Saturday, January 09, 2010

BAUAW NEWSLETTER - SATURDAY, JANUARY 9, 2010

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NEXT MARCH 20 COALITION MEETING:
TODAY! SATURDAY, JANUARY 9, 2010, 2:00 P.M.
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO
474 VALENCIA STREET
Between 16th and 15th Streets, SF)

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Urgent action needed to stop executions in CA
By Stephanie Faucher, Death Penalty Focus
January 8, 2009
stefanie@deathpenalty.org

Dear supporters,

Please take action today to stop executions from resuming in California. This is very urgent, without your help executions could occur in the near future.

Both Californians and non-Californians are encouraged to take action.

Letters must be received by January 20, 2010 at 5pm PDT.

BACKGROUND:

On January 4, 2010, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) proposed minor revisions to its lethal injection procedures in the form of amendments to its previously proposed procedures. CDCR set a fifteen-day comment period ending January 20, 2010 at 5:00 p.m. during which the public can submit written comments on the proposed amendments.

The amended regulations, which are virtually identical to the regulations proposed in May 2009, can be found here:

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=DsL2ekA4m2nB2qSfspkiCinFkqj%2BKN3u

The above link contains only those regulations that were amended. To see the full text of the proposed regulations proposed in May 2009, go to this link:

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=NHU2PZL0sQWgLuC6BWt%2BfynFkqj%2BKN3u

TAKE ACTION:

We have created a draft letter which you can personalize and send here:

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/1265/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=1988

A separate letter will also be sent the Governor of California.

Thank you for taking action!

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BAUAW responds:

Here is the letter I wrote as a representative of BAUAW:

I oppose the racist death penalty to its very core. There is no "humanitarian" way to murder someone. It's barbaric.

Already so many who have been on death row for decades have been proven to be innocent victims of gross forensic mistakes or blatant police frame-ups.

The poor are routinely afforded inferior and indifferent legal services that serve mainly as a go-between the prosecution and accused. It can hardly be called legal defense.

Justice is not served equally or fairly in the United States. Most other nations have done away with the death penalty. Here our "great minds of justice" debate the best way to kill.

Under these concrete circumstances, instead of limiting the appeals process for prisoners, the justice system should bend over backwards to hear and re-hear the evidence and set free those who have been convicted unfairly.

Death should never be our conscious choice as a nation.

I am also very concerned about the newly revised lethal injection procedures.

In particular, I have the following concerns:

* The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) added a news article from the Santa Rosa Press Democrat to the rulemaking file. The article mentions that the original creator of the three-drug lethal injection formula has suggested ways to reform the process, including keeping up with changing drugs and science and proper training of lethal injection team members. The recent experience of Romell Broom in Ohio reinforces a point raised in the article, that botched executions are a real possibility, especially in California, due to the limited training of the lethal injection team members and California's repeated failure to meaningfully change its protocol.

* CDCR's amended regulations continue to be wholly inadequate and inapplicable to female condemned inmates. The regulations now specify that a female condemned inmate shall be transported to San Quentin no sooner than 72 hours and no later than six hours prior to the scheduled execution, but contain no provisions to implement the required 45-day chronology of events prior to her arrival at San Quentin. CDCR also fails to address how and if the female condemned inmate will be in contact with her family members and her legal team during her transport, which may take place on the same day as her scheduled execution.

* Contrary to CDCR's claim, the amended regulations continue to treat the condemned prisoner's witnesses differently than the victim's witnesses. The victim's family is allowed an unlimited number of witnesses at the execution, whereas the prisoner scheduled to die is limited to five individuals other than her or his spiritual adviser. In the event of lack of space, the victim's family is provided with the option of remote viewing of the execution, while the same option is not extended to the inmate's family.

*The distinction drawn between Chaplains and "approved" Spiritual Advisors is confusing and it is unclear how and when a person may become a "pre-approved" Spiritual Advisor.

I expect that you will take these concerns very seriously.

Sincerely,

Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War, bauaw.org

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YouTube - SF Hotel Workers Rally With AFL-CIO Trumka And March On Hilton Hotel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzI8k5Ipwsk

On Jan 5, 2010 over 1,400 SF Hotel Workers Rallied and marched With AFL-CIO President Trumka and Unite-Here President Wilhelm for a contract for the 9,000 unionized hotel workers whose contracts have expired. Over 150 workers and supporters were arrested at the Hilton Hotel which the union is boycotting. For further information on the union go to www.unitehere2.org

Produced by The Labor Video Project
P.O. Box 720027
SF, CA 94172
laborvideo.blip.tv
www.laborvideo.org
(415)282-1908

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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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NEXT MARCH 20 COALITION MEETING:
SATURDAY, JANUARY 9, 2010, 2:00 P.M.
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO
474 VALENCIA STREET
Between 16th and 15th Streets, SF)

The first meeting was held Wednesday, December 9 at 7:00 P.M. It was a broad, democratically run meeting with over 40 people in attendance from many different groups and organizations as well as individuals.

There was an atmosphere of renewed energy and resolve to build as large a demonstration as possible to mark the seventh year of "Shock and Awe" against the people of Iraq. It was especially poignant on the eve of Obama's Orwellian "war is for peace" Nobel speech.

We are encouraging all groups, organizations and individuals to join with us to demand an immediate end of these wars and to demand that the trillions spent on war be used for jobs, housing, healthcare, education for all!

Obama, in his Nobel remarks, points out his intentions to escalate his "wars for peace" wherever the U.S. empire desires to go.

As many pointed out at the first coalition meeting on Wednesday night, the financial, physical and emotional burden for these wars falls on working people across the globe in the broadest war plan ever devised by any empire!

The honeymoon is over! These are Obama's wars and we must organize massively against them.

Please plan on attending the next March 20, 2010 coalition meeting so we can organize broad outreach in our communities and make March 20, 2010 a powerful statement of opposition to the wars and for a world of equality, peace and justice for all.

For more information call: 415-821-6545

In solidarity,

Bonnie Weinstein, bauaw.org

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Getting in Gear for the New Year... of Resistance!
info@bayareacodepink.org

Our 2010 beginning Occupation Strategy from January (in the Bay Area) thru March (in D.C.) and beyond.

A coalition of organizations including CodePINK, Cindy Sheehan, and World Can't Wait are planning a Day of Occupation Actions to END WAR NOW around the Bay Area on January 20th, the 1 year anniversary of Obama's inauguration leading up to many days/weeks of actions at CAMP OUT in Washington D.C. March 13th thru???

The goal for the 20th is to engage in TWENTY different actions around the Bay, from banner drops to teach-ins to occupations at intersections, roof tops, and offices.

The next coalition meeting is Jan 10th, 3pm at Mudrakers Café, 2801 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley in the back room.

Call 510-540-7007 or email info bayareacodepink.org for more info and/or to sign up

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Demand justice for Oscar Grant: Jan. 13 in Oakland

Today marks a year since Oakland erupted in rebellion that got a cop charged with murder for the first time ever in California . And that same night the cops called themselves retaliating by arresting our own Minister of Information JR for the bogus crime of felony arson of a trash can. Not only didn't he do it, but there's no trace on the trash can that it was ever on fire!

Every one of us has a role to play in this historic drama - to ensure that triggerman Johannes Mehserle, who executed Oscar Grant in cold blood, is convicted even though his trial's been moved from Oakland to LA (our thanks to LA activists for their fast and masterful organizing!), and to ensure that JR, whose trial starts Feb. 22, is acquitted. If you're in LA or the Bay Area, your presence is needed at these events - details at Demand justice for Oscar Grant: Jan. 13 in Oakland:

Wednesday, Jan. 13, 7 p.m., Black Dot Café, 1195 Pine St. West Oakland: fundraiser for the last two of the Oakland 100 arrested during the Oakland Rebellions still facing charges, Minister of Information JR and punk rock artist Holly Works, featuring the screening of "Operation Small Axe," which has just been accepted by the Pan African Film Festival in LA - special guest: former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney!

These young activists need and deserve all the help you can give them. Both need funds for their legal defense, and JR needs to replace his camera, which the Oakland PD still refuses to return.

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National Call for March 4 Strike and Day of Action To Defend Public Education
By Elly
http://defendcapubliceducation.wordpress.com/?blogsub=confirmed#subscribe-blog

California has recently seen a massive movement erupt in defense of public education -- but layoffs, fee hikes, cuts, and the re-segregation of public education are attacks taking place throughout the country. A nationwide resistance movement is needed.

We call on all students, workers, teachers, parents, and their organizations and communities across the country to massively mobilize for a Strike and Day of Action in Defense of Public Education on March 4, 2010. Education cuts are attacks against all of us, particularly in working-class communities and communities of color.

The politicians and administrators say there is no money for education and social services. They say that "there is no alternative" to the cuts. But if there's money for wars, bank bailouts, and prisons, why is there no money for public education?

We can beat back the cuts if we unite students, workers, and teachers across all sectors of public education - Pre K-12, adult education, community colleges, and state-funded universities. We appeal to the leaders of the trade union movement to support and organize strikes and/or mass actions on March 4. The weight of workers and students united in strikes and mobilizations would shift the balance of forces entirely against the current agenda of cuts and make victory possible.

Building a powerful movement to defend public education will, in turn, advance the struggle in defense of all public-sector workers and services and will be an inspiration to all those fighting against the wars, for immigrants rights, in defense of jobs, for single-payer health care, and other progressive causes.

Why March 4? On October 24, 2009 more than 800 students, workers, and teachers converged at UC Berkeley at the Mobilizing Conference to Save Public Education. This massive meeting brought together representatives from over 100 different schools, unions, and organizations from all across California and from all sectors of public education. After hours of open collective discussion, the participants voted democratically, as their main decision, to call for a Strike and Day of Action on March 4, 2010. All schools, unions and organizations are free to choose their specific demands and tactics -- such as strikes, rallies, walkouts, occupations, sit-ins, teach-ins, etc. -- as well as the duration of such actions.

Let's make March 4 an historic turning point in the struggle against the cuts, layoffs, fee hikes, and the re-segregation of public education.

- The California Coordinating Committee

To endorse this call and to receive more information contact:
march4strikeanddayofaction@gmail.com

and check out:
www.defendcapubliceducation.wordpress.com

Andy Griggs
andyca6@gmail.com
310-704-3217

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U.S. OUT OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN NOW!
FREE PALESTINE!

San Francisco March and Rally
on Saturday, March 20, 2010
11am, Civic Center Plaza

National March on Washington
on Saturday, March 20, 2010
Fri., March 19 Day of Action & Outreach in D.C.

People from all over the country are organizing to converge on Washington, D.C., to demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan and Iraq.

On Saturday, March 20, 2010, there will be a massive National March & Rally in D.C. A day of action and outreach in Washington, D.C., will take place on Friday, March 19, preceding the Saturday march.

There will be coinciding mass marches on March 20 in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The national actions are initiated by a large number of organizations and prominent individuals. see below)

Click here to become an endorser:

http://answer.pephost.org/site/Survey?SURVEY_ID=5940&ACTION_REQUIRED=URI_ACTION_USER_REQUESTS&autologin=true&link=endorse-body-1

Click here to make a donation:

https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Donation?ACTION=SHOW_DONATION_OPTIONS&CAMPAIGN_ID=2302&autologin=true&donate=body-1&JServSessionIdr002=2yzk5fh8x2.app13b

We will march together to say "No Colonial-type Wars and Occupations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine!" We will march together to say "No War Against Iran!" We will march together to say "No War for Empire Anywhere!"

Instead of war, we will demand funds so that every person can have a job, free and universal health care, decent schools, and affordable housing.

March 20 is the seventh anniversary of the criminal war of aggression launched by Bush and Cheney against Iraq. One million or more Iraqis have died. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops have lost their lives or been maimed, and continue to suffer a whole host of enduring problems from this terrible war.

This is the time for united action. The slogans on banners may differ, but all those who carry them should be marching shoulder to shoulder.

Killing and dying to avoid the perception of defeat

Bush is gone, but the war and occupation in Iraq still go on. The Pentagon is demanding a widening of the war in Afghanistan. They project an endless war with shifting battlefields. And a "single-payer" war budget that only grows larger and larger each year. We must act.

Both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were predicated on the imperial fantasy that the U.S. could create stable, proxy colonial-type governments in both countries. They were to serve as an extension of "American" power in these strategic and resource-rich regions.

That fantasy has been destroyed. Now U.S. troops are being sent to kill or be killed so that the politicians in uniform "the generals and admirals") and those in three-piece suits "our elected officials") can avoid taking responsibility for a military setback in wars that should have never been started. Their military ambitions are now reduced to avoiding the appearance of defeat.

That is exactly what happened in Vietnam! Avoiding defeat, or the perception of defeat, was the goal Nixon and Kissinger set for themselves when they took office in 1969. For this noble cause, another 30,000 young GIs perished before the inevitable troop pullout from Vietnam in 1973. The number of Vietnamese killed between 1969 and 1973 was greater by many hundreds of thousands.

All of us can make the difference - progress and change comes from the streets and from the grassroots.

The people went to the polls in 2008, and the enthusiasm and desire for change after eight years of the Bush regime was the dominant cause that led to election of a big Democratic Party majority in both Houses of Congress and the election of Barack Obama to the White House.

But it should now be obvious to all that waiting for politicians to bring real change - on any front - is simply a prescription for passivity by progressives and an invitation to the array of corporate interests from military contractors to the banks, to big oil, to the health insurance giants that dominate the political life of the country. These corporate interests work around the clock to frustrate efforts for real change, and they are the guiding hand behind the recent street mobilizations of the ultra-right.

It is up to us to act. If people had waited for politicians to do the right thing, there would have never been a Civil Rights Act, or unions, women's rights, an end to the Vietnam war or any of the profound social achievements and basic rights that people cherish.

It is time to be back in the streets. Organizing centers are being set up in cities and towns throughout the country.

We must raise $50,000 immediately just to get started. Please make your contribution today. We need to reserve buses, which are expensive $1,800 from NYC, $5,000 from Chicago, etc.). We have to print 100,000 leaflets, posters and stickers. There will be other substantial expenses as March 20 draws closer.

Please become an endorser and active supporter of the March 20 National March on Washington.

Please make an urgently needed tax-deductible donation today. We can't do this without your active support.

The initiators of the March 20 National March on Washington preceded by the March 19 Day of Action and Outreach in D.C.) include: the ANSWER Coalition; Muslim American Society Freedom; National Council of Arab Americans; Cynthia McKinney; Malik Rahim, co-founder of Common Ground Collective; Ramsey Clark; Cindy Sheehan; Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK; Deborah Sweet, Director, World Can't Wait; Mike Ferner, President, Veterans for Peace; Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition; Heidi Boghosian, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild; Ron Kovic, author of "Born on the 4th of July"; Juan Jose Gutierrez, Director, Latino Movement USA; Col. Ann Wright ret.); March Forward!; Partnership for Civil Justice; Palestinian American Women Association; Alliance for a Just and Lasting Peace in the Philippines; Alliance for Global Justice; Claudia de la Cruz, Pastor, Iglesia San Romero de Las Americas-UCC; Phil Portluck, Social Justice Ministry, Covenant Baptist Church, D.C.; Blase & Theresa Bonpane, Office of the Americas; Coalition for Peace and Democracy in Honduras; Comite Pro-Democracia en Mexico; Frente Unido de los Pueblos Americanos; Comites de Base FMLN, Los Angeles; Free Palestine Alliance; GABRIELA Network; Justice for Filipino American Veterans; KmB Pro-People Youth; Students Fight Back; Jim Lafferty, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild - LA Chapter; LEF Foundation; National Coalition to Free the Angola 3; Community Futures Collective; Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival; Companeros del Barrio; Barrio Unido for Full and Unconditional Amnesty, Bay Area United Against War.

A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.answercoalition.org/
info@internationalanswer.org
National Office in Washington DC: 202-265-1948
New York City: 212-694-8720
Los Angeles: 213-251-1025
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
Chicago: 773-463-0311

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The US Social Forum II
" June 22-26, 2010 "
Detroit, Michigan, USA
Another World Is Possible! Another US is Necessary!
http://www.ussf2010.org/

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B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS

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AMAZING SPEECH BY WAR VETERAN
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akm3nYN8aG8

The Unemployment Game Show: Are You *Really* Unemployed? - From Mint.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ulu3SCAmeBA

Video: Gaza Lives On
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU5Wi2jhnW0

ASSESSMENT - "LEFT IN THE COLD"- CROW CREEK - 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmfue_pjwho&feature=PlayList&p=217F560F18109313&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=5

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Tom Zaniello is a living, walking encyclopedia of films about labour.

I heard him speak at a conference once, but it wasn't so much a speech as a high-speed tour through dozens of film clips, lovingly selected, all aiming to make a point.

I don't know anyone who knows more about cinema and the labour movement than he does.

And Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff: An expanded guide to films about labor is his, well, encyclopedia about the subject.

It's a 434 page guide to 350 labour films from around the world, ranging from those you've heard of - Salt of the Earth, The Grapes of Wrath, Roger & Me - to those you've never heard of but will fall in love with once you see them.

Zaniello describes all the films in detail, tells you whether they're available for rental or purchase, and, if so, where.

Fiction and nonfiction, the films are about unions, labour history, working-class life, political movements, and the struggle between labour and capital.

Each entry includes critical commentary, production data, cast list, suggested related films, and annotated references to books and Web sites for further reading.

If you want to know more about labour films, buy this book.

And remember that every copy you purchase helps support LabourStart.

Thanks very much.

Eric Lee

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Marc Hall jailed for angry 'Stop-Loss' Hip Hop song
By Courage to Resist. Updated December 16, 2009

Stop-lossed Army Specialist Marc Hall aka Hip Hop artist Marc Watercus) was placed in the Liberty County Jail Friday, December 11 for speaking out against the continuing policy that has barred him from exiting the military, including recording an angry and explicit song. He was shipped off to jail after talking to to his Ft Stewart, Georgia commander Captain Cross about not wanting to redeploy. Call the jail at 912-876-6411 to demand an end to this illegal confinement. Also send letters of protest to: CPT Cross, Commander, B 2-7 INF BN, Fort Stewart GA 31314. Marc is being represented by civilian Washington DC lawyer Jim Klimaski. As of 5:00 pm EST) Monday, December 14, Marc was still in the county jail.

Marc Hall is the self-professed "first Hip Hop President of the World", with the issue of ending the Army's "Stop Loss" program being at the top of his agenda. On a music website, he explains, "I am a political artist. I rap about real issues in life in hopes to recover a solution. Life is based on decisions we make. So we should make decisions that will make us better in the future and fully aware in the present."

Recently Marc recorded an angry song entitled "Stop Loss" in order to artistically express some of his frustrations about his situation.

"Stop Loss" by Marc Hall aka Marc Watercus)
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/800/1/

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Dear all,

Dear all,
go the link below to endorse the BT petition against the death penalty in Iraq.

http://www.brusselstribunal.org/Petitions/Petition.html?lists=10&codes=7&s=0abaa878c308c42949c62790df13498f&email=siui_iraqsolidarity@yahoo.co.uk

regards
Tahrir

Maliki's election platform: 900 Iraqi prisoners face summary execution

In the run-up to elections, Maliki proposes executions to bolster his chances

Democracy in the new Iraq equals death and repression

Maliki serves the US occupation: it is the occupation that kills Iraqis

The machine of repression and death in Iraq continues unabated. The Presidential Council of Iraq has reportedly ratified the death sentences of some 900 detainees who languish on death row. Some 17 of them are confirmed to be women.

None of the condemned had a fair trial. The Iraqi judicial system has been deemed corrupt, fundamentally dysfunctional and plagued with sectarianism by responsible international agencies and all major human rights organisations. Hundreds of lawyers have been assassinated since 2003. The Association of Iraqi Lawyers has publicly declared that it cannot reach the detainees.

In a bid to eliminate its political opponents, further terrorise the Iraqi people, ostensibly into submission, and to be casted the "tough leader" the US pretends it is currently seeking for Iraq, Nouri Al-Maliki has pledged to carry out these executions ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled in March of 2010.

Iraq already has one of the highest rates of executions in the world. On a single day in June, 19 people were hanged in Baghdad. Without global action, 900 people will be hanged imminently.

A culture of terror and detention
Terror through mass detention, torture and abuse is one of the trademarks of the US occupation and Maliki. In addition to mass killing, mass forced displacement, the contamination of Iraqi soil, the destruction of all public infrastructure and means of survival, tens of thousands of Iraqis are arbitrarily detained in both official and ghost facilities all over Iraq.

Exact figures of the number, age and gender of detainees are withheld by authorities. Those who want investigations on abuse are either threatened or killed. In June 2009, Harith Al-Obaidi, an MP and critic of human rights abuses, announced in parliament his plan to investigate allegations of corruption, torture and abuse in Iraqi prisons. He was assassinated the following day.

Depending on the source, the number of detainees varies from 44,014 to some 400,000. Tens of thousands of families don't know the fate of a loved one arbitrarily arrested. Even the number of detention facilities is unknown. The ICRC, responsible for monitoring prisoners in time of conflict, has repeatedly complained of being denied access to all "field operation detention facilities" and secret prisons. Amnesty International, the International Federation of Human Rights and even the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq, mandated by the Security Council to provide human rights reporting, are denied access to official detention centres by US Command.

The Red Cross has reported that intelligence officers of the US occupation themselves estimate that 70-90 per cent of Iraqi detainees are arrested "by mistake". The majority is taken in sweeping and arbitrary mass arrest campaigns. They are held incommunicado, without charges, without visits from families or access to lawyers, for indefinite periods. The few who are formally accused are charged on the basis of confessions made under torture or the testimonies of dubious informants of the occupation. No tangible evidence is ever provided.

Since 2003, an estimated 2,400 children have been detained by the US, some as young as 10 years old. After denying it for years, the occupation has now acknowledged that a large but unspecified number of women are being held. Many were kidnapped to blackmail their husbands, accused of "terrorism," into surrendering. They often have their infants and children in prison with them. Several women inmates interviewed by UN researchers reported being raped and sexually abused while held in custody. The US bears primary and final responsibility for these conditions.

Maliki's new Iraq: repression
Everyday news outlets report more arrests and new killings by persons wearing official uniforms. The Maliki government praises itself for the recent waves of detention. Since its appointment, all it has succeeded in achieving is more repression of his opponents while the crimes against innocent people had never been investigated and punished.

Under occupation, Iraq has become the second most corrupted country in the world, the trade of prisoners one of the government militias' most lucrative businesses. The police kidnap, hold prisoners in ghost prisons, sell them and blackmail their families for ransom with impunity.

Year after year, alarming reports have been published by leading human rights organisations, inside and outside Iraq, pointing to random arrests, unlawful detentions, summary executions, abuses, rape and torture of prisoners in Iraq, both at the hands of occupation forces and their local armed gangs.

Under false accusations and deceitful propaganda, the absence of law or a functioning judicial system, and with the support of the US for its puppet government, humanity and the rights of the human being are insulted every day in Iraq. Millions of Iraqis are suffering.

An occupation that tries to impose its plans and interests by force and destruction on a people whose rights, interests and identity is to resist it can only result in the perpetuation of genocide - the intended destruction of Iraq and the Iraqi people as a state and nation.

Call for global action
We call on all to work to stop these executions, demand the release of all political prisoners, and impose a moratorium on the death penalty in Iraq.

Every Iraqi deserves protection and justice.

We call on the UN Human Rights Council to appoint a Special Rapporteur for the human rights situation in Iraq.

We call on all organisations that defend the first human right - the right to life - to take up with urgency the cause of the 900 prisoners on death row in Iraq.

We call on all lawyers associations to protest the absence of law and due process in Iraq, and to declare the imminent execution of these 900 prisoners unlawful.

900 prisoners killed in Iraq would be 900 insults to the common conscience of humanity.

We call on all to do everything within their means to bring the cases of these 900 prisoners facing death to the public eye, and to demand action by relevant authorities.

The US occupation of Iraq must end. It is that occupation that is the ultimate rope around the neck of Iraq, and the ultimate prison for the Iraqi people.

Hana Al Bayaty, Executive Committee of the BRussells Tribunal
Abdul Ilah Albayaty, Executive Committee of the BRussells Tribunal
Ian Douglas, Executive Committee of the BRussells Tribunal
Dirk Adriaensens, Executive Committee of the BRussells Tribunal

Please endorse, distribute and take action

For more information contact:
info@brusselstribunal.org
www.brusselstribunal.org

Endnotes

Zaineb Alani
http://www.thewordsthatcomeout.blogspot.com
http://www.tigresssmiles.blogspot.com
"Yesterday I lost a country. / I was in a hurry, / and didn't notice when it fell from me / like a broken branch from a forgetful tree. / Please, if anyone passes by / and stumbles across it, / perhaps in a suitcase / open to the sky, / or engraved on a rock / like a gaping wound, / ... / If anyone stumbles across it, / return it to me please. / Please return it, sir. / Please return it, madam. / It is my country . . . / I was in a hurry / when I lost it yesterday." -Dunya Mikhail, Iraqi poet

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----- Forwarded Message ----
From: MOOS-Bay
To: Counter Recruitment Events
Subject: [events] Youth Mini Grants, Online Petition, Discount CR Brochures

CR Brochures Available for Cut Rates!
Full Picture recently purchased a large quantity of the brochure, "What Every Girl Should Know About the U.S. Military," which was produced jointly by the War Resisters League and the Women of Color Resource Center. A copy of the brochure can be seen online at http://coloredgirls.live.radicaldesigns.org/downloads/What%20Every%20Girl%20Should%20Know.pdf.

Our network of counter-recruiting organizations and activists will probably not be able to distribute all of them in the near future. We'd like to see them get out to the youth who need them, and -- if necessary -- are willing to sell them at "a loss" to other counter-recruiters who'll be able to reach youth that we cannot. We paid 11.6 cents each, including shipping, which is significantly less than what you'd pay when buying small quantities. If you can make use of some, let us know how many and how much, if anything, you're able to pay. Please remember that we'll have to incur additional costs to ship them to you unless you're able to pick them up at the AFSC office in San Francisco, where we have them stored.
Kevin Casey, Full Picture Core Group, 510) 289-2621 kevinkevin-c-is@sbcglobal.net

Support Oakland Youth: Online Petition--Pass the Word!
The BAY-Peace Youth Manifesto is on it's home stretch to win stronger policies to protect Oakland high school students against aggressive military recruiting. Please help us reach our goal of 2000 signatures to deliver to the Oakland School Board. Sign the Youth Manifesto today and forward this link to your contacts to sign our online petition: http://www.baypeace.org

Mini-Grants for High School Counter Recruitment Projects
If you are part of a high school student group that would like to do a counter recruitment project, you can apply for a grant of up to $500 to help you get your message out about non-military alternatives for youth, aggressive military recruiting in our schools and resisting war.

Bay Area high school students are encouraged to apply. The deadline is the last day of each month, and the funds will be distributed quickly to qualified applicants, so don't wait to apply! For info contact: moos-bay@riseup.net

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Letter from Lynne from behind bars:

Dear Sisters and Brothers, Friends and Supporters:

Well the moment we all hoped would never come is upon us. Good bye to a good cup of coffee in the morning, a soft chair, the hugs of grandchildren and the smaller pleasures in life. I must say I am being treated well and that is due to my lawyer team and your overwhelming support.

While I have received "celebrity" treatment here in MCC - high visibility - conditions for the other women are deplorable. Medical care, food, education, recreation are all at minimal levels. If it weren't for the unqualified bonds of sisterhood and the commissary it would be even more dismal.

My fellow prisoners have supplied me with books and crosswords, a warm it is cold in here most of the time) sweat shirt and pants, treats from the commissary, and of course, jailhouse humor. Most important many of them know of my work and have a deep reservoir of can I say it? Respect.

I continue to both answer the questions put to me by them, I also can't resist commenting on the T.V. news or what is happening on the floor - a little LS politics always! Smile) to open hearts and minds!

Liz Fink, my lawyer leader, believes I will be here at MCC-NY for a while - perhaps a year before being moved to prison. Being is jail is like suddenly inhabiting a parallel universe but at least I have the luxury of time to read! Tomorrow I will get my commissary order which may include an AM/FM Radio and be restored to WBAI and music classical and jazz).

We are campaigning to get the bladder operation scheduled before I came in to MCC) to happen here in New York City. Please be alert to the website I case I need some outside support.

I want to say that the show of support outside the Courthouse on Thursday as I was "transported" is so cherished by me. The broad organizational representation was breathtaking and the love and politics expressed the anger too) will keep me nourished through this.

Organize - Agitate, Agitate, Agitate! And write to me and others locked down by the Evil Empire.

Love Struggle, Lynne Stewart

FREE LYNNE STEWART NOW!

Lynne Stewart in Jail!

For further information contact: Jeff Mackler, Coordinator, West Coast Lynne Stewart Defense Committee 510-268-9429 jmackler@lmi.net
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 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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The trial of Johannes Mehserle, killer of unarmed Oscar Grant, has been moved to Los Angeles.

In the case of an innocent verdict, folks are encouraged to head to Oakland City Hall ASAP to express our outrage in a massive and peaceful way! Our power is in our numbers! Oscar Grant's family and friends need our support!

For more information:
Contact BAMN at 510-502-9072
letters@bamn.com

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With a New Smile, 'Rage' Fades Away [SINGLE PAYER NOW!!!]
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/12/08/health/20091208_Clinic/index.html?ref=us

FTA [F**k The Army] Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HlkgPCgU7g

Jon Stewart: Obama Is Channeling Bush VIDEO)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/03/jon-stewart-obama-is-chan_n_378283.html

US anti-war activists protest
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/12/200912283650408132.html

Buffy Sainte Marie - No No Keshagesh
[Keshagesh is the Cree word to describe a greedy puppy that wants to keep eating everything, a metaphor for corporate greed]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKmAb1gNN74&feature=player_embedded#
Buffy Sainte-Marie - No No Keshagesh lyrics:
http://www.lyricsmode.com/?i=print_lyrics&id=705368

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The Tar Sands Blow
Hi -
I just signed the Tar Sands Blow petition -- and I hope you'll do the same.
The Canadian tar sands produce the dirtiest oil on earth -- including five times the greenhouse gases of conventional oil. World leaders meet next month in Copenhagen to deal with climate change. Sign the petition -- so that we all don't get a raw deal.
http://ien.thetarsandsblow.org/

The Story of Mouseland: As told by Tommy Douglas in 1944
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqgOvzUeiAA

The Communist Manifesto illustrated by Cartoons
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KUl4yfABE4

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VIDEO INTERVIEW: Dan Berger on Political Prisoners in the United States
By Angola 3 News
Angola 3 News
37 years ago in Louisiana, 3 young black men were silenced for trying to expose continued segregation, systematic corruption, and horrific abuse in the biggest prison in the US, an 18,000-acre former slave plantation called Angola. In 1972 and 1973 prison officials charged Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox, and Robert King with murders they did not commit and threw them into 6x9 ft. cells in solitary confinement, for over 36 years. Robert was freed in 2001, but Herman and Albert remain behind bars.
http://angola3news.blogspot.com/2009/09/video-dan-berger-on-political-prisoners.html

Taking Aim Radio Program with
Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone
The Chimera of Capitalist Recovery, Parts 1 and 2
http://www.takingaimradio.com/shows/audio.html

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JROTC MUST GO!

The San Francisco Board of Education has re-installed the Junior Reserve Officer's Training Corps in San Francisco schools -- including allowing it to count for Physical Education credits.

This is a complete reversal of the 2006 decision to end JROTC altogether in San Francisco public schools. Our children need a good physical education program, not a death education program!

With the economy in crisis; jobs and higher education for youth more unattainable; the lure, lies and false promises of military recruiters is driving more and more of our children into the military trap.

This is an economic draft and the San Francisco Board of Education is helping to snare our children to provide cannon fodder for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and for over 700 U.S. military bases around the world!

We can't depend upon "friendly politicians" who, while they are campaigning for office claim they are against the wars but when they get elected vote in favor of military recruitment--the economic draft--in our schools. We can't depend upon them. That has been proven beyond doubt!

It is up to all of us to come together to stop this NOW!

GET JROTC AND ALL MILITARY RECRUITERS OUT OF OUR SCHOOLS NOW!

Write, call, pester and ORGANIZE against the re-institution of JROTC in our San Francisco public schools NOW!

In solidarity,

Bonnie Weinstein
Bay Area United Against War Newsletter

San Francisco Board of Education
555 Franklin Street, 1st Floor
San Francisco, CA 94102
415/241-6427, 415) 241-6493
cascoe@sfusd.edu

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HELP VFP PUT THIS BOOK IN YOUR HIGH SCHOOL OR PUBLIC LIBRARY

For a donation of only $18.95, we can put a copy of the book "10 Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military" into a public or high school library of your choice. [Reason number 1: You may be killed]

A letter and bookplate will let readers know that your donation helped make this possible.

Putting a book in either a public or school library ensures that students, parents, and members of the community will have this valuable information when they need it.

Don't have a library you would like us to put it in? We'll find one for you!

https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/826/t/9311/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=4906

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This is a must-see video about the life of Oscar Grant, a young man who loved his family and was loved by his family. It's important to watch to understand the tremendous loss felt by his whole family as a result of his cold-blooded murder by BART police officers--Johannes Mehserle being the shooter while the others held Oscar down and handcuffed him to aid Mehserle in the murder of Oscar Grant January 1, 2009.

The family wants to share this video here with you who support justice for Oscar Grant.
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/07/21/18611878.php

WE DEMAND JUSTICE FOR OSCAR GRANT!

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Troy Anthony Davis is an African American man who has spent the last 18 years on death row for a murder he did not commit. There is no physical evidence tying him to the crime and seven out of nine witnesses have recanted. New evidence and new testimony have been presented to the Georgia courts, but the justice system refuses to consider this evidence, which would prove Troy Davis' innocence once and for all.

Sign the petition and join the NAACP, Amnesty International USA, and other partners in demanding justice for Troy Davis!

http://www.iamtroy.com/

For Now, High Court Punts on Troy Davis, on Death Row for 18 Years
By Ashby Jones
Wall Street Journal Law Blog
June 30, 2009
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/06/30/for-now-high-court-punts-on-troy-davis-on-death-row-for-18-years/

Take action now:
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&aid=12361&ICID=A0906A01&tr=y&auid=5030305

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Committee To Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 2012
New York, NY 10159-2012

New videos from April 24 Oakland Mumia event
http://abu-jamal-news.com/article?name=jlboak

Donations for Mumia's Legal Defense in the U.S. Our legal effort is the front line of the battle for Mumia's freedom and life. His legal defense needs help. The costs are substantial for our litigation in the U.S. Supreme Court and at the state level. To help, please make your checks payable to the National Lawyers Guild Foundation indicate "Mumia" on the bottom left). All donations are tax deductible under the Internal Revenue Code, section 501c)3), and should be mailed to:

It is outrageous and a violation of human rights that Mumia remains in prison and on death row. His life hangs in the balance. My career has been marked by successfully representing people facing death in murder cases. I will not rest until we win Mumia's case. Justice requires no less.

With best wishes,

Robert R. Bryan
Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal

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Short Video About Al-Awda's Work
The following link is to a short video which provides an overview of Al-Awda's work since the founding of our organization in 2000. This video was first shown on Saturday May 23, 2009 at the fundraising banquet of the 7th Annual Int'l Al-Awda Convention in Anaheim California. It was produced from footage collected over the past nine years.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiAkbB5uC0&eurl
Support Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!

Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, depends on your financial support to carry out its work.

To submit your tax-deductible donation to support our work, go to
http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html and follow the simple instructions.

Thank you for your generosity!

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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT!
FLASHPOINTS Interview with Innocent San Quentin Death Row Inmate
Kevin Cooper -- Aired Monday, May 18,2009
http://www.flashpoints.net/#GOOGLE_SEARCH_ENGINE
To learn more about Kevin Cooper go to:
savekevincooper.org
LINKS
San Francisco Chronicle article on the recent ruling:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/13/BAM517J8T3.DTL
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling and dissent:
http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2009/05/11/05-99004o.pdf

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COURAGE TO RESIST!
Support the troops who refuse to fight!
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/
Donate:
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/21/57/

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C. ARTICLES IN FULL

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1) U.S. Job Losses in December Dim Hopes for Quick Upswing
By PETER S. GOODMAN
January 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/09/business/economy/09jobs.html?hp

2) Sexual Abuse at Juvenile Centers
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Washington
January 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/us/08brfs-SEXUALABUSEA_BRF.html?ref=us

3) Invitation to Disaster
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
January 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/09/opinion/09herbert.html?hp

4) Unions Oppose Possible Health Insurance Tax
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
January 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/09/business/09union.html?hp

5) Hospital Cuts Dialysis Care for the Poor in Miami
By KEVIN SACK
January 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/health/policy/08dialysis.html?ref=health

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1) U.S. Job Losses in December Dim Hopes for Quick Upswing
By PETER S. GOODMAN
January 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/09/business/economy/09jobs.html?hp

The American economy lost another 85,000 jobs in December and the unemployment rate remained at 10 percent, setting back hopes for a swift recovery from the worst downturn since the Great Depression.

The latest monthly snapshot of the national job market released by the Labor Department on Friday provided one potentially encouraging milestone: Data for November was revised to show that the economy gained 4,000 net jobs that month, in contrast to initial reports showing a loss of 11,000 jobs. That marked the first monthly improvement since the recession began two years ago.

But the December data failed to repeat the trend, and the report disappointed economists who had generally been expecting a decline of perhaps 10,000 jobs.

The report broadly confirmed that while the pace of job market deterioration has declined markedly in recent months, companies remain reluctant to hire, heightening the likelihood that scarce paychecks will remain a dominant feature of American life for many months.

"We're still losing jobs," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. "It's nothing like we had in the freefall of last winter, but we're not about to turn around. We're still looking at a really weak economy."

The report intensified pressures on the Obama administration to show progress for the $787 million spending bill it championed last year to stimulate the economy. In recent months, the administration has emphasized initiatives aimed at encouraging jobs, while cognizant that concerns about the federal deficit limit its ability to pursue further spending.

"It certainly isn't the best report, because we continue to lose jobs," the Labor secretary Hilda L. Solis, said. "But last year at this time we were losing over 700,000 jobs a month. The recovery act continues to help."

Some economists fixed on a potentially positive trend tucked within the data: For a fifth consecutive month, temporary help services expanded, adding 47,000 positions in December. The increase burnished the notion that companies are recognizing fresh opportunities and are inclined to add labor, even as they hold off on hiring full-time workers.

"We're going in the right direction," said Michael T. Darda, chief economist at MKM Partners, a research and trading firm in Greenwich, Conn. "If we just have a little bit of patience, we'll start see monthly increases of 200,000 to 300,000 jobs within six months."

But in millions of households still grappling with the bite of a wrenching downturn, patience has long been exhausted - along with savings, credit and cash to pay the bills.

In Charlotte, N.C., Kumar G. Navile, 33, has applied for 500 positions across the country since he lost his job as an engineer a year ago. Each month, he finds himself about $600 short in his monthly expenses after the $1,680 he secures in unemployment benefits. He pays the difference from a savings account, but expects that money to dry up in the next two months.

"You get up every day and say today will be different, but it is mentally challenging when you don't find opportunities," Mr. Navile said. "I performed well in school. I got a job the day I graduated. It's been a struggle, and it continues to be."

For those out of work, the market is bleaker than ever. Unemployed people had been jobless for an average of 29 weeks in December, the longest duration since the government began tracking such data in 1948. Roughly 4 in 10 unemployed workers had been jobless for six months or longer.

In recent weeks, the number of new claims for unemployment insurance benefits has tailed off sharply. But the persistence of double-digit unemployment underscored that companies remain unwilling to add payroll.

"There is almost no hiring going on outside the temporary help sector," said Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Project. "Just slowing layoffs is not enough to produce jobs."

Indeed, even as temporary workers increased, the average workweek for rank-and-file employees - roughly 80 percent of the work force - was essentially unchanged in December, at 33.2 hours.

Amid the usual parsing of data that accompanies the monthly jobs report, the spinning of forecasts and dueling outlooks, no complexity cloaked the simple fact that employment remains scarce. Experts assume the economy needs to add about 100,000 jobs a month just to keep pace with new people entering the work force.

"There's really no dynamism in this economy," Mr. Baker said. "Most people, they're not looking at the data. They're just asking, 'Can I get a job?' And that's not getting any easier."

The government's monthly jobs report is always important, yet in recent times it has emerged as the crucial indicator of economic health.

For years, ordinary households have spent in excess of incomes by borrowing against the value of homes, leaning on credit cards and tapping stock portfolios. But home prices have plummeted in much of the country. Stock holdings have diminished. Nervous banks have sliced credit even for healthy borrowers. That has left the paycheck as the primary source of household finance in an economy in which consumer spending comprises roughly 70 percent of all activity.

Economists have grown increasingly divided over the nation's economic prospects. Some argue that recent expansion on the American factory floor presages broader economic improvement that will eventually deliver large numbers of jobs.

The December report failed to deliver clear evidence for that scenario, even as it saw the pace of job losses continue to slow. Construction lost another 53,000 jobs and manufacturing saw 27,000 positions disappear. Despite a surprisingly strong holiday shopping season, retail trade gave up 10,000 jobs in December.

Health care remained a rare bright spot, expanding by 22,000 jobs.

Skeptics argue that the factory expansion merely reflects a rebuilding of inventories after many businesses slashed stocks during the panic that accompanied the fall of prominent financial institutions such as Lehman Brothers in the fall of 2008. Expansion has also been aided by $787 billion in federal spending aimed at stimulating economic growth, and by tax credits for homebuyers.

Once these factors fade in coming months, skeptics argue, the economy will confront the same challenges that have dogged it for more than two years - strapped households fretting about debts and weak job prospects, curtailing spending; banks still worrying about losses to come on mortgage holdings, reluctant to lend; businesses unwilling to hire.

Those with the gloomiest outlooks envision a so-called double dip recession, in which the economy resumes contracting. Others fear years of stagnant growth much like Japan's Lost Decade in the 1990s.

The one point of agreement among economists is that the nation cannot recover without millions of new jobs. Workers must gain fresh wages they can spend at other businesses, creating jobs for other workers - a virtuous cycle, in the parlance of economists.

Recent months have produced tentative signs that such a cycle might be unfolding, even as economists debate its sustainability. The December jobs report only added to the ambiguity that now grips economic forecasting.

"Standing still feels good when you've been used to falling backwards," said Stuart G. Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh. "But we want to move forward."

Javier Hernandez contributed reporting.

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2) Sexual Abuse at Juvenile Centers
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Washington
January 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/us/08brfs-SEXUALABUSEA_BRF.html?ref=us

A new government study found that 13 juvenile detention facilities around the country had high rates of sexual abuse and victimization, with nearly one of every three detainees reporting victimization. The Justice Department study found that nationwide, about 12 percent of youths in state-run, privately run, or local detention facilities reported some type of sexual victimization. Six sites had reported victimization rates of 30 percent or higher.

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3) Invitation to Disaster
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
January 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/09/opinion/09herbert.html?hp

We didn't pay attention to the housing bubble. We closed our eyes to warnings that the levees in New Orleans were inadequate. We gave short shrift to reports that bin Laden was determined to attack the U.S. And now we're all but ignoring the fiscal train wreck that is coming from states with budget crises big enough to boggle the mind.

The states are in the worst fiscal shape since the Depression. The Great Recession has caused state tax revenues to fall off a cliff. Some states - New York and California come quickly to mind - are facing prolonged budget nightmares. Across the country, critical state services are being chopped like firewood. More cuts are coming. Taxes and fees are being raised. Yet the budgets in dozens and dozens of states remain drastically out of balance.

This is an arrow aimed straight at the heart of a robust national recovery. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has pointed out that if you add up the state budget gaps that have recently been plugged (in most cases, temporarily and haphazardly) and those that remain to be dealt with, you'll likely reach a staggering $350 billion for the 2010 and 2011 fiscal years.

This is not a disaster waiting to happen. It's under way.

Without substantial new federal help, state cuts that are now merely drastic will become draconian, and hundreds of thousands of additional jobs will be lost. The suffering is already widespread. Some states have laid off or furloughed employees. Tens of thousands of teachers have been let go as cuts have been made to public schools and critically important preschool programs. California has bludgeoned its public higher education system, one of the finest in the world.

Michigan has cut some of the benefits it provided to middle-class families struggling with the costs of health care for severely disabled children - benefits that helped pay for such things as incontinence supplies and transportation to special care centers. The Grand Rapids Press quoted a state official who acknowledged that the cuts were "tough" and were hurting families. But he added, "The state simply doesn't have the money."

The collapse of state tax revenues caused by the recession is the sharpest on record. Steep budget cuts have not been enough to offset the unprecedented plunge in tax collections that resulted from unemployment and other aspects of the downturn. The shortfalls swept the nation. As the Rockefeller Institute of Government reported, "Total tax revenue declined in all 44 states for which comparable early data are available."

State governments are not without fault. Very few have been paragons of fiscal responsibility over the years. California is a well-known basket case. New York has a Legislature that is a laughingstock. But for the federal government to resist offering substantial additional help in the face of this growing crisis would be foolhardy. You can't have a healthy national economy while dozens of states are hooked up to life support.

The Center on Budget offered some insight into how the trouble in the states adds up to trouble for us all:

"Expenditure cuts are problematic policies during an economic downturn because they reduce overall demand and can make the downturn deeper. When states cut spending, they lay off employees, cancel contracts with vendors, eliminate or lower payments to businesses and nonprofit organizations that provide direct services, and cut benefit payments to individuals.

"In all of these circumstances, the companies and organizations that would have received government payments have less money to spend on salaries and supplies, and individuals who would have received salaries or benefits have less money for consumption. This directly removes demand from the economy."

The Obama administration has provided significant help to states through its stimulus program, and it has made a difference. It prevented the crisis from being much worse. But much of that assistance will run out by the end of the year and states are fashioning budgets right now that will absolutely hammer the quality of life for some of their most vulnerable residents.

New York's lieutenant governor, Richard Ravitch, has been trying to bring a measure of sanity to the state's budget process. But as he told me this week, without additional federal help, many states will have no choice but to impose extreme budget cuts, or raise taxes, or - most likely - do both.

We need more responsible and less wasteful fiscal behavior from all levels of government. But the country is still faced with a national economic emergency, with tens of millions out of work or underemployed. We can hardly afford any additional economic shocks. Turning our backs on the desperate trouble the states are in right now is nothing less than an utterly willful invitation to disaster.

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4) Unions Oppose Possible Health Insurance Tax
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
January 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/09/business/09union.html?hp

When millions of blue-collar workers were leaning toward John McCain during the 2008 campaign, labor unions moved many of them into Barack Obama's column by repeatedly hammering one theme: Mr. McCain wanted to tax their health benefits.

But now labor leaders are fuming that President Obama has endorsed a tax on high-priced, employer-sponsored health insurance policies as a way to help cover the cost of health care reform. And as Senate and House leaders seek to negotiate a final health care bill, unions are pushing mightily to have that tax dropped from the legislation. Or at the very least, they want the price threshold raised so that the tax would affect fewer workers.

Labor leaders say the tax would hit not only wealthy executives with expensive health benefits, but also many rank-and-file union members who have often settled for lower wage increases in exchange for more generous health benefits.

The tax would affect individual insurance policies with annual premiums above $8,500 and family policies above $23,000, which by one union survey would affect one in four union members.

The House bill does not contain such an excise tax, and many House Democrats oppose adding it to the combined House-Senate legislation. But the tax is a critical revenue component in the Senate's bill. If the bill does too little to cover its costs, it might be defeated. Many economists support the tax, saying it will help hold down costs.

With labor groups warning that the tax will infuriate a key part of the Democratic base - union members - President Obama has agreed to meet with several top labor leaders on Monday to address their concerns and try to defuse their anger. The group includes the presidents of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., Teamsters and the steelworkers' and service employees' unions.

But whether the tax is negotiable remains unclear. Not only has Mr. Obama specifically endorsed the idea, but the White House and Senate leaders see the tax as pivotal in paying for the health care overhaul and addressing runaway health care costs.

Many Democrats and union officials fear that if both sides dig in on the issue, it could create a rift between the White House and labor - with some union leaders hinting they might lobby aggressively against the entire health care bill if it contains such a tax.

Union leaders have repeatedly warned the White House about the strong rank-and-file dismay, which could hurt the Democrats in Congressional elections this fall, especially in battleground states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Ron Gay, an AT&T repairman in Youngstown, Ohio, who spent much of the summer of 2008 urging co-workers to vote for Mr. Obama, said, "If this passes in its current form, a lot of working people are going to feel let down and betrayed by our legislators and president."

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 19 percent of workers - or about 30 million employees - would be affected by the tax in 2016. Economists say most of them would be nonunion, although it is organized labor that has the lobbying clout to take a stand.

In recent days, labor's strategy has become clear. Unions are urging their members to flood their representatives with e-mail messages and phone calls in the hope that the House will stand fast and reject the tax. The A.F.L.-C.I.O., a federation of nine million union members, has declared next Wednesday "National Call-In Day" asking workers to call their lawmakers to urge them not to tax health benefits. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters is urging members to tell their representatives that "such a tax is simply a massive middle-class tax hike that this nation's working families should not be forced to endure."

Many Democrats fear that enacting the tax will hurt their re-election chances.

"This would really have a negative impact on the Democratic base," said Representative Joe Courtney, Democrat of Connecticut, who has enlisted 190 House Democrats to sign a letter opposing the tax. "As far as the message goes, it's a real toughie to defend."

While union leaders would prefer killing the tax, some say privately that they could live with it if the threshold is lifted to $27,000, say, or $30,000. They argue that many insurance policies above $23,000 are typical of the coverage in high-cost areas like New York or Boston, or policies that cover small businesses or employers with older workers.

According to a union survey, one in four members would be hit by a $23,000 threshold, but only one in 14 if the threshold were raised to $27,000.

White House officials, however, voice concern that raising the threshold that much would lose $50 billion of the $149 billion in revenue that the tax is expected to generate over 10 years.

Those officials and Senate leaders argue, moreover, that unions are wrong to fight the tax, saying that it will hold down health costs and that money employers save on health premiums will ultimately go to higher wages.

Some experts say the tax's main effect would be to deter insurers from continually raising premiums. "This is a tax on insurance companies, not on workers," said Erin Shields, an aide to Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and a chief sponsor of the excise tax.

"Health care costs are rising much faster than inflation," Ms. Shields said. "Imposing this tax will help hold down costs because it will give employers an incentive to find a plan that falls beneath the threshold and will give insurers an incentive to offer the best possible plan below the threshold."

Ms. Shields defended Mr. Obama, saying the excise tax he backs is far different from Senator McCain's proposal. Mr. McCain called for eliminating tax breaks for employer-sponsored health benefits, replaced with a tax credit to help consumers obtain health insurance, Ms. Shields said.

She added that the measure Mr. Obama supports would tax only that part of a family policy above the $23,000 threshold - which would be taxed at a 40 percent rate.

But union officials say the tax will cause employers to push higher co-payments and deductibles onto their employees. They argue that a fairer way to generate revenue would be to embrace the House bill, which imposes an income tax surcharge on couples earning more than $1 million.

Neither the House nor the Senate would seem to have much wiggle room on the issue.

Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, has said he would oppose any bill containing the House's surtax. His vote was crucial in enabling Senate Democrats to reach the 60 votes needed to pass the health bill over a potential Republican filibuster.

The House bill, meanwhile, passed by only a five-vote margin, and at least three Democrats who voted for it - Mr. Courtney, Phil Hare of Illinois and Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire - have said they would oppose a final bill if it contained an excise tax like the Senate version.

Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, predicted the excise tax would raise workers' wages from 2010 to 2019. "There are many academic studies showing that when health costs rise, wages fall," he said. "In the mid- and late 1990s, when we got health costs under control, wages rose nicely." But he added that other factors could have also lifted wages during that period.

Leo W. Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers, scoffed at arguments that by restraining health costs, the tax would lead to higher wages.

"The people who are promoting this tax say companies will make up for this with higher wages," Mr. Gerard said. "These people who say that have never been at the bargaining table. It doesn't work that way."

Robert Gleason, chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, said Mr. Obama had made an about-face that would badly hurt the president and other Democrats. "You remember when the first President Bush said, 'Read my lips, no new taxes,' and he raised taxes and he went down to defeat," he added. "This is the same thing."

Michael P. James, a 57-year-old steelworker with the Timken Company in Canton, Ohio, campaigned for Mr. Obama and is seething about the tax.

"I don't think we should be penalized by this bill," Mr. James said. "The president would be going back on his word. If he goes ahead and passes a bill with the excise tax, I won't be able to support him again."

David M. Herszenhorn contributed reporting.

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5) Hospital Cuts Dialysis Care for the Poor in Miami
By KEVIN SACK
January 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/health/policy/08dialysis.html?ref=health

To chip away at an overwhelming budget deficit, Miami's public hospital system stopped paying for kidney dialysis for the indigent this week, officials said, leaving some patients to rely on emergency rooms for their life-sustaining treatments.

A total of 175 patients were affected by the decision by Jackson Health System, which runs South Florida's largest charity hospital, Jackson Memorial, and a number of smaller hospitals and clinics.

The situation at Jackson is similar to that at Atlanta's public hospital, Grady Memorial, which closed its outpatient dialysis clinic in early October to curb costs.

At Jackson, officials said patients could come to the emergency room for treatment, and eight have this week. "That's the best we can do right now," said Dr. Eneida O. Roldan, Jackson's chief executive.

Federal law requires that emergency rooms treat patients in serious medical jeopardy, regardless of their ability to pay. For patients with end-stage kidney disease, going without dialysis can prove fatal in as little as two weeks.

To be treated in an emergency room, however, dialysis patients often must show up in severe distress. In an interview, Dr. Roldan said patients could be treated in Jackson's emergency room as often as three times a week, the national standard for continuing dialysis.

Dialysis provided through an emergency room admission is considerably more expensive than routine treatment at a clinic. But while Jackson was not reimbursed for treating uninsured patients at private clinics, it can receive emergency Medicaid payments for dialysis provided through emergency rooms.

The hospital's decision thus shifts the financial burden from Miami-Dade County taxpayers, who support Jackson's charity care through various levies, to the state and federal governments, which finance the Medicaid program.

Dr. Roldan said the hospital hoped that South Florida hospitals and dialysis providers would form a consortium to pay for the care of uninsured renal patients.

At Grady in Atlanta, most of the patients were illegal immigrants who were not eligible for Medicare and Medicaid. The hospital helped about 10 immigrants relocate to their home countries and paid for dialysis there for a transitional three-month period.

About 50 patients have remained in Atlanta because Grady offered to pay for their dialysis at commercial clinics until Jan. 3. This week, the hospital extended that deadline by a month.

Industry officials said they did not know of other hospitals that had ended dialysis services.

Unlike Grady, Jackson did not operate its own dialysis unit but rather paid private clinics to provide the service to indigent patients. The treatments run about $50,000 a year.

The hospital was losing more than $4 million a year on dialysis, contributing to a deficit approaching $200 million this fiscal year. Over the last year, the economy has generated a nearly 50 percent increase in uncompensated care, and the hospital is also closing two community clinics this week.

All but 41 of Jackson's 175 patients continue to be treated - at least for the short term - at the commercial clinics, hospital officials said.

Jackson discovered that some dialysis patients were eligible for government insurance. Others will be treated for a few more months because of contractual obligations.

Some clinics accepted small numbers of uninsurable patients as charity cases. One patient wed her boyfriend of two years to qualify for his health insurance, a clinic social worker said.

For the patients, including a dozen illegal immigrants, it is a time of worry. "My hair has been falling out," said one of them, Josefina Tello, 37, from Mexico. "From everything I'm seeing, the only choice is the emergency room."

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Friday, January 08, 2010

BAUAW NEWSLETTER - FRIDAY, JANUARY 8, 2010

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Urgent action needed to stop executions in CA
By Stephanie Faucher, Death Penalty Focus
January 8, 2009
stefanie@deathpenalty.org

Dear supporters,

Please take action today to stop executions from resuming in California. This is very urgent, without your help executions could occur in the near future.

Both Californians and non-Californians are encouraged to take action.

Letters must be received by January 20, 2010 at 5pm PDT.

BACKGROUND:

On January 4, 2010, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) proposed minor revisions to its lethal injection procedures in the form of amendments to its previously proposed procedures. CDCR set a fifteen-day comment period ending January 20, 2010 at 5:00 p.m. during which the public can submit written comments on the proposed amendments.

The amended regulations, which are virtually identical to the regulations proposed in May 2009, can be found here:

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=DsL2ekA4m2nB2qSfspkiCinFkqj%2BKN3u

The above link contains only those regulations that were amended. To see the full text of the proposed regulations proposed in May 2009, go to this link:

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=NHU2PZL0sQWgLuC6BWt%2BfynFkqj%2BKN3u

TAKE ACTION:

We have created a draft letter which you can personalize and send here:

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/1265/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=1988

A separate letter will also be sent the Governor of California.

Thank you for taking action!

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BAUAW responds:

Here is the letter I wrote as a representative of BAUAW:

I oppose the racist death penalty to its very core. There is no "humanitarian" way to murder someone. It's barbaric.

Already so many who have been on death row for decades have been proven to be innocent victims of gross forensic mistakes or blatant police frame-ups.

The poor are routinely afforded inferior and indifferent legal services that serve mainly as a go-between the prosecution and accused. It can hardly be called legal defense.

Justice is not served equally or fairly in the United States. Most other nations have done away with the death penalty. Here our "great minds of justice" debate the best way to kill.

Under these concrete circumstances, instead of limiting the appeals process for prisoners, the justice system should bend over backwards to hear and re-hear the evidence and set free those who have been convicted unfairly.

Death should never be our conscious choice as a nation.

I am also very concerned about the newly revised lethal injection procedures.

In particular, I have the following concerns:

* The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) added a news article from the Santa Rosa Press Democrat to the rulemaking file. The article mentions that the original creator of the three-drug lethal injection formula has suggested ways to reform the process, including keeping up with changing drugs and science and proper training of lethal injection team members. The recent experience of Romell Broom in Ohio reinforces a point raised in the article, that botched executions are a real possibility, especially in California, due to the limited training of the lethal injection team members and California’s repeated failure to meaningfully change its protocol.

* CDCR’s amended regulations continue to be wholly inadequate and inapplicable to female condemned inmates. The regulations now specify that a female condemned inmate shall be transported to San Quentin no sooner than 72 hours and no later than six hours prior to the scheduled execution, but contain no provisions to implement the required 45-day chronology of events prior to her arrival at San Quentin. CDCR also fails to address how and if the female condemned inmate will be in contact with her family members and her legal team during her transport, which may take place on the same day as her scheduled execution.

* Contrary to CDCR’s claim, the amended regulations continue to treat the condemned prisoner’s witnesses differently than the victim’s witnesses. The victim’s family is allowed an unlimited number of witnesses at the execution, whereas the prisoner scheduled to die is limited to five individuals other than her or his spiritual adviser. In the event of lack of space, the victim’s family is provided with the option of remote viewing of the execution, while the same option is not extended to the inmate’s family.

*The distinction drawn between Chaplains and "approved" Spiritual Advisors is confusing and it is unclear how and when a person may become a "pre-approved" Spiritual Advisor.

I expect that you will take these concerns very seriously.

Sincerely,

Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War, bauaw.org

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YouTube - SF Hotel Workers Rally With AFL-CIO Trumka And March On Hilton Hotel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzI8k5Ipwsk

On Jan 5, 2010 over 1,400 SF Hotel Workers Rallied and marched With AFL-CIO President Trumka and Unite-Here President Wilhelm for a contract for the 9,000 unionized hotel workers whose contracts have expired. Over 150 workers and supporters were arrested at the Hilton Hotel which the union is boycotting. For further information on the union go to www.unitehere2.org

Produced by The Labor Video Project
P.O. Box 720027
SF, CA 94172
laborvideo.blip.tv
www.laborvideo.org
(415)282-1908

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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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NEXT MARCH 20 COALITION MEETING:
SATURDAY, JANUARY 9, 2010, 2:00 P.M.
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO
474 VALENCIA STREET
Between 16th and 15th Streets, SF)

The first meeting was held Wednesday, December 9 at 7:00 P.M. It was a broad, democratically run meeting with over 40 people in attendance from many different groups and organizations as well as individuals.

There was an atmosphere of renewed energy and resolve to build as large a demonstration as possible to mark the seventh year of "Shock and Awe" against the people of Iraq. It was especially poignant on the eve of Obama's Orwellian "war is for peace" Nobel speech.

We are encouraging all groups, organizations and individuals to join with us to demand an immediate end of these wars and to demand that the trillions spent on war be used for jobs, housing, healthcare, education for all!

Obama, in his Nobel remarks, points out his intentions to escalate his "wars for peace" wherever the U.S. empire desires to go.

As many pointed out at the first coalition meeting on Wednesday night, the financial, physical and emotional burden for these wars falls on working people across the globe in the broadest war plan ever devised by any empire!

The honeymoon is over! These are Obama's wars and we must organize massively against them.

Please plan on attending the next March 20, 2010 coalition meeting so we can organize broad outreach in our communities and make March 20, 2010 a powerful statement of opposition to the wars and for a world of equality, peace and justice for all.

For more information call: 415-821-6545

In solidarity,

Bonnie Weinstein, bauaw.org

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Getting in Gear for the New Year... of Resistance!
info@bayareacodepink.org

Our 2010 beginning Occupation Strategy from January (in the Bay Area) thru March (in D.C.) and beyond.

A coalition of organizations including CodePINK, Cindy Sheehan, and World Can't Wait are planning a Day of Occupation Actions to END WAR NOW around the Bay Area on January 20th, the 1 year anniversary of Obama's inauguration leading up to many days/weeks of actions at CAMP OUT in Washington D.C. March 13th thru???

The goal for the 20th is to engage in TWENTY different actions around the Bay, from banner drops to teach-ins to occupations at intersections, roof tops, and offices.

The next coalition meeting is Jan 10th, 3pm at Mudrakers Café, 2801 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley in the back room.

Call 510-540-7007 or email info bayareacodepink.org for more info and/or to sign up

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Demand justice for Oscar Grant: Jan. 13 in Oakland

Today marks a year since Oakland erupted in rebellion that got a cop charged with murder for the first time ever in California . And that same night the cops called themselves retaliating by arresting our own Minister of Information JR for the bogus crime of felony arson of a trash can. Not only didn't he do it, but there's no trace on the trash can that it was ever on fire!

Every one of us has a role to play in this historic drama - to ensure that triggerman Johannes Mehserle, who executed Oscar Grant in cold blood, is convicted even though his trial's been moved from Oakland to LA (our thanks to LA activists for their fast and masterful organizing!), and to ensure that JR, whose trial starts Feb. 22, is acquitted. If you're in LA or the Bay Area, your presence is needed at these events - details at Demand justice for Oscar Grant: Jan. 13 in Oakland:

Wednesday, Jan. 13, 7 p.m., Black Dot Café, 1195 Pine St. West Oakland: fundraiser for the last two of the Oakland 100 arrested during the Oakland Rebellions still facing charges, Minister of Information JR and punk rock artist Holly Works, featuring the screening of "Operation Small Axe," which has just been accepted by the Pan African Film Festival in LA - special guest: former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney!

These young activists need and deserve all the help you can give them. Both need funds for their legal defense, and JR needs to replace his camera, which the Oakland PD still refuses to return.

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National Call for March 4 Strike and Day of Action To Defend Public Education
By Elly
http://defendcapubliceducation.wordpress.com/?blogsub=confirmed#subscribe-blog

California has recently seen a massive movement erupt in defense of public education -- but layoffs, fee hikes, cuts, and the re-segregation of public education are attacks taking place throughout the country. A nationwide resistance movement is needed.

We call on all students, workers, teachers, parents, and their organizations and communities across the country to massively mobilize for a Strike and Day of Action in Defense of Public Education on March 4, 2010. Education cuts are attacks against all of us, particularly in working-class communities and communities of color.

The politicians and administrators say there is no money for education and social services. They say that "there is no alternative" to the cuts. But if there's money for wars, bank bailouts, and prisons, why is there no money for public education?

We can beat back the cuts if we unite students, workers, and teachers across all sectors of public education - Pre K-12, adult education, community colleges, and state-funded universities. We appeal to the leaders of the trade union movement to support and organize strikes and/or mass actions on March 4. The weight of workers and students united in strikes and mobilizations would shift the balance of forces entirely against the current agenda of cuts and make victory possible.

Building a powerful movement to defend public education will, in turn, advance the struggle in defense of all public-sector workers and services and will be an inspiration to all those fighting against the wars, for immigrants rights, in defense of jobs, for single-payer health care, and other progressive causes.

Why March 4? On October 24, 2009 more than 800 students, workers, and teachers converged at UC Berkeley at the Mobilizing Conference to Save Public Education. This massive meeting brought together representatives from over 100 different schools, unions, and organizations from all across California and from all sectors of public education. After hours of open collective discussion, the participants voted democratically, as their main decision, to call for a Strike and Day of Action on March 4, 2010. All schools, unions and organizations are free to choose their specific demands and tactics -- such as strikes, rallies, walkouts, occupations, sit-ins, teach-ins, etc. -- as well as the duration of such actions.

Let's make March 4 an historic turning point in the struggle against the cuts, layoffs, fee hikes, and the re-segregation of public education.

- The California Coordinating Committee

To endorse this call and to receive more information contact:
march4strikeanddayofaction@gmail.com

and check out:
www.defendcapubliceducation.wordpress.com

Andy Griggs
andyca6@gmail.com
310-704-3217

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U.S. OUT OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN NOW!
FREE PALESTINE!

San Francisco March and Rally
on Saturday, March 20, 2010
11am, Civic Center Plaza

National March on Washington
on Saturday, March 20, 2010
Fri., March 19 Day of Action & Outreach in D.C.

People from all over the country are organizing to converge on Washington, D.C., to demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan and Iraq.

On Saturday, March 20, 2010, there will be a massive National March & Rally in D.C. A day of action and outreach in Washington, D.C., will take place on Friday, March 19, preceding the Saturday march.

There will be coinciding mass marches on March 20 in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The national actions are initiated by a large number of organizations and prominent individuals. see below)

Click here to become an endorser:

http://answer.pephost.org/site/Survey?SURVEY_ID=5940&ACTION_REQUIRED=URI_ACTION_USER_REQUESTS&autologin=true&link=endorse-body-1

Click here to make a donation:

https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Donation?ACTION=SHOW_DONATION_OPTIONS&CAMPAIGN_ID=2302&autologin=true&donate=body-1&JServSessionIdr002=2yzk5fh8x2.app13b

We will march together to say "No Colonial-type Wars and Occupations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine!" We will march together to say "No War Against Iran!" We will march together to say "No War for Empire Anywhere!"

Instead of war, we will demand funds so that every person can have a job, free and universal health care, decent schools, and affordable housing.

March 20 is the seventh anniversary of the criminal war of aggression launched by Bush and Cheney against Iraq. One million or more Iraqis have died. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops have lost their lives or been maimed, and continue to suffer a whole host of enduring problems from this terrible war.

This is the time for united action. The slogans on banners may differ, but all those who carry them should be marching shoulder to shoulder.

Killing and dying to avoid the perception of defeat

Bush is gone, but the war and occupation in Iraq still go on. The Pentagon is demanding a widening of the war in Afghanistan. They project an endless war with shifting battlefields. And a "single-payer" war budget that only grows larger and larger each year. We must act.

Both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were predicated on the imperial fantasy that the U.S. could create stable, proxy colonial-type governments in both countries. They were to serve as an extension of "American" power in these strategic and resource-rich regions.

That fantasy has been destroyed. Now U.S. troops are being sent to kill or be killed so that the politicians in uniform "the generals and admirals") and those in three-piece suits "our elected officials") can avoid taking responsibility for a military setback in wars that should have never been started. Their military ambitions are now reduced to avoiding the appearance of defeat.

That is exactly what happened in Vietnam! Avoiding defeat, or the perception of defeat, was the goal Nixon and Kissinger set for themselves when they took office in 1969. For this noble cause, another 30,000 young GIs perished before the inevitable troop pullout from Vietnam in 1973. The number of Vietnamese killed between 1969 and 1973 was greater by many hundreds of thousands.

All of us can make the difference - progress and change comes from the streets and from the grassroots.

The people went to the polls in 2008, and the enthusiasm and desire for change after eight years of the Bush regime was the dominant cause that led to election of a big Democratic Party majority in both Houses of Congress and the election of Barack Obama to the White House.

But it should now be obvious to all that waiting for politicians to bring real change - on any front - is simply a prescription for passivity by progressives and an invitation to the array of corporate interests from military contractors to the banks, to big oil, to the health insurance giants that dominate the political life of the country. These corporate interests work around the clock to frustrate efforts for real change, and they are the guiding hand behind the recent street mobilizations of the ultra-right.

It is up to us to act. If people had waited for politicians to do the right thing, there would have never been a Civil Rights Act, or unions, women's rights, an end to the Vietnam war or any of the profound social achievements and basic rights that people cherish.

It is time to be back in the streets. Organizing centers are being set up in cities and towns throughout the country.

We must raise $50,000 immediately just to get started. Please make your contribution today. We need to reserve buses, which are expensive $1,800 from NYC, $5,000 from Chicago, etc.). We have to print 100,000 leaflets, posters and stickers. There will be other substantial expenses as March 20 draws closer.

Please become an endorser and active supporter of the March 20 National March on Washington.

Please make an urgently needed tax-deductible donation today. We can't do this without your active support.

The initiators of the March 20 National March on Washington preceded by the March 19 Day of Action and Outreach in D.C.) include: the ANSWER Coalition; Muslim American Society Freedom; National Council of Arab Americans; Cynthia McKinney; Malik Rahim, co-founder of Common Ground Collective; Ramsey Clark; Cindy Sheehan; Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK; Deborah Sweet, Director, World Can't Wait; Mike Ferner, President, Veterans for Peace; Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition; Heidi Boghosian, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild; Ron Kovic, author of "Born on the 4th of July"; Juan Jose Gutierrez, Director, Latino Movement USA; Col. Ann Wright ret.); March Forward!; Partnership for Civil Justice; Palestinian American Women Association; Alliance for a Just and Lasting Peace in the Philippines; Alliance for Global Justice; Claudia de la Cruz, Pastor, Iglesia San Romero de Las Americas-UCC; Phil Portluck, Social Justice Ministry, Covenant Baptist Church, D.C.; Blase & Theresa Bonpane, Office of the Americas; Coalition for Peace and Democracy in Honduras; Comite Pro-Democracia en Mexico; Frente Unido de los Pueblos Americanos; Comites de Base FMLN, Los Angeles; Free Palestine Alliance; GABRIELA Network; Justice for Filipino American Veterans; KmB Pro-People Youth; Students Fight Back; Jim Lafferty, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild - LA Chapter; LEF Foundation; National Coalition to Free the Angola 3; Community Futures Collective; Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival; Companeros del Barrio; Barrio Unido for Full and Unconditional Amnesty, Bay Area United Against War.

A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.answercoalition.org/
info@internationalanswer.org
National Office in Washington DC: 202-265-1948
New York City: 212-694-8720
Los Angeles: 213-251-1025
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
Chicago: 773-463-0311

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The US Social Forum II
" June 22-26, 2010 "
Detroit, Michigan, USA
Another World Is Possible! Another US is Necessary!
http://www.ussf2010.org/

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B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS

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AMAZING SPEECH BY WAR VETERAN
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akm3nYN8aG8

The Unemployment Game Show: Are You *Really* Unemployed? - From Mint.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ulu3SCAmeBA

Video: Gaza Lives On
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU5Wi2jhnW0

ASSESSMENT - "LEFT IN THE COLD"- CROW CREEK - 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmfue_pjwho&feature=PlayList&p=217F560F18109313&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=5

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Tom Zaniello is a living, walking encyclopedia of films about labour.

I heard him speak at a conference once, but it wasn't so much a speech as a high-speed tour through dozens of film clips, lovingly selected, all aiming to make a point.

I don't know anyone who knows more about cinema and the labour movement than he does.

And Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff: An expanded guide to films about labor is his, well, encyclopedia about the subject.

It's a 434 page guide to 350 labour films from around the world, ranging from those you've heard of - Salt of the Earth, The Grapes of Wrath, Roger & Me - to those you've never heard of but will fall in love with once you see them.

Zaniello describes all the films in detail, tells you whether they're available for rental or purchase, and, if so, where.

Fiction and nonfiction, the films are about unions, labour history, working-class life, political movements, and the struggle between labour and capital.

Each entry includes critical commentary, production data, cast list, suggested related films, and annotated references to books and Web sites for further reading.

If you want to know more about labour films, buy this book.

And remember that every copy you purchase helps support LabourStart.

Thanks very much.

Eric Lee

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Marc Hall jailed for angry 'Stop-Loss' Hip Hop song
By Courage to Resist. Updated December 16, 2009

Stop-lossed Army Specialist Marc Hall aka Hip Hop artist Marc Watercus) was placed in the Liberty County Jail Friday, December 11 for speaking out against the continuing policy that has barred him from exiting the military, including recording an angry and explicit song. He was shipped off to jail after talking to to his Ft Stewart, Georgia commander Captain Cross about not wanting to redeploy. Call the jail at 912-876-6411 to demand an end to this illegal confinement. Also send letters of protest to: CPT Cross, Commander, B 2-7 INF BN, Fort Stewart GA 31314. Marc is being represented by civilian Washington DC lawyer Jim Klimaski. As of 5:00 pm EST) Monday, December 14, Marc was still in the county jail.

Marc Hall is the self-professed "first Hip Hop President of the World", with the issue of ending the Army's "Stop Loss" program being at the top of his agenda. On a music website, he explains, "I am a political artist. I rap about real issues in life in hopes to recover a solution. Life is based on decisions we make. So we should make decisions that will make us better in the future and fully aware in the present."

Recently Marc recorded an angry song entitled "Stop Loss" in order to artistically express some of his frustrations about his situation.

"Stop Loss" by Marc Hall aka Marc Watercus)
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/800/1/

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Dear all,

Dear all,
go the link below to endorse the BT petition against the death penalty in Iraq.

http://www.brusselstribunal.org/Petitions/Petition.html?lists=10&codes=7&s=0abaa878c308c42949c62790df13498f&email=siui_iraqsolidarity@yahoo.co.uk

regards
Tahrir

Maliki's election platform: 900 Iraqi prisoners face summary execution

In the run-up to elections, Maliki proposes executions to bolster his chances

Democracy in the new Iraq equals death and repression

Maliki serves the US occupation: it is the occupation that kills Iraqis

The machine of repression and death in Iraq continues unabated. The Presidential Council of Iraq has reportedly ratified the death sentences of some 900 detainees who languish on death row. Some 17 of them are confirmed to be women.

None of the condemned had a fair trial. The Iraqi judicial system has been deemed corrupt, fundamentally dysfunctional and plagued with sectarianism by responsible international agencies and all major human rights organisations. Hundreds of lawyers have been assassinated since 2003. The Association of Iraqi Lawyers has publicly declared that it cannot reach the detainees.

In a bid to eliminate its political opponents, further terrorise the Iraqi people, ostensibly into submission, and to be casted the "tough leader" the US pretends it is currently seeking for Iraq, Nouri Al-Maliki has pledged to carry out these executions ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled in March of 2010.

Iraq already has one of the highest rates of executions in the world. On a single day in June, 19 people were hanged in Baghdad. Without global action, 900 people will be hanged imminently.

A culture of terror and detention
Terror through mass detention, torture and abuse is one of the trademarks of the US occupation and Maliki. In addition to mass killing, mass forced displacement, the contamination of Iraqi soil, the destruction of all public infrastructure and means of survival, tens of thousands of Iraqis are arbitrarily detained in both official and ghost facilities all over Iraq.

Exact figures of the number, age and gender of detainees are withheld by authorities. Those who want investigations on abuse are either threatened or killed. In June 2009, Harith Al-Obaidi, an MP and critic of human rights abuses, announced in parliament his plan to investigate allegations of corruption, torture and abuse in Iraqi prisons. He was assassinated the following day.

Depending on the source, the number of detainees varies from 44,014 to some 400,000. Tens of thousands of families don't know the fate of a loved one arbitrarily arrested. Even the number of detention facilities is unknown. The ICRC, responsible for monitoring prisoners in time of conflict, has repeatedly complained of being denied access to all "field operation detention facilities" and secret prisons. Amnesty International, the International Federation of Human Rights and even the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq, mandated by the Security Council to provide human rights reporting, are denied access to official detention centres by US Command.

The Red Cross has reported that intelligence officers of the US occupation themselves estimate that 70-90 per cent of Iraqi detainees are arrested "by mistake". The majority is taken in sweeping and arbitrary mass arrest campaigns. They are held incommunicado, without charges, without visits from families or access to lawyers, for indefinite periods. The few who are formally accused are charged on the basis of confessions made under torture or the testimonies of dubious informants of the occupation. No tangible evidence is ever provided.

Since 2003, an estimated 2,400 children have been detained by the US, some as young as 10 years old. After denying it for years, the occupation has now acknowledged that a large but unspecified number of women are being held. Many were kidnapped to blackmail their husbands, accused of "terrorism," into surrendering. They often have their infants and children in prison with them. Several women inmates interviewed by UN researchers reported being raped and sexually abused while held in custody. The US bears primary and final responsibility for these conditions.

Maliki's new Iraq: repression
Everyday news outlets report more arrests and new killings by persons wearing official uniforms. The Maliki government praises itself for the recent waves of detention. Since its appointment, all it has succeeded in achieving is more repression of his opponents while the crimes against innocent people had never been investigated and punished.

Under occupation, Iraq has become the second most corrupted country in the world, the trade of prisoners one of the government militias' most lucrative businesses. The police kidnap, hold prisoners in ghost prisons, sell them and blackmail their families for ransom with impunity.

Year after year, alarming reports have been published by leading human rights organisations, inside and outside Iraq, pointing to random arrests, unlawful detentions, summary executions, abuses, rape and torture of prisoners in Iraq, both at the hands of occupation forces and their local armed gangs.

Under false accusations and deceitful propaganda, the absence of law or a functioning judicial system, and with the support of the US for its puppet government, humanity and the rights of the human being are insulted every day in Iraq. Millions of Iraqis are suffering.

An occupation that tries to impose its plans and interests by force and destruction on a people whose rights, interests and identity is to resist it can only result in the perpetuation of genocide - the intended destruction of Iraq and the Iraqi people as a state and nation.

Call for global action
We call on all to work to stop these executions, demand the release of all political prisoners, and impose a moratorium on the death penalty in Iraq.

Every Iraqi deserves protection and justice.

We call on the UN Human Rights Council to appoint a Special Rapporteur for the human rights situation in Iraq.

We call on all organisations that defend the first human right - the right to life - to take up with urgency the cause of the 900 prisoners on death row in Iraq.

We call on all lawyers associations to protest the absence of law and due process in Iraq, and to declare the imminent execution of these 900 prisoners unlawful.

900 prisoners killed in Iraq would be 900 insults to the common conscience of humanity.

We call on all to do everything within their means to bring the cases of these 900 prisoners facing death to the public eye, and to demand action by relevant authorities.

The US occupation of Iraq must end. It is that occupation that is the ultimate rope around the neck of Iraq, and the ultimate prison for the Iraqi people.

Hana Al Bayaty, Executive Committee of the BRussells Tribunal
Abdul Ilah Albayaty, Executive Committee of the BRussells Tribunal
Ian Douglas, Executive Committee of the BRussells Tribunal
Dirk Adriaensens, Executive Committee of the BRussells Tribunal

Please endorse, distribute and take action

For more information contact:
info@brusselstribunal.org
www.brusselstribunal.org

Endnotes

Zaineb Alani
http://www.thewordsthatcomeout.blogspot.com
http://www.tigresssmiles.blogspot.com
"Yesterday I lost a country. / I was in a hurry, / and didn't notice when it fell from me / like a broken branch from a forgetful tree. / Please, if anyone passes by / and stumbles across it, / perhaps in a suitcase / open to the sky, / or engraved on a rock / like a gaping wound, / ... / If anyone stumbles across it, / return it to me please. / Please return it, sir. / Please return it, madam. / It is my country . . . / I was in a hurry / when I lost it yesterday." -Dunya Mikhail, Iraqi poet

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----- Forwarded Message ----
From: MOOS-Bay
To: Counter Recruitment Events
Subject: [events] Youth Mini Grants, Online Petition, Discount CR Brochures

CR Brochures Available for Cut Rates!
Full Picture recently purchased a large quantity of the brochure, "What Every Girl Should Know About the U.S. Military," which was produced jointly by the War Resisters League and the Women of Color Resource Center. A copy of the brochure can be seen online at http://coloredgirls.live.radicaldesigns.org/downloads/What%20Every%20Girl%20Should%20Know.pdf.

Our network of counter-recruiting organizations and activists will probably not be able to distribute all of them in the near future. We'd like to see them get out to the youth who need them, and -- if necessary -- are willing to sell them at "a loss" to other counter-recruiters who'll be able to reach youth that we cannot. We paid 11.6 cents each, including shipping, which is significantly less than what you'd pay when buying small quantities. If you can make use of some, let us know how many and how much, if anything, you're able to pay. Please remember that we'll have to incur additional costs to ship them to you unless you're able to pick them up at the AFSC office in San Francisco, where we have them stored.
Kevin Casey, Full Picture Core Group, 510) 289-2621 kevinkevin-c-is@sbcglobal.net

Support Oakland Youth: Online Petition--Pass the Word!
The BAY-Peace Youth Manifesto is on it's home stretch to win stronger policies to protect Oakland high school students against aggressive military recruiting. Please help us reach our goal of 2000 signatures to deliver to the Oakland School Board. Sign the Youth Manifesto today and forward this link to your contacts to sign our online petition: http://www.baypeace.org

Mini-Grants for High School Counter Recruitment Projects
If you are part of a high school student group that would like to do a counter recruitment project, you can apply for a grant of up to $500 to help you get your message out about non-military alternatives for youth, aggressive military recruiting in our schools and resisting war.

Bay Area high school students are encouraged to apply. The deadline is the last day of each month, and the funds will be distributed quickly to qualified applicants, so don't wait to apply! For info contact: moos-bay@riseup.net

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Letter from Lynne from behind bars:

Dear Sisters and Brothers, Friends and Supporters:

Well the moment we all hoped would never come is upon us. Good bye to a good cup of coffee in the morning, a soft chair, the hugs of grandchildren and the smaller pleasures in life. I must say I am being treated well and that is due to my lawyer team and your overwhelming support.

While I have received "celebrity" treatment here in MCC - high visibility - conditions for the other women are deplorable. Medical care, food, education, recreation are all at minimal levels. If it weren't for the unqualified bonds of sisterhood and the commissary it would be even more dismal.

My fellow prisoners have supplied me with books and crosswords, a warm it is cold in here most of the time) sweat shirt and pants, treats from the commissary, and of course, jailhouse humor. Most important many of them know of my work and have a deep reservoir of can I say it? Respect.

I continue to both answer the questions put to me by them, I also can't resist commenting on the T.V. news or what is happening on the floor - a little LS politics always! Smile) to open hearts and minds!

Liz Fink, my lawyer leader, believes I will be here at MCC-NY for a while - perhaps a year before being moved to prison. Being is jail is like suddenly inhabiting a parallel universe but at least I have the luxury of time to read! Tomorrow I will get my commissary order which may include an AM/FM Radio and be restored to WBAI and music classical and jazz).

We are campaigning to get the bladder operation scheduled before I came in to MCC) to happen here in New York City. Please be alert to the website I case I need some outside support.

I want to say that the show of support outside the Courthouse on Thursday as I was "transported" is so cherished by me. The broad organizational representation was breathtaking and the love and politics expressed the anger too) will keep me nourished through this.

Organize - Agitate, Agitate, Agitate! And write to me and others locked down by the Evil Empire.

Love Struggle, Lynne Stewart

FREE LYNNE STEWART NOW!

Lynne Stewart in Jail!

For further information contact: Jeff Mackler, Coordinator, West Coast Lynne Stewart Defense Committee 510-268-9429 jmackler@lmi.net
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 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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The trial of Johannes Mehserle, killer of unarmed Oscar Grant, has been moved to Los Angeles.

In the case of an innocent verdict, folks are encouraged to head to Oakland City Hall ASAP to express our outrage in a massive and peaceful way! Our power is in our numbers! Oscar Grant's family and friends need our support!

For more information:
Contact BAMN at 510-502-9072
letters@bamn.com

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With a New Smile, 'Rage' Fades Away [SINGLE PAYER NOW!!!]
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/12/08/health/20091208_Clinic/index.html?ref=us

FTA [F**k The Army] Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HlkgPCgU7g

Jon Stewart: Obama Is Channeling Bush VIDEO)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/03/jon-stewart-obama-is-chan_n_378283.html

US anti-war activists protest
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/12/200912283650408132.html

Buffy Sainte Marie - No No Keshagesh
[Keshagesh is the Cree word to describe a greedy puppy that wants to keep eating everything, a metaphor for corporate greed]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKmAb1gNN74&feature=player_embedded#
Buffy Sainte-Marie - No No Keshagesh lyrics:
http://www.lyricsmode.com/?i=print_lyrics&id=705368

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The Tar Sands Blow
Hi -
I just signed the Tar Sands Blow petition -- and I hope you'll do the same.
The Canadian tar sands produce the dirtiest oil on earth -- including five times the greenhouse gases of conventional oil. World leaders meet next month in Copenhagen to deal with climate change. Sign the petition -- so that we all don't get a raw deal.
http://ien.thetarsandsblow.org/

The Story of Mouseland: As told by Tommy Douglas in 1944
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqgOvzUeiAA

The Communist Manifesto illustrated by Cartoons
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KUl4yfABE4

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VIDEO INTERVIEW: Dan Berger on Political Prisoners in the United States
By Angola 3 News
Angola 3 News
37 years ago in Louisiana, 3 young black men were silenced for trying to expose continued segregation, systematic corruption, and horrific abuse in the biggest prison in the US, an 18,000-acre former slave plantation called Angola. In 1972 and 1973 prison officials charged Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox, and Robert King with murders they did not commit and threw them into 6x9 ft. cells in solitary confinement, for over 36 years. Robert was freed in 2001, but Herman and Albert remain behind bars.
http://angola3news.blogspot.com/2009/09/video-dan-berger-on-political-prisoners.html

Taking Aim Radio Program with
Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone
The Chimera of Capitalist Recovery, Parts 1 and 2
http://www.takingaimradio.com/shows/audio.html

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JROTC MUST GO!

The San Francisco Board of Education has re-installed the Junior Reserve Officer's Training Corps in San Francisco schools -- including allowing it to count for Physical Education credits.

This is a complete reversal of the 2006 decision to end JROTC altogether in San Francisco public schools. Our children need a good physical education program, not a death education program!

With the economy in crisis; jobs and higher education for youth more unattainable; the lure, lies and false promises of military recruiters is driving more and more of our children into the military trap.

This is an economic draft and the San Francisco Board of Education is helping to snare our children to provide cannon fodder for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and for over 700 U.S. military bases around the world!

We can't depend upon "friendly politicians" who, while they are campaigning for office claim they are against the wars but when they get elected vote in favor of military recruitment--the economic draft--in our schools. We can't depend upon them. That has been proven beyond doubt!

It is up to all of us to come together to stop this NOW!

GET JROTC AND ALL MILITARY RECRUITERS OUT OF OUR SCHOOLS NOW!

Write, call, pester and ORGANIZE against the re-institution of JROTC in our San Francisco public schools NOW!

In solidarity,

Bonnie Weinstein
Bay Area United Against War Newsletter

San Francisco Board of Education
555 Franklin Street, 1st Floor
San Francisco, CA 94102
415/241-6427, 415) 241-6493
cascoe@sfusd.edu

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HELP VFP PUT THIS BOOK IN YOUR HIGH SCHOOL OR PUBLIC LIBRARY

For a donation of only $18.95, we can put a copy of the book "10 Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military" into a public or high school library of your choice. [Reason number 1: You may be killed]

A letter and bookplate will let readers know that your donation helped make this possible.

Putting a book in either a public or school library ensures that students, parents, and members of the community will have this valuable information when they need it.

Don't have a library you would like us to put it in? We'll find one for you!

https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/826/t/9311/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=4906

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This is a must-see video about the life of Oscar Grant, a young man who loved his family and was loved by his family. It's important to watch to understand the tremendous loss felt by his whole family as a result of his cold-blooded murder by BART police officers--Johannes Mehserle being the shooter while the others held Oscar down and handcuffed him to aid Mehserle in the murder of Oscar Grant January 1, 2009.

The family wants to share this video here with you who support justice for Oscar Grant.
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/07/21/18611878.php

WE DEMAND JUSTICE FOR OSCAR GRANT!

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Troy Anthony Davis is an African American man who has spent the last 18 years on death row for a murder he did not commit. There is no physical evidence tying him to the crime and seven out of nine witnesses have recanted. New evidence and new testimony have been presented to the Georgia courts, but the justice system refuses to consider this evidence, which would prove Troy Davis' innocence once and for all.

Sign the petition and join the NAACP, Amnesty International USA, and other partners in demanding justice for Troy Davis!

http://www.iamtroy.com/

For Now, High Court Punts on Troy Davis, on Death Row for 18 Years
By Ashby Jones
Wall Street Journal Law Blog
June 30, 2009
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/06/30/for-now-high-court-punts-on-troy-davis-on-death-row-for-18-years/

Take action now:
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&aid=12361&ICID=A0906A01&tr=y&auid=5030305

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Committee To Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 2012
New York, NY 10159-2012

New videos from April 24 Oakland Mumia event
http://abu-jamal-news.com/article?name=jlboak

Donations for Mumia's Legal Defense in the U.S. Our legal effort is the front line of the battle for Mumia's freedom and life. His legal defense needs help. The costs are substantial for our litigation in the U.S. Supreme Court and at the state level. To help, please make your checks payable to the National Lawyers Guild Foundation indicate "Mumia" on the bottom left). All donations are tax deductible under the Internal Revenue Code, section 501c)3), and should be mailed to:

It is outrageous and a violation of human rights that Mumia remains in prison and on death row. His life hangs in the balance. My career has been marked by successfully representing people facing death in murder cases. I will not rest until we win Mumia's case. Justice requires no less.

With best wishes,

Robert R. Bryan
Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal

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Short Video About Al-Awda's Work
The following link is to a short video which provides an overview of Al-Awda's work since the founding of our organization in 2000. This video was first shown on Saturday May 23, 2009 at the fundraising banquet of the 7th Annual Int'l Al-Awda Convention in Anaheim California. It was produced from footage collected over the past nine years.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiAkbB5uC0&eurl
Support Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!

Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, depends on your financial support to carry out its work.

To submit your tax-deductible donation to support our work, go to
http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html and follow the simple instructions.

Thank you for your generosity!

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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT!
FLASHPOINTS Interview with Innocent San Quentin Death Row Inmate
Kevin Cooper -- Aired Monday, May 18,2009
http://www.flashpoints.net/#GOOGLE_SEARCH_ENGINE
To learn more about Kevin Cooper go to:
savekevincooper.org
LINKS
San Francisco Chronicle article on the recent ruling:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/13/BAM517J8T3.DTL
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling and dissent:
http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2009/05/11/05-99004o.pdf

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COURAGE TO RESIST!
Support the troops who refuse to fight!
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/
Donate:
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/21/57/

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C. ARTICLES IN FULL

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1) Obama Says Al Qaeda in Yemen Planned Bombing Plot, and He Vows Retribution
By PETER BAKER
January 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/us/politics/03address.html?ref=us

2) That 1937 Feeling
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
January 4, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/opinion/04krugman.html

3) Yes, It Was Torture, and Illegal
"Anyone who doubts the degree of executive branch pliability in this realm needs to consider this: The party that urged the Supreme Court not to grant the victims' appeal because the illegality of torture was not "clearly established" was the Obama Justice Department."
Editorial
January 4, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/opinion/04mon1.html

4) Economy Is Down, but Dubai Tower Tops All
By LANDON THOMAS Jr
January 5, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/business/global/05tower.html?hp?hp

5) Sidebar
Group Gives Up Death Penalty Work in Frustration
"...the death penalty in the United States is a moral and practical failure."
By ADAM LIPTAK
January 5, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/us/05bar.html?ref=us

6) An Uneasy Feeling
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
January 5, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/opinion/05herbert.html?hp

7) This Year's Housing Crisis
Editorial
January 5, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/opinion/05tue1.html?hp

8) As Population Shifts in Harlem, Blacks Lose Their Majority
By SAM ROBERTS
January 6, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/nyregion/06harlem.html?hp

9) The Card Game
How Visa, Using Card Fees, Dominates a Market
By ANDREW MARTIN
January 5, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/your-money/credit-and-debit-cards/05visa.html?hp

10) Tax on Health Care Will Erode Coverage for Middle Class
By Tula Connell
January 4, 2010
http://blog.aflcio.org/2010/01/04/tax-on-health-care-will-erode-coverage-for-middle-class/

11) U.S. Drone Strikes Reported in Pakistan
By ISMAIL KHAN and SALMAN MASOOD
January 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/world/asia/07drones.html?hp

12) Deadly Gunfire at Gaza Protest Along Egypt Border
By ETHAN BRONNER
January 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/world/middleeast/07gaza.html?ref=world

13) Israel: Disputed Housing Approved
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
World Briefing | Middle East
January 6, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/world/middleeast/06briefs-Israel1.html?ref=world

14) Court Backs War Powers Over Rights of Detainees
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
January 6, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/us/06detain.html?ref=us

15) A terrorism designation Cuba doesn't deserve
By Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, January 5, 2010; A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/04/AR2010010402723.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

16) Aid Convoy Breaks Gaza Siege
Al Jazeera
January 6, 2009
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/01/201016165325573953.html

17) Southern Schools Mark Two Majorities
By SHAILA DEWAN
January 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/us/07south.html?ref=us

18) Clothing Retailer Says It Will No Longer Destroy Unworn Garments
By JIM DWYER
January 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/nyregion/07clothes.html?ref=nyregion

19) Courts Seek More Lawyers to Help the Poor
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
January 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/nyregion/07lawyers.html?ref=nyregion

20) Bubbles and the Banks
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
January 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/opinion/08krugman.html

21) U.S. Job Losses in December Dim Hopes for Quick Upswing
By PETER S. GOODMAN
January 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/09/business/economy/09jobs.html?hp

22) Sexual Abuse at Juvenile Centers
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Washington
January 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/us/08brfs-SEXUALABUSEA_BRF.html?ref=us

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1) Obama Says Al Qaeda in Yemen Planned Bombing Plot, and He Vows Retribution
By PETER BAKER
January 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/us/politics/03address.html?ref=us

HONOLULU - President Obama declared for the first time on Saturday that a branch of Al Qaeda based in Yemen sponsored the attempted Christmas Day bombing of an American passenger jet, and he vowed that those behind the failed attack "will be held to account."

In his first weekly Saturday address of the new year, Mr. Obama rebutted attacks by former Vice President Dick Cheney and other Republicans who since the episode have accused him of not recognizing that the struggle against terrorists is a war. Mr. Obama said he was well aware that "our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred."

Mr. Obama also sent a message to President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, delivered on Saturday by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American regional commander, during a quiet visit to Sana, the Yemeni capital.

According to the official Yemen news agency, Saba, Mr. Obama congratulated Mr. Saleh on his counterterrorism efforts and promised close cooperation in the future against Al Qaeda.

On Friday, General Petraeus announced that this year the United States would more than double the $70 million in security aid it sent to Yemen in 2009 to help fight Al Qaeda. Britain announced Sunday that it and the United States would jointly finance a counterterrorism police unit in Yemen, news services reported.

In addition, a senior American military commander said Saturday that United States development assistance over the next three years to Yemen is projected to be about $120 million.

The president's speech, taped from Hawaii, where he is nearing the end of a 10-day vacation, was the third time he had publicly addressed the failed attack on Northwest Flight 253 bound for Detroit on Dec. 25. Mr. Obama noted that he had received preliminary reports about the attack, but gave no more details about how a Nigerian man with known radical views was allowed to board a flight to the United States with explosives in his underwear.

Mr. Obama's comments about the involvement of Al Qaeda, however, were the most direct to date. Administration officials and intelligence analysts previously had said they were increasingly confident that Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, as the Yemeni branch calls itself, was involved, as it claimed.

But the president until now had avoided citing that until analysts were further along in their assessment of the group's activities and its ties to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian charged with trying to blow up the airliner.

"We're learning more about the suspect," Mr. Obama said. "We know that he traveled to Yemen, a country grappling with crushing poverty and deadly insurgencies. It appears that he joined an affiliate of Al Qaeda and that this group, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, trained him, equipped him with those explosives and directed him to attack that plane headed for America."

Mr. Obama's comments indicated that he and the government largely accepted the accounts offered by Mr. Abdulmutallab since he was taken into custody and by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in a statement on the Web. The National Security Agency had intercepted communications among Qaeda leaders months ago talking about an unnamed Nigerian preparing to attack, but the government never correlated that with information about Mr. Abdulmutallab's radicalization collected by embassy officials in Nigeria from the suspect's father.

On Saturday, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael E. Leiter, made his first public comments on the bombing attempt. The center has come under sharp criticism for not connecting various warnings before the attempt.

"The failed attempt to destroy Northwest Flight 253 is the starkest of reminders of the insidious terrorist threats we face," Mr. Leiter said in a statement. "While this attempt ended in failure, we know with absolute certainty that Al Qaeda and those who support its ideology continue to refine their methods to test our defenses and pursue an attack on the homeland."

Some changes have been made in the past week, and others are being forwarded to Mr. Obama for consideration. The terrorism center has elevated several hundred individuals from a handful of countries, including Yemen and Nigeria, to be put on watch lists rather than merely being entered in a terrorism database.

Some of these individuals, as well as others who were already on the terrorism watch list, have now been placed on more selective lists that subject them to secondary screening before boarding a commercial airline flights, or that bar them from flying to the United States altogether, intelligence officials said.

Mr. Obama noted that this was not the first time Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula had tried to attack the United States and its allies. "In recent years, they have bombed Yemeni government facilities and Western hotels," he said, adding, "So as president, I've made it a priority to strengthen our partnership with the Yemeni government."

He said those efforts had already led to strikes against the group's leaders and training camps. "And all those involved in the attempted act of terrorism on Christmas must know, you, too, will be held to account," he said.

The president also used the address to implicitly deflect the criticism of Republicans who have blamed some of his policy changes for what they see as a weakening of the struggle against terrorism. Although he did not name Mr. Cheney, Mr. Obama was clearly responding to the his assertion that the president was "trying to pretend we are not at war."

Mr. Obama defended his policies as tough but reasonable, and called for an end to the sniping that both parties had engaged in since the Christmas episode. "Instead of succumbing to partisanship and division, let's summon the unity that this moment demands," he said. "Let's work together, with a seriousness of purpose, to do what must be done to keep our country safe."

Steven Erlanger contributed reporting from Sana, Yemen, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

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2) That 1937 Feeling
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
January 4, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/opinion/04krugman.html

Here's what's coming in economic news: The next employment report could show the economy adding jobs for the first time in two years. The next G.D.P. report is likely to show solid growth in late 2009. There will be lots of bullish commentary - and the calls we're already hearing for an end to stimulus, for reversing the steps the government and the Federal Reserve took to prop up the economy, will grow even louder.

But if those calls are heeded, we'll be repeating the great mistake of 1937, when the Fed and the Roosevelt administration decided that the Great Depression was over, that it was time for the economy to throw away its crutches. Spending was cut back, monetary policy was tightened - and the economy promptly plunged back into the depths.

This shouldn't be happening. Both Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, and Christina Romer, who heads President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, are scholars of the Great Depression. Ms. Romer has warned explicitly against re-enacting the events of 1937. But those who remember the past sometimes repeat it anyway.

As you read the economic news, it will be important to remember, first of all, that blips - occasional good numbers, signifying nothing - are common even when the economy is, in fact, mired in a prolonged slump. In early 2002, for example, initial reports showed the economy growing at a 5.8 percent annual rate. But the unemployment rate kept rising for another year.

And in early 1996 preliminary reports showed the Japanese economy growing at an annual rate of more than 12 percent, leading to triumphant proclamations that "the economy has finally entered a phase of self-propelled recovery." In fact, Japan was only halfway through its lost decade.

Such blips are often, in part, statistical illusions. But even more important, they're usually caused by an "inventory bounce." When the economy slumps, companies typically find themselves with large stocks of unsold goods. To work off their excess inventories, they slash production; once the excess has been disposed of, they raise production again, which shows up as a burst of growth in G.D.P. Unfortunately, growth caused by an inventory bounce is a one-shot affair unless underlying sources of demand, such as consumer spending and long-term investment, pick up.

Which brings us to the still grim fundamentals of the economic situation.

During the good years of the last decade, such as they were, growth was driven by a housing boom and a consumer spending surge. Neither is coming back. There can't be a new housing boom while the nation is still strewn with vacant houses and apartments left behind by the previous boom, and consumers - who are $11 trillion poorer than they were before the housing bust - are in no position to return to the buy-now-save-never habits of yore.

What's left? A boom in business investment would be really helpful right now. But it's hard to see where such a boom would come from: industry is awash in excess capacity, and commercial rents are plunging in the face of a huge oversupply of office space.

Can exports come to the rescue? For a while, a falling U.S. trade deficit helped cushion the economic slump. But the deficit is widening again, in part because China and other surplus countries are refusing to let their currencies adjust.

So the odds are that any good economic news you hear in the near future will be a blip, not an indication that we're on our way to sustained recovery. But will policy makers misinterpret the news and repeat the mistakes of 1937? Actually, they already are.

The Obama fiscal stimulus plan is expected to have its peak effect on G.D.P. and jobs around the middle of this year, then start fading out. That's far too early: why withdraw support in the face of continuing mass unemployment? Congress should have enacted a second round of stimulus months ago, when it became clear that the slump was going to be deeper and longer than originally expected. But nothing was done - and the illusory good numbers we're about to see will probably head off any further possibility of action.

Meanwhile, all the talk at the Fed is about the need for an "exit strategy" from its efforts to support the economy. One of those efforts, purchases of long-term U.S. government debt, has already come to an end. It's widely expected that another, purchases of mortgage-backed securities, will end in a few months. This amounts to a monetary tightening, even if the Fed doesn't raise interest rates directly - and there's a lot of pressure on Mr. Bernanke to do that too.

Will the Fed realize, before it's too late, that the job of fighting the slump isn't finished? Will Congress do the same? If they don't, 2010 will be a year that began in false economic hope and ended in grief.

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3) Yes, It Was Torture, and Illegal
"Anyone who doubts the degree of executive branch pliability in this realm needs to consider this: The party that urged the Supreme Court not to grant the victims' appeal because the illegality of torture was not "clearly established" was the Obama Justice Department."
Editorial
January 4, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/opinion/04mon1.html

Bush administration officials came up with all kinds of ridiculously offensive rationalizations for torturing prisoners. It's not torture if you don't mean it to be. It's not torture if you don't nearly kill the victim. It's not torture if the president says it's not torture.

It was deeply distressing to watch the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sink to that standard in April when it dismissed a civil case brought by four former Guantánamo detainees never charged with any offense. The court said former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the senior military officers charged in the complaint could not be held responsible for violating the plaintiffs' rights because at the time of their detention, between 2002 and 2004, it was not "clearly established" that torture was illegal.

The Supreme Court could have corrected that outlandish reading of the Constitution, legal precedent, and domestic and international statutes and treaties. Instead, last month, the justices abdicated their legal and moral duty and declined to review the case.

A denial of certiorari is not a ruling on the merits. But the justices surely understood that their failure to accept the case would further undermine the rule of law.

In effect, the Supreme Court has granted the government immunity for subjecting people in its custody to terrible mistreatment. It has deprived victims of a remedy and Americans of government accountability, while further damaging the country's standing in the world.

Contrary to the view of the lower appellate court, it was crystal clear that torture inflicted anywhere is illegal long before the Supreme Court's 2008 ruling that prisoners at Guantánamo, de facto United States territory, have a constitutional right to habeas corpus. Moreover, the shield of qualified immunity was not raised in good faith. Officials decided to hold detainees offshore at Guantánamo precisely to try to avoid claims from victims for conduct the officials knew was illegal.

Reversing the Circuit Court would not have ended the matter. The plaintiffs would still have had to prove their case at trial. They deserved that chance. There are those who oppose trying to punish Bush-era lawlessness - some who argue that America should not look backward and some who excuse that lawlessness. But the rule of law rests on scrutinizing evidence of past behavior to establish accountability, confer justice and deter bad behavior in the future.

President Obama, much to his credit, has forsworn the use of torture, but politics and policy makers change and democracy cannot rely merely on the good will of one president and his aides. Such good will did not exist in the last administration. And the inhumane and illegal treatment of detainees could make a return in a future administration unless the Supreme Court sends a firm message that ordering torture is a grievous violation of fundamental rights.

Anyone who doubts the degree of executive branch pliability in this realm needs to consider this: The party that urged the Supreme Court not to grant the victims' appeal because the illegality of torture was not "clearly established" was the Obama Justice Department.

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4) Economy Is Down, but Dubai Tower Tops All
By LANDON THOMAS Jr
January 5, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/business/global/05tower.html?hp?hp

LONDON - For all the towers that give shape to Dubai's skyline, the city-state still hails the addition of each new one as a reaffirmation of its reach-for-the-skies spirit.

And so, even in the midst of a devastating real estate crash, Dubai pulled out all the stops Monday to celebrate the opening of the world's tallest building: a rocket-shaped edifice that soars 828 meters, or 2,717 feet, with views that can reach 100-kilometers, or 60-miles.

Following its close brush with bankruptcy late last year, and the tsunami of international criticism that ensued, the opening was also an opportunity for Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, the ruler of Dubai, to shift attention from the economic troubles that still plague Dubai to the allure of its future.

But they weren't forgotten completely. In a surprise move, the building's name was changed from Burj Dubai to Burj Khalifa, in honor of the president of Abu Dhabi, Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

The last-minute switch carries a symbolic weight in light of the billions of dollars oil-rich Abu Dhabi has poured into Dubai in order to cover its debts. Once the most pridefully autonomous of the United Arab Emirates, Dubai's financial troubles have made it more dependent on Abu Dhabi and likely to be drawn closer into the federation.

"Dubai not only has the world's tallest building, but has also made what looks like the most expensive naming rights deal in history," said Jim Krane, author of City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism. "Renaming the Burj Dubai after Sheikh Khalifa of Abu Dhabi - if not an explicit quid pro quo - is a down-payment on Dubai's gratitude for its neighbor's $10 billion bailout last month."

In any case, the opening festivities had the feel of a national holiday, with fireworks, parachute jumps and shooting streams of water from the world's tallest fountain. Indeed, by the numbers there is much to celebrate.

At a cost estimated at $1.5 billion, the Burj took five years to build, is over 160 floors high and has comfortably surpassed the previous record holder in Taipei.

With its mix of nightclubs, mosques, luxury suites and boardrooms, the Burj is an almost-perfect representation of Dubai's own complexities and contradictions. It will boast the world's first Armani hotel; the world's highest swimming pool, on the 76th floor; the highest observation deck on the 124th floor; and the highest mosque on the 158th floor.

More than 12,000 people will occupy its 6 million square feet, zooming up and down in the 54 elevators that can hit speeds of 65 kilometers, or 40 miles, an hour. It was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in Chicago.

At a time when a number of Dubai's newly built office towers stand empty, it is 90 percent sold, according to the building's developer Emaar Properties.

To be sure, some have questioned the utility of such a towering project. At least three foreign workers died during the construction and at a time of increasing concerns over global terror, such a building could well pose an inviting target.

But for a city-state that from its very beginning has taken pleasure in proving its doubters wrong, the Burj is evidence that if you build it big and brash enough the people will come, from near and far.

All the same, the Burj's success by no means signals a recovery in Dubai's beaten-down real estate market, where prices have collapsed by as much as 50 percent and may have further fall according to analysts.

With its strong government backing and unquestioned prestige, the Burj was a project that was destined to succeed and its developer, Emaar, had little difficulty in attracting residents - especially as much of the space was sold in the midst of Dubai's real estate frenzy.

Other projects, however, have not been so lucky. One such example is the Omniyat Bayswater, a 24-story office building that stands less than a kilometer away from the Burj and remains more than 50 percent vacant despite having opened more than six months ago.

Targeted to be the flagship structure of an ambitious development project in an area by the sea called Business Bay, the inability of Bayswater to attract tenants is an obvious consequence of the debilitating real estate crisis here that has seen prices halved.

More broadly, however, there is a deeper significance to its desolation that speaks to a larger truth behind the Dubai real estate bubble that, despite the excitement over the Burj, could well forestall a meaningful recovery.

Like many office projects that were born during the peak years Dubai's expansion four to five years ago, the Omniyat Bayswater is estimated to have more than 50 landlords, or more than two per floor - with some landlords owning as little as a 1,000 foot small office suite.

A spokesman for Bayswater said that Omniyat has recognized the problem of multiple landowners and taken steps to address it and that it expects to see floors leased by the second quarter of this year.

At a time when selling real estate was like handing out candy to children, such a strategy became a quick and easy way to finance building projects as speculators from around the world clamored for the smallest slice of Dubai property.

But with the crash, the building's splintered ownership structure has made it virtually impossible to sell a floor or two to foreign companies seeking to expand their presence here.

As a result, few offers have been made for space in buildings using this development model which is called strata title.

"There has been a difficulty in creating a collective of owners," said Nick Maclean of CB Ellis in Dubai. "The majority of the building is empty."

Mr. Maclean says a law is expected soon to rectify this issue.

But with two thirds of the new buildings coming on line this year being under strata title and 70 percent in 2011, a lack of government action could push office vacancy rates to as high as 40 percent.

As for the effect the Burj will have on the overall market, Mr. Maclean said its opening, while heartening to a city that has taken its lumps over the past year, was unlikely to drive an immediate turn around in the market.

"It is a unique building and symbolically important but it is not going to stimulate demand," he said.

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5) Sidebar
Group Gives Up Death Penalty Work in Frustration
"...the death penalty in the United States is a moral and practical failure."
By ADAM LIPTAK
January 5, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/us/05bar.html?ref=us

WASHINGTON

Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it.

There were other important death penalty developments last year: the number of death sentences continued to fall, Ohio switched to a single chemical for lethal injections and New Mexico repealed its death penalty entirely. But not one of them was as significant as the institute's move, which represents a tectonic shift in legal theory.

"The A.L.I. is important on a lot of topics," said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "They were absolutely singular on this topic" - capital punishment - "because they were the only intellectually respectable support for the death penalty system in the United States."

The institute is made up of about 4,000 judges, lawyers and law professors. It synthesizes and shapes the law in restatements and model codes that provide structure and coherence in a federal legal system that might otherwise consist of 50 different approaches to everything.

In 1962, as part of the Model Penal Code, the institute created the modern framework for the death penalty, one the Supreme Court largely adopted when it reinstituted capital punishment in Gregg v. Georgia in 1976. Several justices cited the standards the institute had developed as a model to be emulated by the states.

The institute's recent decision to abandon the field was a compromise. Some members had asked the institute to take a stand against the death penalty as such. That effort failed.

Instead, the institute voted in October to disavow the structure it had created "in light of the current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment."

That last sentence contains some pretty dense lawyer talk, but it can be untangled. What the institute was saying is that the capital justice system in the United States is irretrievably broken.

A study commissioned by the institute said that decades of experience have proved that the system cannot reconcile the twin goals of individualized decisions about who should be executed and systemic fairness. It added that capital punishment is plagued by racial disparities; is enormously expensive even as many defense lawyers are underpaid and some are incompetent; risks executing innocent people; and is undermined by the politics that come with judicial elections.

Roger S. Clark, who teaches at Rutgers School of Law in Camden, N.J., and was one of the leaders of the movement to have the institute condemn the death penalty outright, said he was satisfied with the compromise. "Capital punishment is going to be around for a while," Professor Clark said. "What this does is pull the plug on the whole intellectual underpinnings for it."

The framework the institute developed in 1962 was an effort to make the death penalty less arbitrary. It proposed limiting capital crimes to murder and narrowing the categories of people eligible for the punishment. Most important, it gave juries a framework to decide whom to put to death, asking them to balance aggravating factors against mitigating ones.

The move to combat arbitrariness without giving up sensitivity to individual circumstances is known as "guided discretion," which sounds good until you notice that it is a phrase at war with itself.

The Supreme Court's capital justice jurisprudence since 1976 has only complicated things. Justice Harry A. Blackmun conceded in 1987 that "there perhaps is an inherent tension between the discretion accorded capital sentencing juries and the guidance for use of that discretion that is constitutionally required."

That was an understatement, Justice Antonin Scalia said in 1990. "To acknowledge that 'there perhaps is an inherent tension,' " he wrote, "is rather like saying that there was perhaps an inherent tension between the Allies and the Axis powers in World War II."

Justice Scalia solved the problem by vowing never to throw out a death sentence on the ground that the sentencer's discretion had been unconstitutionally restricted.

In 1994, Justice Blackmun came around to the view that "guided discretion" amounted to "irreconcilable constitutional commands." But he drew a different conclusion than Justice Scalia had from the same premise, saying that "the death penalty cannot be administered in accord with our Constitution." He said he would no longer "tinker with the machinery of death." The institute came to essentially the same conclusion.

Some supporters of the death penalty said they welcomed the institute's move. Capital sentencing "is so micromanaged by Supreme Court precedents that a model statute really serves very little function," Kent Scheidegger of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation wrote in a blog posting. "We are perfectly O.K. with dumping it."

Mr. Scheidegger expressed satisfaction that an effort to have the institute come out against the death penalty as such was defeated.

But opponents of the death penalty said the institute's move represents a turning point.

"It's very bad news for the continued legitimacy of the death penalty," Professor Zimring said. "But it's the kind of bad news that has many more implications for the long term than for next week or the next term of the Supreme Court."

Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan, said he recalled reading Model Penal Code as a first-year law student in 1970. "The death penalty was an abstract issue of little interest to me or my fellow students," he said. But he remembered being impressed by the institute's work. "I thought in passing that smarter people than I had done a sensible job of figuring out this tricky problem."

Things will look different come September, Professor Gross said.

"Law students who take first-year criminal law from 2010 on," he said, "will learn that this same group of smart lawyers and judges - the ones whose work they read every day - has said that the death penalty in the United States is a moral and practical failure."

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6) An Uneasy Feeling
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
January 5, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/opinion/05herbert.html?hp

I'm starting the new year with the sinking feeling that important opportunities are slipping from the nation's grasp. Our collective consciousness tends to obsess indiscriminately over one or two issues - the would-be bomber on the flight into Detroit, the Tiger Woods saga - while enormous problems that should be engaged get short shrift.

Staggering numbers of Americans are still unemployed and nearly a quarter of all homeowners owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. Forget the false hope of modestly improving monthly job numbers. The real story right now is the entrenched suffering (with no end in sight) that has been inflicted on scores of millions of working Americans by the Great Recession and the misguided economic policies that preceded it.

As The Washington Post reported over the weekend, the entire past decade "was the worst for the U.S. economy in modern times." There was no net job creation - none - between December 1999 and now. None!

The Post article read like a lament, a longing for the U.S. as we'd once known it: "No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent."

Middle-class families in 2008 actually earned less, adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999. The data for 2009 are not yet in, but you can just imagine what happened to those families in that nightmarish downturn. Small children over the holidays were asking Santa Claus to bring mommy or daddy a job.

One in eight Americans, and one in four children, are on food stamps. Some six million Americans, according to an article in The Times on Sunday, have said that food stamps were their only income.

This is a society in deep, deep trouble and the fixes currently in the works are in no way adequate to the enormous challenges we're facing. For example, an end to the mantra of monthly job losses would undoubtedly be welcomed. But even if the economy manages to create a few hundred thousand new jobs a month, it would do little to haul us from the unemployment pit dug for us by the Great Recession. We need to create more than 10 million new jobs just to get us back to where we were when the recession began in December 2007.

What's needed are big new innovative efforts to fashion an economy that creates jobs for all who want and need to work. Just getting us back in fits and starts over the next few years to where we were when the recession began should not be acceptable to anyone. We should be moving now to invest aggressively in a new, greener economy, leading the world in the development of alternative fuels, advanced transportation networks and the effort to restrain the poisoning of the planet. We should be developing an industrial policy that emphasizes the need for America to regain its manufacturing mojo, as tough as that might seem, and we need to rebuild our infrastructure.

We're not smart as a nation. We don't learn from the past, and we don't plan for the future. We've spent a year turning ourselves inside out with arguments of every sort over health care reform only to come up with a bloated, Rube Goldberg legislative mess that protects the insurance and drug industries and does not rein in runaway health care costs.

The politicians will be back soon, trust me, screaming about the need to rein in health costs.

We keep talking about how essential it is to radically improve public education while, at the same time, we're closing libraries and firing teachers by the tens of thousands for economic reasons.

The fault lies everywhere. The president, the Congress, the news media and the public are all to blame. Shared sacrifice is not part of anyone's program. Politicians can't seem to tell the difference between wasteful spending and investments in a more sustainable future. Any talk of raising taxes is considered blasphemous, but there is a constant din of empty yapping about controlling budget deficits.

Oh, yes, and we're fighting two wars.

If America can't change, then the current state of decline is bound to continue. You can't have a healthy economy with so many millions of people out of work, and there is no plan now that would result in the creation of millions of new jobs any time soon.

Voters were primed at the beginning of the Obama administration for fundamental changes that would have altered the trajectory of American life for the better. Politicians of all stripes, many of them catering to the nation's moneyed interests, fouled that up to a fare-thee-well.

Now we're escalating in Afghanistan, falling back into panic mode over an attempted act of terror and squandering a golden opportunity to build a better society.

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7) This Year's Housing Crisis
Editorial
January 5, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/opinion/05tue1.html?hp

The financial crisis and Great Recession have their roots in the housing bust. When it comes, a lasting recovery will be evident in a housing rebound. Unfortunately, housing appears to be weakening anew.

Figures released last week show that after four months of gains, home prices flattened in October. At that time, low mortgage rates (courtesy of the Federal Reserve) and a home buyer's tax credit (courtesy of Congress) were fueling sales. That should have propped up prices. But it was not enough to overcome the drag created by a glut of 3.2 million new and existing unsold single-family homes - about a seven-month supply.

The situation, we fear, will only get worse in months to come. Rates already are starting to rise as lenders brace for the Fed to curtail support for mortgage lending as early as the end of March. The home buyer's tax credit is scheduled to expire at the end of April. And a new flood of foreclosed homes is ready to hit the market.

It is increasingly clear that the Obama administration's anti-foreclosure effort - which pressed lenders to reduce interest rates - isn't doing nearly enough. High unemployment rates also mean that many borrowers who did qualify for aid have been unable to keep up with even reduced monthly payments.

As a result, an estimated 2.4 million foreclosed homes will be added to the existing glut in 2010, driving prices down by another 10 percent or so. That would bring the average decline nationwide to about 40 percent since the peak of the market in 2006.

A renewed price drop could usher in a new grim chapter in the foreclosure crisis. Already an estimated one-third of homeowners with a mortgage - nearly 16 million people - owe more than their homes are worth; in industry parlance, they are "underwater." If prices drop further, ever more borrowers will sink ever deeper. Research suggests that the greater the loss of home equity, the greater the likelihood that borrowers will decide to turn in the keys and find a cheaper place to rent.

Things didn't have to get this bad.

The best way to modify an underwater loan is to reduce the principal balance, lowering the monthly payment and restoring equity. But for the most part, lenders have refused to reduce principal because it would force them to take an immediate loss on the loan. Lenders also have vehemently - and successfully - resisted Congressional efforts to change the law so that bankruptcy courts could reduce the mortgage balances for bankrupt borrowers.

The administration decided not to press lenders to grant principal reductions in the flawed belief that simply making payments more affordable would be enough to forestall foreclosures. It hasn't. The administration also didn't fight for the bankruptcy fix when it was before Congress last year despite President Obama's campaign promise to do so.

The economy is hard pressed to function, let alone thrive, when house prices are falling. As home equity erodes, consumer spending falls and foreclosures increase. Lenders lose the ability and willingness to extend credit and employers are disinclined to hire. True economic recovery is all but impossible.

To avert the worst, the White House should alter its loan-modification effort to emphasize principal reduction. Job creation should also be a priority so that rising unemployment does not cause more defaults.

We wish we could proclaim a Happy New Year in housing. But until more is done to help struggling homeowners, the portents are not good.

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8) As Population Shifts in Harlem, Blacks Lose Their Majority
By SAM ROBERTS
January 6, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/nyregion/06harlem.html?hp

For nearly a century, Harlem has been synonymous with black urban America. Given its magnetic and growing appeal to younger black professionals and its historic residential enclaves and cultural institutions, the neighborhood's reputation as the capital of black America seems unlikely to change soon.

But the neighborhood is in the midst of a profound and accelerating shift. In greater Harlem, which runs river to river, and from East 96th Street and West 106th Street to West 155th Street, blacks are no longer a majority of the population - a shift that actually occurred a decade ago, but was largely overlooked.

By 2008, their share had declined to 4 in 10 residents. Since 2000, Harlem's population has already grown more than in any decade since the 1940s, to 126,000 from 109,000, but its black population - about 77,000 in central Harlem and about twice that in greater Harlem - is smaller than at any time since the 1920s.

In 2008, 22 percent of the white households in Harlem had moved to their present homes within the previous year. By comparison, only 7 percent of the black households had.

"It was a combination of location and affordability," said Laura Murray, a 31-year-old graduate student in medical anthropology at Columbia, who moved to Sugar Hill near City College about a year ago. "I feel a community here that I don't feel in other parts of the city."

Change has been even more pronounced in the narrow north-south corridor defined as central Harlem, which planners roughly define as north of 110th Street between Fifth and St. Nicholas Avenues.

There, blacks account for 6 in 10 residents, but native-born African-Americans born in the United States make up barely half of all residents. Since 2000, the proportion of whites living there has more than doubled, to more than one in 10 residents - the highest since the 1940s. The Hispanic population, which was concentrated in East Harlem, is now at an all-time high in central Harlem, up 27 percent since 2000.

Harlem, said Michael Henry Adams, a historian of the neighborhood and a local resident, "is poised again at a point of pivotal transition."

Harlem is hardly the only ethnic neighborhoods to have metamorphosed because of inroads by housing pioneers seeking bargains and more space - Little Italy, for instance, has been largely gobbled up by immigrants expanding the boundaries of Chinatown and by creeping gentrification from SoHo. But Harlem has evolved uniquely.

Because so much of the community was devastated by demolition for urban renewal, arson and abandonment beginning in the 1960s, many newcomers have not so much dislodged existing residents as succeeded them. In the 1970s alone, the black population of central Harlem declined by more than 30 percent.

"This place was vacated," said Howard Dodson, director of Harlem's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. "Gentrification is about displacement."

Meanwhile, the influx of non-Hispanic whites has escalated. The 1990 census counted only 672 whites in central Harlem. By 2000, there were 2,200. The latest count, in 2008, recorded nearly 13,800.

"There's a lot of new housing to allow people to come into the area without displacing people there," said Joshua S. Bauchner, who moved to a Harlem town house in 2007 and is the only white member of Community Board 10 in central Harlem. "In Manhattan, there are only so many directions you can go. North to Harlem is one of the last options."

In 1910, blacks constituted about 10 percent of central Harlem's population. By 1930, the beginnings of the great migration from the South and the influx from downtown Manhattan neighborhoods where blacks were feeling less welcome transformed them into a 70 percent majority. Their share of the population (98 percent) and total numbers (233,000) peaked in 1950.

In 2008, according to the census, the 77,000 blacks in central Harlem amounted to 62 percent of the population.

In greater Harlem, the population peaked at 341,000 in 1950. The black share hit a high of 64 percent in 1970. In 2008, the comparable figures were 153,000 and 41 percent, respectively.

About 15 percent of Harlem's black population is foreign-born, mostly from the Caribbean, with a growing proportion from Africa.

Some experts say the decline in the black population may be overstated because poorer people are typically undercounted by the census, and Harlem has a disproportionate number of poor people. Others warn that proposed development and higher property values may force poor people out and say that when the city was the neighborhood's leading landlord it should have increased ownership opportunities for Harlem residents .

"Gentrification - the buying up and rehabilitation of land and buildings, whether by families or developers, occupied or abandoned -means a rising rent tide for all, leading inevitably to displacement next door, down the block, or two streets away," said Neil Smith, director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Mr. Dodson of the Schomburg Center moved from Riverside Drive to Newark not long ago. He said, "I tell people that I can't afford to live in Harlem or in New York in the manner I deserve to."

Other analysts point to the outflow of some blacks and the influx of others as positive evidence that barriers to integration have fallen in other neighborhoods and that Harlem has become a more attractive place to live.

"It's a mistake to see this only as a story of racial change," said Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president. "What's interesting is that many African-Americans are living in Harlem by choice, not necessity."

Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College, said, "Harlem has become as it was in the early 1930s - a predominantly black neighborhood, but with other groups living there as well."

Ronald Copney, a former limousine driver, and his two sisters share a brownstone on West 147th Street that his grandmother bought in 1929. He rents two floors to tenants, one of whom is white.

"This was always a very nice neighborhood," he said. "In a way, it's better now as far as property values are concerned."

Geneva Bain, the district manager of Community Board 10, blamed the economy and the lack of jobs, rather than gentrification, for the dwindling number of blacks.

She acknowledged, though, that white newcomers have sometimes been greeted ambivalently. "Integration is very subjective," Ms. Bain said. "One person's fellowship is another person's antagonism. I am one who thinks that central Harlem has become a better place because of integration."

Mr. Dodson, the Schomburg Center director, said one source of historic resentment remained true: that while blacks made up a majority of the population, they still accounted for a tiny minority of the property owners.

"There are people who would like to maintain Harlem as a 'black enclave,' but the only way to do that is to own it," Mr. Dodson said. "That having been said, you can't have it both ways: You can't on the one hand say you oppose being discriminated against by others who prevent you from living where you want to and say out of the other side of your mouth that nobody but black people can live in Harlem."

"The question of whether it's a good thing or not," he added. "I honestly can't make that judgment yet."

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9) The Card Game
How Visa, Using Card Fees, Dominates a Market
By ANDREW MARTIN
January 5, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/your-money/credit-and-debit-cards/05visa.html?hp

Every day, millions of Americans stand at store checkout counters and make a seemingly random decision: after swiping their debit card, they choose whether to punch in a code, or to sign their name.

It is a pointless distinction to most consumers, since the price is the same either way. But behind the scenes, billions of dollars are at stake.

When you sign a debit card receipt at a large retailer, the store pays your bank an average of 75 cents for every $100 spent, more than twice as much as when you punch in a four-digit code.

The difference is so large that Costco will not allow you to sign for your debit purchase in its checkout lines. Wal-Mart and Home Depot steer customers to use a PIN, the debit card norm outside the United States.

Despite all this, signature debit cards dominate debit use in this country, accounting for 61 percent of all such transactions, even though PIN debit cards are less expensive and less vulnerable to fraud.

How this came to be is largely a result of a successful if controversial strategy hatched decades ago by Visa, the dominant payment network for credit and debit cards. It is an approach that has benefited Visa and the nation's banks at the expense of merchants and, some argue, consumers.

Competition, of course, usually forces prices lower. But for payment networks like Visa and MasterCard, competition in the card business is more about winning over banks that actually issue the cards than consumers who use them. Visa and MasterCard set the fees that merchants must pay the cardholder's bank. And higher fees mean higher profits for banks, even if it means that merchants shift the cost to consumers.

Seizing on this odd twist, Visa enticed banks to embrace signature debit - the higher-priced method of handling debit cards - and turned over the fees to banks as an incentive to issue more Visa cards. At least initially, MasterCard and other rivals promoted PIN debit instead.

As debit cards became the preferred plastic in American wallets, Visa has turned its attention to PIN debit too and increased its market share even more. And it has succeeded - not by lowering the fees that merchants pay, but often by pushing them up, making its bank customers happier.

In an effort to catch up, MasterCard and other rivals eventually raised fees on debit cards too, sometimes higher than Visa, to try to woo bank customers back.

"What we witnessed was truly a perverse form of competition," said Ronald Congemi, the former chief executive of Star Systems, one of the regional PIN-based networks that has struggled to compete with Visa. "They competed on the basis of raising prices. What other industry do you know that gets away with that?"

Visa has managed to dominate the debit landscape despite more than a decade of litigation and antitrust investigations into high fees and anticompetitive behavior, including a settlement in 2003 in which Visa paid $2 billion that some predicted would inject more competition into the debit industry.

Yet today, Visa has a commanding lead in signature debit in the United States, with a 73 percent share. Its share of the domestic PIN debit market is smaller but growing, at 42 percent, making Visa the biggest PIN network, according to The Nilson Report, an industry newsletter.

The Risk of Refusing

Critics complain that Visa does not fight fair, and that it used its market power to force merchants to accept higher costs for debit cards. Merchants say they cannot refuse Visa cards because it would result in lower sales.

"A dollar is no longer a dollar in this country," said Mallory Duncan, senior vice president of the National Retail Federation, a trade association. "It's a Visa dollar. It's only worth 99 cents because they take a piece of every one."

Visa officials say its critics are griping about debit products that have transformed the nation's payment system, adding convenience for consumers and higher sales for merchants, while cutting the hassle and expense of dealing with cash and checks. In recent years, New York cabbies and McDonald's restaurants are among those reporting higher sales as a result of accepting plastic.

"At times we have a perspective problem," said William M. Sheedy, Visa's president for the Americas. "Debit has become so mainstream, some of the people who have benefited have lost sight of what their business model was, what their cost structure was."

Visa officials said the costs of debit for merchants had not gone down because the cards now provided greater value than they did five or 10 years ago. The costs must not be too onerous, they say, because merchant acceptance has doubled in the last decade.

The fees are "not a cost-based calculation, but a value-based calculation," said Elizabeth Buse, Visa's global head of product.

As for Visa's market share, company officials maintain that it is rather small when considered within the larger context of all payments, where, for now at least, cash remains king.

While Visa may be among the best-known brands in the world, how it operates is a mystery to many consumers.

Visa does not distribute credit or debit cards, nor does it provide credit so consumers can buy flat-screen televisions or a Starbucks latte. Those tasks are left to the banks, which owned Visa until it went public in 2008.

Instead, Visa provides an electronic network that acts like a tollbooth, processing the transaction between merchants and banks and collecting a fee that averages 5 or 6 cents every time. For the financial year ended in June, Visa handled 40 billion transactions. Banks that issue Visa cards also pay a separate licensing fee, based on payment volume. MasterCard, which is roughly half the size of Visa, uses a similar model.

"It's a penny here or there," said Moshe Katri, an analyst who tracks the payments industry for Cowen and Company. "But when you have a billion transactions or more, it adds up."

With debit transactions forecast to overtake cash purchases by 2012, the model has investors swooning: Visa's stock traded at $88.14 on Monday, near a 52-week high, while shares of MasterCard, at $256.84 each, have soared by more than 450 percent since the company went public in 2006.

While there is little controversy about the fees that Visa collects, some merchants are infuriated by a separate, larger fee, called interchange, that Visa makes them pay each time a debit or credit card is swiped. The fees, roughly 1 to 3 percent of each purchase, are forwarded to the cardholder's bank to cover costs and promote the issuance of more Visa cards.

The banks have used interchange fees as a growing profit center and to pay for cardholder perks like rewards programs. Interchange revenue has increased to $45 billion today, from $20 billion in 2002, driven in part by the surge in debit card use.

Some merchants say there should be no interchange fees on debit purchases, because the money comes directly out of a checking account and does not include the risks and losses associated with credit cards. Regardless, merchants say they inevitably pass on that cost to consumers; the National Retail Federation says the interchange fees cost households an average of $427 in 2008.

While the cost per transaction may seem small, at Best Buy, the biggest stand-alone electronics chain, "these skyrocketing fees add up to hundreds of millions of dollars every year," said Dee O'Malley, director of financial services. "Every additional dollar we are forced to pay credit card companies is another dollar we can't use to hire employees, or pass along to our customers in the form of savings."

Weighing Rules on Merchants

The Justice Department is investigating if rules imposed by payment networks, including Visa, on merchants regarding "various payment forms" are anticompetitive, a spokeswoman said. Several bills have been introduced in Congress seeking to give merchants more ability to negotiate interchange, which is largely unregulated.

While interchange remains legal despite repeated challenges, a group of merchants is pursuing yet another class-action suit, this time in federal court in Brooklyn, against Visa and MasterCard that seeks to upend the system for setting fees.

"Visa and MasterCard have morphed into a giant cookie jar for banks at the expense of consumers," said Mitch Goldstone, a plaintiff in the case.

Fees were not an issue when debit cards first gained traction in the 1980s. The small networks that operated automated teller machines, like STAR, Pulse, MAC and NYCE, issued debit cards that required a PIN. MasterCard had its own PIN debit network, called Maestro.

Merchants were not charged a fee for accepting PIN debit cards, and sometimes they even got a small payment because it saved banks the cost of processing a paper check.

That changed after Visa entered the debit market. In the 1990s, Visa promoted a debit card that let consumers access their checking account on the same network that processed its credit cards, which required a signature.

To persuade the banks to issue more of its debit cards, Visa charged merchants for these transactions and passed the money to the issuing banks. By 1999, Visa was setting fees of $1.35 on a $100 purchase, while Maestro and other regional PIN networks charged less than a dime, Federal Reserve data shows. Visa says the fee was justified because signature debit was so much more useful than PIN debit; at the time, roughly 15 percent of merchants had keypads for entering a PIN.

Merchants said they had no choice but to continue taking the debit cards, despite the higher fees, because Visa's rules required them to honor its debit cards if they chose to accept Visa's credit cards.

A Seven-Year Battle

Wal-Mart, Circuit City, Sears and a number of major merchants eventually sued. After seven years of litigation, Visa and MasterCard agreed to end the "honor all cards" rule between credit and debit and to pay the retailers a settlement of around $3 billion, one of the largest in American corporate history. Visa paid $2 billion, and MasterCard the remainder.

Since then, only a handful of retailers have stopped accepting Visa debit cards, an indication that the crux of the lawsuit was "much ado about nothing," Mr. Sheedy says.

And while some merchants said they thought the lawsuit would pave the way to a new era of competition, a curious thing happened instead: while Visa temporarily lowered its fees for signature debit, it raised the price on PIN debit transactions and passed the funds on to card-issuing banks, and its competitors soon followed.

The current class-action lawsuit joined by Mr. Goldstone contends that Visa's PIN debit network, called Interlink, is offering banks higher fees as an incentive to issue debit cards that are exclusively routed over this network. Interlink, which has raised its PIN debit fees for small merchants to 90 cents for each $100 transaction, from 20 cents in 2002, is often the most expensive, especially for small merchants, Fed data shows.

One large retailer, who requested anonymity to preserve its relationship with Visa, provided data that showed Interlink's share of PIN purchases rose to 47 percent in 2009, from 20 percent in 2002, even as its fees steadily increased ahead of most other networks - to 49 cents per $100 transaction in 2009, from 38 cents in 2006.

Visa officials say its PIN debit network is taking off despite rising costs because it offers merchants, banks and consumers a level of efficiency and security that regional networks cannot match. "We are motivated as a company to try to drive value to each one of those participants so that they accept the card, issue more cards, use the card," Mr. Sheedy said.

At checkout counters, meanwhile, consumers are quietly tugged in one direction or the other.

Safeway, 7-Eleven and CVS drugstores automatically prompt consumers to do a less costly PIN debit transaction. The banks, however, still steer consumers toward the more expensive form of signature debit. Wells Fargo and Chase are among those that offer bonus points only on debit purchases completed with a signature.

Visa says it does not care how consumers use their debit card, as long as it is a Visa. But for now at least, the company says the only way to ensure that a purchase is routed over the Visa network is to sign.

"When you use your Visa card, you have a chance to win a trip to the Olympic Winter Games," a new Visa commercial promises.

The commercial does not explain the rules, but the fine print on Visa's Web site does: nearly all Visa purchases are eligible - as long as the cardholder does not enter a PIN.

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10) Tax on Health Care Will Erode Coverage for Middle Class
By Tula Connell
January 4, 2010
http://blog.aflcio.org/2010/01/04/tax-on-health-care-will-erode-coverage-for-middle-class/

A new year brings with it lots of hope.

Let's hope 2010 brings a health care reform bill that does not penalize working families with a tax on their coverage. Because right now, as New York Times columnist Bob Herbert aptly [1] describes it, there is a "middle-class tax time bomb ticking in the Senate's version" of the health care reform legislation.

The bill that passed the Senate with such fanfare on Christmas Eve would impose a confiscatory 40 percent excise tax on so-called Cadillac health plans, which are popularly viewed as over-the-top plans held only by the very wealthy. In fact, it's a tax that in a few years will hammer millions of middle-class policyholders, forcing them to scale back their access to medical care.

Jon Walker at Firedoglake [2] took a look at a report released in December by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which found the health care tax "will result in most people getting worse health insurance from their employer, insurance that covers less." Walker translates the report's conclusions this way:

"Your employer will reduce what your current insurance plan [covers] and put in place high co-pays and deductibles. The result is that many people with employer-provided health insurance will see their insurance get much worse. For younger, healthier employees, possibly getting less comprehensive insurance but maybe higher wages (I think it is very doubtful that there is a pure dollar for dollar passthrough), this might be a decent deal. For older, less healthy employees this is a very bad deal. They will be forced to pay much more out-of-pocket for their health care."

More cost, less coverage for working families. Yet portraying the tax as only affecting "Cadillac plans," purposely obscures how it will harm America's working families.

Or, as Herbert puts it:

The tax on health benefits is being sold to the public dishonestly as something that will affect only the rich....

[1] describes it: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/opinion/29herbert.html?_r=1
[2] took a look: http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2009/12/11/cms-excise-tax-on-insurance-will-make-your-insurance-cov
erage-worse-and-cause-almost-no-reduction-in-nhe/

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11) U.S. Drone Strikes Reported in Pakistan
By ISMAIL KHAN and SALMAN MASOOD
January 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/world/asia/07drones.html?hp

PESHAWAR, Pakistan - American missiles, presumably fired by remotely piloted drones, struck twice Wednesday in North Waziristan, the tribal region that is a stronghold of Qaeda and Taliban militants.

The drone strikes were the first reported since Dec. 30, when a double agent detonated a suicide vest packed with explosives and killed eight people at a C.I.A. base in southeastern Afghanistan. The C.I.A. base served as an important part of the American effort to target Al Qaeda's top leadership in the region, including with drone strikes.

The missiles hit along the border with Afghanistan's Paktika Province, in an area that has been a repeated target of drone strikes as the United States seeks to halt the flow of fighters from Pakistan.

Details of the drones strikes in the remote area remained sketchy and the death tolls varied, but a government official said as many as 20 or 25 people may have been killed.

A resident of Miramshah, the capital of North Waziristan, said by telephone that the initial strike occurred in the village of Sanzalai, in a mountainous region about 22 miles west.

"Just when militants people gathered at the scene to retrieve the bodies and pull out the wounded, another missile struck an hour later," he said. The second strike left five dead and wounded another three, he said.

He said that the area was under the control of local militants and those killed in the first strike appeared to "guests," a term used for foreign militants, or Al Qaeda.

A senior government official in Peshawar, the capital of neighboring North West Frontier Province, said that 17 people were killed but acknowledged that details remained unclear.

The official who gave the higher death toll said that the target of the attack was a base of Pakistani militants frequented by foreign fighters, and that some two dozen people were killed.

Both officials said foreign militants were among the dead. They spoke on condition of anonymity while discussing security matters.

The United States has stepped up the pace and intensity of its drone attacks in Pakistan, launching more than 40 last year in a C.I.A. program that is ostensibly covert, but is in fact widely known.

The area struck on Wednesday is a headquarters for the Taliban network group run by Sirajuddin Haqqani, which works closely with Al Qaeda and using North Waziristan to stage its insurgency against American and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Ismail Khan reported from Peshawar and Salman Masood from Islamabad.

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12) Deadly Gunfire at Gaza Protest Along Egypt Border
By ETHAN BRONNER
January 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/world/middleeast/07gaza.html?ref=world

JERUSALEM - An anti-Egypt rally in southern Gaza turned deadly on Wednesday when demonstrators rushed the border fence and stoned Egyptian troops on the other side, leading to an exchange of gunfire and the death of an Egyptian soldier. Nine Egyptian soldiers and a dozen Palestinians were wounded from stones and gunfire, witnesses and medics said.

It was the most serious Palestinian-Egyptian violence along the closed Gaza border since Israel's short-lived invasion more than a year ago, and reflected rising tensions between Gaza's Hamas rulers and the Egyptian government, which, like Israel, appears determined to keep Gaza isolated.The demonstration, organized by Hamas, protested Egypt's refusal to allow international aid and solidarity missions into Gaza as well as Egypt's construction of an underground barrier to obstruct smuggler tunnels. Those tunnels supply both goods and arms to Hamas and Gaza.

As Hamas leaders gave speeches, young men climbed the border fence and threw rocks at the Egyptians, witnesses and police reported, and Palestinian police officers shot in the air to control the crowd, though to little avail. Egyptian troops then shot from their side. "Two Palestinians were instantly wounded from five bullets," a witness said.

The Egyptian forces also tear-gassed demonstrators who waved Hamas and Turkish flags, witnesses said. A Palestinian aid convoy was stopped by Egypt in the northern Sinai city of El Arish and included Turkish activists. The group, called Viva Palestina, consisted of 500 people, including Americans, British and Jordanians. It had scuffled earlier with Egyptian security officials in El Arish. Dozens were hurt.

A compromise was reached and part of the convoy was en route into Gaza by nightfall.

"The area is calm now and the situation on the border is stable," said Ihab al-Ghussein, spokesman for the Hamas Interior Ministry, at a news conference in Gaza City.

The Egyptian soldier who was killed was in an observation tower 100 yards from the demonstration's stage, witnesses said.

Dr. Ahmed Shehada of Abu Yousef al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah, said it had taken in 12 wounded Palestinians, "most of them hit by gunshots."

Fares Akram contributed reporting from Gaza.

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13) Israel: Disputed Housing Approved
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
World Briefing | Middle East
January 6, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/world/middleeast/06briefs-Israel1.html?ref=world

Israel has approved construction of four new apartment buildings in a site that has drawn opposition from Palestinians, just outside the old city of East Jerusalem, officials said Tuesday.

The 24-unit project is being developed in a predominantly Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem, which Palestinians claim for a future capital.

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14) Court Backs War Powers Over Rights of Detainees
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
January 6, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/us/06detain.html?ref=us

A federal appeals court panel on Tuesday strongly backed the powers of the government to hold Guantánamo detainees and other noncitizens suspected of committing terrorist acts.

In a sweeping opinion, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that the presidential war power to detain those suspected of terrorism is not limited even by international law of war.

The decision, if it is not reversed by the Supreme Court, could apply to all cases involving detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, since all of those cases are heard by the District of Columbia Circuit. As a result, the Obama administration will have a stronger position when opposing a court order to release a terrorism suspect.

In its ruling, the court denied a request by Ghaleb Nassar al-Bihani, a former cook for a Taliban paramilitary brigade, to be released from the detention center at Guantánamo. It is the first case to directly apply a landmark 2008 Supreme Court decision that allowed prisoners to challenge their detention.

Mr. Bihani, who is from Yemen, was captured in 2002 when his brigade surrendered. He challenged his detention with a petition for habeas corpus, which the courts did not act on before the decision of the 2008 Supreme Court case, Boumediene v. Bush, which said federal judges had jurisdiction to hear such claims.

Last year, a federal district court denied Mr. Bihani's petition for release; Tuesday's decision upheld the lower court.

Mr. Bihani argued that his continued detention violated international law because he was not part of the military of a nation at war, and had not committed "a direct hostile act" like firing his weapon. His petition for release, he said, should have been reviewed under standards like those for criminal defendants in the United States.

But the court found that granting such a high level of protection to the rights of detainees like Mr. Bihani would affect the military's entire approach to war.

"From the moment a shot is fired, to battlefield capture, up to a detainee's day in court, military operations would be compromised as the government strove to satisfy evidentiary standards in anticipation of habeas litigation," the opinion said.

A lawyer for Mr. Bihani did not return calls seeking comment. A Department of Justice spokesman also declined to comment.

Eric M. Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University and an expert in habeas cases, said the appeals court had "gone out of its way to poke a stick in the eye of the Supreme Court" by taking a view that expands government power beyond the limits laid out in decisions like Boumediene.

The 25-page opinion was written by Judge Janice Rogers Brown and joined by Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, both appointees of President George W. Bush. Both are considered among the most conservative judges on the circuit.

The third member of the panel, who joined in denying Mr. Bihani's petition but not in the complete reasoning of the decision, was Judge Stephen F. Williams., a senior judge who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan. In a concurring opinion, Judge Williams, wrote that the majority's argument that the president's war powers are not bound by the international laws of war actually "goes well beyond even what the government has argued in this case."

In a separate concurrence, Judge Brown wrote that the war placed the nation "past the leading edge of a new and frightening paradigm, one that demands new rules be written."

She wrote, "War is a challenge to law, and the law must adjust."

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15) A terrorism designation Cuba doesn't deserve
By Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, January 5, 2010; A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/04/AR2010010402723.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Under new rules prompted by the failed Christmas Day terrorist attack, airline passengers coming to the United States from 14 nations will undergo extra screening: Afghanistan, Algeria, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. For our first quiz of the new decade, which country doesn't fit with the others?

The obvious answer is Cuba, which presents a threat of terrorism that can be measured at precisely zero. Cuba is not a failed state where swaths of territory lie beyond government control; rather, it is one of the most tightly locked-down societies in the world, a place where the idea of private citizens getting their hands on plastic explosives, or terrorist weapons of any kind, is simply laughable.

There is no history of radical Islam in Cuba. In fact, there is hardly any history of Islam at all. With its long-standing paranoia about internal security and its elaborate network of government spies and snitches, the island nation would have to be among the last places on Earth where al-Qaeda would try to establish a cell, let alone plan and launch an attack. Yet Cuba is on the list because the State Department still considers it -- along with Iran, Sudan and Syria -- to be a state sponsor of terrorism.

Really? Despite the fact that the U.S. Interests Section in Havana was one of the few American diplomatic posts in the world to remain open for normal business, with no apparent increased security, in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks?

The Obama administration has made many admirable moves to bring U.S. foreign policy into closer alignment with objective reality. But progress toward a fact-based relationship with Cuba has been tentative and halting, at best. Obvious steps that could only serve U.S. interests -- and, in the process, almost surely make Cuba a more open society -- remain untaken.

Last month, New York Times correspondent Tim Golden and I hosted a lunchtime conversation -- and mini-concert -- in Washington with Carlos Varela, a singer-songwriter who is often called Cuba's Bob Dylan. The event, sponsored by the New America Foundation's U.S.-Cuba Policy Initiative and the Center for Democracy in the Americas, was notable for the fact that it could take place at all: Varela's only previous trip to the United States was in 1998. He wanted to come again in 2004, but the U.S. government refused him a visa.

The George W. Bush administration adopted a hard-line policy of denying visas to most Cuban artists, including some who were trying to come because they had been nominated for Grammy Awards. The fact that Varela got a visa this time is indicative of a partial thaw, but there has not yet been a full return to the pre-Bush status quo, when the question that preoccupied Cuban musicians was whether the Castro government would let them out, not whether the U.S. government would let them in.

In May, the Obama administration denied a visa to world-famous Cuban folk singer Silvio Rodriguez, who had hoped to perform at a concert in New York marking the legendary Pete Seeger's 90th birthday. I suppose it's possible to draw a distinction -- Rodriguez is known as a true believer in the communist system that Fidel Castro installed, while Varela, without explicitly criticizing the regime, uses nuance and metaphor to question the government and express the impatience of Cuban youth. But since when is the United States afraid of exposure to a competing ideology?

The Obama administration has inched forward in the right direction. Last April, the president lifted restrictions on how often Cuban Americans can visit relatives on the island and how much money they can send to family members. Basically undisturbed, however, are the main pillars of a half-century' s worth of failed policy toward Cuba: the ban that effectively keeps almost all other Americans from traveling to Cuba, and the trade embargo that forbids U.S. companies from doing business there.

Granted, the president already has plenty on his plate. He may be reluctant to introduce yet another variable. It's not hard to imagine a senator or a group of House members holding, say, health-care reform hostage over Cuba policy.

But it's difficult for me to believe that Obama fails to see how insane our current policy really is. He needs to change it -- and he can begin by ceasing to pretend that looking for al-Qaeda terrorists on flights from Cuba is anything but a big waste of time.

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16) Aid Convoy Breaks Gaza Siege
Al Jazeera
January 6, 2009
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/01/201016165325573953.html

Palestinians threw stones at Egyptian forces across the
border to protest the convoy's delay [AFP]

A humanitarian aid convoy carrying food and medical
supplies has arrived in the Gaza Strip nearly a month
after it embarked from the UK.

Members of the much-delayed Viva Palestina convoy began
passing through Egypt's Rafah border crossing into Gaza
on Wednesday, waving Palestinian flags and raising
their hands in peace signs.

Al Jazeera's Ayman Mohyeldin, reporting from Gaza, said
the first wave of vehicles was greeted by Gaza's Hamas
leaders as well as members of a Turkish humanitarian
organisation that aided in bringing the convoy to the
strip.

"We had been expecting the arrival of the convoy amid
much fanfare but it almost caught the Palestinians here
by surprise," he said.

"The doors suddenly flung open and within minutes the
first batch of about 12 or so vehicles made their way
from the Egyptian side to the Palestinians."

More than 100 vehicles followed the first batch into
Gaza shortly afterward, he said.

Violent clashes

Participants of the convoy are expected to spend the
next 48 hours distributing the aid supplies.

Viva Palestina's arrival in Gaza followed violent
clashes between Egyptian security forces, Palestinians
and members of the convoy.

Hours before the convoy's arrival, an Egyptian soldier
was shot dead during a clash with Palestinian
protesters who had gathered along the border to protest
a delay in the convoy's arrival.

Egyptian forces opened fire to disperse the stone-
throwing protesters, and at least 35 Palestinians were
wounded in the ensuing clash, according to Hamas
officials.

Late on Tuesday, more than 50 people were wounded
during a clash between Egyptian authorities and
international members of the convoy.

The protests were sparked by an Egyptian decision to
allow 139 vehicles to enter Gaza through the Rafah
crossing, but requiring a remaining 59 vehicles to pass
via Israel.

Bitter disputes

The convoy, led by George Galloway, a British MP, had
already been delayed by more than a week, after he and
a delegation of Turkish MPs failed to persuade the
Egyptians to change their mind.

The convoy of nearly 200 vehicles arrived in Egypt's
port city of al-Arish on Monday after a dispute with
Cairo on the route.

But the arrival came after a bitter dispute between its
organisers and the government, which banned the convoy
from entering Egypt's Sinai from Jordan by ferry,
forcing it to drive north to the Syrian port of
Lattakia.

Al Jazeera's Amr El Kahky, who has been travelling with
the convoy, said Viva Palestina's organisers had hoped
to reach Gaza by December 27.

"We're talking about an almost 10 day delay. The convoy
members are happy to have reached their destination,"
he said.

"Many of them have taken time off from their jobs in
Europe and other areas and that's why they're happy to
deliver the aid and go back home to resume their normal
lives. So their jubilation is justified."

Gaza blockade

Israel and Egypt have severely restricted travel to and
from the Gaza Strip since Hamas seized power there in
June 2007, after winning Palestinian legislative
elections in 2006.

The blockade currently allows only very basic supplies
into Gaza.

The siege has severely restricted essential supplies
and placed Gazans in a dire situation, made worse by
Israel's military assault last winter that reduced much
of the territory to ruins.

Galloway, the convoy organiser, said the mission
represents only "a drop in the ocean" as long as the
siege on Gaza continues.

"No number of convoys is going to solve the problems
here," he told Al Jazeera.

"So we're not only trying to bring in aid, we're trying
to show the world there is a siege.

"If there is anyone who doubted there is a siege on
Gaza, they certainly aren't doubting it now after the
events of the last 31 days with this convoy."

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17) Southern Schools Mark Two Majorities
By SHAILA DEWAN
January 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/us/07south.html?ref=us

ATLANTA - The South has become the first region in the country where more than half of public school students are poor and more than half are members of minorities, according to a new report.

The shift was fueled not by white flight from public schools, which spiked during desegregation but has not had much effect on school demographics since the early 1980s. Rather, an influx of Latinos and other ethnic groups, the return of blacks to the South and higher birth rates among black and Latino families have contributed to the change.

The new numbers, from the 2008-9 school year, are a milestone for the South, "the only section of the United States where racial slavery, white supremacy and racial segregation of schools were enforced through law and social custom," said the report, to be released on Thursday by the Southern Education Foundation, a nonprofit group based here that supports education improvement in the region. But the numbers also herald the future of the country as a whole, as minority students are expected to exceed 50 percent of public school enrollment by 2020 and the share of students poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches is on the rise in every state.

The South, desperate for a well-educated work force that can attract economic development, will face an enormous challenge in tackling on such a broad scale the lower achievement rates among poor and minority students, who score lower than average on tests and drop out more frequently than whites. Four of the 15 states in the report - Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas - now have a majority of both low-income and minority pupils. Only one, Virginia, has neither.

"This is the beginning of a very clear trend that has enormous implications," said Michael A. Rebell, the executive director of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia University. "When we realize that the majority of graduates of our schools in the long run are going to come from backgrounds with educational deprivation, it makes it imperative that schools be improved."

School districts in the South are already struggling to adapt, but it is not clear which methods are most effective.

"That's the question that Congress, the legislature, the Gates Foundation - everybody's trying to solve that," said Arthur C. Johnson, the superintendent of the Palm Beach School District in Florida, which has gone from 40 percent minority students to 63 percent in 15 years. Remedial programs, career-centered academies, and intensive teacher training have helped, Mr. Johnson said, but have not closed the gap in achievement and graduation rates.

Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia and Maryland have been among those states where poor and minority students have shown the most improvement in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math. From 2003 to 2007, black fourth-graders in Alabama showed the most improvement of any state in reading on the National Assessment of Economic Progress, though they still rank slightly below average.

In Tennessee, where many districts have seen Hispanic enrollment increase by factors of 10 or more, districts have scrambled to hire more teachers of English as a second language. In Mississippi, which has no publicly financed preschool, some schools have used federal money for poor students to prepare 4-year-olds for the classroom.

In Louisiana, a recent study has tried to determine which teacher-training programs are most effective. Districts are experimenting with ways to attract more experienced teachers to high-risk schools.

"We've got to figure out how to break the cycle of poverty, and the way we're doing it now isn't working," said Hank M. Bounds, the Mississippi commissioner of higher education and, until recently, the state superintendent of schools. "An affluent 5-year-old has about the same vocabulary as an adult living in poverty."

More minority students in a district does not mean that classrooms are more integrated, said Richard Fry, a senior research associate with the Pew Hispanic Center, whose research shows that most white children in the South attend predominantly white schools and an even higher percentage of black and Hispanic children attend predominantly minority schools.

Southern schools are far more segregated now than they were at the height of integration in the '70s and '80s, a period that saw a narrowing of the achievement gap, said Gary Orfield, the co-director of The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at U.C.L.A. The South has the lowest percentage of children in private school of any region, Mr. Orfield said.

Minority schools tend to be larger, have higher student-teacher ratios and have higher poverty rates, Mr. Fry said. For some education advocates, such correlations raise the possibility that politicians will be less likely to adequately finance public schools as they fill with poor and minority students.

"We have a history of providing the least educational resources to the students who need the most," said Steve Suitts, the vice president of the Southern Education Foundation and the author of the study. "The people in the South have to be concerned about all children, not just their own grandchildren."

On the other hand, Southern politicians are keenly aware of the need for an educated work force. Spurred in part by school financing lawsuits, more than half the 15 states included in the study already provide more state and local financing to heavily poor or minority districts than to affluent or low-minority ones, according to figures compiled by Education Trust, an advocacy group in Washington. But schools often layer programs on top of programs without analyzing which are effective, said Daria Hall, the trust's director of K-12 policy.

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18) Clothing Retailer Says It Will No Longer Destroy Unworn Garments
By JIM DWYER
January 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/nyregion/07clothes.html?ref=nyregion

The clothing retailer H & M promised on Wednesday to stop destroying new, unworn clothing that it cannot sell at its store in Herald Square, and would instead donate the garments to charities.

The practice was discovered by Cynthia Magnus, a graduate student at the City University of New York, who found bags of unworn but mutilated clothing that had been thrown away by H & M on West 35th Street. She also found bags of new Wal-Mart garments with holes punched through them.

After Ms. Magnus wrote to H & M's headquarters in Sweden and got no response, she contacted The New York Times. More slashed clothing was found Monday night on 35th Street and reported in the About New York column on Wednesday.

"It will not happen again," said Nicole Christie, a spokeswoman for H & M in New York. "We are committed 100 percent to make sure this practice is not happening anywhere else, as it is not our standard practice."

Ms. Christie said it was H & M's policy to donate unworn clothing to charitable groups. She said that she did not know why the store on 34th Street was slashing the clothes, and that the company was checking to make sure that none of its other stores were doing so.

A Wal-Mart spokeswoman, Melissa Hill, said she had been unable to learn why new clothing with the store's tags had been destroyed, but added that the company typically donated or recycled such items.

One charitable program, the New York Clothing Bank, was set up by the city when Edward I. Koch was mayor to accept unworn clothing and to protect the retailers from people who might use the donations to get store credit or undercut sales.

"I would welcome H & M, Wal-Mart and every enterprise that presently is destroying new clothing to call me immediately," said Mary Lanning, chairwoman of the Clothing Bank.

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19) Courts Seek More Lawyers to Help the Poor
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
January 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/nyregion/07lawyers.html?ref=nyregion

The recession has swelled the number of people showing up in New York State courts who cannot afford lawyers to 2.1 million annually, often turning eviction, foreclosure, debt collection and other civil cases into lopsided battles that raise questions about the fairness of the legal system.

In response, the state court system is beginning an unusual new program this week to try to fill the gap with volunteer retired lawyers, hoping partly to attract Baby Boomer lawyers who may be ready to slow down but are not keen on full-time golf.

New York's chief judge, Jonathan Lippman, said in an interview that officials changed the state's rules this week to add a new category of lawyer, attorney emeritus, that will free lawyers of some burdens of full-time practice, like paying for malpractice insurance, while channeling them to dozens of legal programs around the state that represent low-income people without charge. Until now, lawyers were required to register with the state as either active or retired.

Judge Lippman said that the program could sharply increase the number of lawyers volunteering for such public interest work, after decades of efforts that have not come close to meeting the demand. "This is putting a gold star on their chest, saying, 'You are doing something important,' " Judge Lippman said.

Although such work is often described as an ethical obligation of law practice, some studies have shown that more than half of the state's 250,000 lawyers provide no free services.

In interviews, judges described the growing ranks of people who say they cannot afford lawyers as a crisis in the courts. They said that unrepresented people sometimes blundered into errors that could lead to destitution and homelessness. Court officials said the number of people who say they cannot afford lawyers statewide has grown by 300,000 since 2005, to 2.1 million annually by 2009.

Nationally, court officials and bar associations have begun to talk about the potential for volunteer work from some 400,000 of the country's 1.1 million lawyers in the Baby Boom generation who are moving toward retirement.

In the New York program, lawyers over 55 who register in the attorney emeritus category will be trained and supervised in the work for low-income clients. Steven Banks, the attorney in chief of the Legal Aid Society in New York City, said the program could be a breakthrough in efforts to draw more volunteer lawyers. "It is an innovative idea to tap into untapped resources," Mr. Banks said.

He said that because of limited resources, the society was turning away eight of every nine people who come to it seeking legal help in civil cases.

Bar associations and other groups around the country have worked for decades to increase lawyers' volunteer efforts. Court officials said that at least six states, including Florida, Illinois and Nevada, have attorney emeritus programs like the one New York is adopting.

At many large corporate law firms there is now an established culture of regularly handling public-interest cases without charging fees.

But there has also been resistance to participation in volunteer programs by some lawyers. A statewide study in 2002 said only about a quarter of all lawyers worked more than 20 hours a year on such voluntary efforts.

Many of the organizations that provide free legal services in the state are facing their own fund-raising and other financial challenges because of the economy, at a time when more people need lawyers, said Fern Schair, the chairwoman of the board of the Feerick Center for Social Justice at Fordham Law School, which works to expand representation for people who cannot afford lawyers.

Judge Lippman said that Ms. Schair proposed the attorney emeritus program to him last summer as a way that New York might try to cope with the challenge of the growing number of unrepresented people in the courts.

"I immediately said to her, 'We're going to do it,' " Judge Lippman said on Wednesday. "This struck me as a unique opportunity to kind of seize the day."

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20) Bubbles and the Banks
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
January 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/opinion/08krugman.html

Health care reform is almost (knock on wood) a done deal. Next up: fixing the financial system. I'll be writing a lot about financial reform in the weeks ahead. Let me begin by asking a basic question: What should reformers try to accomplish?

A lot of the public debate has been about protecting borrowers. Indeed, a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency to help stop deceptive lending practices is a very good idea. And better consumer protection might have limited the overall size of the housing bubble.

But consumer protection, while it might have blocked many subprime loans, wouldn't have prevented the sharply rising rate of delinquency on conventional, plain-vanilla mortgages. And it certainly wouldn't have prevented the monstrous boom and bust in commercial real estate.

Reform, in other words, probably can't prevent either bad loans or bubbles. But it can do a great deal to ensure that bubbles don't collapse the financial system when they burst.

Bear in mind that the implosion of the 1990s stock bubble, while nasty - households took a $5 trillion hit - didn't provoke a financial crisis. So what was different about the housing bubble that followed?

The short answer is that while the stock bubble created a lot of risk, that risk was fairly widely diffused across the economy. By contrast, the risks created by the housing bubble were strongly concentrated in the financial sector. As a result, the collapse of the housing bubble threatened to bring down the nation's banks. And banks play a special role in the economy. If they can't function, the wheels of commerce as a whole grind to a halt.

Why did the bankers take on so much risk? Because it was in their self-interest to do so. By increasing leverage - that is, by making risky investments with borrowed money - banks could increase their short-term profits. And these short-term profits, in turn, were reflected in immense personal bonuses. If the concentration of risk in the banking sector increased the danger of a systemwide financial crisis, well, that wasn't the bankers' problem.

Of course, that conflict of interest is the reason we have bank regulation. But in the years before the crisis, the rules were relaxed - and, even more important, regulators failed to expand the rules to cover the growing "shadow" banking system, consisting of institutions like Lehman Brothers that performed banklike functions even though they didn't offer conventional bank deposits.

The result was a financial industry that was hugely profitable as long as housing prices were going up - finance accounted for more than a third of total U.S. profits as the bubble was inflating - but was brought to the edge of collapse once the bubble burst. It took government aid on an immense scale, and the promise of even more aid if needed, to pull the industry back from the brink.

And here's the thing: Since that aid came with few strings - in particular, no major banks were nationalized even though some clearly wouldn't have survived without government help - there's every incentive for bankers to engage in a repeat performance. After all, it's now clear that they're living in a heads-they-win, tails-taxpayers-lose world.

The test for reform, then, is whether it reduces bankers' incentives and ability to concentrate risk going forward.

Transparency is part of the answer. Before the crisis, hardly anyone realized just how much risk the banks were taking on. More disclosure, especially with regard to complex financial derivatives, would clearly help.

Beyond that, an important aspect of reform should be new rules limiting bank leverage. I'll be delving into proposed legislation in future columns, but here's what I can say about the financial reform bill the House passed - with zero Republican votes - last month: Its limits on leverage look O.K. Not great, but O.K. It would, however, be all too easy for those rules to get weakened to the point where they wouldn't do the job. A few tweaks in the fine print and banks would be free to play the same game all over again.

And reform really should take on the financial industry's compensation practices. If Congress can't legislate away the financial rewards for excessive risk-taking, it can at least try to tax them.

Let me conclude with a political note. The main reason for reform is to serve the nation. If we don't get major financial reform now, we're laying the foundations for the next crisis. But there are also political reasons to act.

For there's a populist rage building in this country, and President Obama's kid-gloves treatment of the bankers has put Democrats on the wrong side of this rage. If Congressional Democrats don't take a tough line with the banks in the months ahead, they will pay a big price in November.

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21) U.S. Job Losses in December Dim Hopes for Quick Upswing
By PETER S. GOODMAN
January 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/09/business/economy/09jobs.html?hp

The American economy lost another 85,000 jobs in December and the unemployment rate remained at 10 percent, setting back hopes for a swift recovery from the worst downturn since the Great Depression.

The latest monthly snapshot of the national job market released by the Labor Department on Friday provided one potentially encouraging milestone: Data for November was revised to show that the economy gained 4,000 net jobs that month, in contrast to initial reports showing a loss of 11,000 jobs. That marked the first monthly improvement since the recession began two years ago.

But the December data failed to repeat the trend, and the report disappointed economists who had generally been expecting a decline of perhaps 10,000 jobs.

The report broadly confirmed that while the pace of job market deterioration has declined markedly in recent months, companies remain reluctant to hire, heightening the likelihood that scarce paychecks will remain a dominant feature of American life for many months.

"We're still losing jobs," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. "It's nothing like we had in the freefall of last winter, but we're not about to turn around. We're still looking at a really weak economy."

The report intensified pressures on the Obama administration to show progress for the $787 million spending bill it championed last year to stimulate the economy. In recent months, the administration has emphasized initiatives aimed at encouraging jobs, while cognizant that concerns about the federal deficit limit its ability to pursue further spending.

"It certainly isn't the best report, because we continue to lose jobs," the Labor secretary Hilda L. Solis, said. "But last year at this time we were losing over 700,000 jobs a month. The recovery act continues to help."

Some economists fixed on a potentially positive trend tucked within the data: For a fifth consecutive month, temporary help services expanded, adding 47,000 positions in December. The increase burnished the notion that companies are recognizing fresh opportunities and are inclined to add labor, even as they hold off on hiring full-time workers.

"We're going in the right direction," said Michael T. Darda, chief economist at MKM Partners, a research and trading firm in Greenwich, Conn. "If we just have a little bit of patience, we'll start see monthly increases of 200,000 to 300,000 jobs within six months."

But in millions of households still grappling with the bite of a wrenching downturn, patience has long been exhausted - along with savings, credit and cash to pay the bills.

In Charlotte, N.C., Kumar G. Navile, 33, has applied for 500 positions across the country since he lost his job as an engineer a year ago. Each month, he finds himself about $600 short in his monthly expenses after the $1,680 he secures in unemployment benefits. He pays the difference from a savings account, but expects that money to dry up in the next two months.

"You get up every day and say today will be different, but it is mentally challenging when you don't find opportunities," Mr. Navile said. "I performed well in school. I got a job the day I graduated. It's been a struggle, and it continues to be."

For those out of work, the market is bleaker than ever. Unemployed people had been jobless for an average of 29 weeks in December, the longest duration since the government began tracking such data in 1948. Roughly 4 in 10 unemployed workers had been jobless for six months or longer.

In recent weeks, the number of new claims for unemployment insurance benefits has tailed off sharply. But the persistence of double-digit unemployment underscored that companies remain unwilling to add payroll.

"There is almost no hiring going on outside the temporary help sector," said Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Project. "Just slowing layoffs is not enough to produce jobs."

Indeed, even as temporary workers increased, the average workweek for rank-and-file employees - roughly 80 percent of the work force - was essentially unchanged in December, at 33.2 hours.

Amid the usual parsing of data that accompanies the monthly jobs report, the spinning of forecasts and dueling outlooks, no complexity cloaked the simple fact that employment remains scarce. Experts assume the economy needs to add about 100,000 jobs a month just to keep pace with new people entering the work force.

"There's really no dynamism in this economy," Mr. Baker said. "Most people, they're not looking at the data. They're just asking, 'Can I get a job?' And that's not getting any easier."

The government's monthly jobs report is always important, yet in recent times it has emerged as the crucial indicator of economic health.

For years, ordinary households have spent in excess of incomes by borrowing against the value of homes, leaning on credit cards and tapping stock portfolios. But home prices have plummeted in much of the country. Stock holdings have diminished. Nervous banks have sliced credit even for healthy borrowers. That has left the paycheck as the primary source of household finance in an economy in which consumer spending comprises roughly 70 percent of all activity.

Economists have grown increasingly divided over the nation's economic prospects. Some argue that recent expansion on the American factory floor presages broader economic improvement that will eventually deliver large numbers of jobs.

The December report failed to deliver clear evidence for that scenario, even as it saw the pace of job losses continue to slow. Construction lost another 53,000 jobs and manufacturing saw 27,000 positions disappear. Despite a surprisingly strong holiday shopping season, retail trade gave up 10,000 jobs in December.

Health care remained a rare bright spot, expanding by 22,000 jobs.

Skeptics argue that the factory expansion merely reflects a rebuilding of inventories after many businesses slashed stocks during the panic that accompanied the fall of prominent financial institutions such as Lehman Brothers in the fall of 2008. Expansion has also been aided by $787 billion in federal spending aimed at stimulating economic growth, and by tax credits for homebuyers.

Once these factors fade in coming months, skeptics argue, the economy will confront the same challenges that have dogged it for more than two years - strapped households fretting about debts and weak job prospects, curtailing spending; banks still worrying about losses to come on mortgage holdings, reluctant to lend; businesses unwilling to hire.

Those with the gloomiest outlooks envision a so-called double dip recession, in which the economy resumes contracting. Others fear years of stagnant growth much like Japan's Lost Decade in the 1990s.

The one point of agreement among economists is that the nation cannot recover without millions of new jobs. Workers must gain fresh wages they can spend at other businesses, creating jobs for other workers - a virtuous cycle, in the parlance of economists.

Recent months have produced tentative signs that such a cycle might be unfolding, even as economists debate its sustainability. The December jobs report only added to the ambiguity that now grips economic forecasting.

"Standing still feels good when you've been used to falling backwards," said Stuart G. Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh. "But we want to move forward."

Javier Hernandez contributed reporting.

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22) Sexual Abuse at Juvenile Centers
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Washington
January 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/us/08brfs-SEXUALABUSEA_BRF.html?ref=us

A new government study found that 13 juvenile detention facilities around the country had high rates of sexual abuse and victimization, with nearly one of every three detainees reporting victimization. The Justice Department study found that nationwide, about 12 percent of youths in state-run, privately run, or local detention facilities reported some type of sexual victimization. Six sites had reported victimization rates of 30 percent or higher.

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