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Help us rent a billboard for Bradley Manning in Washington DC!
Sign the "I am Bradley Manning" photo petition at iam.bradleymanning.org
Help us rent a billboard for Bradley in Washington DC
Bradley will soon have his own billboard in the Washington DC metro area, if we step up. We're launching this campaign to rent the high-profile ad space to coincide with the soon-expected start of his pre-trial court martial in the DC area.
View the billboards, donate, and help choose the design:
epicstep.com/campaign/239/support-bradley
View the new 90 second "I am Bradley Manning" video:
I am Bradley Manning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-P3OXML00s
Courage to Resist
484 Lake Park Ave. #41
Oakland, CA 94610
510-488-3559
couragetoresist.org
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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Table of Contents:
A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.
C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
D. ARTICLES IN FULL
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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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Join the ANSWER Coalition and other community organizations and unions in supporting this important action.
LOCAL 2 SIEGE ACTION!
INTERCONTINENTAL HOTEL ASKS FOR A FIGHT!
Join Local 2 for a whole day picket!
Where: Intercontinental Hotel, 888 Howard Street (at 5th Street)
Date: Wednesday, May 25th, 2011
Time: 7am to 7pm
The Intercontinental Hotel corporation continues to insist on transferring PBX (telephone operators) work to front desk clerks at the Holiday Inn Express Fisherman's Wharf. At the same time, they refuse to adjust the low pay rate for workers who are performing a higher job classification. Intercontinental said NO! to our job security clause in the event that rooms at the Mark Hopkins get converted into condominiums, and when we proposed to adjust the workload for room cleaners at the Intercontinental Hotel, management was very disrespectful and went as far as saying that the women very often finished their rooms at 3pm instead of 4pm. This hotel chain manages the Intercontinental Hotel - Moscone, Mark Hopkins, Holiday Inn Express, and Holiday Inn - Fisherman's Wharf.
Visit www.unitehere2.org for more info.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.AnswerCoalition.org
http://www.AnswerSF.org
Answer@AnswerSF.org
2969 Mission St.
415-821-6545
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"There are more African Americans under correctional control today -- in jail or prison, on parole or probation -- than were enslaved in 1850..."
Support the work to End Mass Incarceration and Put a Stop to the New Jim Crow.
Michelle Alexander, author of the groundbreaking new book, The New Jim Crow, will be making two appearances in the area:
Sacramento - Wed., May 25th, 6:30 - 8:00 p.m., Women's Civic Improvement Center, 3555 Third Ave., Sacramento
Berkeley - Friday, May 27th, 7:00 - 9:00 p.m., St. Paul AME Church, 2024 Ashby, Berkeley
The events are hosted by All of Us Are None, and Legal Services for Prisoners with Children. For more information, you may open the attachment.
Please come, and tell your friends. This is an important movement we all need to support, and learn more about!
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MURDERER MEHSERLE WILL WALK THE STREETS SOON
Johannes Mehserle received two years for the murder of Oscar Grant.
On June 1st, he will go before Judge Perry and COULD WALK OUT FREE.
We don't know the exact date, but we do know that in June, Murderer Mehserle will be back on the streets.
We need to be ready to show them that Oakland has NOT forgotton that justice was NOT served.
On the DAY OF HIS RELEASE: The Coalition for Justice for Oscar Grant will hold events at TWO PLACES:
3:00 PM: Gather at Oscar Grant Station (Fruitvale BART)
5:30 PM: Gather on 14th & Broadway
Stay tuned for more details!!!
Click here to view Facebook Event: Mehserle the Murderer is Being Released Soon:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=115287888554806
Or call us at (510) 575-9005
The ANSWER Coalition is a member of the Coalition for Justice for Oscar Grant.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.AnswerCoalition.org
http://www.AnswerSF.org
Answer@AnswerSF.org
2969 Mission St.
415-821-6545
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Next UNAC general meeting is Sunday, June 12, 2:00 PM at Redstone Bldg., 16th Street and Capp. (Capp Street is one block or so below Mission Street.) Third Floor Conference Room, San Francisco. MARK YOUR CALENDAR NOW!
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Save the Date!
NATIONAL LABOR-COMMUNITY CONFERENCE TO DEFEAT THE CORPORATE AGENDA AND FIGHT FOR A WORKING PEOPLE'S AGENDA
Kent State University
Kent, Ohio
June 24-26, 2011
Working people across the country -- from Wisconsin and Ohio to New York, Oregon, and California -- are facing unprecedented attacks by corporations and the rich with the help of the federal, state and local politicians that they fund.
The corporate agenda is clear: It is to bust unions and cut workers' pay and benefits -- both in the private and public sectors. It is to erode and privatize Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. It is to dismantle the public sector and social services by denying funds for job creation, education, health care, environmental protection, and rebuilding the infrastructure. It is to ensure that taxes on the wealthy are constantly lowered while the bite on workers and the poor is constantly increased. It is to perpetuate U.S. wars and occupations whenever it serves the interests of the multinationals. It is to divide the working class by race, gender, national origin, religion, and sexual orientation. It is also to limit and restrict constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties. The list goes on.
In state capitals, communities and workplaces across the country, workers are fighting back. But if we're going to be successful in pushing back the attacks on collective bargaining, stopping the budget cuts and concessions, creating jobs, and defending social services and education, we need to build unity within our movement, including forging stronger ties with labor's allies: communities of color, students and youth, single-payer advocates, environmentalists, antiwar activists, immigrant rights supporters, and other progressive forces.
Relying on politicians to defend us -- the so-called "friends of labor" -- has proven to be disastrous. During the past three decades, working people have suffered a dramatic decline in their standard of living while the rich have amassed an unprecedented amount of wealth at the top, regardless of which of the major parties was running the government. We have had every combination imaginable: Republicans occupying the White House with a majority in Congress, Democrats occupying the White House with a majority in Congress, or some kind of "divided government." But in each case the result for working people has been the same: conditions got worse for workers while the corporations prospered even more. Why should we continue this vicious cycle?
The working class has the power to put an end to this situation. And as the debate over the debt and the deficit intensifies, the need has never been greater for an organized campaign to demand "No Cuts, No Concessions!" whether in regard to social programs or workers' wages and benefits. We say place the burden for solving the financial crises squarely where it belongs: on the rich. They caused the crisis, let them pay for it!
The Emergency Labor Network (ELN) was initiated earlier this year at a historic meeting of 100 union leaders and activists from around the country. Join us June 24-26, 2011 at Kent State University in Ohio for a national labor-community conference to spur the campaign to build a more militant fight-back movement and to launch a national campaign for an alternative agenda for working people. Together we can move forward on both fronts.
This conference is open to all who agree with its purpose, as explained in this Call. To register for the conference, please go to our website at www.laborfightback.org. If you prefer to register offline, write emergencylabor@aol.com or call 216-736-4715 for a registration form.
For more information, e-mail emergencylabor@aol.com or call 216-736-4715.
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Oct. 7 - Protest, March & Die-In on 10th Anniversary of Afghanistan War
Friday, Oct. 7, 2011, 4:30-6:30pm
New Federal Building, 7th & Mission Sts, SF
Protest & Die-In on 10th Anniversary of Afghanistan War
End All the Wars & Occupations-Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Libya, Haiti . . .
Money for Jobs, Healthcare & Schools-Not for the Pentagon
Friday, October 7, 2011 will be the exact 10th anniversary of the U.S./NATO war on the people of Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of Afghani people have been killed, wounded and displaced, and thousands of U.S. and NATO forces killed and wounded. The war costs more than $126 billion per year at a time when social programs are being slashed.
The true and brutal character of the U.S. strategy to "win hearts and minds" of the Afghani population was described by a Marine officer, quoted in a recent ANSWER Coalition statement:
"You can't just convince them [Afghani people] through projects and goodwill," another Marine officer said. "You have to show up at their door with two companies of Marines and start killing people. That's how you start convincing them." (To read the entire ANSWER statement, click here)
Mark your calendar now and help organize for the October 7 march and die-in in downtown San Francisco. There are several things you can do:
1. Reply to this email to endorse the protest and die-in.
2. Spread the word and help organize in your community, union, workplace and campus.
3. Make a donation to help with organizing expenses.
Only the people can stop the war!
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.AnswerCoalition.org
http://www.AnswerSF.org
Answer@AnswerSF.org
2969 Mission St.
415-821-6545
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B. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.:
[Some of these videos are embeded on the BAUAW website:
http://bauaw.blogspot.com/ or bauaw.org ...bw]
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Dear readers,
This episode of Frontline titled, "WikiSecrets" seems to be a comprehensive report based upon the case the government is trying to build against Bradley Manning and Julian Assange. It cleverly plays down the conviction that exposing a crime is not a crime! It also implys that supporters of Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are naieve, at best and co-conspirators, at worst. The case against Manning and the one they are trying to establish against Julian Assange as presented here seems to be based on heresay, innuendo and guilt by association. Yet Bradley Manning still faces the death penalty and they're trying their best to make a case against Julian Assange.
They blame Wikileaks for Tunisia and Egypt! As if it was wrong for the people of those countries to oust their crooked dictators! They portray Julian Assange as a criminal for leaking evidence of the stinking corruption to the masses who are struggling and demanding bread, jobs and justice.
No government has the right to murder people and keep it a secret! Unfortunately, however, this has become the common practice of the U.S. bi-partisan government of, by and for the wealthy.
FREE BRADLEY MANNING! HANDS OFF JULIAN ASSANGE! STOP THE FBI GRAND JURY INDICTMENTS AGAINST ANTIWAR AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ACTIVISTS!
--Bonnie Weinstein
WikiSecrets
The inside story of Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and the largest intelligence breach in U.S. history.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/wikileaks/?utm_source=FRONTLINE+Bulletin&utm_campaign=2526af6825-WikiSecrets5_23_2011&utm_medium=email
Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.
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"Uncle Genpachi and Tama 001 to 005";
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFeVquF84X4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsYFFu2YIb4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9-s17Hn70Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnqurSMYuiU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8EEwSvm4I4
PS:
We'd very much appreciate it if you could send us a solidarity message to our decisive rally on June 5th.
http://www.doro-chiba.org/z-undou/pdf/65f.pdf
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RSA Animate - Crises of Capitalism
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOP2V_np2c0&feature=player_embedded
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Labor Beat: May Day Weekend
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiitdOiO6kA
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Paradise Gray Speaks At Jordan Miles Emergency Rally 05/06/2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJOLz1EYDYE&feature=player_embedded
Police Reassigned While CAPA Student's Beatdown Investigated
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qK-6IsP3dUg&NR=1&feature=fvwp
Pittsburgh Student Claims Police Brutality; Shows Hospital Photos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_j_AVsTXZc&feature=relmfu
Justice For Jordan Miles
By jasiri x
http://justiceforjordanmiles.com/
Monday, May 9, 2011 at 3:22 pm
Even though Pittsburgh Police beat Jordan Miles until he looked like this: (Photo at website)
And even though Jordan Miles, an honor student who plays the viola, broke no laws and committed no crimes, the Federal Government decided not to prosecute the 3 undercover Pittsburgh Police officers who savagely beat him.
To add insult to injury, Pittsburgh's Mayor and Police Chief immediately reinstated the 3 officers without so much as a apology. An outraged Pittsburgh community called for an emergency protest to pressure the local District Attorney to prosecute these officers to the fullest extent of the law.
Below is my good friend, and fellow One Hood founding member Paradise Gray (also a founding member of the Blackwatch Movement and the legendary rap group X-Clan) passionately demanding Justice for Jordan Miles and speaking on the futility of a war of terror overseas while black men are terrorized in their own neighborhoods.
For more information on how you can help get Justice For Jordan Miles go to http://justiceforjordanmiles.com/
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Nation Behind Bars Mass Incarceration And Political Prisoners In the U.S. - Efia Nwangaza, Malcolm X Center for Self-Determination
Black is Back Conference on the Other Wars, March 26, 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBKfFEqaoSs&feature=email
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Tier Systems Cripple Middle Class Dreams for Young Workers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09pQW6TW8m4&feature=youtu.be
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Cindy Sheehan has turned her grief into an anti-war crusade, even questioning the death of Osama bin Laden. From HLN's Dr. DREW Show Thurs. 5/5/11:
http://911blogger.com/news/2011-05-06/cindy-sheehan-mothers-war-war
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Epidemiologist, Dr. Steven Wing, Discusses Global Radiation Exposures and Consequences with Gundersen
Epidemiologist, Dr. Steven Wing and nuclear engineer, Arnie Gundersen, discuss the consequences of the Fukushima radioactive fallout on Japan, the USA, and the world. What are the long-term health effects? What should the government(s) do to protect citizens?
http://vimeo.com/22706805
Epidemiologist, Dr. Steven Wing, Discusses Global Radiation Exposures and Consequences with Gundersen from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.
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New Video - Lupe Fiasco ft. Skylar Grey - 'Words I Never Said'
Thu, Apr 28 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22l1sf5JZD0
Lupe Fiasco addresses some heavy issues in the latest video for his new single, 'Words I Never Said,' featuring Skylar Grey. In the 5 minute and 45 second dose of reality, Lupe tackles issues such as the war on terrorism, devastation, conspiracy theories, 9/11 and genocide. From the opening lyrics of "I really think the war on terror is a bunch of bullsh*t", Lupe doesn't hold back as he voices his socio-political concerns.
"If you turn on TV all you see's a bunch of what the f-ks'
Dude is dating so and so blabbering bout such and such
And that ain't Jersey Shore, homie that's the news
And these the same people that supposed to be telling us the truth
Limbaugh is a racist, Glenn Beck is a racist
Gaza strip was getting bombed, Obama didn't say s-t
That's why I ain't vote for him, next one either
I'm a part of the problem, my problem is I'm peaceful."
Skylar Grey (who also lends her vocals to Dirty money's 'Coming Home' and Eminem's 'I Need A Doctor') does an excellent job of complementing the Alex Da Kid produced track.
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BREAKING ALERT: Mass Arrests, Tear Gas, Sound Weapons used Against WIU Students
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufKv-5t0t4E
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Union Town by Tom Morello: The Nightwatchman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5ZT71DxLuM&feature=player_embedded
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MAY DAY 1886-International Workers Day
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF-ADtNerPM&feature=player_embedded
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Labor Beat: We Are One - Illinois
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOntwNsWHac
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BRADLEY MANNING "BROKE THE LAW" SAYS OBAMA!
"He broke the law!" says Obama about Bradley Manning who has yet to even be charged, let alone, gone to trial and found guilty. How horrendous is it for the President to declare someone guilty before going to trial or being charged with a crime! Justice in the U.S.A.!
Obama on FREE BRADLEY MANNING protest... San Francisco, CA. April 21, 2011-Presidential remarks on interrupt/interaction/performance art happening at fundraiser. Logan Price queries Barack after org. FRESH JUICE PARTY political action.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfmtUpd4id0&feature=youtu.be
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More troops join anti-government protests in Yemen
More soldiers have been joining anti-government protests on the streets of the capital Sana'a.
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=6658
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W.E. A.L.L. B.E.: Miss. Medical Examiner Dr. Adel Shaker On Frederick Carter Hanging (4/19/2011)
http://blip.tv/file/5057532
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Egyptian Soldiers Join Protest Demanding End to Military Dictatorship
Adam Hanieh: Class struggle in Egypt enters a new stage
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=6626
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Row over Wikileaks leaker Bradley Manning treatment (12Apr11)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv8xyHhDKkY&feature=related
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AP writer--State Department on Human Rights Abuse of Bradley Manning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUctxdsKk9Q
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Max Romeo - Socialism Is Love
http://youtu.be/eTvUs4rY4to
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Cuba: The Accidental Eden
http://video.pbs.org/video/1598230084/
[This is a stunningly beautiful portrait of the Cuban natural environment as it is today. However, several times throughout, the narrator tends to imply that if it werent for the U.S. embargo against Cuba, Cuba's natural environmet would be destroyed by the influx of tourism, ergo, the embargo is saving nature. But the Cuban scientists and naturalists tell a slightly different story. But I don't want to spoil the delightfully surprising ending. It's a beautiful film of a beautiful country full of beautiful, articulate and well-educated people....bw]
Watch the full episode. See more Nature.
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VIDEO: SWAT Team Evicts Grandmother
Take Back the Land- Rochester Eviction Defense March 28, 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2axN1zsZno&feature=player_embedded
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B. D. S. [Boycott, Divest, Sanction against Israel]
(Jackson 5) Chicago Flashmob
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4tXe2HKqqs&feature=player_embedded
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Afghans for Peace
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ror0qPcasM&NR=1
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The Kill Team
How U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdered innocent civilians and mutilated their corpses - and how their officers failed to stop them. Plus: An exclusive look at the war crime photos censored by the Pentagon
Rolling Stone
March 27, 3011
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-kill-team-20110327
Afghans respond to "Kill Team"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3guxWIorhdA
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END THE U.S./UN/NATO KILL TEAM NOW!
WARNING: THESE ARE HORRIFIC, DISGUSTING, VIOLENT CRIMES COMMITTED BY THE U.S. MILITARY MAKING THE UPCOMING APRIL 10 [APRIL 9 IN NEW YORK] MARCH AND RALLY AGAINST THE WARS A FIRST PRIORITY FOR WE, THE PEOPLE OF THE U.S. WE DEMAND OUT NOW! END THE WARS AGAINST WORKING PEOPLE HERE AND EVERYWHERE! BRING ALL THE TROOPS, UN/NATO/US/ and CONTRACTORS HOME NOW!
The Kill Team Photos More war crime images the Pentagon doesn't want you to see
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/the-kill-team-photos-20110327
'Death Zone' How U.S. soldiers turned a night-time airstrike into a chilling 'music video'
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/death-zone-20110327
'Motorcycle Kill' Footage of an Army patrol gunning down two men in Afghanistan
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/motorcyle-kill-20110327
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BOB MARLEY - WAR
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73zaNwyhXn0&playnext=1&list=PLA467527F8DD7DE1F
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LOWKEY - TERRORIST? (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmBnvajSfWU
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Frederick Alexander Meade on The Prison Industrial Complex
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vqzfEYo6Lo
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BP Oil Spill Scientist Bob Naman: Seafood Still Not Safe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3VdxvMnDls
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Exclusive: Flow Rate Scientist : How Much Oil Is Really Out There?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsHl3kn63ZA&NR=1
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Iraq Veterans Against the War in Occupied Capitol, Madison, WI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7K0wn73uJU
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Stop LAPD Stealing of Immigrant's Cars
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0lf4kENkxo
On Februrary 19, 2011 Members of the Southern California Immigration Coalition (SCIC) organized and engaged in direct action to defend the people of Los Angeles, CA from the racist LAPD "Sobriety" Checkpoints that are a poorly disguised trap to legally steal the cars from working class people in general and undocumented people in particular. Please disseminate this link widely.
Venceremos,
SCIC
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WikiLeaks Mirrors
Wikileaks is currently under heavy attack.
In order to make it impossible to ever fully remove Wikileaks from the Internet, you will find below a list of mirrors of Wikileaks website and CableGate pages.
Go to
http://wikileaks.ch/Mirrors.html
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Labor Beat: Labor Stands with Subpoenaed Activists Against FBI Raids and Grand Jury Investigation of antiwar and social justice activists.
"If trouble is not at your door. It's on it's way, or it just left."
"Investigate the Billionaires...Full investigation into Wall Street..." Jesse Sharkey, Vice President, Chicago Teachers Union
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSNUSIGZCMQ
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Oil Spill Commission Final Report: Catfish Responds
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3ZRdsccMsM
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Free Bradley Manning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4eNzokgRIw&feature=player_embedded
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Domestic Espionage Alert - Houston PD to use surveillance drone in America!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpstrc15Ogg
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Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVGqE726OAo&feature=player_embedded
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Coal Ash: One Valley's Tale
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E7h-DNvwx4&feature=player_embedded
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Flashmob: Cape Town Opera say NO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wElyrFOnKPk
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"Don't F*** With Our Activists" - Mobilizing Against FBI Raid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyG3dIUGQvQ
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C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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Mumia Wins Decision Against Re-Imposition Of Death Sentence, But...
The Battle Is Still On To
FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL!
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222 • Oakland CA 94610
www.laboractionmumia.org
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ELLA BAKER CENTER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
CLOSE PRISONS NOT SCHOOLS!
https://secure3.convio.net/ebc/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=164&utm_campaign=bnb_close_prisons_not_schools&utm_source=email-action&utm_medium=email&s_src=bnb_close_prisons_not_schools&s_subsrc=email-action&autologin=true&JServSessionIdr004=k3sp4vh2j4.app332b
Carlos* was only 14 years when he was locked up in a California youth prison. Growing up in a rough neighborhood in Northern CA, there were few resources for him or his younger brothers. Carlos was swept up by gangs and ended up serving a 10 year sentence in Division of Juvenile Justice (DJJ), leaving his siblings and childhood behind.
For 10 long years, our state spent millions of dollars to lock him up in a cell. Meanwhile, the state spent a tiny fraction of that amount providing an inadequate education to his younger brothers.
When Carlos was finally released earlier this year, he returned to a neighborhood that hasn't changed. Resources for youth are still scarce. He worries about his little brothers growing up in a society that would rather lock them up than invest in their educations and future.
Carlos' experience is only one example of why California ranks near the bottom in education spending and performance, but we're #1 in prison spending. DJJ drains much-needed resources from California's schools and the vital community programs that would help our State thrive. It's time to close the expensive, abusive DJJ and redirect those resources into our schools.
Join Books Not Bars in calling on Governor Brown to protect our schools by closing the Division of Juvenile Justice.
On May 10, join Books Not Bars, teachers, students, and other concerned Californians at the Capitol to save our schools. For more information or if you plan on attending, please contact Jennifer Kim at Jennifer@ellabakercenter.org, or (510) 285-8234.
If you can't join us in person, take action now, then sign up for join our online rally next Tuesday by sending Gov. Brown an email now.
Justice for families.
Sumayyah Waheed
Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
*Carlos' name has been changed to protect his privacy.
Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
www.ellabakercenter.org | 510.428.3939
1970 Broadway, Suite 450 | Oakland, CA | 94612
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U.S. Attorney Escalates Attacks on Civil Liberties of Anti-War,
Palestinian Human Rights Activists
Call U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald first thing Monday morning! (contact info at bottom of this email)
On Friday, May 6, the U.S. government froze the bank accounts of Hatem Abudayyeh and his wife, Naima. This unwarranted attack on a leading member of the Palestinian community in Chicago is the latest escalation of the repression of anti-war and Palestinian community organizers by the FBI, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Hatem Abudayyeh is one of 23 activists from Minnesota, Michigan, and Illinois subpoenaed to a federal grand jury in Chicago, and his home was raided by the FBI in September of last year. Neither Hatem Abudayyeh nor Naima Abudayyeh have been charged with any crime.
One of the bank accounts frozen was exclusively in Naima Abudayyeh's name. Leaders of the national Committee to Stop FBI Repression, as well as Chicago's Coalition to Protect People's Rights are appalled at the government's attempt to restrict the family's access to its finances, especially so soon before Mothers' Day. Not only does the government's action seriously disrupt the lives of the Abudayyehs and their five-year-old daughter, but it represents an attack on Chicago's Arab community and activist community and the fundamental rights of Americans to freedom of speech.
The persecution of the Abudayyeh family is another example of the criminalization of Palestinians, their supporters, and their movement for justice and liberation. There has been widespread criticism of the FBI and local law enforcement for their racial profiling and scapegoating of Arab and Muslim Americans. These repressive tactics include infiltration of community centers and mosques, entrapment of young men, and the prominent case of 11 students from the University of California campuses at Irvine and Riverside who have been subpoenaed to a grand jury and persecuted for disrupting a speech by Michael Oren, Israeli Ambassador to the US. The government's attempt to conflate the anti-war and human rights movements with terrorism is a cynical attempt to capitalize on the current political climate in order to silence Palestinians and other people of conscience who exercise their First Amendment rights in a manner which does not conform to the administration's foreign policy agenda in the Middle East.
The issuance of subpoenas against the 23 activists has been met with widespread opposition and criticism across the country. Six members of the U.S. Congress, including five in the past month, have sent letters to either Holder or President Obama, expressing grave concern for the violations of the civil liberties and rights of the 23 activists whose freedom is on the line. Three additional U.S. representatives have also promised letters, as thousands of constituents and other people of conscience across the U.S. have demanded an end to this assault on legitimate political activism and dissent. Over 60 Minnesota state legislators also issued a resolution condemning the subpoenas.
The Midwest activists have been expecting indictments for some time. The freezing of the Abudayyeh family's bank accounts suggests that the danger of indictments is imminent.
Take action:
Call U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald at 312-353-5300.
Then dial 0 (zero) for the operator and ask to leave a message with the Duty Clerk.
Demand Fitzgerald
-- Unfreeze the bank accounts of the Abudayyeh family and
-- Stop repression against Palestinian, anti-war and international solidarity activists.
In solidarity,
The Committee to Stop FBI Repression and
The Coalition to Protect People's Rights
For more info go to StopFBI.net
follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend
Copyright (c) 2011 Committee to Stop FBI Repression, All rights reserved.
Thanks for your ongoing interest in the fight against FBI repression of anti-war and international solidarity activists!
Our mailing address is:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
PO Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55415
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Abolish the Death Penalty Blog
http://www.ncadp.org/blog.cfm?postID=165
Abolish the Death Penalty is a blog dedicated to...well, you know. The purpose of Abolish is to tell the personal stories of crime victims and their loved ones, people on death row and their loved ones and those activists who are working toward abolition. You may, from time to time, see news articles or press releases here, but that is not the primary mission of Abolish the Death Penalty. Our mission is to put a human face on the debate over capital punishment.
You can also follow death penalty news by reading our News page and by following us on Facebook and Twitter.
1 Million Tweets for Troy! April 12, 2011
Take Action! Tweet for Troy!
The state of Georgia is seeking to change the drugs they use to carry out executions so they can resume scheduling execution dates, including that of Troy Davis, a man with a strong claim of innocence. Doubts in the case persist, including the fact that no physical evidence links him to the murder, most of the witnesses have recanted or contradicted their testimony and newer testimony implicates a different person (including an eyewitness account).
The Davis case has already generated hundreds of thousands of emails, calls, and letters in support of clemency, including from leaders such as the Pope, Jimmy Carter and former FBI chief Bill Sessions. We need to continue to amass petitions in support of clemency, demonstrating the widespread concern about this case and what it represents.
Please help us send a message to Georgia officials that they can do the right thing - they can intervene as the final failsafe by commuting Davis' sentence. Please help us generate 1 million tweets for Troy Davis!
Share this tweet alert with your friends and family that care about justice and life as soon as you can.
More information about the case is available at www.justicefortroy.org
Here are some sample tweets:
When in doubt, don't execute!! Sign the petition for #TroyDavis! www.tinyurl.com/troyepetition
Too much doubt! Stop the execution! #TroyDavis needs us! www.tinyurl.com/troyepetition
No room for doubt! Stop the execution of #TroyDavis . Retweet, sign petition www.tinyurl.com/troyepetition
Case not "ironclad", yet Georgiacould execute #TroyDavis ! Not on our watch! Petition: www.tinyurl.com/troyepetition
No murder weapon. No physical evidence. Stop the execution! #TroyDavis petition: www.tinyurl.com/troyepetition
7 out of 9 eyewitnesses recanted. No physical evidence. Stop the execution of Troy Davis www.tinyurl.com/troyepetition #TroyDavis
Thanks!
Exonerated Death Row Survivors Urge Georgia to:
Stop the Execution of Troy Davis
Chairman James E. Donald
Georgia State Board of Pardons & Paroles
2 Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive, SE
Suite 458, Balcony Level, East Tower
Atlanta, GA 30334
May 1, 2011
Dear Chairperson Donald and Members of the Board:
We, the undersigned, are alive today because some individual or small group of individuals decided that our insistent and persistent proclamations of innocence warranted one more look before we were sent to our death by execution. We are among the 138 individuals who have been legally exonerated and released from death rows in the United States since 1973. We are alive because a few thoughtful persons-attorneys, journalists, judges, jurists, etc.-had lingering doubts about our cases that caused them to say "stop" at a critical moment and halt the march to the execution chamber. When our innocence was ultimately revealed, when our lives were saved, and when our freedom was won, we thanked God and those individuals of conscience who took actions that allowed the truth to eventually come to light.
We are America's exonerated death row survivors. We are living proof that a system operated by human beings is capable of making an irreversible mistake. And while we have had our wrongful convictions overturned and have been freed from death row, we know that we are extremely fortunate to have been able to establish our innocence. We also know that many innocent people who have been executed or who face execution have not been so fortunate. Not all those with innocence claims have had access to the kinds of physical evidence, like DNA, that our courts accept as most reliable. However, we strongly believe that the examples of our cases are reason enough for those with power over life and death to choose life. We also believe that those in authority have a unique moral consideration when encountering individuals with cases where doubt still lingers about innocence or guilt.
One such case is the case of Troy Anthony Davis, whose 1991 conviction for killing Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail rested almost solely on witness testimony. We know that today, 20 years later, witness evidence is considered much less reliable than it was then. This has meant that, even though most of the witnesses who testified against him have now recanted, Troy Davis has been unable to convince the courts to overturn his conviction, or even his death sentence.
Troy Davis has been able to raise serious doubts about his guilt, however. Several witnesses testified at the evidentiary hearing last summer that they had been coerced by police into making false statements against Troy Davis. This courtroom testimony reinforced previous statements in sworn affidavits. Also at this hearing, one witness testified for the first time that he saw an alternative suspect, and not Troy Davis, commit the crime. We don't know if Troy Davis is in fact innocent, but, as people who were wrongfully sentenced to death (and in some cases scheduled for execution), we believe it is vitally important that no execution go forward when there are doubts about guilt. It is absolutely essential to ensuring that the innocent are not executed.
When you issued a temporary stay for Troy Davis in 2007, you stated that the Board "will not allow an execution to proceed in this State unless and until its members are convinced that there is no doubt as to the guilt of the accused." This standard is a welcome development, and we urge you to apply it again now. Doubts persist in the case of Troy Davis, and commuting his sentence will reassure the people of Georgia that you will never permit an innocent person to be put to death in their name.
Freddie Lee Pitts, an exonerated death row survivor who faced execution by the state of Florida for a crime he didn't commit, once said, "You can release an innocent man from prison, but you can't release him from the grave."
Thank you for considering our request.
Respectfully,
Kirk Bloodsworth, Exonerated and freed from death row Maryland; Clarence Brandley, Exonerated and freed from death row in Texas; Dan Bright, Exonerated and freed from death row in Louisiana; Albert Burrell, Exonerated and freed from death row in Louisiana; Perry Cobb, Exonerated and freed from death row in Illinois; Gary Drinkard, Exonerated and freed from death row in Alabama; Nathson Fields, Exonerated and freed from death row in Illinois; Gary Gauger, Exonerated and freed from death row in Illinois; Michael Graham, Exonerated and freed from death row in Louisiana; Shujaa Graham, Exonerated and freed from death row in California; Paul House, Exonerated and freed from death row in Tennessee; Derrick Jamison, Exonerated and freed from death row in Ohio; Dale Johnston, Exonerated and freed from death row in Ohio; Ron Keine, Exonerated and freed from death row in New Mexico; Ron Kitchen, Exonerated and freed from death row in Illinois; Ray Krone, Exonerated and freed from death row in Arizona; Herman Lindsey, Exonerated and freed from death row in Florida; Juan Melendez, Exonerated and freed from death row in Florida; Randal Padgett, Exonerated and freed from death row in Alabama; Freddie Lee Pitts, Exonerated and freed from death row in Florida; Randy Steidl, Exonerated and freed from death row in Illinois; John Thompson, Exonerated and freed from death row in Louisiana; Delbert Tibbs, Exonerated and freed from death row in Florida; David Keaton, Exonerated and freed from death row in Florida; Greg Wilhoit, Exonerated and freed from death row in Oklahoma; Harold Wilson, Exonerated and freed from death row in Pennsylvania.
-Witness to Innocence, May 11, 2011
http://www.witnesstoinnocence.com/view_news.php?Exonerated-Death-Row-Survivors-Urge-George-to-Stop-the-Execution-of-Troy-Davis-181
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FREE BRADLEY MANNING! HANDS OFF JULIAN ASSANGE!
In a recent New York Daily News Poll the question was asked:
Should Army pfc Bradley Manning face charges for allegedly stealing classified documents and providing them for WikiLeaks?
New York Daily News Poll Results:
Yes, he's a traitor for selling out his country! ...... 28%
No, he's a hero for standing up for what's right! ..... 62%
We need to see more evidence before passing judgment.. 10%
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2011/03/05/2011-03-05_wikileaks_private_loses_his_underwear.html?r=news
Sign the Petition:
We stand for truth, for government transparency, and for an end to our tax-dollars funding endless occupation abroad...
We stand with accused whistle-blower
US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning
Stand with Bradley!
A 23-year-old Army intelligence analyst, Pfc. Manning faces decades in prison for allegedly leaking a video of a US helicopter attack that killed at least eleven Iraqi civilians to the website Wikileaks. Among the dead were two working Reuters reporters. Two children were also severely wounded in the attack.
In addition to this "Collateral Murder" video, Pfc. Manning is suspected of leaking the "Afghan War Diaries" - tens of thousands of battlefield reports that explicitly describe civilian deaths and cover-ups, corrupt officials, collusion with warlords, and a failing US/NATO war effort.
"We only know these crimes took place because insiders blew the whistle at great personal risk ... Government whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal," noted Barack Obama while on the campaign trail in 2008. While the President was referring to the Bush Administration's use of phone companies to illegally spy on Americans, Pfc. Manning's alleged actions are just as noteworthy. If the military charges against him are accurate, they show that he had a reasonable belief that war crimes were being covered up, and that he took action based on a crisis of conscience.
After nearly a decade of war and occupation waged in our name, it is odd that it apparently fell on a young Army private to provide critical answers to the questions, "What have we purchased with well over a trillion tax dollars and the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan?" However, history is replete with unlikely heroes.
If Bradley Manning is indeed the source of these materials, the nation owes him our gratitude. We ask Secretary of the Army, the Honorable John M. McHugh, and Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, General George W. Casey, Jr., to release Pfc. Manning from pre-trial confinement and drop the charges against him.
http://standwithbrad.org/
Bulletin from the cause: Bradley Manning Support Network
Go to Cause
Posted By: Tom Baxter
To: Members in Bradley Manning Support Network
A Good Address for Bradley!!!
We have a good address for Bradley,
"A Fort Leavenworth mailing address has been released for Bradley Manning:
Bradley Manning 89289
830 Sabalu Road
Fort Leavenworth, KS 66027
The receptionist at the military barracks confirmed that if someone sends Bradley Manning a letter to that address, it will be delivered to him."
http://www.bradleymanning.org/news/update-42811
This is also a Facebook event
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=207100509321891#!/event.php?eid=207100509321891
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The Arab Revolutions:
Guiding Principles for Peace and Justice Organizations in the US
Please email endorsement to ekishawi@yahoo.com
We, the undersigned, support the guiding principles and demands listed in this statement. We call on groups who want to express solidarity with the Arab revolutions to join our growing movement by signing this statement or keeping with the demands put forward herewith.
Background
The long-awaited Arab revolution has come. Like a geologic event with the reverberations of an earthquake, the timing and circumstances were unpredictable. In one Arab country after another, people are taking to the street demanding the fall of monarchies established during European colonial times. They are also calling to bring down dictatorships supported and manifested by neo-colonial policies. Although some of these autocratic regimes rose to power with popular support, the subsequent division and subjugation of the Arab World led to a uniform repressive political order across the region. The Arab masses in different Arab countries are therefore raising a uniform demand: "The People Want to Topple the Regimes!"
For the past two decades, the Arab people witnessed the invasion and occupation of Iraq with millions killed under blockade and occupation, Palestinians massacred with the aim to crush the anti-Zionist resistance, and Lebanon repeatedly invaded with the purposeful targeting of civilians. These actions all served to crush resistance movements longing for freedom, development, and self-determination. Meanwhile, despotic dictatorships, some going back 50 years, entrenched themselves by building police states, or fighting wars on behalf of imperialist interests.
Most Arab regimes systematically destroyed the social fabric of civil society, stifled social development, repressed all forms of political dissent and democratic expression, mortgaged their countries' wealth to foreign interests and enriched themselves and their cronies at the expense of impoverishing their populations. After pushing the Arab people to the brink, populations erupted.
The spark began in Tunisia where a police officer slapped and spat on Mohammad Bou Azizi, flipping over his produce cart for not delivering a bribe on time. . Unable to have his complaint heard, he self-immolated in protest, igniting the conscience of the Tunisian people and that of 300 million Arabs. In less than a month, the dictator, Zine El Abedine Ben Ali, was forced into exile by a Tunisian revolution. On its way out, the regime sealed its legacy by shooting at unarmed protestors and burning detention centers filled with political prisoners. Ben Ali was supported by the US and Europe in the fight against Islamic forces and organized labor.
Hosni Mubarak's brutal dictatorship fell less than a month after Tunisia's. The revolution erupted at a time when one half of the Egyptian population was living on less than $2/day while Mubarak's family amassed billions of dollars. The largest population recorded in Egyptian history was living in graveyards and raising their children among the dead while transportation and residential infrastructure was crumbling. Natural gas was supplied to Israel at 15% of the market price while the Rafah border was closed with an underground steel wall to complete the suffocation of the Palestinians in Gaza. Those who were deemed a threat swiftly met the fate of Khalid Said. 350 martyrs fell and 2,000 people were injured.
After Egypt and Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain, Oman, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan exploded in protest. Some governments quickly reshuffled faces and ranks without any tangible change. Some, like Bahrain and Yemen, sent out their security forces to massacre civilians. Oman and Yemen represent strategic assets for the US as they are situated on the straits of Hormuz and Aden, respectively. Bahrain is an oil country that hosts a US military base, situated in the Persian Gulf. A new round of US funded blood-letting of Arab civilians has begun!
Libyan dictator Qaddafi did not prove to be an exception. He historically took anti-imperialist positions for a united Arab World and worked for an African Union. He later transformed his regime to a subservient state and opened Libya to British Petroleum and Italian interests, working diligently on privatization and political repression. He amassed more wealth than that of Mubarak. In the face of the Libyan revolution, Qaddafi exceeded the brutality of Ben Ali and Mubarak blind-folding and executing opponents, surrounding cities with tanks, and bombing his own country. Death toll is expected to be in the thousands.
Qaddafi's history makes Libya an easy target for imperialist interests. The Obama administration followed the Iraq cookbook by freezing Libyan assets amounting to 30% of the annual GDP. The White House, with the help of European governments, rapidly implemented sanctions and called for no-fly zones. These positions were precipitated shortly after the US vetoed a resolution condemning the illegal Israeli colonization of the West Bank. Special operations personnel from the UK were captured by the revolutionary commanders in Ben Ghazi and sent back. The Libyan revolutionary leadership, the National Council clearly stated: "We are completely against foreign intervention. The rest of Libya will be liberated by the people ... and Gaddafi's security forces will be eliminated by the people of Libya."
Demands of the Solidarity Movement with Arab Revolutions
1. We demand a stop to US support, financing and trade with Arab dictatorships. We oppose US policy that has favored Israeli expansionism, war, US oil interest and strategic shipping routes at the expense of Arab people's freedom and dignified living.
2. We support the people of Tunisia and Egypt as well as soon-to-be liberated nations to rid themselves of lingering remnants of the deposed dictatorships.
3. We support the Arab people's right to sovereignty and self-determination. We demand that the US government stop its interference in the internal affairs of all Arab countries and end subsidies to wars and occupation.
4. We support the Arab people's demands for political, civil and economic rights. The Arab people's movement is calling for:
a. Deposing the unelected regimes and all of its institutional remnants
b. Constitutional reform guaranteeing freedom of organizing, speech and press
c. Free and fair elections
d. Independent judiciary
e. National self-determination.
5. We oppose all forms of US and European military intervention with or without the legitimacy of the UN. Standing in solidarity with the revolution against Qaddafi, or any other dictator, does not equate to supporting direct or indirect colonization of an Arab country, its oil or its people. We therefore call for:
a. Absolute rejection of military blockades, no-fly zones and interventions.
b. Lifting all economic sanctions placed against Libya and allowing for the formation of an independent judiciary to prosecute Qaddafi and deposed dictators for their crimes.
c. Immediately withdrawing the US and NATO troops from the Arab region.
6. We support Iraq's right to sovereignty and self determination and call on the US to immediately withdraw all occupation personnel from Iraq.
7. We recognize that the borders separating Arab nations were imposed on the Arab people by the colonial agreements of Sykes-Picot and the Berlin Conference on Africa. As such, we support the anti-Zionist nature of this revolution in its call for:
a. Ending the siege and starvation of the Palestinian people in Gaza
b. Supporting the right of the Palestinian people to choose their own representation, independent of Israeli and US dictates
c. Supporting the right of the Lebanese people to defend their country from Israeli violations and their call to end vestiges of the colonial constitution constructed on the basis of sectarian representation
d. Supporting the right of the Jordanian people to rid themselves of their repressive monarchy
e. Ending all US aid to Israel.
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Committee to Stop FBI Repression
NATIONAL CALL-IN DAY -- ANY DAY
to Fitzgerald, Holder and Obama
The Grand Jury is still on its witch hunt and the FBI is still
harassing activists. This must stop.
Please make these calls:
1. Call U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald at 312-353-5300 . Then dial 0
(zero) for operator and ask to leave a message with the Duty Clerk.
2. Call U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder 202-353-1555
3. Call President Obama at 202-456-1111
Suggested text: "My name is __________, I am from _______(city), in
______(state). I am calling _____ to demand he call off the Grand Jury
and stop FBI repression against the anti-war and Palestine solidarity
movements. I oppose U.S. government political repression and support
the right to free speech and the right to assembly of the 23 activists
subpoenaed. We will not be criminalized. Tell him to stop this
McCarthy-type witch hunt against international solidarity activists!"
If your call doesn't go through, try again later.
Update: 800 anti-war and international solidarity activists
participated in four regional conferences, in Chicago, IL; Oakland,
CA; Chapel Hill, NC and New York City to stop U.S. Attorney Patrick
Fitzgerald's Grand Jury repression.
Still, in the last few weeks, the FBI has continued to call and harass
anti-war organizers, repressing free speech and the right to organize.
However, all of their intimidation tactics are bringing a movement
closer together to stop war and demand peace.
We demand:
-- Call Off the Grand Jury Witch-hunt Against International Solidarity
Activists!
-- Support Free Speech!
-- Support the Right to Organize!
-- Stop FBI Repression!
-- International Solidarity Is Not a Crime!
-- Stop the Criminalization of Arab and Muslim Communities!
Background: Fitzgerald ordered FBI raids on anti-war and solidarity
activists' homes and subpoenaed fourteen activists in Chicago,
Minneapolis, and Michigan on September 24, 2010. All 14 refused to
speak before the Grand Jury in October. Then, 9 more Palestine
solidarity activists, most Arab-Americans, were subpoenaed to appear
at the Grand Jury on January 25, 2011, launching renewed protests.
There are now 23 who assert their right to not participate in
Fitzgerald's witch-hunt.
The Grand Jury is a secret and closed inquisition, with no judge, and
no press. The U.S. Attorney controls the entire proceedings and hand
picks the jurors, and the solidarity activists are not allowed a
lawyer. Even the date when the Grand Jury ends is a secret.
So please make these calls to those in charge of the repression aimed
against anti-war leaders and the growing Palestine solidarity
movement.
Email us to let us know your results. Send to info@StopFBI.net
**Please sign and circulate our 2011 petition at http://www.stopfbi.net/petition
In Struggle,
Tom Burke,
for the Committee to Stop FBI Repression
FFI: Visit www.StopFBI.net or email info@StopFBI.net or call
612-379-3585 .
Copyright (c) 2011 Committee to Stop FBI Repression, All rights
reserved.
Our mailing address is:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
PO Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55415
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Call for EMERGENCY RESPONSE Action if Assange Indicted,
Dear Friends:
We write in haste, trying to reach as many of you as possible although the holiday break has begun.......This plan for an urgent "The Day After" demonstration is one we hope you and many, many more organizations will take up as your own, and mobilize for. World Can't Wait asks you to do all you can to spread it through list serves, Facebook, twitter, holiday gatherings.
Our proposal is very very simple, and you can use the following announcement to mobilize - or write your own....
ANY DAY NOW . . . IN THE EVENT THAT THE U.S. INDICTS JULIAN ASSANGE
An emergency public demonstration THE DAY AFTER any U.S. criminal indictment is announced against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Spread the word and call people to come out, across the whole range of movements and groups: anti-war, human rights, freedom of information/freedom of the press, peace, anti-torture, environmental, students and youth, radicals and revolutionaries, religious, civil liberties, teachers and educators, journalists, anti-imperialists, anti-censorship, anti-police state......
At the Federal Building in San Francisco, we'll form ourselves into a human chain "surrounding" the government that meets the Wikileaked truth with repression and wants to imprison and silence leakers, whistleblowers and truthtellers - when, in fact, these people are heroes. We'll say:
HANDS OFF WIKILEAKS! FREE JULIAN ASSANGE! FREE BRADLEY MANNING!
Join the HUMAN CHAIN AROUND THE FEDERAL BUILDING!
New Federal Building, 7th and Mission, San Francisco (nearest BART: Civic Center)
4:00-6:00 PM on The Day FOLLOWING U.S. indictment of Assange
Bring all your friends - signs and banners - bullhorns.
Those who dare at great risk to themselves to put the truth in the hands of the people - and others who might at this moment be thinking about doing more of this themselves -- need to see how much they are supported, and that despite harsh repression from the government and total spin by the mainstream media, the people do want the truth told.
Brad Manning's Christmas Eve statement was just released by his lawyer: "Pvt. Bradley Manning, the lone soldier who stands accused of stealing millions of pages secret US government documents and handing them over to secrets outlet WikiLeaks, wants his supporters to know that they've meant a lot to him. 'I greatly appreciate everyone's support and well wishes during this time,' he said in a Christmas Eve statement released by his lawyer...." Read more here:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/mannings-message-christmas-eve-i-gr/
Demonstrations defending Wikileaks and Assange, and Brad Manning, have already been flowering around the world. Make it happen here too.
Especially here . . .
To join into this action plan, or with questions, contact World Can't Wait or whichever organization or listserve you received this message from.
World Can't Wait, SF Bay
415-864-5153
sf@worldcantwait.org
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DEFEND LYNNE STEWART!
Write to Lynne Stewart at:
Lynne Stewart #53504 - 054
Unit 2N
Federal Medical Center, Carswell
P.O. Box 27137
Fort Worth, TEXAS 76127
Visiting Lynne:
Visiting is very liberal but first she has to get people on her visiting list; wait til she or the lawyers let you know. The visits are FRI, SAT, SUN AND MON for 4 hours and on weekends 8 to 3. Bring clear plastic change purse with lots of change to buy from the machines. Brief Kiss upon arrival and departure, no touching or holding during visit (!!) On visiting forms it may be required that you knew me before I came to prison. Not a problem for most of you.
Commissary Money:
Commissary Money is always welcome It is how Lynne pay for the phone and for email. Also for a lot that prison doesn't supply in terms of food and "sundries" (pens!) (A very big list that includes Raisins, Salad Dressing, ankle sox, mozzarella (definitely not from Antonys--more like a white cheddar, Sanitas Corn Chips but no Salsa, etc. To add money, you do this by using Western Union and a credit card by phone or you can send a USPO money order or Business or Govt Check. The negotiable instruments (PAPER!) need to be sent to Federal Bureau of Prisons, 53504-054, Lynne Stewart, PO Box 474701, Des Moines Iowa 50947-001 (Payable to Lynne Stewart, 53504-054) They hold the mo or checks for 15 days. Western Union costs $10 but is within 2 hours. If you mail, your return address must be on the envelope. Unnecessarily complicated? Of course, it's the BOP !)
The address of her Defense Committee is:
Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
1070 Dean Street
Brooklyn, New York 11216
For further information:
718-789-0558 or 917-853-9759
Please make a generous contribution to her defense.
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Help end the inhumane treatment of Bradley Manning!
Bradley Manning Support Network.
Contact the Marine Corps officers above and respectfully, but firmly, ask that they lift the extreme pre-trial confinement conditions against Army PFC Bradley Manning.
Forward this urgent appeal for action widely.
Sign the "Stand with Brad" public petition and letter campaign at www.standwithbrad.org - Sign online, and we'll mail out two letters on your behalf to Army officials.
Donate to Bradley's defense fund at www.couragetoresist.org/bradley
References:
"The inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning's detention", by Glenn Greenwald for Salon.com, 15 December 2010
"A Typical Day for PFC Bradley Manning", by attorney David E. Coombs, 18 December 2010
"Bradley Manning's Life Behind Bars", by Denver Nicks for the Daily Beast, 17 December 2010
Bradley Manning Support Network
Courage To Resist
484 Lake Park Ave. #41
Oakland, CA 94610
510-488-3559
couragetoresist.org
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In earnest support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange:
http://readersupportednews.org/julian-assange-petition
rsn:Petition
We here undersigned express our support for the work and integrity of Julian Assange. We express concern that the charges against the WikiLeaks founder appear too convenient both in terms of timing and the novelty of their nature.
We call for this modern media innovator, and fighter for human rights extraordinaire, to be afforded the same rights to defend himself before Swedish justice that all others similarly charged might expect, and that his liberty not be compromised as a courtesy to those governments whose truths he has revealed have embarrassed.
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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT! FREE KEVIN COOPER!
Reasonable doubts about executing Kevin Cooper
Chronicle Editorial
Monday, December 13, 2010
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/12/13/EDG81GP0I7.DTL
Death penalty -- Kevin Cooper is Innocent! Help save his life from San Quentin's death row!
http://www.savekevincooper.org/
http://www.savekevincooper.org/pages/essays_content.html?ID=255
URGENT ACTION APPEAL
- From Amnesty International USA
17 December 2010
Click here to take action online:
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/index.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&template=x.ascx&action=15084
To learn about recent Urgent Action successes and updates, go to
http://www.amnestyusa.org/iar/success
For a print-friendly version of this Urgent Action (PDF):
http://www.amnestyusa.org/actioncenter/actions/uaa25910.pdf
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Free the Children of Palestine!
Sign Petition:
http://www.gopetition.com/petition/41467.html
Published by Al-Awda, Palestine Right to Return Coalition on Dec 16, 2010
Category: Children's Rights
Region: GLOBAL
Target: President Obama
Web site: http://www.al-awda.org
Background (Preamble):
According to Israeli police, 1200 Palestinian children have been arrested, interrogated and imprisoned in the occupied city of Jerusalem alone this year. The youngest of these children was seven-years old.
Children and teen-agers were often dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night, taken in handcuffs for questioning, threatened, humiliated and many were subjected to physical violence while under arrest as part of an ongoing campaign against the children of Palestine. Since the year 2000, more than 8000 have been arrested by Israel, and reports of mistreatment are commonplace.
Further, based on sworn affidavits collected in 2009 from 100 of these children, lawyers working in the occupied West Bank with Defense Children International, a Geneva-based non governmental organization, found that 69% were beaten and kicked, 49% were threatened, 14% were held in solitary confinement, 12% were threatened with sexual assault, including rape, and 32% were forced to sign confessions written in Hebrew, a language they do not understand.
Minors were often asked to give names and incriminate friends and relatives as a condition of their release. Such institutionalized and systematic mistreatment of Palestinian children by the state of Israel is a violation international law and specifically contravenes the Convention on the Rights of the Child to which Israel is supposedly a signatory.
Petition:
http://www.gopetition.com/petition/41467.html
We, the undersigned call on US President Obama to direct Israel to
1. Stop all the night raids and arrests of Palestinian Children forthwith.
2. Immediately release all Palestinian children detained in its prisons and detention centers.
3. End all forms of systematic and institutionalized abuse against all Palestinian children.
4. Implement the full restoration of Palestinian children's rights in accordance with international law including, but not limited to, their right to return to their homes of origin, to education, to medical and psychological care, and to freedom of movement and expression.
The US government, which supports Israel to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars a year while most ordinary Americans are suffering in a very bad economy, is bound by its laws and international conventions to cut off all aid to Israel until it ends all of its violations of human rights and basic freedoms in a verifiable manner.
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"Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority, which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests."..."Publishing State Secrets" By Leon Trotsky
Documents on Soviet Policy, Trotsky, iii, 2 p. 64
November 22, 1917
http://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/foreign-relations/1917/November/22.htm
FREE JULIAN ASSANGE! FREE BRADLEY MANNING! STOP THE FBI RAIDS NOW!
MONEY FOR HUMAN NEEDS NOT WAR!
To understand how much a trillion dollars is, consider looking at it in terms of time:
A million seconds would be about eleven-and-one-half days; a billion seconds would be 31 years; and a trillion seconds would be 31,000 years!
From the novel "A Dark Tide," by Andrew Gross
Now think of it in terms of U.S. war dollars and bankster bailouts!
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For Immediate Release
Antiwar movement supports Wikileaks and calls for and independent, international investigation of the crimes that have been exposed. We call for the release of Bradley Manning and the end to the harassment of Julian Assange.
12/2/2010
For more information: Joe Lombardo, 518-281-1968,
UNACpeace@gmail.org, NationalPeaceConference.org
Antiwar movement supports Wikileaks and calls for and independent, international investigation of the crimes that have been exposed. We call for the release of Bradley Manning and the end to the harassment of Julian Assange.
The United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC) calls for the release of Bradley Manning who is awaiting trial accused of leaking the material to Wikileaks that has been released over the past several months. We also call for an end to the harassment of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks and we call for an independent, international investigation of the illegal activity exposed through the material released by Wikileaks.
Before sending the material to Wikileaks, Bradley Manning tried to get his superiors in the military to do something about what he understood to be clear violations of international law. His superiors told him to keep quiet so Manning did the right thing; he exposed the illegal activity to the world.
The Afghan material leaked earlier shows military higher-ups telling soldiers to kill enemy combatants who were trying to surrender. The Iraq Wikileaks video from 2007 shows the US military killing civilians and news reporters from a helicopter while laughing about it. The widespread corruption among U.S. allies has been exposed by the most recent leaks of diplomatic cables. Yet, instead of calling for change in these policies, we hear only a call to suppress further leaks.
At the national antiwar conference held in Albany in July, 2010, at which UNAC was founded, we heard from Ethan McCord, one of the soldiers on the ground during the helicopter attack on the civilians in Iraq exposed by Wikileaks (see: http://www.mediasanctuary.org/movie/1810 ). He talked about removing wounded children from a civilian vehicle that the US military had shot up. It affected him so powerfully that he and another soldier who witnessed the massacre wrote a letter of apology to the families of the civilians who were killed.
We ask why this material was classified in the first place. There were no state secrets in the material, only evidence of illegal and immoral activity by the US military, the US government and its allies. To try to cover this up by classifying the material is a violation of our right to know the truth about these wars. In this respect, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange should be held up as heroes, not hounded for exposing the truth.
UNAC calls for an end to the illegal and immoral policies exposed by Wikileaks and an immediate end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an end to threats against Iran and North Korea.
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Courage to Resist needs your support
By Jeff Paterson, Courage to Resist.
It's been quite a ride the last four months since we took up the defense of accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower Bradley Manning. Since then, we helped form the Bradley Manning Support Network, established a defense fund, and have already paid over half of Bradley's total $100,000 in estimated legal expenses.
Now, I'm asking for your support of Courage to Resist so that we can continue to support not only Bradley, but the scores of other troops who are coming into conflict with military authorities due to reasons of conscience.
Please donate today:
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38590
"Soldiers sworn oath is to defend and support the Constitution. Bradley Manning has been defending and supporting our Constitution."
-Dan Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistle-blower
Iraq War over? Afghanistan occupation winding down? Not from what we see. Please take a look at, "Soldier Jeff Hanks refuses deployment, seeks PTSD help" in our December newsletter. Jeff's situation is not isolated. Actually, his story is only unique in that he has chosen to share it with us in the hopes that it may result in some change. Jeff's case also illustrates the importance of Iraq Veterans Against the War's new "Operation Recovery" campaign which calls for an end to the deployment of traumatized troops.
Most of the folks who call us for help continue to be effected by Stoploss, a program that involuntarily extends enlistments (despite Army promises of its demise), or the Individual Ready Reserve which recalls thousands of former Soldiers and Marines quarterly from civilian life.
Another example of our efforts is Kyle Wesolowski. After returning from Iraq, Kyle submitted an application for a conscientious objector discharge based on his Buddhist faith. Kyle explains, "My experience of physical threats, religious persecution, and general abuse seems to speak of a system that appears to be broken.... It appears that I have no other recourse but to now refuse all duties that prepare myself for war or aid in any way shape or form to other soldiers in conditioning them to go to war." We believe he shouldn't have to walk this path alone.
Sincerely,
Jeff Paterson
Project Director, Courage to Resist
First US military service member to refuse to fight in Iraq
Please donate today.
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38590
P.S. I'm asking that you consider a contribution of $50 or more, or possibly becoming a sustainer at $15 a month. Of course, now is also a perfect time to make a end of year tax-deductible donation. Thanks again for your support!
Please click here to forward this to a friend who might
also be interested in supporting GI resisters.
http://ymlp.com/forward.php?id=lS3tR&e=bonnieweinstein@yahoo.com
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Add your name! We stand with Bradley Manning.
"We stand for truth, for government transparency, and for an end to our tax-dollars funding endless occupation abroad... We stand with accused whistle-blower US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning."
Dear All,
The Bradley Manning Support Network and Courage to Resist are launching a new campaign, and we wanted to give you a chance to be among the first to add your name to this international effort. If you sign the letter online, we'll print out and mail two letters to Army officials on your behalf. With your permission, we may also use your name on the online petition and in upcoming media ads.
Read the complete public letter and add your name at:
http://standwithbrad.org/
Courage to Resist (http://couragetoresist.org)
on behalf of the Bradley Manning Support Network (http://bradleymanning.org)
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610
510-488-3559
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Committee to Stop FBI Repression
P.O. Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414
Dear Friend,
On Friday, September 24th, the FBI raided homes in Chicago and Minneapolis, and turned the Anti-War Committee office upside down. We were shocked. Our response was strong however and we jumped into action holding emergency protests. When the FBI seized activists' personal computers, cell phones, and papers claiming they were investigating "material support for terrorism", they had no idea there would be such an outpouring of support from the anti-war movement across this country! Over 61 cities protested, with crowds of 500 in Minneapolis and Chicago. Activists distributed 12,000 leaflets at the One Nation Rally in Washington D.C. Supporters made thousands of calls to President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. Solidarity statements from community organizations, unions, and other groups come in every day. By organizing against the attacks, the movement grows stronger.
At the same time, trusted lawyers stepped up to form a legal team and mount a defense. All fourteen activists signed letters refusing to testify. So Assistant U.S. Attorney Brandon Fox withdrew the subpoenas, but this is far from over. In fact, the repression is just starting. The FBI continues to question activists at their homes and work places. The U.S. government is trying to put people in jail for anti-war and international solidarity activism and there is no indication they are backing off. The U.S. Attorney has many options and a lot of power-he may re-issue subpoenas, attempt to force people to testify under threat of imprisonment, or make arrests.
To be successful in pushing back this attack, we need your donation. We need you to make substantial contributions like $1000, $500, and $200. We understand many of you are like us, and can only afford $50, $20, or $10, but we ask you to dig deep. The legal bills can easily run into the hundreds of thousands. We are all united to defend a movement for peace and justice that seeks friendship with people in other countries. These fourteen anti-war activists have done nothing wrong, yet their freedom is at stake.
It is essential that we defend our sisters and brothers who are facing FBI repression and the Grand Jury process. With each of your contributions, the movement grows stronger.
Please make a donation today at stopfbi.net (PayPal) on the right side of your screen. Also you can write to:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
P.O. Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414
This is a critical time for us to stand together, defend free speech, and defend those who help to organize for peace and justice, both at home and abroad!
Thank you for your generosity! Tom Burke
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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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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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D. ARTICLES IN FULL (Unless otherwise noted)
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1) When Austerity Fails
By PAUL KRUGMAN
May 22, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/opinion/23krugman.html?hp
2) As Lenders Hold Homes in Foreclosure, Sales Are Hurt
By ERIC DASH
May 22, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/business/economy/23glut.html?hp
3) Workers of the World, Please See Our Web Site
By JOSEPH BERGER
May 22, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/nyregion/leftist-parties-in-new-york-have-new-appeal.html?ref=us
4) Remarks by AFL-CIO President Richard L. Trumka, National Press Club, Washington, DC
"It doesn't matter if candidates and parties are controlling the wrecking ball or simply standing aside--the outcome is the same either way. If leaders aren't blocking the wrecking ball and advancing working families' interests, working people will not support them. This is where our focus will be-now, in 2012 and beyond."
AFL-CIO MEDIA CENTER
May 20, 2011
http://www.aflcio.org/mediacenter/prsptm/sp05202011.cfm
5) Jordan Miles, Honor Student Brutally Beaten by Police, Speaks for the First Time
By jasiri x
Monday, May 23, 2011 at 12:18 pm
http://www.blackyouthproject.com/blog/2011/05/jordan-miles-honor-student-brutally-beaten-by-pittsburgh-police-speaks-for-the-first-time/
6) California's Prison Crisis
New York Times Editorial
May 23, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/opinion/24tue1.html?_r=1&hp
7) NATO Bombs Libyan Capital in Heaviest Strikes Yet
By JOHN F. BURNS
May 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/world/africa/25libya.html?hp
8) Company Believes 3 Reactors Melted Down in Japan
By HIROKO TABUCHI
May 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/world/asia/25nuclear.html?hp
9) Times Reporter Served With Subpoena in Leak Case
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
May 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/us/25subpoena.html?hp
10) Steady Decline in Major Crime Baffles Experts
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
May 23, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24crime.html?ref=us
11) Justices, 5-4, Tell California to Cut Prisoner Population
By ADAM LIPTAK
May 23, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24scotus.html?ref=us
12) Union Effort Turns Its Focus to Target
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
May 23, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/business/economy/24target.html?ref=business
13) How the Police Get Away With Murder
By Luke Hiken and Marti Hiken
Progressive Avenues
May 25, 2011
info@progressiveavenues.org
415-702-9682
www.progressiveavenues.org
14) Philadelphia is Franz Fanon's "Black Skin, White Masks" in Real Time
By SUNDIATA SADIQ co chair of the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC) 914 672 5807 May 21, 2011
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Philadelphia-is-Franz-Fano-by-Sundiata-Sadiq-NY-110520-966.html
15) Fukushima Mothers and Farmers in Unity
16) CODEPINK Disrupts Netanyahu During Address to Congress
CODEPINK peace activist Rae Abileah injured and hospitalized.
May 24th, 2011
http://codepink.org/article.php?id=5838
17) As Housing Goes, So Goes the Economy
New York Times Editortial
May 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/opinion/25wed1.html?hp
18) Daunting Task for NATO in Libya as Strikes Intensify
By ERIC SCHMITT
May 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/world/africa/25nato.html?ref=world
19) Egypt to Open Rafah Crossing Permanently
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 25, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/05/25/world/middleeast/AP-ML-Egypt-Gaza-Border.html?ref=world
20) Revolutionary Cuba Now Lays Sand Traps for the Bourgeoisie
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
May 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/world/americas/25cuba.html?ref=world
21) Switzerland Decides on Nuclear Phase-Out
By JAMES KANTER
May 25, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/26/business/global/26nuclear.html?ref=world
22) Risk From Spent Nuclear Reactor Fuel Is Greater in U.S. Than in Japan, Study Says
"'The largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet will remain in storage at U.S. reactor sites for the indefinite future,' the report's author, Robert Alvarez, a senior scholar at the institute, wrote. 'In protecting America from nuclear catastrophe, safely securing the spent fuel by eliminating highly radioactive, crowded pools should be a public safety priority of the highest degree.'"
By MATTHEW L. WALD
May 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/business/energy-environment/25nuke.html?ref=world
23) In a California Prison, Bunk Beds Replace Pickup Games
By JENNIFER MEDINA
May 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/us/25prison.html?ref=us
24) High Unemployment 'Most Pressing Legacy' of Financial Crisis, Report Says
By DAVID JOLLY
May 25, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/26/business/global/26oecd.html?ref=business
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1) When Austerity Fails
By PAUL KRUGMAN
May 22, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/opinion/23krugman.html?hp
I often complain, with reason, about the state of economic discussion in the United States. And the irresponsibility of certain politicians - like those Republicans claiming that defaulting on U.S. debt would be no big deal - is scary.
But at least in America members of the pain caucus, those who claim that raising interest rates and slashing government spending in the face of mass unemployment will somehow make things better instead of worse, get some pushback from the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration.
In Europe, by contrast, the pain caucus has been in control for more than a year, insisting that sound money and balanced budgets are the answer to all problems. Underlying this insistence have been economic fantasies, in particular belief in the confidence fairy - that is, belief that slashing spending will actually create jobs, because fiscal austerity will improve private-sector confidence.
Unfortunately, the confidence fairy keeps refusing to make an appearance. And a dispute over how to handle inconvenient reality threatens to make Europe the flashpoint of a new financial crisis.
After the creation of the euro in 1999, European nations that had previously been considered risky, and that therefore faced limits on the amount they could borrow, began experiencing huge inflows of capital. After all, investors apparently thought, Greece/Portugal/Ireland/Spain were members of a European monetary union, so what could go wrong?
The answer to that question is now, of course, painfully apparent. Greece's government, finding itself able to borrow at rates only slightly higher than those facing Germany, took on far too much debt. The governments of Ireland and Spain didn't (Portugal is somewhere in between) - but their banks did, and when the bubble burst, taxpayers found themselves on the hook for bank debts. The problem was made worse by the fact that the 1999-2007 boom left prices and costs in the debtor nations far out of line with those of their neighbors.
What to do? European leaders offered emergency loans to nations in crisis, but only in exchange for promises to impose savage austerity programs, mainly consisting of huge spending cuts. Objections that these programs would be self-defeating - not only would they impose large direct pain, but they also would, by worsening the economic slump, reduce revenues - were waved away. Austerity would actually be expansionary, it was claimed, because it would improve confidence.
Nobody bought into the doctrine of expansionary austerity more thoroughly than Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank, or E.C.B. Under his leadership the bank began preaching austerity as a universal economic elixir that should be imposed immediately everywhere, including in countries like Britain and the United States that still have high unemployment and aren't facing any pressure from the financial markets.
But as I said, the confidence fairy hasn't shown up. Europe's troubled debtor nations are, as we should have expected, suffering further economic decline thanks to those austerity programs, and confidence is plunging instead of rising. It's now clear that Greece, Ireland and Portugal can't and won't repay their debts in full, although Spain might manage to tough it out.
Realistically, then, Europe needs to prepare for some kind of debt reduction, involving a combination of aid from stronger economies and "haircuts" imposed on private creditors, who will have to accept less than full repayment. Realism, however, appears to be in short supply.
On one side, Germany is taking a hard line against anything resembling aid to its troubled neighbors, even though one important motivation for the current rescue program was an attempt to shield German banks from losses.
On the other side, the E.C.B. is acting as if it is determined to provoke a financial crisis. It has started to raise interest rates despite the terrible state of many European economies. And E.C.B. officials have been warning against any form of debt relief - in fact, last week one member of the governing council suggested that even a mild restructuring of Greek bonds would cause the E.C.B. to stop accepting those bonds as collateral for loans to Greek banks. This amounted to a declaration that if Greece seeks debt relief, the E.C.B. will pull the plug on the Greek banking system, which is crucially dependent on those loans.
If Greek banks collapse, that might well force Greece out of the euro area - and it's all too easy to see how it could start financial dominoes falling across much of Europe. So what is the E.C.B. thinking?
My guess is that it's just not willing to face up to the failure of its fantasies. And if this sounds incredibly foolish, well, who ever said that wisdom rules the world?
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2) As Lenders Hold Homes in Foreclosure, Sales Are Hurt
By ERIC DASH
May 22, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/business/economy/23glut.html?hp
EL MIRAGE, Ariz. - The nation's biggest banks and mortgage lenders have steadily amassed real estate empires, acquiring a glut of foreclosed homes that threatens to deepen the housing slump and create a further drag on the economic recovery.
All told, they own more than 872,000 homes as a result of the groundswell in foreclosures, almost twice as many as when the financial crisis began in 2007, according to RealtyTrac, a real estate data provider. In addition, they are in the process of foreclosing on an additional one million homes and are poised to take possession of several million more in the years ahead.
Five years after the housing market started teetering, economists now worry that the rise in lender-owned homes could create another vicious circle, in which the growing inventory of distressed property further depresses home values and leads to even more distressed sales. With the spring home-selling season under way, real estate prices have been declining across the country in recent months.
"It remains a heavy weight on the banking system," said Mark Zandi, the chief economist of Moody's Analytics. "Housing prices are falling, and they are going to fall some more."
Over all, economists project that it would take about three years for lenders to sell their backlog of foreclosed homes. As a result, home values nationally could fall 5 percent by the end of 2011, according to Moody's, and rise only modestly over the following year. Regions that were hardest hit by the housing collapse and recession could take even longer to recover - dealing yet another blow to a still-struggling economy.
Although sales have picked up a bit in the last few weeks, banks and other lenders remain overwhelmed by the wave of foreclosures. In Atlanta, lenders are repossessing eight homes for each distressed home they sell, according to March data from RealtyTrac. In Minneapolis, they are bringing in at least six foreclosed homes for each they sell, and in once-hot markets like Chicago and Miami, the ratio still hovers close to two to one.
Before the housing implosion, the inflow and outflow figures were typically one-to-one.
The reasons for the backlog include inadequate staffs and delays imposed by the lenders because of investigations into foreclosure practices. The pileup could lead to $40 billion in additional losses for banks and other lenders as they sell houses at steep discounts over the next two years, according to Trepp, a real estate research firm.
"These shops are under siege; it's just a tsunami of stuff coming in," said Taj Bindra, who oversaw Washington Mutual's servicing unit from 2004 to 2006 and now advises financial institutions on risk management. "Lenders have a strong incentive to clear out inventory in a controlled and timely manner, but if you had problems on the front end of the foreclosure process, it should be no surprise you are having problems on the back end."
A drive through the sprawling subdivisions outside Phoenix shows the ravages of the real estate collapse. Here in this working-class neighborhood of El Mirage, northwest of Phoenix, rows of small stucco homes sprouted up during the boom. Now block after block is pockmarked by properties with overgrown shrubs, weeds and foreclosure notices tacked to the doors. About 116 lender-owned homes are on the market or under contract in El Mirage, according to local real estate listings.
But that's just a small fraction of what is to come. An additional 491 houses are either sitting in the lenders' inventory or are in the foreclosure process. On average, homes in El Mirage sell for $65,300, down 75 percent from the height of the boom in July 2006, according to the Cromford Report, a Phoenix-area real estate data provider. Real estate agents and market analysts say those ultra-cheap prices have recently started attracting first-time buyers as well as investors looking for several properties at once.
Lenders have also been more willing to let distressed borrowers sidestep foreclosure by selling homes for a loss. That has accelerated the pace of sales in the area and even caused prices to slowly rise in the last two months, but realty agents worry about all the distressed homes that are coming down the pike.
"My biggest fear right now is that the supply has been artificially restricted," said Jayson Meyerovitz, a local broker. "They can't just sit there forever. If so many houses hit the market, what is going to happen then?"
The major lenders say they are not deliberately holding back any foreclosed homes. They say that a long sales process can stigmatize a property and ratchet up maintenance and other costs. But they also do not want to unload properties in a fire sale.
"If we are out there undercutting prices, we are contributing to the downward spiral in market values," said Eric Will, who oversees distressed home sales for Freddie Mac. "We want to make sure we are helping stabilize communities."
The biggest reason for the backlog is that it takes longer to sell foreclosed homes, currently an average of 176 days - and that's after the 400 days it takes for lenders to foreclose. After drawing government scrutiny over improper foreclosures practices last fall, many big lenders have slowed their operations in order to check the paperwork, and in two dozen or so states they halted them for months.
Conscious of their image, many lenders have recently started telling real estate agents to be more lenient to renters who happen to live in a foreclosed home and give them extra time to move out before changing the locks.
"Wells Fargo has sent me back knocking on doors two or three times, offering to give renters money if they cooperate with us," said Claude A. Worrell, a longtime real estate agent from Minneapolis who specializes in selling bank-owned property. "It's a lot different than it used to be."
Realty agents and buyers say the lenders are simply overwhelmed. Just as lenders were ill-prepared to handle the flood of foreclosures, they do not have the staff and infrastructure to manage and sell this much property.
Most of the major lenders outsourced almost every part of the process, be it sales or repairs. Some agents complain that lender-owned home listings are routinely out of date, that properties are overpriced by as much as 10 percent, and that lenders take days or longer to accept an offer.
The silver lining for home lenders, however, is that the number of new foreclosures and recent borrowers falling behind on their payments by three months or longer is shrinking.
"If they are able to manage through the next 12 to 18 months," said Mr. Zandi, the Moody's Analytics economist, "they will be in really good shape."
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3) Workers of the World, Please See Our Web Site
By JOSEPH BERGER
May 22, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/nyregion/leftist-parties-in-new-york-have-new-appeal.html?ref=us
You can still be a card-carrying Communist in New York, but these days committed Communists usually register online.
"We actually have a card, but we don't make a big deal of it," said Sam Webb, the national chairman of the Communist Party U.S.A.
The Socialist Party U.S.A. does distribute red cards to members willing to "subscribe to the principles" of the party, but another leftist group, the Democratic Socialists of America, prefers online registration, with members using a virtual shopping cart to pay yearly dues of about $60 by credit card - Marx be damned.
In some ways, the Left remains locked in place. Its three major national parties are still confined to cramped Manhattan offices that are plastered with gaudy posters and honeycombed with pamphlets for distribution and envelopes for stuffing.
But in other ways the landscape has changed significantly. All three parties are finding the Internet to be a fruitful recruiting tool and believe their message has been given a fresh, beguiling appeal by the failures of capitalist symbols like Lehman Brothers and by debacles like the billions of dollars in securities tied to subprime mortgages.
"The economic crisis of 2008 gave us new life," said Billy Wharton, a co-chairman of the Socialist Party, who grew enamored of socialism while battling tuition increases as a student at the College of Staten Island. "We have ideas for resolving the economic crisis, and people began to listen to them."
Rather than trumpeting membership numbers, the parties, embracing the norms of the digital era, prefer to discuss the number of hits on their Web sites and Facebook pages. And philosophically, they take a kind of I-told-you-so schadenfreude in statistics that indicate a growing gap between the rich and the poor, with top chief executives now making 275 times as much as the average proletarian.
Still, it is hard to imagine that the parties have inherited a revolutionary tradition once so popular that in the 1932 presidential election, Norman Thomas, the Socialist candidate, garnered 884,000 votes and William Z. Foster, the Communist candidate, had over 100,000. But then again, after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the collapse of socialist republics in Eastern Europe, some people may be surprised to learn that these parties are still around.
All three have greatly shrunk from their heydays. The Socialist Party has about 1,000 members nationally. The Communists claim 2,000. The Democratic Socialists, which for many years included luminaries like Michael Harrington and Irving Howe, have about 6,000.
"It's not easy to make political progress outside the two-party structure because people don't want to waste their votes," said Frank Llewellyn, 62, the national director of the Democratic Socialists, who became a socialist as a result of the civil rights and antiwar movements.
Rather than battling for power through elections, all three parties try to sway the national conversation through coalitions with labor unions and other mainstream organizations. Both socialist groups turned out at City Hall this month to protest budget cuts, at a rally that was largely organized by the unions.
But on matters of principle, the leftist parties diverge. All three oppose President Obama's health care program, seeing it as a giveaway to insurance companies and preferring either a single-payer government plan or a socialized system like that of Britain, where doctors work for the government.
The Socialists sometimes do have candidates who run in states where the rules for getting on the ballot are not too onerous; Greg Pason, the national secretary, ran for governor of New Jersey in 2009. But the Democratic Socialists see that effort as futile and prefer endorsements; they supported David N. Dinkins and Ruth W. Messinger in their mayoral bids in New York City.
The parties' enduring character is obvious in visits to their offices. The Socialist Party is housed in a tumbledown building on Lafayette Street known informally as the "Peace Pentagon" or the A. J. Muste building, not because the name approximates its mildewed atmosphere but because Mr. Muste was a benefactor of the peace groups that the building houses. The Democratic Socialists even have a foothold on Wall Street, with cluttered offices in a building on Maiden Lane. It is not because Wall Street has suddenly adopted a philosophy of "to each according to his own needs."
"It's cheap," Mr. Llewellyn explained. "This is an area of the city where you get the best deals."
The Communists even own the means of production - they lease out their eight-story building on West 23rd Street to other left-wing organizations. The party has the most decorous space, having redesigned its office with glass walls and tall windows.
"We're not up to some nefarious business we have to hide from the American government," said Libero Della Piana, 38, the party's communications director.
Physical space matters less these days than virtual space. All three groups have lively Web sites that flaunt their philosophies and histories. Mr. Della Piana, the child of an Italian anarchist, boasts that the Communists' news site has 25,000 unique visitors a week; before it stopped publishing in the late 1960s, its newspaper, The Daily Worker, was read by just 5,000 subscribers. In 2010, he said, 700 prospective members applied through the Web site.
Recent disclosures of capitalist excesses have given the parties a second wind after the collapse of the Soviet Union suggested the bankruptcy of collectivist philosophy. Mr. Llewellyn said that since 2007 his party's membership had increased by 50 percent, to 6,000.
"People see the consequences of unregulated markets, greed, a lack of checks on the power of the private flow of capital to drive the economy and undermine jobs," Mr. Llewellyn said.
Mr. Webb, who joined the Communists in the 1970s, likes to emphasize the party's rich history, including the fight against McCarthyism and the volunteers who helped the Spanish Republicans battle the Fascists, rather than more unpleasant episodes like the case of the American Communist Julius Rosenberg, who spied for the Soviet Union.
Mr. Della Piana says the Soviet Union's dissolution freed the party to be more ideological because "no one could ever say again we were puppets."
"We have a whole generation of young people attracted to the idea of communism without the baggage of the cold war," he said.
After declining to 250 members in 1980, the Socialist Party's membership has quadrupled, Mr. Wharton said. He was even asked to appear on a Fox affiliate when conservatives raised suspicions that Mr. Obama was a socialist.
"They thought I'd go on and on and actually support the policies of President Obama," said Mr. Wharton, 42, a General Educational Development, or G.E.D., teacher in Brooklyn. "The question was 'Is he a socialist?' and my answer was 'I'm not sure he's even a liberal.' I called him a hedge-fund Democrat."
None of the parties view their existence as futile - immersing themselves in everyday local battles, they believe, will spread their influence.
"Socialism won't come to this country until tens of millions decide capitalism doesn't work for them," Mr. Webb said. "If you're a revolutionary, if you're a socialist, you have to have patience."
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4) Remarks by AFL-CIO President Richard L. Trumka, National Press Club, Washington, DC
"It doesn't matter if candidates and parties are controlling the wrecking ball or simply standing aside--the outcome is the same either way. If leaders aren't blocking the wrecking ball and advancing working families' interests, working people will not support them. This is where our focus will be-now, in 2012 and beyond."
AFL-CIO MEDIA CENTER
May 20, 2011
http://www.aflcio.org/mediacenter/prsptm/sp05202011.cfm
Good morning. Thank you all for joining me here, and thank you to the National Press Club for inviting me to speak.
Friends, how can we make sense of the spectacle that's been unfolding across the American political landscape?
Politicians in Wisconsin, Ohio and a dozen other states are trying to take away workers' right to organize and bargain for a better life.
But that's not all. In state after state, politicians are attacking voting rights by imposing ID requirements, shortening early voting periods, blocking young people from voting because they're too "liberal" and even levying criminal penalties and fines for breaking arbitrary rules in the voter registration process. So it will be harder for people to vote-especially the least privileged among us. Just in Wisconsin, listen to the list of who doesn't have state-issued photo IDs that will be needed to cast a ballot under legislation that Gov. Scott Walker will sign next week: 23 percent of elderly Wisconsinites; 59 percent of Latina women; 55 percent of African American men overall; and 78 percent of African American men who are 18 to 24 years old.
Budget proposals unveiled in Washington and state capitals across our country this year revealed a despicable canvas of cruelty. In Michigan, a state senator thinks foster children should be required by law to purchase second-hand clothes. In Maine, the governor thinks more children should go to work. In North Carolina, the legislature thinks we should balance the state budget on the backs of autistic children. In Arizona, the state Senate president floats the idea of locking up protesting public employees in desert tent city jails. In New York, a billionaire mayor proposes to fire 5,000 teachers rather than tax the bonuses of the Wall Street executives who brought down the American economy.
And not just meanness. Destructiveness. A willful desire to block the road to the future. How else can you explain governors of states with mass unemployment refusing to allow high-speed rail lines to be built in their states? How else can you explain these same governors' plans to defund higher education, close schools and fire teachers, when we know that without an educated America, we have no future?
Here in Washington, the Republicans in Congress have defunded housing counselors and fuel aid for the poor, and they are blocking worker training and transportation infrastructure.
But the final outrage of these budgets is hidden in the fine print. In state after state and here in Washington, these so called fiscal hawks are actually doing almost nothing to cut the deficit. The federal budget embraced by House Republicans, for example, cuts $4.3 trillion in spending, but gives out $4.2 trillion in tax cuts that disproportionately benefit wealthy individuals and corporations. Florida is gutting aid for jobless workers and using the money saved to cut already-low business taxes. At the end of the day, our governments will be in no better fiscal shape than when we started-they are just being used as a pass-through to enrich the already rich-at a time when inequality stands at historic levels.
Think about the message these budgets send: Sacrifice is for the weak. The powerful and well-connected get tax cuts.
All these incredible events should be understood as part of a single challenge. It is not just a political challenge-it's a moral challenge. Because these events signal a new and dangerous phase of a concerted effort to change the very nature of America-to turn this into an "I've got mine" nation and replace the land of liberty and justice for all with the land of the rich, by the rich, for the rich.
You see, I believe the United States is not a place as much as it is an idea. For working people, the United States of America has offered, from its foundation, a promise that everyone can be full participants in national life. A promise that we the people make the rules so that hard work is rewarded with economic security and a fair share in the wealth we all help create. That promise has always been a work in progress. This year we commemorate the 150th anniversary of our bloodiest war - a war that resulted in the extension of the American promise to the African Americans who did so much of the work of creating the United States.
We were the first country in the history of the world to embrace the idea that you don't have to own land to vote-that citizenship comes from where you live, not what you own or who your parents were. We were the first country to make land available to those who would work the land-in the Homestead Act. And in the modern era, when giant corporations dominated our economy, we pioneered the idea that we had a right to a voice on the job-a right made real when we came together to form unions and bargain collectively. And while Boeing and the Chamber of Commerce may not like it, the law of the land protects working people who exercise that right against any retaliation by their employers.
In the 1960s, public employees won those same rights. Working people remember that these rights were not easily won. The pivotal 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike began with two men crushed to death in a garbage truck, and ended with Martin Luther King giving his life for the cause of public workers' right to organize together.
From the beginning of this country, through our efforts and our ideas, working people have made the American Dream real. And what is that dream? It is the idea that if you work hard and play by the rules you will enjoy economic security and build a better future for your children. It is not that a few of us will be rich, but that all of us will be treated fairly, that we will look after each other, and that we will all have a share in the wealth we create together.
This spring working people are engaged in a great struggle to defend their dream. In Green Bay and Indianapolis, in Benton Harbor, Michigan, and in Columbus, Ohio. And not just in the Midwest. In New York and Los Angeles, in Florida and Texas-in every corner of our nation.
This struggle began after last November's elections brought to power politicians in state capitals across the heartland who had a hidden agenda. An agenda worked out at posh resorts with the Koch Brothers, the American Legislative Exchange Council and other shadowy groups. Politicians like John Kasich and Scott Walker campaigned promising to do something about jobs, only to reveal when they took office that their jobs agenda was to make them disappear. But their real passion was for eliminating the rights of working people and destroying their unions-who are standing in the way of their agenda.
In response, working people took to the streets. On April 4th, under the banner, "We are One," we came together all across America, and then we did so again on May 1st when we stood together with our immigrant brothers and sisters saying again that we truly are one.
In signs all across the rotunda in the Wisconsin state house, we proclaimed we were there to defend the principle that in America, we look after each other. One of the people who was there is here with us today, and I'd like to introduce him. Alex Hanna is a Graduate Assistant at the University of Wisconsin - Madison and a co-president of the Teaching Assistants Associates of the American Federation of Teachers. Alex stood up for teachers and other public workers in Madison over the last couple of months, even as he built solidarity with workers in the Middle East. His family comes from Egypt and he strengthened links between movements for change around the world.
Thank you, Alex, for your inspiration.
Alex embodies the fact that we are not a nation of isolated individuals, we are a land of communities, of families. Our republic, our democracy, is an expression of our solidarity, our common values and our common life as a nation.
In America, firefighters rush into burning buildings every day, risking their lives to save people they have never met. Social workers care for other people's abused children, and home health workers provide care and companionship to those who need it. Every day you and I pay our Social Security taxes and Medicare, and that same money is sent out again to provide comfort and security to other people's parents and grandparents.
This is not just a matter of morality - but it also makes economic sense. And never more so than today. It will simply not be enough to beat back the Scott Walkers, the John Kasichs, and the Koch Brothers. America's economic fate depends on us coming together to educate our children, to invest in our infrastructure, to face the threat of climate change and to reverse the yawning economic inequality that threatens our future.
Let me be specific. Unemployment stands at 9%. Underemployment is at 16%. Housing prices are falling, and foreclosures remain at historic highs. Economic growth is hovering at around 2% annually-not enough to put a dent in unemployment, especially as tax cuts expire, as the Recovery Act winds down -- and state and local governments gear up for more deep cuts.
Yet instead of having a national conversation about putting America back to work to build our future, the debate here in Washington is about how fast we can destroy the fabric of our country, about breaking the promises we made to our parents and grandparents. Understand, the Ryan budget destroys jobs-it destroys almost all the jobs created during this recovery. It guts Medicare. It attacks Social Security, the one piece of our retirement security system that actually works. And now we see Speaker Boehner and his colleagues engaged in a new round of blackmail-with a ransom note that reads: "Cut Medicare, dismantle the government, destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs to fund more tax cuts for the rich, or we will cause the United States to default on its debts.
" Why is our national conversation in such a destructive place? Not because we are impoverished. We have never been richer. The American economy has never produced as much wealth as it does today. But we feel poor because the wealth in our society has flowed to a handful among us, and they and the politicians who pander to the worst instincts of the wealthy would rather break promises to our parents and grandparents and deny our children a future than pay their fair share of taxes.
America's real deficit is a moral deficit-where political choices come down to forcing foster children to wear hand-me-downs while cutting taxes for profitable corporations.
Powerful political forces are seeking to silence working people-to drive us out of the national conversation. I can think of no greater proof of the moral decay in our public life than that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker would dare give a Martin Luther King Day speech hailing Dr. King at the same time that he drafted a bill to take away collective bargaining rights from sanitation workers in Wisconsin.
The ultimate goal of those who blame workers for Wall Street's economic crisis is to unravel the fabric of our common life in pursuit of greed and power.
In this environment, working people and our unions must do more than just protect our own right to a voice in the life of our nation. We must raise our voice to win a better future for all working families here in America and around the globe.
Here's what we are going to do. First, we are going to use that voice to end the Scott Walker agenda as a viable political strategy by winning recall elections in Wisconsin and citizen vetoes of destructive legislation in other states and retaking state houses.
Then we will spend the summer holding elected leaders in Congress as well as the states accountable on one measure: Are they improving or degrading life for working families?
And moving forward, we are looking hard at how we work in the nation's political arena. We have listened hard, and what workers want is an independent labor movement that builds the power of working people-in the workplace and in political life.
Working people want a labor movement strong enough to help return balance to our economy, fairness to our tax system, security to our families and moral and economic standing to our nation. Our role is not to build the power of a political party or a candidate. It is to improve the lives of working families and strengthen our country.
It doesn't matter if candidates and parties are controlling the wrecking ball or simply standing aside-the outcome is the same either way. If leaders aren't blocking the wrecking ball and advancing working families' interests, working people will not support them. This is where our focus will be-now, in 2012 and beyond.
We will uphold the dignity of work and restore respect for working people. In this season's political battles, teachers, nurses and firefighters have been vilified. Decent jobs with economic security have been cast as more than America's workers deserve. Low-wage, part-time, temporary, no-benefit work is being sold as the "new normal" for our economy.
We know that only a dynamic, effective movement of working people working together can reclaim the value of work. Our unions must reach out to every working person in America-to those whose jobs have been outsourced and down-sized, to carwash workers in Los Angeles, to domestic workers who have few legal rights, to freelancers and young people who have "gigs" rather than jobs. And together with the AFL-CIO's construction and manufacturing workers, pilots and painters, plumbers and public employees, bakers and others, we will be heard.
The stakes are so high, for working families, for America. Will we be a country ruled by greed, by people who would cut or take pensions away from first responders, people who would take away the fundamental human rights of our workers, who would choose tax breaks for the richest among us over a future for all of us? Or will we be a country where we choose the future, where we look out for each other, where all of us have a voice?
We'll only win investments in our future if we again embrace the idea that we are one national community. That our very identity is bound up with the promise that all of us have a voice-in the workplace, at the ballot box-and that we are responsible in a deep sense for each other. The fabric of our government, our democratic republic, is about making that responsibility for each other real.
This is the message working people have always brought to our national conversation. It is the message Alex Hanna and hundreds of thousands of others took to the streets of the Midwest this spring and that we will take to the polling places of the heartland in recall elections and in citizen veto campaigns in the coming months. And it is the message we will continue to shout this year, and next, and the next, until we are heard.
The moral character of America is worth fighting for, and that is exactly what working people are going to do in the days and months to come. Thank you.
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5) Jordan Miles, Honor Student Brutally Beaten by Police, Speaks for the First Time
By jasiri x
Monday, May 23, 2011 at 12:18 pm
http://www.blackyouthproject.com/blog/2011/05/jordan-miles-honor-student-brutally-beaten-by-pittsburgh-police-speaks-for-the-first-time/
For the first time since January 12, 2010 when the Pittsburgh Police brutally beat innocent and unarmed honor student Jordan Miles until he looked like this:
Jordan Miles Speaks for the first time since being brutally beaten by Pittsburgh Police:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG82Fkkviw0&feature=player_embedded
In a article from the Pittsburgh City Paper, Jordan Miles answers questions about how he felt when the Police Officers who brutally beat him were quickly reinstated and when Police Chief Nate Harper called his senseless beating, "a teachable moment":
When Police Chief Nate Harper announced that the officers would be going back to work, he said there was no evidence that there was any wrongful conduct on their part. He also said he's "very comfortable" bringing the officers back. How comfortable are you?
I'm not comfortable at all. They can do [what they did to me] to just about anybody. ... I don't see any reason for them to go to the level of brutality given to me. Those cops, they are brutal and they were wrong. And I would really like it for them not to be back on the streets.
Harper called the incident a "teachable moment," and said, "We would hope that young people realize that when a police officer approaches them, and they've done nothing wrong, to see what the police officer wants instead of running away." What's your reaction?
When I first heard that, it almost made me want to laugh, because he said that statement as if I knew that these were cops. If I knew that these were undercover cops, then I would have obliged to anything that they asked for. ... [T]he fact that they did not identify themselves as cops was the reason why I ran away. If they did, then I would have obliged. I don't know if he believes that I did not know that these were cops or not, but he's speaking as if I did, and [saying] I ran as if I felt like I was guilty of committing a crime.
Pittsburgh Post Gazette illustrator Rob Rogers' cartoon say it all:
Lastly, One Hood and X-Clan founding member Paradise Gray lays out the demands for Justice from the community and his opinion of Chief Harper's controversial comments:
Paradise Gray Speaks At Jordan Miles Emergency Rally 05/06/2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJOLz1EYDYE&feature=related
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6) California's Prison Crisis
New York Times Editorial
May 23, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/opinion/24tue1.html?_r=1&hp
Three photographs are part of Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion in which the Supreme Court orders California to release more than 30,000 inmates from state prisons to reduce dangerous overcrowding. Looking at the photos, there should be no doubt that the conditions violate the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
In the first two, men are packed into what looks like a makeshift shelter, with just a few guards monitoring as many as 200 prisoners. The third photo shows man-sized cages in which prisoners needing mental health treatment are held until a bed opens up. One inmate, Justice Kennedy writes, was found standing "in a pool of his own urine, unresponsive and nearly catatonic."
The state has two years to reduce the overcrowding. Whatever means it chooses, it needs to rethink laws and policies that keep a large number of people in prison for technical parole violations and others for minor, nonviolent crimes. Its limited prison space should be used for people who truly pose a threat to society.
The case, Brown v. Plata, grows out of two class-action lawsuits, one started in 1990 by seriously mentally ill prisoners, the other in 2001 by prisoners with serious medical conditions. In 2009, a panel of three federal judges ordered California to reduce its prison population to 110,000 from 156,000 (today there are more than 140,000). The system's official capacity is 80,000.
In their ruling, the panel noted that 12 years after the first suit was brought - and despite 70 court orders for remedies - conditions had continued to deteriorate horribly. A special master appointed by the panel studied suicides in California prisons and found the rate was almost twice as high as the national average for prisons. Almost three-fourths of the suicides were "probably foreseeable or preventable" because they involved "some measure of inadequate assessment, treatment or intervention."
California challenged the panel's ruling in the Supreme Court - especially the need for a limit on the size of the prison population. In Monday's ruling, Justice Kennedy affirmed the panel's finding that overcrowding is the "primary cause" of "severe and unlawful mistreatment of prisoners through grossly inadequate provision of medical and mental health care," leading to "needless suffering and death."
In separate dissents, Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito Jr. attack the court's decision in terms so extreme they call for an answer. Justice Scalia accuses the majority of affirming "what is perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation's history." Justice Alito warns that the majority makes a "dangerous error" in relying on the three-judge court's finding that a large release of prisoners will not jeopardize public safety.
In fact, Justice Kennedy's opinion is attentive to safety: California can give early release only to prisoners posing the least risk; it can divert low-risk offenders to community programs; and so on. And he bends over backward to let California decide how to solve the problem. The state retains the choice of how to reduce the overcrowding, through parole reform, construction of new prisons and otherwise. It can propose remedies not yet considered and ask the three-judge court for additional flexibility in using them.
But as Justice Kennedy reminds, if the Supreme Court did not impose a limit on California's prison population, there would be an "unacceptable risk" of continuing violations "with the result that many more will die or needlessly suffer." And that would defy the Constitution.
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7) NATO Bombs Libyan Capital in Heaviest Strikes Yet
By JOHN F. BURNS
May 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/world/africa/25libya.html?hp
TRIPOLI, Libya - In the heaviest attack yet on the capital since the start of the two-month-old NATO bombing campaign, alliance aircraft struck at least 15 targets in central Tripoli early Tuesday, with most of the airstrikes concentrated on an area around Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi's command compound.
The strikes, within a 30-minute period around 1 a.m., caused thunderous explosions and fireballs that leapt high into the night sky, causing people in neighborhoods a mile or more away to cry out in alarm.
Just as one strike ended, the sound of jet engines from low-flying aircraft in the stormy skies above the capital signaled the imminence of another. Huge plumes of black smoke rose and converged over the darkened cityscape.
"We thought it was the day of judgment," one enraged Libyan said.
The intensity of the attacks, and their focus on the area of the Bab al-Aziziya command compound in central Tripoli, appeared to reflect a NATO decision to step up the tempo of the air war over the Libyan capital, perhaps with a view to breaking the stalemate that has threatened to settle over the three-month-old Libyan conflict.
As NATO intensified its airstrikes, the American State Department's highest-ranking Middle East official, Jeffrey D. Feltman, was in Benghazi on Tuesday on a visit aimed at providing fresh impetus to the rebel cause. Speaking at a news conference, Mr. Feltman said that the Obama administration had invited the Libyan opposition to open an office in Washington, but stopped short of offering the formal recognition the rebels have been seeking.
"This step marks an important milestone in our relationship with the Transitional Council," Mr. Feltman said, referring to the rebel governing body, who he said had accepted the American invitation.
Several countries, including France and Gambia, have recognized the rebel council, but the United States and Britain have not, instead sending diplomatic envoys.
In answering a question about what the rebels would have to do to earn formal recognition, Mr. Feltman cited concerns about "historic, legal" precedents, but said the questions about recognition "frankly miss the point."
"The point is Qaddafi and Tripoli are increasingly isolated diplomatically," he said. He did not announce any funding for movement, which has sought billions of dollars in aid and weapons. "We're looking at what else we can do," Mr. Feltman said. "I certainly got some strong messages yesterday from council members."
On Monday, Mr. Feltman toured the rebel headquarters, a visit that coincided with an announcement by France's defense minister, Gérard Longuet, that Britain and France would add attack helicopters to the NATO force as soon as possible. The move appeared to go at least some way toward meeting rebel appeals for stronger attacks on Qaddafi loyalist fighters. British officials, however, said on Tuesday that London had not made a final decision on the deployment of attack helicopters, news agencies reported.
As the rebels pushed for helicopter attacks, Tuesday's airstrikes shook the center of the capital near Colonel Qaddafi's compound. Libyan officials have accused NATO of repeatedly trying to assassinate Colonel Qaddafi with airstrikes on and near the compound, and Colonel Qaddafi himself has mocked the attacks, saying NATO cannot reach him as he "lives in the hearts of millions."
In a familiar pattern, the accounts of the latest attacks given by NATO and the Qaddafi government varied widely. A government spokesman, Moussa Ibrahim, said the strikes had hit a compound housing units of an auxiliary army force known as the Popular Guard. He said military commanders had largely cleared the compound in anticipation that it would be hit, and that casualties - which he gave as 3 dead and 150 wounded - were civilians from a nearby neighborhood.
NATO'S account, issued from the alliance's southern European headquarters in Naples, Italy, said the target was a government vehicle storage facility adjacent to the Qaddafi compound. It said the facility had been used by the Qaddafi forces since the revolt against the government began in February, "and has remained so ever since, resupplying the regime forces that have been conducting attacks against innocent civilians."
Reporters taken to the Tripoli Central Hospital were shown three dirt-strewn male bodies in civilian clothes with gaping shrapnel wounds to their heads, and half a dozen other men being treated for what appeared to be light wounds. Mr. Ibrahim said that the other wounded had been treated and released before reporters arrived, or had been treated at another hospital.
It was one of the few instances in recent weeks when reporters who have been told of civilian casualties from a NATO attack have seen any casualties, a pattern that has led to persistent uncertainties about official accounts. Most NATO attacks are launched late at night, and many of the buildings struck appeared to have been empty.
NATO has called the targets military, and often designates them as "command-and-control" centers; Qaddafi government spokesmen say the bombs and missiles have hit civilian structures.
Despite more than 2,500 NATO airstrikes, and an increasing focus in the past two weeks on targets in Tripoli, there have been few signs of an imminent collapse of the Qaddafi government, and rebel forces in the east, despite recent gains around the city of Misurata, have shown no sign of a broader breakthrough to the west.
Low-flying helicopters, including Britain's fleet of American-built Apaches and France's Tigre gunships, would give allied air commanders more flexibility to strike at government targets than the fast combat jets used until now.
Kareem Fahim contributed reporting from Benghazi, Libya.
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8) Company Believes 3 Reactors Melted Down in Japan
By HIROKO TABUCHI
May 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/world/asia/25nuclear.html?hp
TOKYO - In a belated acknowledgment of the severity of Japan's nuclear disaster, the Tokyo Electric Power Company said Tuesday that three of the stricken Fukushima plant's reactors likely suffered fuel meltdowns in the early days of the crisis.
The plant's operator also said that it was possible that the pressure vessels in the three stricken reactors, which house the uranium fuel rods, had been breached as well. But most of the fuel remained inside the vessels, the company said - far from a more severe nuclear meltdown in which molten fuel penetrates the ground, a calamity known as the "China Syndrome."
Also Tuesday, a team of experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear oversight body of the United Nations, began an investigation into Japan's handling of the accident, amid criticism that a slow response made matters worse.
"We're here to gather info and to seek to learn lessons that we can apply across the world to improve nuclear safety," Michael Weightman, the chief nuclear inspector of Britain and the team's leader, said at a meeting with Japan's trade minister.
Tuesday's disclosure by Tokyo Electric Power, the operator of the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, could delay efforts to bring the plant's reactors under control. Earlier this month, the company released an updated plan to bring all reactors at the plant to a stable state known as a "cold shutdown" in six to nine months. But that goal was based on an understanding that workers could efficiently cool the fuel in the three reactors, a harder task if their inner pressure vessels are breached.
It is also likely to trigger more criticism over what many critics have called a lack of timely disclosure by Tokyo Electric, and by the Japanese government, of important details of the accident. Prime Minister Naoto Kan has apologized in parliament for fanning public mistrust.
"We take this disclosure very seriously. But what's important now is our response," said Goshi Hosono, who heads the Japanese government's nuclear crisis task force.
"Though we now know the situation is very severe, the fuel still remains inside the reactors," Mr. Hosono said. "There is no change to our strategy of continuing to cool the reactors until we can bring them to a stable state," he said.
Experts had long suggested that meltdowns occurred at the three reactors after a 50-foot tsunami knocked out power for their cooling systems, causing the nuclear fuel at the reactors' cores to overheat.
Three other reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, about 150 miles north of Tokyo, were not operating at the time of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
Last week Tokyo Electric for the first time acknowledged that the fuel at one of the reactors, Unit 1, likely melted and fell to the bottom of the reactor's inner pressure vessel.
On Tuesday, Tokyo Electric said that meltdowns likely occurred at units 2 and 3.
It took time for Tokyo Electric to reach that conclusion because it has been gradually retrieving data from the damaged plant and analyzing its findings, Junichi Matsumoto, a senior nuclear official at the company, said at a press conference.
Mr. Matsumoto said data showed that damage to unit 2 began three days after the quake, when its back-up cooling system failed, with most fuel rods eventually melting and collecting at the bottom of the pressure vessel. At unit 3, fuel rods showed signs of damage by the afternoon of March 13.
But many of the details of how the accident unfolded still remain murky. The 18-person I.A.E.A. team, which includes experts from the United States, China, Britain and Russia, will interview officials at Tokyo Electric, as well as Japanese nuclear regulators, before drafting a preliminary report next month.
Greeting the team, Banri Kaieda, Japan's trade minister, promised full cooperation.
"We are prepared to disclose all the information we have," Mr. Kaieda told the team's leader, Mr. Weightman.
Later speaking to reporters, Mr. Weightman expressed some understanding for the severe circumstances workers at the plant faced in the early hours of the crisis.
"In these severe circumstances, when roads, electricity, communications is severely disrupted, how do you manage to have an effective response?" he said.
The Japanese government is conducting separate independent inquiry into the accident. On Tuesday, the government appointed Yotaro Hatamura, known for pioneering a field that studies systematic failures, to head an investigation into the government's response to the disaster.
"We hope that the inquiry is wide-ranging, and treats nothing as off limits, including actions taken by cabinet ministers and the prime minister himself," said Yoshito Sengoku, deputy chief cabinet secretary.
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9) Times Reporter Served With Subpoena in Leak Case
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
May 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/us/25subpoena.html?hp
WASHINGTON - Federal prosecutors, with the approval of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., are trying to force a New York Times reporter and author to testify at a criminal trial about who leaked information to him about a C.I.A. effort to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program at the end of the Clinton administration.
The reporter, James Risen, was served with a subpoena late on Monday, ordering him to testify at the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former Central Intelligence Agency operations officer who was charged earlier this year as part of a wider crackdown by the Obama administration on officials accused of disclosing restricted information to journalists.
The subpoena tells Mr. Risen that "you are commanded" to appear at a federal district court in Alexandria, Va., on Sept. 12 to testify in the case. A federal district court judge, Leonie M. Brinkema, quashed a similar subpoena to Mr. Risen late last year, when prosecutors were trying to convince a grand jury to indict Mr. Sterling.
Mr. Risen said he would ask the judge to quash the new subpoena, too.
"I am going to fight this subpoena," Mr. Risen said. "I will always protect my sources, and I think this is a fight about the First Amendment and the freedom of the press."
In a 30-page motion that prosecutors filed on Monday, they argued that the First Amendment did not give Mr. Risen the right to avoid testifying about his confidential sources in a criminal proceeding. The Justice Department argued that Mr. Risen was an eyewitness and should be compelled to provide information to a jury "like any other citizen" would be, contending that there is no basis to conclude "that the reporter is being harassed in order to disrupt his relationship with confidential news sources."
The motion also said that prosecutors anticipated a motion by Mr. Risen to quash the subpoena. If the court does not agree to do so and Mr. Risen still refuses to testify, he would risk being held in contempt. In 2005, a Times reporter, Judith Miller, was jailed for 85 days for refusing to testify in connection with the Valerie Plame Wilson leak case.
Prosecutors believe that Mr. Sterling provided classified information to Mr. Risen that served as the basis for a chapter in the writer's 2006 book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration."
The chapter details an effort by the C.I.A. in 2000 to disrupt Iran's nuclear program by sending a former Russian scientist to give it blueprints for a nuclear triggering device with a hidden design flaw. Mr. Risen portrayed the operation as botched, saying that the agency may have helped Iranian scientists gain valuable and accurate information.
The material in that chapter did not appear in The New York Times. Mr. Sterling's indictment said that Mr. Risen had worked on an article about the program in 2003, but the newspaper decided not to publish it after government officials told editors that such a disclosure would jeopardize national security.
The Justice Department's motion said that prosecutors want Mr. Risen to testify about what Mr. Sterling allegedly told him - and where and when specific information was provided; to authenticate his book and lay the foundation for admitting as evidence statements from the book; and to discuss his "preexisting non-confidential source relationship" with Mr. Sterling, including Mr. Risen's writing a newspaper article in 2002 about a civil lawsuit filed by Mr. Sterling.
In President Obama's first two years, civilian and military prosecutors have charged five people in cases involving leaking information, more than all previous presidents combined. Several of those cases began as criminal investigations under the Bush administration.
In several weeks, for example, a former National Security Agency official, Thomas Drake, will go on trial on charges related to accusations that he provided restricted information to the Baltimore Sun about cost overruns and mismanagement at the agency.
Mr. Risen has also written extensively about classified information involving the agency, including a series of articles that he and a colleague, Eric Lichtblau, wrote for The Times that exposed the agency's program of surveillance without warrants under the Bush administration. The series won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.
Earlier this year, another filing in the Sterling case disclosed that federal law enforcement officials had secretly gathered "various telephone records showing calls made" by Mr. Risen, as well as his "credit card and bank records and certain records of his airline travel" and three credit reports listing his financial accounts.
Justice Department regulations instruct prosecutors to "ordinarily refrain" from issuing subpoenas to the news media that could damage its "news gathering function," citing "the importance of freedom of the press to a free and democratic society."
But the rules also allow the attorney general to make an exception after weighing "the proper balance between the public's interest in the free dissemination of information and effective law enforcement."
"We make every reasonable effort to attempt to obtain information from alternatives sources before even considering a subpoena to a member of the press, and only seek information essential to directly establishing innocence or guilt," said Laura Sweeney, a department spokeswoman.
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10) Steady Decline in Major Crime Baffles Experts
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
May 23, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24crime.html?ref=us
The number of violent crimes in the United States dropped significantly last year, to what appeared to be the lowest rate in nearly 40 years, a development that was considered puzzling partly because it ran counter to the prevailing expectation that crime would increase during a recession.
In all regions, the country appears to be safer. The odds of being murdered or robbed are now less than half of what they were in the early 1990s, when violent crime peaked in the United States. Small towns, especially, are seeing far fewer murders: In cities with populations under 10,000, the number plunged by more than 25 percent last year.
The news was not as positive in New York City, however. After leading a long decline in crime rates, the city saw increases in all four types of violent lawbreaking - murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault - including a nearly 14 percent rise in murders. But data from the past few months suggest the city's upward trend may have slowed or stopped.
Criminology experts said they were surprised and impressed by the national numbers, issued on Monday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and based on data from more than 13,000 law-enforcement agencies. They said the decline nationally in the number of violent crimes, by 5.5 percent, raised the question, at least in some places, of to what extent crime could continue to fall - or at least fall at the same pace as the past two years. Violent crimes fell nearly the same amount in 2009.
"Remarkable," said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University. "Given the fact that we have had some healthy declines in recent years, I fully expected that the improvement would slow. There is only so much air you can squeeze out of a balloon."
There was no immediate consensus to explain the drop. But some experts said the figures collided with theories about correlations between crime, unemployment and the number of people in prison.
Take robbery: The nation has endured a devastating economic crisis, but robberies fell 9.5 percent last year, after dropping 8 percent the year before.
"Striking," said Alfred Blumstein, a professor and a criminologist at the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University, because it came "at a time when everyone anticipated it could be going up because of the recession."
Nationally, murder fell 4.4 percent last year. Forcible rape - which excludes statutory rape and other sex offenses - fell 4.2 percent. Aggravated assault fell 3.6 percent. Property crimes - including burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft and arson - fell 2.8 percent, after a 4.6 percent drop the year before.
But the gains were uneven. New York saw 536 murders last year - 65 more than in 2009, which was the lowest since 1963.
The number of rapes in New York City jumped 24.5 percent; robberies, 5.4 percent, and aggravated assaults, 3.2 percent.
New York was the only city with more than a million people besides San Antonio with an increase in the total number of violent crimes - a 4.6 percent jump, to 48,489 - and the only one besides Philadelphia to see a rise in murders.
Some experts cautioned against reading too much into the city's numbers, noting that New York's drop in violent crime over the last two decades has far outpaced many places, some of which are only now catching up.
"It's been so huge, there's always been this lingering question, how low could it go?" said Michael Jacobson, director of the Vera Institute of Justice, and a former New York City correction and probation commissioner.
There were 2,245 murders in New York in 1990, but the total has been less than 600 for the past nine years.
"One murder is too many, but the 2010 spike has to be viewed in the context of the historic low the year before," said Paul J. Browne, the New York Police Department's chief spokesman. He said the department was doing more to encourage victims to report rapes.
Eli Silverman, a professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said Mr. Browne's account might only be a "partial explanation" - the other part, he said, was increased scrutiny of the integrity of the department's crime statistics. When crime rates go up, the police say it is because they are encouraging more victims to come forward, Mr. Silverman said, "but when crime goes down, it's the work of the police."
Nationally, the drop in violent crime not only calls into question the theory that crime rates are closely correlated with economic hardship, but another argument as well, said Frank E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
As the percentage of people behind bars has decreased in the past few years, violent crime rates have fallen as well. For those who believed that higher incarceration rates inevitably led to less crime, "this would also be the last time to expect a crime decline," he said.
"The last three years have been a contrarian's delight - just when you expect the bananas to hit the fan," said Mr. Zimring, a visiting law professor at New York University and the author of a coming book on the decline in the city's crime rate.
But he said there was no way to know why - at least not yet.
"The only thing that is reassuring being in a room full of crime experts now is that they are as puzzled as I am," he said.
Joseph Goldstein contributed reporting.
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11) Justices, 5-4, Tell California to Cut Prisoner Population
By ADAM LIPTAK
May 23, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24scotus.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON - Conditions in California's overcrowded prisons are so bad that they violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday, ordering the state to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in a 5-to-4 decision that broke along ideological lines, described a prison system that failed to deliver minimal care to prisoners with serious medical and mental health problems and produced "needless suffering and death."
Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr. filed vigorous dissents. Justice Scalia called the order affirmed by the majority "perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation's history." Justice Alito said "the majority is gambling with the safety of the people of California."
The majority opinion included photographs of inmates crowded into open gymnasium-style rooms and what Justice Kennedy described as "telephone-booth-sized cages without toilets" used to house suicidal inmates. Suicide rates in the state's prisons, Justice Kennedy wrote, have been 80 percent higher than the average for inmates nationwide. A lower court in the case said it was "an uncontested fact" that "an inmate in one of California's prisons needlessly dies every six or seven days due to constitutional deficiencies."
Monday's ruling in the case, Brown v. Plata, No. 09-1233, affirmed an order by a special three-judge federal court requiring state officials to reduce the prison population to 110,000, which is 137.5 percent of the system's capacity. There have been more than 160,000 inmates in the system in recent years, and there are now more than 140,000.
Prison release orders are rare and hard to obtain, and even advocates for prisoners' rights said Monday's decision was unlikely to have a significant impact around the nation.
"California is an extreme case by any measure," said David C. Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Prison Project, which submitted a brief urging the justices to uphold the lower court's order. "This case involves ongoing, undisputed and lethal constitutional violations. We're not going to see a lot of copycat litigation."
State officials in California will have two years to comply with the order, and they may ask for more time. Justice Kennedy emphasized that the reduction in population need not be achieved solely by releasing prisoners early. Among the other possibilities, he said, are new construction, transfers out of state and using county facilities.
At the same time, Justice Kennedy, citing the lower court decision, said there was "no realistic possibility that California would be able to build itself out of this crisis," in light of the state's financial problems.
The court's more liberal members - Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan - joined Justice Kennedy's opinion.
The special court's decision, issued in 2009, addressed two consolidated class-action suits, one filed in 1990, the other in 2001. In 2006, Arnold Schwarzenegger, then governor, said conditions in the state's prisons amounted to a state of emergency.
The majority seemed persuaded that the passage of time required the courts to act.
Justice Scalia summarized his dissent, which was pungent and combative, from the bench. Oral dissents are rare; this was the second of the term. Justice Kennedy looked straight ahead as his colleague spoke, his face frozen in a grim expression.
The decision was the fourth 5-to-4 decision of the term so far. All four of them have found the court's more liberal members on one side and its more conservative members on the other, with Justice Kennedy's swing vote the conclusive one. In the first three cases, Justice Kennedy sided with the conservatives.
On Monday, he went the other way. This was in some ways unsurprising: in his opinions and in speeches, Justice Kennedy has long been critical of what he views as excessively long and harsh sentences.
"A prison that deprives prisoners of basic sustenance, including adequate medical care, is incompatible with the concept of human dignity and has no place in civilized society," Justice Kennedy wrote on Monday.
In his dissent, Justice Scalia wrote that the majority opinion was an example of the problem of courts' overstepping their constitutional authority and institutional expertise in issuing "structural injunctions" in "institutional-reform litigation" rather than addressing legal violations one by one.
He added that the prisoners receiving inadequate care were not necessarily the ones who would be released early.
"Most of them will not be prisoners with medical conditions or severe mental illness," Justice Scalia wrote, "and many will undoubtedly be fine physical specimens who have developed intimidating muscles pumping iron in the prison gym."
In his statement from the bench, Justice Scalia said that the prisoners to be released "are just 46,000 happy-go-lucky felons fortunate enough to be selected." (The justices used varying numbers in describing the number of affected prisoners. California's prison population has been declining.)
Justice Kennedy concluded his majority opinion by saying that the lower court should be flexible in considering how to carry out its order.
Justice Scalia called this concluding part of the majority opinion "a bizarre coda" setting forth "a deliberately ambiguous set of suggestions on how to modify the injunction."
"Perhaps," he went on, "the coda is nothing more than a ceremonial washing of the hands - making it clear for all to see, that if the terrible things sure to happen as a consequence of this outrageous order do happen, they will be none of this court's responsibility. After all, did we not want, and indeed even suggest, something better?"
Justice Clarence Thomas joined Justice Scalia's dissent.
In a second dissent, Justice Alito, joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., addressed what he said would be the inevitable impact of the majority decision on public safety in California.
He summarized the decision this way, adding italics for emphasis: "The three-judge court ordered the premature release of approximately 46,000 criminals - the equivalent of three Army divisions."
Justice Alito acknowledged that "particular prisoners received shockingly deficient medical care." But, he added, "such anecdotal evidence cannot be given undue weight" in light of the sheer size of California's prison system, which was at its height "larger than that of many medium-sized cities" like Bridgeport, Conn.; Eugene, Ore.; and Savannah, Ga.
"I fear that today's decision, like prior prisoner-release orders, will lead to a grim roster of victims," Justice Alito wrote. "I hope that I am wrong. In a few years, we will see."
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12) Union Effort Turns Its Focus to Target
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
May 23, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/business/economy/24target.html?ref=business
In the world of big-box discounters, Target enjoys a reputation as a model corporate citizen that sells the latest in cheap chic. That's a sharp contrast to the image of Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, which labor unions have pilloried for years, accusing it of providing skimpy wages and benefits and skirting various labor laws.
But the arrows are about to come flying at Target's famous bull's-eye logo. The nation's largest union for retail workers has embarked on its first broad campaign to unionize Target workers.
The union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, is trying to organize 5,000 workers at 27 Target stores in the New York City area. A majority of workers at the Target store in Valley Stream, N.Y., have already signed cards supporting unionization, and a government-supervised election there on June 17 will be the first time in more than two decades that Target workers will vote on whether to join a union.
"A lot of people are going to be shocked that Target workers would consider unionizing because of its very good image and because it's known as such a fantastic philanthropic organization," said Burt Flickinger, a retailing consultant who has worked on projects for both the union and Target suppliers.
The union decided to focus on Target after employees in Valley Stream, on Long Island, asked for help in unionizing. Echoing longstanding complaints by some Wal-Mart workers, the store's employees complained that many of them earned too little to support a family or afford health insurance, forcing some to rely on food stamps and Medicaid for their children.
"What we want from Target is simply this: we need a living wage where we can get by," said Sonia Williams, a logistics employee in Valley Stream who said she earns $11.71 an hour, plus a $1-an-hour night differential.
Target says its wages are competitive and its employees do not need a union.
Interviews with 10 of the store's employees suggest that an important issue behind the unionization drive is frustration about being assigned too few hours of work, sometimes just one or two days a week.
Retailers are increasingly assigning such short workweeks as they seek to build an extensive roster of workers to fill their ever-changing scheduling needs. But some Target workers say that means they are offered too few hours to qualify for the company's health plan.
Ms. Williams, who receives $200 a month in food stamps to help her and her 18-year-old son, complained that she was often assigned just three days of work each week, down from full time when she started nearly nine years ago.
So far, the union's organizing efforts have not turned belligerent as it hopes to convince Target employees that it wants to work with the company, not hurt it. In contrast, the union has never been shy about attacking Wal-Mart - hurling invective, organizing protests and lobbying officials to block the retailer's plans to expand in New York, Chicago and other cities unless it agrees to improve wages and benefits.
Union officials assert that Target's wages and benefits are only slightly better than Wal-Mart's.
Jim Rowader, Target's vice president for employee and labor relations, said the company provided "great benefits, flexible scheduling and great career opportunities for workers in all stages of life."
He said Target emphasized building trust between managers and employees. "When you talk about bringing a union into that mix, certainly based on the culture we have and the one we're trying to build, we don't think a union or any third party will improve on anything," he said.
None of Target's 1,755 stores in the United States are unionized, nor are any of Wal-Mart's 4,420 American stores. The union has tried over the last decade to unionize Wal-Marts in Minnesota and Las Vegas and a Target in Minnesota, but fierce antiunion campaigns by the retailers deflated the efforts before they even came to a vote.
Mr. Flickinger said unions had been loath to undertake large-scale organizing drives against retailers, like the new one against Target in New York, because of obstacles like high employee turnover, the fear of some workers that they would be fired for supporting a union and the aggressive opposition by many companies toward unionization.
But Mr. Flickinger said the recession and retailers' increasing use of part-time workers had improved the climate for organizing even though union membership had been sliding and unions were on the defensive nationwide. "Unions feel it might be the best of times for organizing in retail because many workers can't afford the health benefits and many can't even afford to shop in the stores where they work," he said.
Patrick J. O'Neill, the union's organizing director, said it was vital to try to unionize big-box stores. "Retail is a major employer in our economy," he said. "If we don't want the middle class to go away, we've got to do something about improving the wages and benefits for retail workers."
About 12 percent of all American workers are unionized, but just 4.7 percent of retail workers are in unions. Kroger is the retailer with the most unionized workers: 200,000.
While the organizing drive is going full tilt in Valley Stream, the United Food and Commercial Workers has just started reaching out to employees at the other New York-area Targets. It is distributing fliers, asking workers to sign pro-union cards, and lining up support from community groups.
Tashawna Green, a stock clerk in Valley Stream, said a union was needed to help increase her pay, $8 an hour after one year there, and her hours, often six to 17 hours a week.
"I just feel that a union is going to help us," she said. "If they ask for better hours, they get better hours. If they ask for respect, they get respect."
Like many of her co-workers, Ms. Green, 21, a native of Jamaica, hails from the Caribbean, where unions are generally more popular than in the United States.
Ms. Green, the mother of a 5-year-old, said she would like to work four or five days a week, but is often assigned two days and then earns just $120 for the week. "It's very hard to support yourself on that," she said. "Sometimes I have to borrow money from people. I'm lucky that I'm able to stay with an aunt who understands. I try my best to pay her rent of $200 a month."
Ms. Green said it was maddening that although many employees were desperate to work more hours, managers ask them whether they have any friends who are looking for jobs. Several workers said they were perplexed that the store hired 13 new workers in recent weeks.
Target defended its compensation and scheduling practices.
"The wages and benefits provided at the store are at or, frankly, above the market for comparable retail jobs, union or nonunion," Mr. Rowader said. He said the store's overall payroll hours had not declined, although individuals might be working fewer hours.
In campaigning against the union, Target is also distributing fliers. One says: "Like any other failing business the union needs to increase revenue to stay in business. Taking dues from new members is the only way for them to get more money."
Betsy Wilson, who earns $10.50 an hour after working in Valley Stream for two years erecting merchandise displays, opposes having a union - and the dues payments that would come along with one. "Basically if you do your job, you won't have any problems," she said.
John Budd, a professor of human resources at the University of Minnesota, said the public's ambivalence about unions could play a big role in the outcome of the Target unionization effort.
The workers' call for higher wages may win little support, he said. "But the public may be much more sympathetic when someone is working just 10 hours a week and is asking for more hours."
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13) How the Police Get Away With Murder
By Luke Hiken and Marti Hiken
Progressive Avenues
May 25, 2011
info@progressiveavenues.org
415-702-9682
www.progressiveavenues.org
Police officers who murder citizens in our communities are more likely than not to get off scot-free. The odds are that they will not be prosecuted at all, and if they are, they will be offered a plea bargain to misdemeanor assault or manslaughter, at worst. The reasons that police can kill at will are found in the laws themselves.
The disparity in how police officers who kill are treated, as compared to citizens who kill, lies in the way the state deals with the two groups. A citizen who is accused or suspected of killing another citizen, is immediately arrested, held without bail, and subjected to sustained and often brutal interrogation. The threats that police make to murder suspects are the subject of books, television dramas and newspaper articles. The pressure applied by police officers to murder suspects borders on the illegal in most situations, and can even constitute the sort of torture we've come to expect from our lawless government. The treatment of "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo is only marginally less horrific than the treatment of prison inmates and gang members suspected of committing serious offenses. Threats to "throw the book" at a suspect, if (s)he doesn't confess, threats to arrest and/or deport family members, threats of beatings and worse, are the every day grist of police interrogations. The justification is that suspects are "bad" people, and deserve what they get. Naïve principles about presumptions of innocence go out the window when the interrogation room door closes.
Within hours, if not days, of a citizen suspect's arrest, the police will have gathered incriminating evidence, a confession, or leads to witnesses who can assure a conviction in the case. Only the most street-wise defendants will assert their right to remain silent, or speak with a lawyer in the face of the kind of bullying that goes on in these situations. Those charged with murder will not be released on bail, and only the wealthy will have access to an attorney who will have time to spend with them before their first court appearance.
Compare that situation with that of a police officer who kills a citizen. In San Francisco, the officer will first be placed on "paid administrative leave." [See SFPD General Order 8.11, entitled "Investigations of Officer Involved Shootings and Discharges."] The officer will then be asked to participate in an internal police investigation, where (s)he is represented by an attorney, and provided with all of the rights set forth in the "Police Officer's Bill of Rights."
The trail of obfuscation begins the day of the killing when the police officer is hustled into the custody of the police and away from public scrutiny. The police officer then becomes the property of the internal police agencies and their chain of command.
Initially, there are two investigations for police officers. One is a criminal investigation, which is conducted separately by the Homicide Detail and the Office of the District Attorney (DA). The other is the Administrative Investigation conducted by the Management Control Division. Then, the Emergency Communications Division, and the immediate supervisor or platoon commander where the crime took place, take command. This agency notifies the Field Operations Bureau Headquarters (Center), who notifies at least nine more internal police agencies. Also, the DA's and Office of Citizen Complaints are notified as well as the police Legal Division.
The victims' family members, their attorneys, and the media are not allowed to interview the officer; and, no public bodies have access to the officer while the police investigation is proceeding. This period of grace affords the officer the opportunity to work with his/her colleagues and attorneys to assure that no damaging version of the offense is publicized or pursued. A cynical individual might surmise that it also gives the police department an opportunity to destroy inculpatory evidence, or "turn" witnesses who might have damaging testimony or versions of what occurred.
The police officer is escorted from the crime scene to the Bureau Headquarters (department facility) where the officer will be interviewed by the Homicide Detail Inspectors. Officers shall not return to regular assignment for a minimum of 10 calendar days. "This reassignment is administrative only and in no way shall be considered punitive."
Within 5 business days, the Chief of Police shall convene a panel to discuss whether it is appropriate for the involved member to return to duty. There is a mandatory debriefing (per DGO 8.04, Section 1.A), where a written report is made and sent to the Police Commission and Director of the OCC. The written report "shall not be disclosed to any member of the public except by court order." Then the Police Commission meets with the Chief of Police to review the Chief's findings and decision. The officer is also debriefed by the Crisis Incident Response Team.
It is both the Homicide Detail and the Management Control Division that respond immediately and conduct an investigation into every officer-involved shooting. Within 45 calendar days the Firearm Discharge Review Board shall receive the Homicide Detail Investigation report. Within 60 days, the Management Control Division findings shall be completed and submitted to the same Firearm Discharge Board, which must convene within 30 days. It then has 120 days to complete its investigation and issue its findings.
After these months of delay (and cover-up?), the police officer might be charged with an offense by the DA's office. Picture how many murder prosecutions there would be for citizens who were provided the same protections as police officers before being arrested and interrogated. The state would never be able to charge anyone with murder if citizens were secluded and protected the way the police are.
This disparate treatment is a blatant violation of the Equal Protection Clauses of our state and federal Constitutions, and defense attorneys should challenge this outrageous contradiction at every stage of the criminal process. The reasons police get away with murder in our society, while citizens are often convicted of crimes they didn't even commit, is simply because of the differing way the laws are written and designed. Our society doesn't mind cops who kill, only citizens who do.
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Marti Hiken is the director of Progressive Avenues. She is the former Associate Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and former chair of the National Lawyers Guild Military Law Task Force. She can be contacted at info@progressiveavenues.org, 415-702-9682.
Luke Hiken is an attorney who has engaged in the practice of criminal, military, immigration, and appellate law.
The Progressive Avenues website, www.progressiveavenues.org, is regularly updated in the "What's Added, What's New" link on the Home page, at http://www.progressiveavenues.org/Whats_New_Added.html
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14) Philadelphia is Franz Fanon's "Black Skin, White Masks" in Real Time
By SUNDIATA SADIQ co chair of the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC) 914 672 5807 May 21, 2011
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Philadelphia-is-Franz-Fano-by-Sundiata-Sadiq-NY-110520-966.html
The white ruling class strategy since the end of the ruthless reign of Frank Rizzo, as former chief of police and then mayor of Philadelphia, is to replace white faces with black faces and to support and prop up such black faces to carry out the bidding of that power elite without regard to the continued oppression of the black working class of the city of Philadelphia. This phenomenon in Africa politics is called 'Neo- Colonialism,' that is replacing white faces with black faces to keep the masses of blacks in their place and to maximize profits for the multi national business community.
In Philadelphia, enter its first black Mayor, first black Police Chief and now the first black District Attorney.
Former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell describes District Attorney Seth Williams, as lawyer of courage, intelligence and likeability. In other words, Governor Rendell sees DA Seth Williams as a 'good boy.'
As a backdrop, we must remember the 26th anniversary of tragic events in the City of Brotherly Love. At that time, the power elite attempted to destroy the MOVE organization with Wilson Goode, Philadelphia's first black mayor in office. In similar terms to Rendell's description of Seth Williams, Goode was described as a likeable, intelligent black man. Nevertheless, Goode did the unthinkable for his "masters". On May 13, 1985, he gave the order to the police to drop a bomb on the MOVE house on Osage Avenue that killed eleven people: men women and children and destroyed an entire Black neighborhood...
In an article in New York Times Magazine, Lynne Abraham, Williams's predecessor was called "tough on crime" and "America's deadliest DA" for her pursuit of the death penalty in capital cases. That article never mentioned the innocent people who were wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death during her tenure, who later had their convictions overturned after spending years on death row. One example is Harold Wilson, a black man convicted of a triple homicide. Harold Wilson spent 16 years on death row, until he was exonerated.
Even under the police state conditions imposed by Frank Rizzo, DA Abraham was unable to affect the legal lynching of Mumia Abu-Jamal, prize winning journalist, called the "Voice of the Voiceless". During the reign of terror in Philadelphia under Frank Rizzo, Mumia was framed for killing police officer Daniel Faulkner on a Philadelphia street in December 1981. Mumia was ultimately convicted and sentenced to die in 1995. Since 1982 Mumia has languished in a cell on death row and fortunately, as a result of a series of appeals, Lynn Abraham was unable to see the legal lynching carried out.
The credit for preventing this miscarriage of justice goes to the people of Philadelphia, other cities, towns, villages and folk in the United States and around the world who rose up in protest.
Enter stage right: Seth Williams who runs for DA of Philadelphia on a platform where he promised to seek the death penalty for Mumia Abu-Jamal and prosecute his execution. Of course, that stand gained Williams the immediate support of the Fraternal Order of Police and big business. Stunningly, civil rights organizations, such as Philadelphia chapter NAACP jumped aboard. Adding to the circus, Tigre Hill, a local black filmmaker, produced a documentary film entitled "Barrel of a Gun" whose ridiculous premise was that ever since he was a fifteen year old youth Mumia harbored a desire to kill a police officer.
Last month when the Third Circuit Court of Appeals rendered its decision setting aside Mumia's death sentence, District Attorney Williams stated on local television that he received a call from Maureen Faulkner, widow of slain officer Daniel Faulkner. A willing tool of Philadelphia's Fraternal Order of Police, she asked DA Williams to appeal the Third Circuit's unanimous decision to reduce Mumia's sentence to life in prison without parole stating that she can only have closure when she knows Mumia is dead.
We watched as "Uncle" Seth Williams half choked saying "I will try Ms Faulkner because most people don't know the facts like we do."
Neither Seth Williams nor Maureen Faulkner "knows" the facts of this case. Investigations show that in order to frame Mumia, who had been a thorn in their side for reporting about police corruption and their persecution of MOVE, the police began their manipulation of the evidence in order to frame Mumia as soon as they arrived on the scene. Amnesty International and other legal experts have issue reports that show that Mumia's trial was a kangaroo court.
Since Mumia's conviction and imprisonment in the death house of SCI Green for three decades up to the election of Philadelphia's first black District Attorney, we still hear the cries throughout the world the battle cry of 'Brick by brick, wall by wall, We gonna free Mumia Abu-Jamal!"
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15) Fukushima Mothers and Farmers in Unity
Dear our friends of the world,
On May 23, Fukushima mothers and their supporters strongly demanded that the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) should back down its pretense: an allowable radiation exposure per year is 20 mSv for adults and children, too.
However TAKAGI Yoshiaki, the minister of MEXT has hided himself escaping from the building of MEXT.
The following video is a heartfelt appeal of Fukushima mothers, who are asking people of the world to send international support and solidarity messages.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByHsPS8Maa0
And Fukushima Farmers have risen up in unity, demanding fiercely: "The government should hire our whole village and take full responsibility for all things in our village." For more detail, please refer to Doro-Chiba Quake Report No. 21.
The united power of working class and people alone can create future!
Stop mass dismissal of one million under the pretext of the huge quake!
Abolish nuclear plants by the power of international solidarity!
In Struggle and Solidarity,
International Labor Solidarity Committee of Doro-Chiba
H. Yamamoto
========================
Doro-Chiba Quake Report No.21
Fukushima Farmers have risen up in unity!
"Give Back Our Livelihoods!"
"Give Back Our Village, Our Whole Life!"
On May 13, the Japanese government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) admitted that the core of the Fukushima Daiichi No.1 had gone into a full meltdown almost immediately after the March 11 earthquake. All fuel rods had been melted and fallen to the bottom, and the molten pool of radioactive fuel had burned a hole through the bottom of the reactor vessel. Part of it leaked into the environment. The TEPCO also announced that it started to use boric acid in the reactor cooling water for the Reactor 3 to prevent re-criticality from happening. All three reactors and four spent nuclear fuel pools are out of control. The situation has remained serious for more than two months.
Thus about 100 thousand residents around Fukushima Daiichi are forced to evacuate because of a huge amount of radiation leakage. Two cities and nine towns face the danger of annihilation. In addition to that, more than a million people who are living in the center part of Fukushima prefecture including Fukushima city will also be forced to evacuate sooner or later. It is totally intolerable that 300 thousand school children in Fukushima are exposed to gigantic radiation every day. There is no moment to lose!
In such circumstances, the farmers of a whole village resolutely rose to action, following the courageous action of the mothers of Fukushima to protect their children. They are the evacuees of Iidate Village. The residents of Kawamata Town and Minamisoma City joined in the struggle. At last the affected people by the nuclear disaster in Hamadori Coast Region (the area where the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant stands) got a rebel stronghold.
On April 26, people of Iidate Village held a rally to protest against the government. Their raging voices are as follows:
"Our people have strived hard to develop the poorest village in Abukuma Mountains as a famous village for its beef feedlots. Alas! The nuclear accident destroyed all our efforts for a long time in an instant. The government repeated, "You are safe, no need to worry". And no measures were taken at all. But suddenly on April 20, our village was officially designated as an area of forced evacuation. All during that time, we, including our children, have been continuously exposed to the high level of radiation. To defend the management of TEPCO, the government abandoned us. The Japanese government and the TEPCO have full responsibility for the nuclear accident. Our burning anger is directed violently against the government."
"25 years have passed since the Chernobyl accident but the affected people still cannot go back to their own villages. It is impossible and absurd to imagine that we could clean up all radioactive materials of Iidate Village of 250sq km (97sq mi) by a vacuum cleaner. Our village has mountains, rivers, meadows and farming lands with air. The scholars say irresponsible things such as the damaged soil can be replaced with healthy soil. Incredible!"
"Our village is being divided and the villagers are now breaking up. We can never accept it. We don't mind whether it is inside or outside Fukushima. The government should prepare for us just the same kind of place like Iidate Village and let us live there. We shall get back our village! We must make the government promise us before we evacuate from our village."
The people from Minamisoma City and Kawamata Town joined in the rally. They also raised the voice of resentment.
"Minamisoma City is located within 30 km of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant, where villagers were instructed to stay indoors a little before, is now designated as the area to prepare for evacuation. Now supplies of electricity, gas and water are restored and we can get all products required for daily life including gasoline. In spite of this, we cannot receive our grandchildren in our homes. We cannot carry on our business. We are cooped up in the area separated from others by the transparent (invisible) barrier (of radiation). Our district is now going to be eliminated by our own state called Japan."
"Brothers and sisters throughout the country, please try to know what is happening in our area. It is quite unreasonable and outrageous situation. The nuclear accident is a man-made disaster. The news of the nuclear accident is reported every day. But it is quite shameless and unacceptable that the voices of numerous people who demand to stop nuclear plants are totally neglected. We are boiling with anger. Our last resort is to expect on mounting angry voices demanding to stop nuclear plants from all over the country. It helps us from despair."
"Dear our friends of Iidate Village, you are ordered to evacuate under the government's directive. Please be united and consciously take your future alternative, be smart and think real hard how to build your new Iidate Village. Your yielding efforts give us hope and courage."
The resolution was adopted at the rally. The coordinator concluded, "There are many who think it still not enough, but lets' start from here".
Now spring has come, but an incredible amount of radiation is beating down on us. One and a half months have passed since the March 11, and we have experienced various feelings such as anger, indignation, resentment, and so on. We should get back our Iidate Village where we will be able to hear happy voices of children again. We resolute as follows:
1. End the nuclear accident as early as possible!
2. Implement promptly the planned evacuation!
3. Restore our Iidate Village to original state and return it to us!
4. Compensate sufficiently for the future of our children!
At a briefing session on May 11, the villagers furiously condemned the government and the TEPCO and pursued their full responsibility.
"The government should hire our whole village and take full responsibility for all things in our village. Take care of our cows and other cattle, meadows, farm lands, machines, and mountains, rivers, air and everything"-this was the overwhelming demand of the villagers.
The specific written demand was adopted, and the village officials and the agricultural cooperative leaders decided with firm resolve to press ahead with the direct negotiation against the government. The residents decisively confirmed that they would never fall back on the Act on Compensation for Nuclear Damage, because this law was enacted for the defense of the interest of electric capitals.
At the rally, a violent anger of farmers was boiling up and the voice of their resentment was raised; "Give back our livelihoods!" "Give back our village, our whole life!" When the planned evacuation starts, the village will be divided and the villagers are going to be forced apart. However, the battle against the government and the TEPCO has been eventually started. No one can suppress and eliminate the uprising of the angry farmers.
On the same day of the farmers' rally, May 11, the mothers of Fukushima again went to the Fukushima Board of Education for the protest action. It is the struggle against the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology who recently raised the maximum level of radiation exposure for children to 20mSv/y. Their movement is spreading widely in Fukushima.
On May 13, one of the temporary workers dispatched to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant was killed. He was left untreated for about two hours after having had a heart attack and eventually died. Only one full-time doctor is allocated in the workplace of extremely high radiation level where thousands of workers are engaging in the dangerous work. Their workplace is 20 km away from the place where ambulances are allowed to drive into. Such a poor medical system means to let the workers die if they become ill.
The TEPCO capital has been gaining limitless profits by monopolizing electric power industry, ignoring all regulations of safety and security at workplaces. Its limitless gigantic profits are based on the brutal forced labor and miserable working conditions of temporary workers. The struggle of nuclear plant workers, mostly temporary workers, will surely be initiated with a slogan, "let us live a human life".
On May 15, it is revealed that the Japan Nuclear Energy Safety Organization of Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry had announced officially in its report of 2009 as follows: "the probability of the nuclear fuel core damage caused by the tsunami of over 7 meters is 100 %". It means the government had expected the "unexpected"!
The Fukushima nuclear accident is an unprecedented organized crime committed by Japanese imperialism and the TEPCO in history! It is inevitable that the cry of "expropriate the expropriators" will spread like a tidal wave of fire throughout the fields.
We have to expose the fact that the main culprit is the Japanese imperialism's nuclear power policy intending to secure its position as a potential nuclear-armed state in the world. The world supremacy after World War II was established through atomic war race started by atrocious bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the fierce competition in nuclear development. Both nuclear armaments and nuclear power policies are the key of world domination by imperialism after World War II.
We call on the working class people of the world.
Now in Japan, the struggles of the inhabitants in regional and local communities are evolving around workers, farmers, fishermen and mothers, striving hard to overcome the disastrous situation and huge pressure of the Fukushima nuclear accident.
Let's rise up to stop and abolish all nuclear power plants in the world by the unity and solidarity of all working class people of the world!
And we shall step forward to defeat the nuclear ruling society!
May 20, 2011
Doro-Chiba International Labor Solidarity Committee
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16) CODEPINK Disrupts Netanyahu During Address to Congress
CODEPINK peace activist Rae Abileah injured and hospitalized.
May 24th, 2011
http://codepink.org/article.php?id=5838
Police arrested CODEPINK peace activist Rae Abileah at the George Washington University Hospital in Washington DC. Abileah was taken to the hospital after having been assaulted and tackled to the ground by AIPAC members of the audience in the House Gallery during Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu's speech to Congress.
Abileah interrupted Netanyahu with a banner that said "Occupying Land Is Indefensible" and shouting, "No more occupation, stop Israel war crimes, equal rights for Palestinians, occupation is indefensible." She rose up to speak out just after the Prime Minister talked about the youth around the world rising up for more democracy.
As this 28-year-old Jewish American woman spoke out for the human rights of Palestinians, other members of the audience-wearing badges from the conference of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee-brutally attacked her. The police then dragged her out of the Gallery and took her to the George Washington University Hospital, where she was being treating for neck and shoulder injuries.
"I am in great pain, but this is nothing compared to the pain and suffering that Palestinians go through on a regular basis," said Abileah from her hospital bed. "I have been to Gaza and the West Bank, I have seen Palestinians homes bombed and bulldozed, I have talked to mothers whose children have been killed during the invasion of Gaza, I have seen the Jewish-only roads leading to ever-expanding settlements in the West Bank. This kind of colonial occupation cannot continue. As a Jew and a U.S. citizen, I feel obligated to rise up and speak out against stop these crimes being committed in my name and with my tax dollars."
Abileah explained that she stands in solidarity with the Palestinian and Israeli activists who are routinely jailed and beaten for speaking out for democracy.
During the Joint Session of Congress while Prime Minister Netanyahu was speaking, Rae Abileah stood up from the gallery and shouted "Stop Israeli War Crimes."
From the peace group CODEPINK, Rae is a 28 yr. old Jewish American of Israeli descent. She has traveled to Israel, the West Bank and Gaza and witnessed firsthand the reality of occupation and oppression.
"Prime Minister Netanyahu says that the 1967 borders are indefensible. But what is really indefensible is the occupation of land, the starvation of Gaza, the jailing of dissenters and the lack of equal rights in the alleged Israeli democracy. As a Jew and an American taxpayer, I can't be silent when these crimes are being committed in my name and with my tax money."
Ms. Abileah grew up on Half Moon Bay and presently lives in San Francisco. She was arrested and charged with disrupting Congress. Upon release, she can be reached at 415-994-1723.
This protest is part of the week-long series of actions, organized by CODEPINK as part of a coalition of groups gathered in Washington D.C. for a campaign named Move Over AIPAC. During Netanyahu's speech to AIPAC yesterday, 5 individuals interrupted Netanyahu and were removed from the building (see more: http://bit.ly/aipac2011).
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17) As Housing Goes, So Goes the Economy
New York Times Editortial
May 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/opinion/25wed1.html?hp
The Great Recession began with the bursting of the housing bubble. Today, nearly two years after the recession officially ended, the housing market is still in trouble.
At times, it has looked as if things were improving, like last year's jump in sales because of a temporary homebuyer's tax credit or the recent rise in new-home sales from near-record lows. But, over all, sales and construction have been flat for two years, while prices, driven down by foreclosures, are plumbing new depths.
Even a recent drop in foreclosure filings isn't a reason for optimism. April was the seventh straight decline in monthly filings - which include notices of default, auction and bank repossessions - according to RealtyTrac, a real estate data provider. But the decline appears to be largely the result of banks slowing the foreclosure process in order to keep properties off the market until prices recover. The catch is that prices are unlikely to recover as long as millions of foreclosures are imminent.
This isn't just bad news for homeowners. Selling and building of houses are one of the economy's most powerful engines. Until the market recovers, the entire recovery is imperiled. Falling home equity dents consumer confidence, making things even worse.
Since the problems in housing are not self-curing, a government fix is in order. But the Obama administration's main antiforeclosure effort has fallen far short of its goal to modify three million to four million troubled loans.
Its basic flaw is that participation by the banks is voluntary. Most have joined the program but face no real pressure to meet its goals. Another big problem is that banks often do not own the troubled loans; rather, they service the loans for investors who own them. As servicers - in charge of collecting payments and managing defaults - banks can make more from fees and charges on defaulted loans than on modifications. Not surprisingly, defaults proceed and modifications lag. Banks win. Homeowners and investors lose. The economy suffers.
That does not have to be the end of the story. In a recent hearing in a Senate banking subcommittee, witnesses proposed new laws and regulations to change loan-servicing standards in ways that would prevent banks from putting their interests above those of everyone else.
For starters, various government guidelines on loan servicing would be replaced with tough national standards. Among the new rules, homeowners would be evaluated for loan modifications before any foreclosure - or foreclosure-related fee - is initiated. The bank analysis used to approve or reject modifications would be standardized and public, and failure by the bank to offer a modification when the analysis indicates one is warranted would be grounds for blocking any attempt to foreclose.
National servicing standards could succeed where antiforeclosure programs have failed, namely, in compelling banks to help clean up the mess they did so much to create.
In the Senate, Democrats Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Sherrod Brown of Ohio have introduced bills to establish standards. The new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau can also impose servicing rules. The Obama administration should champion national standards, and Congress and regulators should act - soon.
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18) Daunting Task for NATO in Libya as Strikes Intensify
By ERIC SCHMITT
May 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/world/africa/25nato.html?ref=world
OVER THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA - Just after midnight on Sunday, an allied Mirage 2000 fighter jet prowling the Libyan coastline attacked a Libyan missile patrol boat that military officials said threatened NATO and humanitarian aid vessels in nearby waters.
The strike on the Libyan warship in the harbor at Sirt came at the end of a convoluted chain that started with political orders from Brussels, passed through two military command centers in Italy and concluded with controllers aboard this Awacs command-and-control plane 50 miles off the Libyan coast authorizing the Mirage to bomb the boat.
Two months into the Libya air campaign, allied officers insist they have worked out the kinks in an operation initially plagued by NATO's inexperience in waging a complex air war against moving targets and botched communications with the ragtag rebel army. The confusion resulted in at least two accidental bombings that killed over a dozen rebel fighters.
As Tuesday's heavy airstrikes in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, underscored, NATO is escalating the pace and intensity of attacks on Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi's forces, trying to break an apparent stalemate in the three-month-old conflict. Yet the alliance is still short on reconnaissance planes to identify hostile targets and refueling planes to allow fighter-bombers to conduct longer missions, a senior NATO diplomat said.
French and British officials said this week that they were sending more than a dozen attack helicopters to allow for more precise ground attacks, particularly around Misurata, where loyalist forces continue to fire mortars and artillery despite rebel gains and heavy air attacks.
With no troops on the ground, NATO planners and pilots acknowledge that they often cannot pinpoint the shifting battle lines in cities like Misurata. "The front lines are more scattered," said Col. L. S. Kjoeller, who commands four Danish F-16s flying eight daily strike missions from Sigonella air base in Sicily.
Information on Libyan forces filters up from Central Intelligence Agency officers and allied special operations troops working with the rebels on the ground, as well as from the rebels themselves. But NATO planners say they have no direct contact with anyone on the ground to help coordinate the roughly 50 allied attack missions every night.
Instead, they rely on an array of imagery and electronic intercepts collected by drones, spy planes and satellites, as well as news media reports and other whispers of intelligence. These are used to build a round-the-clock campaign that allied officers say is preventing Colonel Qaddafi from making sustained attacks on rebel fighters and driving him deeper into hiding.
"We're grinding down the regime," said Maj. Gen. Stephen Schmidt, an American officer who commands two dozen NATO and British Awacs planes.
The daily strikes include targets assessed in advance, from mobile missile launchers to command-and-control sites in the capital, which NATO officials said were attacked with 28 bunker-busting satellite-guided bombs on Tuesday night. But there are also fleeting targets of opportunity, like the Libyan warship on Sunday, as well as tanks, artillery or pickup trucks outfitted with heavy guns that are spotted in hiding places, vetted swiftly and hunted down, often in minutes.
The targeting process started in Brussels in March, when NATO ambassadors approved the broad objectives of the campaign, which was authorized by the United Nations Security Council to protect civilians from attack by Qaddafi forces.
Translating those political objectives into military priorities to achieve specific results on the ground falls to NATO's southern headquarters in Naples, led by Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard of Canada, the allied operational commander, and his British deputy, Rear Adm. Russell Harding.
"It takes time to go through and target properly," Admiral Harding said in an interview. "We decide we want to go after command-and-control or resupply routes, or we ask, where is the ammunition coming from? Where is it, what is it and what do we need to do?"
Operating from a converted ballroom once used by Mussolini, a special cell of intelligence analysts, targeting experts and other planners pull together information on possible targets.
From Naples, the authorized target list is sent to an air operations center near Bologna. There, a United States Air Force officer, Lt. Gen. Ralph J. Jodice II, oversees the delicate process of matching specific allied aircraft, armed with specific weapons, to specific targets to achieve the best effects on the ground with the least risk to civilians.
The targeting experts decide, for example, which bomb can penetrate a reinforced concrete underground bunker, at what time of day an attack poses the least risk to civilians, and whether delaying a bomb's impact a few seconds until it burrows into the ground will reduce deadly shrapnel but still destroy an ammunition depot.
For command bunkers in Tripoli, which require long periods of surveillance before striking, NATO increasingly relies on American Predator drones armed with Hellfire missiles. The drones can fly high overhead for hundreds of hours, chronicling the "pattern of life" below until allied commanders feel confident the site is a legitimate target.
Commanders begin reviewing targets 96 hours ahead and prepare a final list 24 hours before missions take off. Bombs are then loaded on planes and scores of aircraft take to the skies from bases around the Mediterranean.
Then it becomes the job of the Awacs crews to manage the scores of allied fighters, interceptors, refueling tankers and surveillance planes operating in the airspace in and around Libya.
On its overnight mission on Sunday, the Awacs plane cruised at 36,000 feet, higher than usual to avoid thunderstorms below that canceled a few missions. The rotating Frisbee-shaped radar on top of the aircraft counted 50 planes just past midnight.
In the Awacs, a windowless military version of a Boeing 707 jet, the war in Libya unfolds on the 20-inch computer screens of controllers in dark green flight suits who keep aircraft safely separated, guide them to tankers when they need fuel and keep an eye out for potential threats.
On the screens, the outlines of the Mediterranean and the Libyan coast emerge. Fighters, refuelers, jammers, reconnaissance planes and remotely piloted drones as well as commercial airliners each have different symbols: tiny white circles, yellow rectangles, check marks, dashes, dots of different colors. A mouse click on a symbol reveals the plane's altitude, speed and other information. On a separate console, a controller can follow hundreds of ships and even trucks driving along the Libyan coast.
Just before midnight, the air operations center sends a message through an encrypted chat room, asking the Awacs to direct a Mirage 2000 jet to check out suspicious vehicles near the airport in Misurata. Under the mission's ground rules, the aircraft's nationality cannot be reported. "There are three big trucks," the pilot reports.
"Are they stationary or moving? Do you see any weapons?" asks a Canadian weapons controller.
"I am unable to identify them as military vehicles," the pilot responds, saying that rain clouds are obscuring his view.
The command center decides against an attack.
Nearly two hours later, however, a different Mirage is summoned to investigate the suspicious boat in Sirt harbor. Cleared to attack, the jet drops two bombs, the first narrowly missing, the second a direct hit.
With missions like this, NATO officials express greater confidence than ever that Colonel Qaddafi is unable to direct his forces, possibly resorting to couriers in some cases to relay strategic and operational guidance.
Even with their combat effectiveness eroding, Libyan forces try to carry out sporadic attacks on civilians and allied forces.
Adm. Samuel J. Locklear III, the overall commander of NATO forces in the Mediterranean, said from his office in Naples that the allied mission has largely achieved its goal of protecting civilians, especially in eastern Libya, and has seriously damaged the Libyan military.
"Qaddafi will never be able to turn a large army on his people again, because it's gone," said Admiral Locklear, noting that the air campaign has wiped out more than half of Libya's ammunition stockpiles and cut off most supply lines to forces in the field.
But the admiral acknowledged Colonel Qaddafi's resiliency, and said that without sustained political and economic pressure as well, "the military piece will take a very long time."
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19) Egypt to Open Rafah Crossing Permanently
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 25, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/05/25/world/middleeast/AP-ML-Egypt-Gaza-Border.html?ref=world
CAIRO (AP) - Egypt's decision Wednesday to end its blockade of Gaza by opening the only crossing to the Hamas-ruled Palestinian territory this weekend could ease the isolation of 1.4 million Palestinians there. It also puts the new Egyptian regime at odds with Israel, which insists on careful monitoring of people and goods entering Gaza for security reasons.
The Rafah crossing will be open permanently starting Saturday, Egypt's official Middle East News Agency announced. That would provide Gaza Palestinians their first open border to the world in four years, since Egypt and Israel slammed their crossings shut after the Islamic militant Hamas overran the Gaza Strip in 2007.
During the closure, Egypt sometimes opened its border to allow Palestinians through for special reasons such as education or medical treatment. But with Israel severely restricting movement of Palestinians through its Erez crossing in northern Gaza, residents there were virtual prisoners.
MENA's statement said the old rules will be reinstated, allowing Palestinians with passports to cross into Egypt every day from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. except for Fridays and holidays.
Entry into Gaza was more complicated. Palestinians ran their side of the crossing. European monitors had a role at the crossing, and they have been waiting to resume that function. Also, Israel was supposed to have a monitoring role from afar, theoretically to stop weapons and militants from entering Gaza.
Mohammed Awad, the Hamas minister of foreign affairs, said he "highly appreciates the decision by the Egyptian brothers to ease the process of travel at Rafah terminal. This reflects the deep relation between us and Egypt, and it will contribute to ease the lives of the Palestinians in Gaza."
Col. Ayoub Abu Shaer, Gaza director of the Rafah terminal, said the two sides have been discussing the changes in recent weeks. Under the proposal, women would be able to leave Gaza without restrictions, while men between the ages of 18 and 40 would have to obtain visas for Egypt at the border.
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor refused to comment.
The decision reflected a change in Egypt's attitude toward Israel since the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in February.
The military council running the country until parliamentary and presidential elections is less concerned about its relations with Israel and has shown more interest in the Palestinians.
Last month, the Egyptian regime successfully brokered a reconciliation between Hamas and rival Fatah, which runs the West Bank government. The two had been at odds since the brief 2007 conflict, when Hamas expelled Fatah forces from Gaza. Repeated efforts by the previous Egyptian government to heal the rift failed.
MENA said the decision to open the Rafah crossing was part of efforts "to end the status of the Palestinian division and achieve national reconciliation." Before the Gaza conflict, the Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas ran the Palestinian side of the Gaza crossing, and Israel always objected to Hamas having a role there.
Egypt's Foreign Minister Nabil Elaraby told the Arabic satellite channel Al-Jazeera last month that the closure of Rafah crossing was about to end, calling the decision to close it "a disgusting matter."
Egypt was the first Arab nation to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1979. There have been polls that indicate many Egyptians would favor canceling the treaty. But that subject is not high on the agenda of Egypt's new rulers who are concerned with internal crises, including unemployment and weeding out corruption.
Besides trapping more than a million Palestinians in Gaza, the Rafah border closure has been largely ineffective.
Gazans have circumvented the blockade by operating hundreds of smuggling tunnels under the nine-mile (15-kilometer) Gaza-Egypt border. The tunnels have been used to bring in all manner of products, as well as people. Israel charges Hamas has used the tunnels to import weapons, including rockets that can reach main population centers in Israel's center.
The tunnel industry is a semi-official Gaza enterprise, with Hamas collecting taxes on goods smuggled in.
Over the past year, the tunnels - and the blockade itself - have lessened in significance as Israel eased its import restrictions, banning weapons and materials it feels could be used for military purposes by Hamas, including many types of construction materials. Israel cut back on its restrictions following world outcry from Israel's violent interception of a flotilla heading for Gaza on May 31, 2010, when nine pro-Palestinian activists were killed.
Israel has complained often about Egypt's inability to stop the smuggling.
In recent months, Palestinian militants in Gaza have fired rockets at Israeli cities, indicating that that have graduated from the homemade, wobbly short-range projectiles to factory-made, longer-range rockets. Israel charges that Iran is among the suppliers, and weapons merchants have been secreting the rockets and other ordnance through Egypt's Sinai desert to the tunnels, and then into Gaza.
Rafah is impractical as a cargo crossing, however, because goods would have to be transported across the 130 mile- (210 kilometer-) wide Sinai desert in Egypt. It also means a long, hot bus trip for Palestinians crossing into Egypt through Rafah.
__
Associated Press writers Maamoun Youssef in Cairo, Karin Laub in Ramallah, West Bank, and Ian Deitch in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
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20) Revolutionary Cuba Now Lays Sand Traps for the Bourgeoisie
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
May 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/world/americas/25cuba.html?ref=world
MEXICO CITY - One of Fidel Castro's first acts upon taking power was to get rid of Cuba's golf courses, seeking to stamp out a sport he and other socialist revolutionaries saw as the epitome of bourgeois excess.
Now, 50 years later, foreign developers say the Cuban government has swung in nearly the opposite direction, giving preliminary approval in recent weeks for four large luxury golf resorts on the island, the first in an expected wave of more than a dozen that the government anticipates will lure free-spending tourists to a nation hungry for cash.
The four initial projects total more than $1.5 billion, with the government's cut of the profits about half. Plans for the developments include residences that foreigners will be permitted to buy - a rare opportunity from a government that all but banned private property in its push for social equality.
Mr. Castro and his comrade in arms Che Guevara, who worked as a caddie in his youth in Argentina, were photographed in fatigues hitting the links decades ago, in what some have interpreted as an effort to mock either the sport or the golf-loving president at the time of the revolution, Dwight D. Eisenhower - or both.
President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, who maintains close ties with Cuba, has taken aim at the pastime in recent years as well, questioning why, in the face of slums and housing shortages, courses should spread over valuable land "just so some little group of the bourgeois and the petit bourgeois can go and play golf."
But Cuba's deteriorating economy and the rise in the sport's popularity, particularly among big-spending travelers who expect to bring their clubs wherever they go, have softened the government's view, investors said. Cuban officials did not respond to requests for comment, but Manuel Marrero, the tourism minister, told a conference in Europe this month that the government anticipates going forward with joint ventures to build 16 golf resorts in the near future.
For the past three years, Cuba's only 18-hole course, a government-owned spread at the Varadero Beach resort area, has even hosted a tournament. It has long ceased to be, its promoters argued, a rich man's game.
"We were told this foray is the top priority in foreign investment," said Graham Cooke, a Canadian golf course architect designing a $410 million project at Guardalavaca Beach, along the island's north coast about 500 miles from Havana, for a consortium of Indians from Canada. The company, Standing Feather International, says it signed a memorandum of agreement with the Cuban government in late April and will be the first to break ground, in September.
Andrew Macdonald, the chief executive of London-based Esencia Group, which helps sponsor the golf tournament in Cuba and is planning a $300 million country club in Varadero, said, "This is a fundamental development in having a more eclectic tourist sector."
The other developments are expected to include at least one of the three proposed by Leisure Canada, a Vancouver-based firm that recently announced a licensing agreement with the Professional Golfers Association for its planned resorts in Cuba, and a resort being designed by Foster & Partners of London.
The projects are primarily aimed at Canadian, European and Asian tourists; Americans are not permitted to spend money on the island, under the cold-war-era trade embargo, unless they have a license from the Treasury Department.
Developers working on the new projects said they believed Cuba had a dozen or so courses before the revolution, some of which were turned into military bases. Cuba and foreign investors for years have talked about building new golf resorts, but the proposals often butted against revolutionary ideals and red tape. Several policy changes adopted at a Communist Party congress in April, however, appear to have helped clear the way, including one resolution specifically naming golf and marinas as important assets in developing tourism and rescuing the sagging economy.
"Cuba saw the normal sun and salsa beach offerings and knew it was not going to be sustainable," said Chris Nicholas, managing director of Standing Feather, which negotiated for eight years with Cuba's state-run tourism company. "They needed more facets of tourism to offer and decided golf was an excellent way to go."
The developers said putting housing in the complexes was important to make them more attractive to tourists and investors, and to increase profits.
Still, John Kavulich, a senior adviser for the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, said Cuba had a history of pulling back on perceived big steps toward freer enterprise and might wrestle to explain how such high-dollar compounds could coexist with often dilapidated housing for everyone else.
"Will Cuba allow Cuban citizens to be members, to play?" he said. "How will that work out? Allowing someone to work there and allowing someone to prosper there is an immense deep ravine for the government."
But Mr. Macdonald said political issues were moot, given that Cuba already had come to terms with several beach resorts near Havana that generally attracted middle-class foreign travelers.
"It's not an issue for them," he said. "It's tourism. It's people coming to visit the country."
If the projects are built as envisioned, the tourists will enjoy not just new, state-of-the-art courses and the opportunity for a second home in Cuba, but shopping malls, spas and other luxury perks. Standing Feather, which calls its complex Estancias de Golf Loma Linda (Loma Linda Golf Estates), promises 1,200 villas, bungalows, duplexes and apartments set on 520 acres framed by mountains and beach.
The residences are expected to average $600,000, and rooms at the 170-room hotel the complex will include may go for about $200 a night, a stark contrast in a nation where salaries average $20 a month.
Standing Feather said that to build a sense of community and provide the creature comforts of home among its clientele, the complex will include its own shopping center, selling North American products under relaxed customs regulations.
"It is in the area that Castro is from, in Holguin Province," added Mr. Cooke, the golf course architect.
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21) Switzerland Decides on Nuclear Phase-Out
By JAMES KANTER
May 25, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/26/business/global/26nuclear.html?ref=world
BRUSSELS - The Swiss government decided Wednesday to abandon plans to build new nuclear reactors, while European Union regulators agreed on a framework for stress-testing theirs, as repercussions from the disaster in Japan continue to ripple across Europe.
The Swiss Energy Minister Doris Leuthard had suspended the approvals process for three new reactors, pending a safety review, after the accident that struck the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami of March 11.
On Wednesday - days after an anti-nuclear rally in Switzerland drew a large crowd of 20,000 people - the Cabinet said it had decided to make the ban permanent.
The country's five existing reactors - which supply about 40 percent of the country's power - would be allowed to continue operating, but would not be replaced at the end of their life span, it said. The last would go offline in 2034.
In a statement, the Cabinet said it was responding to the desires of the Swiss people to reduce risks "in the face of the severe damage that the earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima caused."
However, it said that there was no need to shut down plants ahead of schedule, insisting that their safe operation was assured.
The lengthy phase-out will also allow time for Switzerland to develop new energy sources and improve energy efficiency, it said, adding that long-term, nuclear energy was expected to lose its competitive advantage over renewable sources of energy because the costs associated with nuclear power, such as for new safety standards and equipment, are expected to climb.
The nuclear fuel meltdowns in Japan have prompted different reactions in other parts of Europe. France, which relies on nuclear power for about 80 percent of its electricity and is a major exporter of nuclear technology, has reaffirmed its commitment to the technology. Just across the border, however, the German government reversed a previous decision to extend the life of its nuclear plants and is working on a plan to accelerate the phase out there.
Meanwhile, national regulators from across the 27-nation European Union are planning new safety tests for the 143 operating nuclear reactors in their territories.
On Wednesday, they agreed that the tests would include some man-made disasters as well as natural ones. But the European Commission said that there would be a separate process to check whether nuclear operators could adequately thwart acts of terrorism, because of sharp differences among governments about encroaching on sensitive areas of defense and security.
The E.U. energy commissioner, Günther Oettinger, said at a news conference in Brussels that the tests would be robust.
"The quality and the depth of this stress test is such as to fulfill the requirements of the European citizen to live in a safe environment," Mr. Oettinger said. "All of this will be done in as transparent way as possible."
Greenpeace, an environmental group that opposes nuclear power, strongly disagreed.
The tests "won't be independent, won't cover plans for emergencies and won't always tell us whether some of Europe's most obvious terrorist targets are protected or not," said Jan Haverkamp, a nuclear policy adviser at Greenpeace.
Britain, France and the Czech Republic were among countries that had fought hardest to water down the tests, Mr. Haverkamp said.
Britain generates only around 18 percent of its electricity from nuclear power but faces the prospect of a worsening energy shortfall if it is required to shut its reactors. The Czech Republic still mines uranium for sale to nuclear power generators.
Still, atomic power remains a hugely sensitive matter after the Ukrainian nuclear disaster in Chernobyl in 1986 spread fallout across the Continent.
Although the tests remain voluntary, the European Commission recommended that the 14 member states with reactors producing electricity begin testing for so-called man-made events by June 1.
Those tests would in some cases be more rigorous than routine safety checks. For example, power plants built to withstand earthquakes of a magnitude of 6.0 on the Richter scale would be tested for earthquakes of a higher magnitude, although it would be up to the authorities in each country to define how much tougher to make the criteria.
The tests also would include peer-review teams composed of seven people, drawing from regulators from all 27 E.U. countries and the European Commission. Those teams would have leeway to conduct inspections inside nuclear plants.
According to the commission, the key goal of the tests is to prevent the kind of accident in Europe that struck the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
The commission said nuclear operators would need to describe what would happen if their reactors lost power for "several days" and what measures were in place if primary backup systems powered by batteries also failed.
The tests would include a review of containment systems to ensure they could withstand an air crash or the explosion of a nearby oil tanker, whether as a result of an accident or a terror attack. The tests would also seek to ascertain whether there were adequate systems to put out any resulting fire from explosions occurring near nuclear power plants.
The E.U. authorities still need to set a schedule for checking whether reactors could withstand a wider range of terror attacks, possibly including cyber attacks. Those tests are far more sensitive because governments want to avoid revealing any vulnerabilities of their reactors.
The commission, the executive arm of the European Union, said that reactors failing the tests should be shut down and decommissioned if safety upgrades were too difficult or too expensive. But it acknowledged that it had no authority to order such shutdowns.
The European Commission said national operators and regulators had agreed to make their findings public, despite initial concerns in Paris and London that publishing certain information might encourage attacks. Governments would present a final report on the tests at the end of year.
Paul Geitner contributed reporting from Paris.
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22) Risk From Spent Nuclear Reactor Fuel Is Greater in U.S. Than in Japan, Study Says
"'The largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet will remain in storage at U.S. reactor sites for the indefinite future,' the report's author, Robert Alvarez, a senior scholar at the institute, wrote. 'In protecting America from nuclear catastrophe, safely securing the spent fuel by eliminating highly radioactive, crowded pools should be a public safety priority of the highest degree.'"
By MATTHEW L. WALD
May 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/business/energy-environment/25nuke.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON - The threat of a catastrophic release of radioactive materials from a spent fuel pool at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant is dwarfed by the risk posed by such pools in the United States, which are typically filled with far more radioactive material, according to a study released on Tuesday by a nonprofit institute.
The report, from the Institute for Policy Studies, recommends that the United States transfer most of the nation's spent nuclear fuel from pools filled with cooling water to dry sealed steel casks to limit the risk of an accident resulting from an earthquake, terrorism or other event.
"The largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet will remain in storage at U.S. reactor sites for the indefinite future," the report's author, Robert Alvarez, a senior scholar at the institute, wrote. "In protecting America from nuclear catastrophe, safely securing the spent fuel by eliminating highly radioactive, crowded pools should be a public safety priority of the highest degree."
At one plant that is a near twin of the Fukushima units, Vermont Yankee on the border of Massachusetts and Vermont, the spent fuel in a pool at the solitary reactor exceeds the inventory in all four of the damaged Fukushima reactors combined, the report notes.
After a March 11 earthquake and tsunami hit the Japanese plant, United States officials urged Americans to stay at least 50 miles away, citing the possibility of a major release of radioactive materials from the pool at Unit 4. The warning has reinvigorated debate about the safety of the far more crowded fuel pools at American nuclear plants.
Adding to concern, President Obama canceled a plan for a repository at Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert last year, making it likely that the spent fuel will accumulate at the nation's reactors for years to come.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission maintains that both pool and cask storage are safe, although it plans to re-examine the pool issue in light of events at Fukushima.
Nearly all American reactors, especially the older ones, have far more spent fuel on hand than was anticipated when they were designed, Mr. Alvarez, a former senior adviser at the Department of Energy, wrote.
In general, the plants with the largest inventories are the older ones with multiple reactors. By Mr. Alvarez's calculation, the largest amount of spent fuel is at the Millstone Point plant in Waterford, Conn., where two reactors are still operating and one is retired. The second-biggest is at the Palo Verde complex in Wintersburg, Ariz., the largest nuclear power plant in the United States, with three reactors.
Companies that run reactors are generally reluctant to say how much spent fuel they have on hand, citing security concerns. But Mr. Alvarez, drawing from the environmental impact statement for the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain, estimated the amount of radioactive material at all of the nation's reactors.
In the 1960s, when most of the 104 reactors operating today were conceived, reactor manufacturers assumed that the fuel would be trucked away to factories for reprocessing to recover uranium. But reprocessing proved a commercial flop and was banned in the United States in the 1970s out of concerns that the plutonium could find its way into weapons worldwide.
Today roughly 75 percent of the nation's spent nuclear fuel is stored in pools, the report said, citing data from the Nuclear Energy Institute. About 25 percent is stored in dry casks, or sealed steel containers within a concrete enclosure. The fuel is cooled by the natural flow of air around the steel container.
But spent fuel is transferred to dry casks only when reactor pools are nearly completely full. The report recommends instead that all spent nuclear fuel older than five years be stored in the casks. It estimated that the effort would take 10 years and cost $3.5 billion to $7 billion.
"With a price tag of as much as $7 billion, the cost of fixing America's nuclear vulnerabilities may sound high, specially given the heated budget debate occurring in Washington," Mr. Alvarez wrote. "But the price of doing too little is incalculable."
The casks are not viewed as a replacement for a permanent disposal site, but as an interim solution that would last for decades.
The security of spent fuel pools also drew new attention after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, partly because one of the planes hijacked by terrorists flew down the Hudson River, over the Indian Point nuclear complex in Westchester County, before crashing into the World Trade Center in Manhattan.
Indian Point has pressurized water reactors with containment domes, but its spent fuel pools are outside the domes. The pools themselves are designed to withstand earthquakes and other challenges, but the surrounding buildings are not nearly as strong as those that house the reactors.
In a 2005 study ordered by Congress, the National Academy of Sciences also concluded that the pools were a credible target for terrorist attack and that consideration should be given to moving some fuel to dry casks.
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23) In a California Prison, Bunk Beds Replace Pickup Games
By JENNIFER MEDINA
May 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/us/25prison.html?ref=us
CHINO, Calif. - The basketball hoops jimmied up to the ceiling prove that this dingy space was a gym once upon a time. But for years now, the windowless space has served as a de facto cell for dozens of prisoners at the California Institution for Men.
The rows of bunk beds, just a few inches apart, covered almost every empty space on the floor Tuesday afternoon. The gap between most beds allowed only the thinnest of inmates to stand comfortably. A few prisoners wandered around, but most simply rested on their thin mattresses, reading or dozing. As a rule, they go out to the yard just two or three times a week.
Ominous messages stenciled on the walls signaled the tension: "Caution: No warning shots will be fired." Two guards mind the 200 prisoners, while another, known as a gunner, watches from up high, ready to intervene at any moment.
It would be hard to call the cavernous cell anything but crowded. Still, there are fewer people in it than there were just a few months ago, when triple bunk beds lined the wall. Now, those have been converted to hold just two inmates.
"That helped," said Michael Collins, a 49-year-old inmate who sits a few feet from a dank corner converted into a group of metal toilets and open shower stalls. "We have less people using the bathroom now. If you just mind your business and stay in your bed, it's O.K."
But according to a Supreme Court ruling issued Monday, California - which has the highest overcrowding rate of any prison system in the country - must eliminate rooms like this at its facilities across the state, shedding some 30,000 prisoners over the next two years.
The problem is not new. For decades, the prison population has steadily risen, largely because of tougher mandatory sentencing laws. The overcrowding has led to riots, suicides and killings of inmates and guards over the last several years.
Matthew Cate, the secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said conditions had actually improved since the filing of the lawsuit in 2006 that ended with Monday's court decision. There are now roughly 143,000 inmates in the state's prisons, down from 162,000 in 2006, in part because the state has sent some 10,000 inmates to out-of-state facilities.
While there were once nearly 20,000 inmates in spaces not meant for housing, commonly referred to as "bad beds," that number has dropped to 6,600.
"It's not perfect, but we haven't been at those kinds of levels since the early 1990s," Mr. Cate said. "The standard that I use personally is: are the prisons clean, are the staff positions filled and are prisoners complaining about care? I think that conditions are good on a day-to-day basis on the basics."
But critics say that it is impossible for the state to deal with such a glutted system. The lack of space can make it impossible, for example, to move inmates from one prison to another for their own safety.
Mr. Cate said that the state was "the birthplace for every major prison gang in the country," but that the overcrowding paralyzes wardens from switching prisoners to defuse racial and gang tensions.
"It's an unacceptable working environment for everyone," said Jeanne Woodford, a former director of the state prisons and a former warden at San Quentin prison. "Every little space is filled with inmates and they are housed where they shouldn't be housed, and every bed is full. It leads to greater violence, more staff overtime and a total inability to deal with health care and mental illness issues."
One major impact of the overcrowding, and a centerpiece of the Supreme Court's ruling, is the lack of adequate health care for prisoners with mental illness or other chronic medical conditions.
In 2005, a federal official began overseeing California's prison health care system after a judge ruled that the state was giving substandard medical care for prisoners. Now, Mr. Cate said, roughly 90 percent of all clinical positions are filled, although that rate varies among the prisons.
Donald Specter, the director of the Prison Law Office who argued against the state before the Supreme Court, said that medical care was still wanting.
"There are not enough beds for the mentally ill, you have prisons all over the state who are flunking by every measure in taking care of chronic conditions like H.I.V. and diabetes and high blood pressure," Mr. Specter said, citing several recent reports by the state's inspector general.
Mr. Cate concedes that the state is doing little to rehabilitate prisoners and has almost no space to run programs that would keep them from landing back here again.
"There's far too much idleness, and that's the thing that concerns me the most," he said. "When you have lockdown as often as we have to, it's not setting anyone up for anything good."
Many of the prisoners here are serving sentences of less than a year for parole violations. According to California law, any parolee caught violating the terms of release could be sent back to state prison, creating a situation that many call the "revolving door." Under a plan Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed, those inmates would instead be sent to county jails.
Robert Caldera, 52, has spent much of his life floating in and out of the prison system, most recently arriving at Chino after he did not report to his parole officer. Mr. Caldera was convicted of second-degree robbery several years ago, he said. Now, he spends his days reading the Bible with a group of inmates. He, too, said the conditions had improved, but like nearly everyone else here, he said the real problem is the bathroom.
"It's nasty pretty much all the time," he said. "There are holes in the walls that have feces in them. It's damp constantly so you don't ever feel clean."
Even from several feet away, it is possible to smell the scent of an overused locker room. There is something that looks like mold on each of the walls and one guard said they are constantly battling broken pipes and leaks.
The conditions at other California prisons have led to outbreaks of viruses, causing officials to quarantine hundreds of prisoners at a time.
Correction officers in Chino say that while the crowding has eased, guarding as many as 70 prisoners at a time is unspeakably stressful. Several said they looked forward to the day when they would have a more manageable number of inmates. But it can be hard for them to muster sympathy for their charges.
"It's worse than this in the Navy and you don't hear those guys complaining," said Robert Spejcher, an officer who oversees a room converted to hold 42 inmates. "We never really know what we're dealing with and we never know how long they are going to stay."
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24) High Unemployment 'Most Pressing Legacy' of Financial Crisis, Report Says
By DAVID JOLLY
May 25, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/26/business/global/26oecd.html?ref=business
PARIS - The world economy is moving into a self-sustaining recovery, but high unemployment remains a threat three years after the financial crisis, a prominent economic research organization said Wednesday.
"The global recovery is getting stronger, more broad-based, more self-sustained," Pier Carlo Padoan, the chief economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said.
"The private sector is driving growth," he added, "especially through a pick-up in trade," while at the same time, support through government spending programs "is being withdrawn slowly."
The O.E.C.D. represents 34 leading developed economies, including the United States and the other members of the Group of 7 industrialized nations. The Paris-based organization is marking its 50th anniversary this week, with the celebration timed to overlap with a Group of 8 summit meeting taking place in Deauville, France, on Thursday and Friday.
In its Economic Outlook report, the O.E.C.D. said global gross domestic product will likely grow by a healthy 4.2 percent this year and by 4.6 percent in 2012. But that figure reflects strong growth in emerging economies; O.E.C.D. members' G.D.P. is expected to rise by a more modest 2.3 percent in 2011 and by 2.8 percent next year.
The organization forecast U.S. growth of 2.6 percent this year and 3.1 percent in 2012. It said it expected the euro-zone economy to expand by 2 percent in both 2011 and 2012. Japan's economy, hurt by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, will likely shrink by 0.9 percent this year before rebounding to 2.2 percent growth in 2012, the O.E.C.D. said.
Still, it noted, "high unemployment remains among the most pressing legacies of the crisis," and that "should prompt countries to improve labor market policies that boost job creation and prevent today's high joblessness from becoming permanent."
Unemployment, which affects more than 50 million people in the O.E.C.D. area, is an important political consideration, as evidenced by recent demonstrations in Spain, which, with more than 20 percent of the population out of work, has the highest jobless rate in the European Union.
The O.E.C.D. called on governments to provide appropriate employment services and training programs and to encourage temporary work, while considering employment tax cuts and workshare arrangements.
Angel Gurria, the O.E.C.D.'s secretary general, called in a statement for governments to work toward fiscal consolidation, noting that government debt is expected to rise to an average of 96 percent of G.D.P. in the euro zone this year, and to just over 100 percent of G.D.P. in the overall O.E.C.D.
Mr. Padoan, the chief economist, warned that there remained a number of downside risks for the global economy, including high energy and commodity prices, a slowdown in China caused by the government's efforts to fight high inflation, and the crisis among the euro states.
"There is a concern that these downside risks could accumulate and possibly prompt some stagflationary risks in some advanced economies," he added.
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