actual flow measurement." If the leak is not contained or slowed and continues at the higher estimated flow rate of 19,000 barrels a day until Aug. 20 - four months after the accident - it could amount to close to 2.3 million barrels spilled into the gulf.
After more than a month of diagnostic tests and the pumping of tens of thousands of barrels of drilling fluids - and everything from golf balls to shards of rubber - into the broken blowout preventer, engineers are still debating about what they think may be the inner contours of the five-story stack of pipes and how to best contain its leaking gashes.
In the end, all the mysteries of what went wrong and caused one of the greatest environmental calamities of history may not be known until the well is finally killed and the ill-fated blowout preventer is brought up from the bottom of the sea.
The final plugging of the well will have to wait until August, when the two relief wells are scheduled be completed. Those wells are being drilled diagonally to intersect with the runaway well and inject it with heavy liquids and cement. Work could be slowed by storms in what is expected to be an active summer hurricane season.
Officials from BP and the administration announced on Saturday that the top kill was a failure and had been abandoned, and that engineers were once again trying to solve the problem with a containment cap. A similar operation was tried nearly four weeks ago, but it failed because a slush of icy water and gas, known as hydrates, filled the large containment device, blocking the escaping oil from entering it. This time, engineers will pump hot sea water around the new, smaller device to keep hydrates from forming, and there will be far less space between the cap and the well for any hydrates that do form to flow in.
BP officials expressed optimism on Sunday about the new operation, though one technician working on the project warned that there were concerns that hydrates could again stymie the containment effort. The technician and outside experts also warned that by cutting the riser, the engineers may increase the flow of escaping oil.
Donald Van Nieuwenhuise, director of petroleum geoscience programs at the University of Houston, said that he thought BP's next plan had a good chance of succeeding, but that there was also a risk of increasing the flow of escaping oil by 10 percent.
"Then it just makes the situation worse for longer," he said, unless the containment cap succeeds in collecting a substantial amount of oil.
Clifford Krauss reported from Houston, John M. Broder from Washington and Jackie Calmes from Chicago.
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4) CALL FROM GAZA FOR GLOBAL RESPONSE TO KILLINGS ON THE FREEDOM FLOTILLA
PRESS RELEASE
GAZA, PALESTINE
MAY 31, 2010
The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) is a Palestinian-led
non-violent resistance movement committed to ending Israel's illegal
occupation of Palestinian land. We call for full compliance with all
relevant UN resolutions and international law. For specific media
inquires such as interview requests, photo usage, etc. please email the
ISM Media Office at media@palsolidarity.org
We Gaza based Palestinian Civil Society Organizations and
International activists call on the international community and civil
society to pressure their governments and Israel to cease the
abductions and killings in Israel's attacks against the Gaza Freedom
Flotilla sailing for Gaza, and begin a global response to hold Israel
accountable for the murder of foreign civilians at sea and illegal
piracy of civilian vessels carrying humanitarian aid for Gaza.
We salute the courage of all those who have organized this aid
intervention and demand a safe passage through to Gaza for the 750
people of conscience from 40 different countries including 35
international politicians intent on breaking the Israeli-Egyptian
blockade. We offer our sincerest condolences to family and friends
who have lost loved ones in the attack.
By sailing directly to Gaza, outside of Israeli waters, with cargo
banned illegally by Israel, such as the 10,000 tonnes of badly needed
concrete, toys, workbooks, chocolate, pasta and substantial medical
supplies, the flotilla is exercising international law and upholding
article 33 of the Geneva Convention which clearly states that
collective punishment is a crime against humanity.
The hardships of Israel's closure of Gaza have been well documented
by all human rights groups operating, most recently by Amnesty
International in their Annual Human Rights Report concluding that the
siege has "deepened the ongoing humanitarian crisis. Mass
unemployment, extreme poverty, food insecurity and food price rises
caused by shortages left four out of five Gazans dependent on
humanitarian aid. The scope of the blockade and statements made by
Israeli officials about its purpose showed that it was being imposed
as a form of collective punishment of Gazans, a flagrant violation of
international law." The United Nations continuously states that only
a fraction of the required aid is entering the Strip due to what it
calls 'the medieval siege', with John Ging the Director of UNRWA in
Gaza specifically expressing the need for the Flotilla to enter Gaza.
The European Union's new foreign affairs minister Catherine Ashton has
just reiterated its call for, "an immediate, sustained and
unconditional opening of crossings for the flow of humanitarian aid,
commercial goods and persons to and from Gaza."
The people of Gaza are not dependent people, but self sufficient
people doing what they can to retain some dignity in life in the wake
of this colossal man-made devastation that deprives so many of a basic
start in life or minimal aspirations for the future.
We, from Gaza, call on you to demonstrate and support the courageous
men and women on the Flotilla and join the, many now murdered on a
humanitarian aid mission. We insist on severance of diplomatic ties
with Israel, trials for war crimes and the International protection of
the civilians of Gaza. We call on you to join the growing
international boycott, divestment and sanction campaign of a country
proving again to be so violent and yet so unchallenged. Join the
growing critical mass around the world with a commitment to the day
when Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as any other people,
when the siege is lifted, the occupation is over and the 6 million
Palestinian refugees are finally granted justice.
Press Contacts:
Dr Haidar Eid: One Democratic Sate Group and University Teachers'
Association
Dr Mona El Farra: Middle East Children's Alliance, Gaza
00.972(0)598.868.222
Adie Mormech: International Solidarity Movement 00.972(0)597.717.696
Max Ajl: Gaza Freedom March 00.972(0)597.750.798
Signatory Organisations:
The One Democratic State Group; University Teachers Association; Arab Cultural Forum; Palestinian Students' Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel; Association of Al-Quds Bank for Culture and Info; Popular Committee against the Wall and Settlements; International Solidarity Movement; Palestinian Network of Non-Governmental Organisations; Palestinian Women Committees; Progressive Students Union; Medical Relief Society; The General Society for Rehabilitation; Gaza Community Mental Health Program; General Union of Palestinian Women; Afaq Jadeeda Cultural Centre for Women and Children;Deir Al-Balah Cultural Centre for Women and Children; Maghazi Cultural Centre for Children; Al-Sahel Centre for Women and Youth; Ghassan Kanfani Kindergartens; Rachel Corrie Centre, Rafah; Rafah Olympia City Sisters; Al Awda Centre, Rafah; Al Awda Hospital, Jabaliya Camp; Ajyal Association, Gaza; General Union of Palestinian Syndicates; Al Karmel Centre, Nuseirat; Local Inititiative, Beit Hanoun; Union of Health Work Committees; Red Crescent Society Gaza Strip; Beit Lahiya Cultural Centre; Al Awda Centre, Rafah
-- The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) is a Palestinian-led
non-violent resistance movement committed to ending Israel's illegal
occupation of Palestinian land. We call for full compliance with all
relevant UN resolutions and international law. For specific media
inquires such as interview requests, photo usage, etc. please email the
ISM Media Office at media@palsolidarity.org
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5) Blacks in Memphis Lose Decades of Economic Gains
By MICHAEL POWELL
May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/business/economy/31memphis.html?hp
MEMPHIS - For two decades, Tyrone Banks was one of many African-Americans who saw his economic prospects brightening in this Mississippi River city.
A single father, he worked for FedEx and also as a custodian, built a handsome brick home, had a retirement account and put his eldest daughter through college.
Then the Great Recession rolled in like a fog bank. He refinanced his mortgage at a rate that adjusted sharply upward, and afterward he lost one of his jobs. Now Mr. Banks faces bankruptcy and foreclosure.
"I'm going to tell you the deal, plain-spoken: I'm a black man from the projects and I clean toilets and mop up for a living," said Mr. Banks, a trim man who looks at least a decade younger than his 50 years. "I'm proud of what I've accomplished. But my whole life is backfiring."
Not so long ago, Memphis, a city where a majority of the residents are black, was a symbol of a South where racial history no longer tightly constrained the choices of a rising black working and middle class. Now this city epitomizes something more grim: How rising unemployment and growing foreclosures in the recession have combined to destroy black wealth and income and erase two decades of slow progress.
The median income of black homeowners in Memphis rose steadily until five or six years ago. Now it has receded to a level below that of 1990 - and roughly half that of white Memphis homeowners, according to an analysis conducted by Queens College Sociology Department for The New York Times.
Black middle-class neighborhoods are hollowed out, with prices plummeting and homes standing vacant in places like Orange Mound, White Haven and Cordova. As job losses mount - black unemployment here, mirroring national trends, has risen to 16.9 percent from 9 percent two years ago; it stands at 5.3 percent for whites - many blacks speak of draining savings and retirement accounts in an effort to hold onto their homes. The overall local foreclosure rate is roughly twice the national average.
The repercussions will be long-lasting, in Memphis and nationwide. The most acute economic divide in America remains the steadily widening gap between the wealth of black and white families, according to a recent study by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University. For every dollar of wealth owned by a white family, a black or Latino family owns just 16 cents, according to a recent Federal Reserve study.
The Economic Policy Institute's forthcoming "The State of Working America" analyzed the recession-driven drop in wealth. As of December 2009, median white wealth dipped 34 percent, to $94,600; median black wealth dropped 77 percent, to $2,100. So the chasm widens, and Memphis is left to deal with the consequences.
"This cancer is metastasizing into an economic crisis for the city," said Mayor A. C. Wharton Jr. in his riverfront office. "It's done more to set us back than anything since the beginning of the civil rights movement."
The mayor and former bank loan officers point a finger of blame at large national banks - in particular, Wells Fargo. During the last decade, they say, these banks singled out blacks in Memphis to sell them risky high-cost mortgages and consumer loans.
The City of Memphis and Shelby County sued Wells Fargo late last year, asserting that the bank's foreclosure rate in predominantly black neighborhoods was nearly seven times that of the foreclosure rate in predominantly white neighborhoods. Other banks, including Citibank and Countrywide, foreclosed in more equal measure.
In a recent regulatory filing, Wells Fargo hinted that its legal troubles could multiply. "Certain government entities are conducting investigations into the mortgage lending practices of various Wells Fargo affiliated entities, including whether borrowers were steered to more costly mortgage products," the bank stated.
Wells Fargo officials are not backing down in the face of the legal attacks. They say the bank made more prime loans and has foreclosed on fewer homes than most banks, and that the worst offenders - those banks that handed out bushels of no-money-down, negative-amortization loans - have gone out of business.
"The mistake Memphis officials made is that they picked the lender who was doing the most lending as opposed to the lender who was doing the worst lending," said Brad Blackwell, executive vice president for Wells Fargo Home Mortgage.
Not every recessionary ill can be heaped upon banks. Some black homeowners contracted the buy-a-big-home fever that infected many Americans and took out ill-advised loans. And unemployment has pitched even homeowners who hold conventional mortgages into foreclosure.
Federal and state officials say that high-cost mortgages leave hard-pressed homeowners especially vulnerable and that statistical patterns are inescapable.
"The more segregated a community of color is, the more likely it is that homeowners will face foreclosure because the lenders who peddled the most toxic loans targeted those communities," Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's civil rights division, told a Congressional committee.
The reversal of economic fortune in Memphis is particularly grievous for a black professional class that has taken root here, a group that includes Mr. Wharton, a lawyer who became mayor in 2009. Demographers forecast that Memphis will soon become the nation's first majority black metropolitan region.
That prospect, noted William Mitchell, a black real estate agent, once augured for a fine future.
"Our home values were up, income up," he said. He pauses, his frustration palpable. "What we see today, it's a new world. And not a good one."
Porch View
"You don't want to walk up there! That's the wild, wild west," a neighbor shouts. "Nothing on that block but foreclosed homes and squatters."
To roam Soulsville, a neighborhood south of downtown Memphis, is to find a place where bungalows and brick homes stand vacant amid azaleas and dogwoods, where roofs are swaybacked and thieves punch holes through walls to strip the copper piping. The weekly newspaper is swollen with foreclosure notices.
Here and there, homes are burned by arsonists.
Yet just a few years back, Howard Smith felt like a rich man. A 56-year-old African-American engineer with a gray-flecked beard, butter-brown corduroys and red sneakers, he sits with two neighbors on a porch on Richmond Avenue and talks of his miniature real estate empire: He owned a home on this block, another in nearby White Haven and another farther out. His job paid well; a pleasant retirement beckoned.
Then he was laid off. He has sent out 60 applications, obtained a dozen interviews and received no calls back. A bank foreclosed on his biggest house. He will be lucky to get $30,000 for his house here, which was assessed at $80,000 two years ago.
"It all disappeared overnight," he says.
"Mmm-mm, yes sir, overnight," says his neighbor, Gwen Ward. In her 50s, she, too, was laid off, from her supervisory job of 15 years, and she moved in with her elderly mother. "It seemed we were headed up and then" - she snaps her fingers - "it all went away."
Mr. Smith nods. "The banks and Wall Street have taken the middle class and shredded us," he says.
For the greater part of the last century, racial discrimination crippled black efforts to buy homes and accumulate wealth. During the post-World War II boom years, banks and real estate agents steered blacks to segregated neighborhoods, where home appreciation lagged far behind that of white neighborhoods.
Blacks only recently began to close the home ownership gap with whites, and thus accumulate wealth - progress that now is being erased. In practical terms, this means black families have less money to pay for college tuition, invest in businesses or sustain them through hard times.
"We're wiping out whatever wealth blacks have accumulated - it assures racial economic inequality for the next generation," said Thomas M. Shapiro, director of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University.
The African-American renaissance in Memphis was halting. Residential housing patterns remain deeply segregated. While big employers - FedEx and AutoZone - have headquarters here, wage growth is not robust. African-American employment is often serial rather than continuous, and many people lack retirement and health plans.
But the recession presents a crisis of a different magnitude.
Mayor Wharton walks across his office to a picture window and stares at a shimmering Mississippi River. He describes a recent drive through ailing neighborhoods. It is akin, he says, to being a doctor "looking for pulse rates in his patients and finding them near death."
He adds: "I remember riding my bike as a kid through thriving neighborhoods. Now it's like someone bombed my city."
Banking on Nothing
Camille Thomas, a 40-year-old African-American, loved working for Wells Fargo. "I felt like I could help people," she recalled over coffee.
As the subprime market heated up, she said, the bank pressure to move more loans - for autos, for furniture, for houses - edged into mania. "It was all about selling your units and getting your bonus," she said.
Ms. Thomas and three other Wells Fargo employees have given affidavits for the city's lawsuit against the bank, and their statements about bank practices reinforce one another.
"Your manager would say, 'Let me see your cold-call list. I want you to concentrate on these ZIP codes,' and you knew those were African-American neighborhoods," she recalled. "We were told, 'Oh, they aren't so savvy.' "
She described tricks of the trade, several of dubious legality. She said supervisors had told employees to white out incomes on loan applications and substitute higher numbers. Agents went "fishing" for customers, mailing live checks to leads. When a homeowner deposited the check, it became a high-interest loan, with a rate of 20 to 29 percent. Then bank agents tried to talk the customer into refinancing, using the house as collateral.
Several state and city regulators have placed Wells Fargo Bank in their cross hairs, and their lawsuits include similar accusations. In Illinois, the state attorney general has accused the bank of marketing high-cost loans to blacks and Latinos while selling lower-cost loans to white borrowers. John P. Relman, the Washington, D.C., lawyer handling the Memphis case, has sued Wells Fargo on behalf of the City of Baltimore, asserting that the bank systematically exploited black borrowers.
A federal judge in Baltimore dismissed that lawsuit, saying it had made overly broad claims about the damage done by Wells Fargo. City lawyers have refiled papers.
"I don't think it's going too far to say that banks are at the core of the disaster here," said Phyllis G. Betts, director of the Center for Community Building and Neighborhood Action at the University of Memphis, which has closely examined bank lending records.
Former employees say Wells Fargo loan officers marketed the most expensive loans to black applicants, even when they should have qualified for prime loans. This practice is known as reverse redlining.
Webb A. Brewer, a Memphis lawyer, recalls poring through piles of loan papers and coming across name after name of blacks with subprime mortgages. "This is money out of their pockets lining the purses of the banks," he said.
For a $150,000 mortgage, a difference of three percentage points - the typical spread between a conventional and subprime loan - tacks on $90,000 in interest payments over its 30-year life.
Wells Fargo officials say they rejected the worst subprime products, and they portray their former employees as disgruntled rogues who subverted bank policies.
"They acknowledged that they knowingly worked to defeat our fair lending policies and controls," said Mr. Blackwell, the bank executive.
Bank officials attribute the surge in black foreclosures in Memphis to the recession. They say that the average credit score in black Census tracts is 108 points lower than in white tracts.
"People who have less are more vulnerable during downturns," said Andrew L. Sandler of Buckley Sandler, a law firm representing Wells Fargo.
Mr. Relman, the lawyer representing Memphis, is unconvinced. "If a bad economy and poor credit explains it, you'd expect to see other banks with the same ratio of foreclosures in the black community," he said. "But you don't. Wells is the outlier."
Whatever the responsibility, individual or corporate, the detritus is plain to see. Within a two-block radius of that porch in Soulsville, Wells Fargo holds mortgages on nearly a dozen foreclosures. That trail of pain extends right out to the suburbs.
Begging to Stay
To turn into Tyrone Banks's subdivision in Hickory Ridge is to find his dream in seeming bloom. Stone lions guard his door, the bushes are trimmed and a freshly waxed sport utility vehicle sits in his driveway.
For years, Mr. Banks was assiduous about paying down his debt: he stayed two months ahead on his mortgage, and he helped pay off his mother's mortgage.
Two years ago, his doorbell rang, and two men from Wells Fargo offered to consolidate his consumer loans into a low-cost mortgage.
"I thought, 'This is great! ' " Mr. Banks says. "When you have four kids, college expenses, you look for any savings."
What those men did not tell Mr. Banks, he says (and Ms. Thomas, who studied his case, confirms), is that his new mortgage had an adjustable rate. When it reset last year, his payment jumped to $1,700 from $1,200.
Months later, he ruptured his Achilles tendon playing basketball, hindering his work as a janitor. And he lost his job at FedEx. Now foreclosure looms.
He is by nature an optimistic man; his smile is rueful.
"Man, I should I have stayed 'old school' with my finances," he said. "I sat down my youngest son on the couch and I told him, 'These are rough times.' "
Many neighbors are in similar straits. Foreclosure notices flutter like flags on the doors of two nearby homes, and the lawns there are overgrown and mud fills the gutters.
Wells Fargo says it has modified three mortgages for every foreclosure nationwide - although bank officials declined to provide the data for Memphis. A study by the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project and six nonprofit groups found that the nation's four largest banks, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, had cut their prime mortgage refinancing 33 percent in predominantly minority communities, even as prime refinancing in white neighborhoods rose 32 percent from 2006 to 2008.
For Mr. Banks, it is as if he found the door wide open on his way into debt but closed as he tries to get out.
"Some days it feels like everyone I know in Memphis is in trouble," Mr. Banks says. "We're all just begging to stay in our homes, basically."
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6) Reforms Slow to Arrive at Drilling Agency
By JOHN M. BRODER and MICHAEL LUO
May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/us/politics/31drill.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON - As President Obama and his top aides were convening a series of meetings that led to the announcement in March of a major expansion of offshore oil drilling, the troubled history of the agency that regulates such drilling operations was well known.
Mr. Obama, shortly after taking office, had assigned Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to clean up the agency, the Minerals Management Service. The office's history of corruption and coziness with the industry it was supposed to regulate had been the subject of years of scathing reports by government auditors, lurid headlines and a score of Congressional hearings.
But the promised reforms of the agency were slow to arrive, and the subject of the minerals service never came up at the meetings leading to the new drilling policy, according to a senior administration official involved in the discussions.
"I don't recall a conversation on how the offshore drilling and M.M.S. issues overlapped," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential deliberations involving the president.
Defending the new policy on April 2, less than three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. Obama emphasized the safety record of offshore operations.
"It turns out, by the way," he said, "that oil rigs today generally don't cause spills. They are technologically very advanced."
In the weeks since the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the Minerals Management Service has come under intense scrutiny, and Mr. Salazar moved this month to essentially disband the agency, splitting it into three parts.
On Thursday, he asked for the resignation of the head of the service, S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, and named an interim successor on Friday.
But the question remains why Mr. Obama - and members of Congress charged with oversight of the agency - did not come to grips with its obvious problems before the accident occurred.
The answer may have as much to do with the workings of business as usual in Washington and the long-entrenched influence of the oil industry in Washington politics as it does with anything more sinister.
Political expediency may have played a role. In pushing offshore drilling, Mr. Obama was hoping to placate the oil industry and its supporters in Congress, who were demanding increased access to the outer continental shelf in exchange for their possible support for broader climate change and energy legislation that Mr. Obama wants.
That focus apparently eclipsed any concerns about the minerals agency, especially since at the time no oil rig had exploded and sent hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil into the gulf.
The breadth of the expansion stunned oil industry representatives, who were expecting a much more restrictive policy accompanied by tough new safety and environmental rules. They were prepared to attack the new policy; instead, the American Petroleum Institute, the industry's main lobby, praised it.
"We saw the president's announcement as a positive development," said Jack Gerard, president of the institute, "a recognition that oil and natural gas play a critical role in our energy future."
But there had been warnings for years from government auditors about the Minerals Management Service, including revelations just before Mr. Obama took office that agency personnel had accepted gifts, drugs and sexual favors from oil company representatives.
Shortly after he was appointed in 2009, Mr. Salazar visited the agency's Denver office and declared at a news conference that he was the "new sheriff in town" who would bring significant changes. He issued new ethics guidelines and eliminated a controversial royalty program.
But it is now clear that he did little else, focusing his energies elsewhere, for example on offshore wind projects.
On Thursday, Mr. Obama acknowledged that he should have paid more attention to the problems at the service and moved more quickly to correct them.
"At M.M.S., Ken Salazar was in the process of making these reforms," Mr. Obama said at a news conference. "But the point that I'm making is that, obviously, they weren't happening fast enough."
For lawmakers on the Congressional committees that oversee the agency, there was also little to gain politically in taking it on. Many of those committee members come from states where the energy industry is important. And members also draw an outsize share of oil industry contributions.
Members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, for instance, have taken in an average of about $52,000 from individuals and groups associated with the oil and gas industry this election cycle, compared with $24,000 for others in the Senate, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, an ardent foe of offshore drilling who in 2008 introduced unsuccessful legislation to impose new ethics and disclosure guidelines on employees of the minerals service, said that the industry played a powerful role in shaping the agenda on energy legislation, and that overhauling the minerals service obviously was not on that agenda.
"They've got every interest in the world to have a cozy relationship with the regulators," he said of the oil companies.
Still, Mr. Nelson added, the failure of his bill was more a function of poor timing. He proposed it toward the end of the legislative session, and in the rush to complete other business after the presidential election, it had no chance.
And, he said, the fact a Democratic administration was coming in reassured him that changes were coming.
The unusual structure of the agency has also helped thwart efforts to overhaul it, despite its problems. Established in 1982 by Interior Secretary James G. Watt, it was created by secretarial order, not legislation, a set-up that some lawmakers said made Congress pay less attention to it.
And because it is financed by the $13 billion a year it collects in oil royalties, it largely escapes the kind of scrutiny that other regulatory bodies get in the appropriations process.
Serious concerns about the agency were raised as early as 2006, when Representative Darrell E. Issa, Republican of California, led the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in a series of hearings on problems in deepwater oil leases during the Clinton administration that freed companies from paying billions of dollars in royalties.
Earl E. Devaney, the Interior Department's inspector general, testified at those hearings about a culture of "managerial irresponsibility and a lack of accountability" at the agency.
But Mr. Issa recalled in an interview last week that he had trouble getting his fellow committee members, both Democrats and Republicans, to attend the hearings, because the agency operated in relative obscurity and its problems were not of intense interest on Capitol Hill.
"It was kind of lonely," he said.
Two years later, the department's inspector general released new reports of misconduct, this time accompanied by more attention from the news media and outrage in Congress. Both the House and Senate held hearings. Several lawmakers, including Mr. Issa, Mr. Nelson and Representative Nick Rahall, a West Virginia Democrat and chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, introduced bills to fix the minerals service.
But none of the measures went anywhere. Mr. Rahall drew parallels with the regulation of the coal mining industry, where changes often occur only after tragic accidents. "It's unfortunate that it takes such before we enact safety legislation," he said.
Griff Palmer contributed reporting from New York.
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7) Fears Rise in Europe Over Potential for Deflation
By JACK EWING
May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/business/global/31deflation.html?ref=business
FRANKFURT - If the European Central Bank has one monetary dragon it considers essential to slay, it is inflation.
Keeping inflation under control is the central bank's primary legal responsibility, and as Europe struggles to overcome economic problems caused by the sovereign debt crisis, inflation has remained the bank's primary focus.
But some economists say it has become a driving obsession that has blinded the bank to a potentially bigger threat to Europe: deflation.
The central bank's doubters grew louder after it made a big show of taking measures to cancel out the supposed inflationary impact of the government bond purchases it began on May 10 to help keep Greece and several other euro zone countries from defaulting on their debts.
"It's nuts: how can they be concerned about the inflationary impact of this?" said Carl B. Weinberg, chief economist of High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, N.Y. "If I were the head of the E.C.B., I would be printing money to avert the decline in the money supply."
Many economists regard deflation as more dangerous than inflation, because it prompts consumers to delay purchases as they wait for lower prices, creating a downward spiral of lower demand and production. Deflation is also bad for debtors like Greece, because they may have to pay back money that would be worth more than it was when they borrowed it.
Economists like Mr. Weinberg - and a few policy makers as well - are beginning to worry that a danger of deflation in Europe, similar to the one that strangled Japanese growth for most of the 1990s, is a bigger threat than inflation.
Prices fell in Ireland in April, while inflation was below 1 percent in five other euro zone countries. The problem also extends outside the euro zone.
"We all share some risks and problems in common with Japan circa 1995," Adam S. Posen, a member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, told an audience at the London School of Economics on May 2.
The United States is also at risk, Mr. Posen said, though he rated the chances of deflation there as low. But just as Japan did in the 1990s, the European Central Bank and the United States Federal Reserve have cut interest rates close to zero while pumping huge amounts of credit into their economies. That means the two central banks would have limited policy tools left with which to combat a collapse in prices and demand.
The downward pressure on prices has its roots in the economic decline that followed the 2008 financial crisis, but Europe's sovereign debt problems are likely to add extra impetus. Governments, including those of Spain and Germany, are sharply reducing spending to lower their deficits, which will inevitably curb consumer demand and employment, hindering growth.
Inflation in the euro zone - the 16 countries that use the euro - rose slightly in April, to an annual rate of 1.5 percent, from 1.4 percent in March. Declines in categories like recreation and culture, communications and vacation tour packages blunted the impact of higher transportation costs. And so-called core inflation - which excludes energy prices and which most economists consider a better measure for policy-making purposes - declined to 0.7 percent in April from 0.8 percent in March. By either measure, the overall rate was still well below the central bank's target of about 2 percent.
The real challenge for policy makers will occur in the coming months and years as Spain, Greece and Portugal struggle to regain their competitiveness on international markets. Without their own currencies to devalue, they have little choice but to cut wages and keep them well below those in countries like Germany and France. Pay cuts and lower government spending will put downward pressure on prices.
Spanish core inflation already turned negative in April.
A mild decline in prices in a few euro zone countries can be managed, economists say, but it will add to the risks of deflation. And the central bank will face more difficulty than usual in devising a monetary policy that fits both the ailing countries and the faster-growing economies like Germany and France.
"The E.C.B. has a careful balancing act to do," said Dennis Snower, president of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in Germany.
The central bank has remained firm in its focus on containing inflation. Jean-Claude Trichet, the bank's president, has said he considers inflation a tax on the poor. And the bank's charter obliges it to serve foremost as guardian of price stability.
As recently as Friday, Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, a member of the bank's executive board, defended the wisdom of the mandate. In a speech in Rabat, Morocco, he said permitting inflation to rise to make it easier for European nations to repay their debts, as some have urged, would backfire.
The resulting decline in the value of government bonds would inflict "major losses on the banks and financial institutions which have been heavily investing in these markets, potentially undermining the recovery," he said.
Nevertheless, Mr. Trichet has been under fire, especially from critics in Germany, ever since the central bank began the unprecedented bond purchases to halt a sell-off of Greek, Portuguese and Spanish government debt.
By buying government bonds on the open market, and being coy about how much it was spending, the bank was able to reduce the high premiums investors were demanding for debt from the weakest countries. A continuation of the market rout would have raised the interest rates that Spain and other countries had to pay to sell new bonds, aggravating their already grave fiscal problems.
The problem was that, to buy the bonds, the bank had to expand the assets it held on its books. So to prove that it had not stooped to printing money, the bank promised to offset the bond purchases, which totaled 26.5 billion euros ($32.6 billion as of May 24, the most recent data available), by taking in a like amount in short-term deposits from banks. In effect, it siphoned off as much liquidity as it had added.
The bond purchases were only the latest of a series of extraordinary moves that Mr. Trichet has pursued to stabilize the European banking system. Since the beginning of the financial crisis, the central bank has been essentially keeping banks afloat by providing almost unlimited loans at 1 percent interest.
Mr. Trichet is eager to squash any doubts that such moves represent a shift in the bank's focus on inflation, said Mr. Snower of the Kiel Institute. "The E.C.B. is showing very clearly that its objectives have not changed."
Other economists say that scale of the bond purchases would not increase the money supply enough to pose an inflation risk. And the money supply is falling because of a decline in bank lending.
In addition, factories are operating below capacity and euro zone unemployment is at 10 percent. Extra money in the system would not create scarcities of goods or labor that could drive up prices, Mr. Weinberg of High Frequency Economics said.
"You don't have to pay any more to get those workers to come out of unemployment," Mr. Weinberg said.
The recent decline of the euro against the dollar could create some inflation. Oil and other commodities are priced in dollars and could become more expensive in euros.
Still, few economists see prices rising. "There is no reason to fear high inflation for the time being," Simon Junker, a Commerzbank analyst, said in a note.
Much of Mr. Trichet's anti-inflation stance seems aimed at mollifying Germany's anxiety over the bank's bond purchases.
After the purchases, Mr. Trichet gave interviews to three leading German publications, an unusually high number in such a short period. In each case, he tried to reassure Germans on inflation and convince them that the euro is as solid as the German mark that they reluctantly gave up 11 years ago.
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8) Questions About the Gulf
New York Times Editorial
May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/opinion/31mon1.html?hp
BP’s latest failure to plug the leaking oil well in the Gulf of Mexico is one more crushing disappointment to Louisiana’s beleaguered people, one more strike against the company and one more signal to President Obama to redouble efforts to contain and clean the spill.
BP now pins its hopes — and those of the country — on yet another containment strategy, its fifth since the April 20 explosion. It does so amid mounting public anger and a report in The Times on Sunday that the company may have violated its own safety standards by ignoring warnings about design flaws in the well.
These disclosures add to the growing list of questions that must be addressed by the special commission President Obama has appointed to examine the root causes of the spill and recommend ways to prevent future catastrophes.
Here are others:
WHAT HAPPENED, AND WHY Five weeks after the blowout, there is no clear picture of the fatal sequence of events. Gas somehow escaped up the well, then exploded, collapsing the rig. The blowout preventer — a giant set of valves on the ocean floor — failed to work, and oil began spurting into the gulf at a rate recently estimated at 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day. The total spill now exceeds the estimated 250,000 barrels that leaked from the stricken tanker Exxon Valdez in 1989. The public needs to get an honest accounting of the spill’s size, and BP’s word is not enough since it has to pay for the cleanup.
A joint Interior Department-Coast Guard investigative committee in Louisiana, and numerous Congressional panels, have been seeking clarity. Their search has not been helped by industry grandstanding and finger-pointing, with BP blaming the rig operator, Transocean, for the faulty blowout preventer.
It is also unclear which company was calling the shots on the rig, and there have been ominous suggestions that BP short-circuited standard drilling procedures to cut costs.
THE RESPONSE The questions about whether BP and the government responded quickly enough, and with the right weapons, could fill a book — and probably will. Both parties seem to have underestimated the size of the spill, and neither had a coherent underwater response plan in place. Though the oil industry had experienced blowouts at shallower depths, BP’s disjointed response suggested it had given little thought to the possibility of a blowout at 5,000 feet.
Partly as a result of laws passed after the Exxon Valdez, industry and the Coast Guard were better prepared to deal with the oil when it hit the surface. But the techniques — the controlled burns, the skimmers, the booms, the dispersants — were little more sophisticated than they were in 1989. Why no progress? And why was there only one dispersant available (and a toxic one at that) made by one company, Nalco?
REGULATORY FAILURE Much has been said — including by President Obama — about the incestuous relationship between the oil industry and its chief regulator, the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, which routinely ignored basic environmental laws and its own rules to fast track drilling permits.
But while these were terrible failures, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s promise to reform the agency is overdue, it is hard to believe that other agencies in Washington, and even the Congressional oversight committees, were not also culpable.
NEW WEAPONS One outside-the-box question that looms large is whether the federal government should now develop its own capacity to deal with a huge blowout. As things stand now, industry has all the equipment and experience. In an interim report to the president on Thursday, Mr. Salazar suggested the creation of a kind of parallel technological universe in which government would have the robots, the coffer dams and the other tools necessary to help control a big blowout.
That could be expensive, but Mr. Obama indicated on Friday that he had been thinking along the same lines. As well he should be. The images from the last month — Washington essentially powerless, BP flailing away — have been deeply disheartening.
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