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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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FREEDOM FROM VIOLENCE AND POLICE STATE TERROR
Saturday, August 20 at 2:00pm
Location: In front of SF City Hall, Polk Street side, between Grove & McAllister
On the 34th Birthday of Idriss Stelley, Killed by SFPD on 6-12-01 at the Sony Metreon Complex,
The event is meant to launch a citywide police accountability and transparency COLLECTIVE comprised of socially mindful grassroots entities , social/racial Justice activists, and "progressive "city officials, as well as mayoral candidates, HOLD THEM TO THEIR PROMISES!
Performances, music, spoken word, and speakers.
If you would like to speak or perform,
please contact Jeremy Miller at 415-595-2894, djasik87.9@gmail.com,
or mesha Monge-Irizarry at 415-595-8251
Please join our facebook group at
Idriss Stelley Foundation !
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please forward widely)
ENDORSEMENTS REQUESTED
National Call to Action!
Organizing Meeting!
For Jobs, Healthcare, Education, Pensions,
Housing and the Environment, Not War!
No to NATO/G-8 Warmakers!
No to War and Austerity!
You are invited to attend a Chicago/National Organizing Meeting:
Sunday, August 28, 2011
9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Kent College of Law, Room C50
565 West Adams Street
Chicago
At the invitation of the White House, military and civilian representatives of the 28-nation U.S.-commanded and largely U.S.-financed North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and heads of state and finance ministers of the G-8 world economic powers are convening to Chicago, May 15-22, 2012.
The U.S./NATO military behemoth enforces the interests of the global great power elites. $Trillions are expended for never-ending wars and occupations while $trillions in austerity programs are extracted from working people the world over.
The G-8 nations, the richest on earth, will assemble to plan ever new draconian measures seeking to resolve the problems created by their crisis-ridden and profit-driven social order at the expense of working people and the poor everywhere.
Theirs is the agenda of the heads of state of the world's richest nations and their imperial military-industrial establishments - the agenda of the banks and corporations - the agenda for austerity, unprecedented social cutbacks, union-busting, environmental destruction, global warming/climate crisis, racism, sexism, homophobia, deepening attacks on civil liberties, democratic rights and never-ending war.
Ours is the agenda for humanity's future. We will mobilize in the tens of thousands from cities across the U.S. and around the world. On Tuesday, May 15, the opening day of the NATO/G-8 deliberations, we will announce our agenda with a press conference, rally and peaceful march. On Saturday, May 19 we will mobilize for a massive march and rally - exercising our democratic rights to peaceful assembly to demand:
• Bring All U.S./NATO Troops, Mercenaries & War Contractors Home Now! Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, the Middle East and Elsewhere.
• End U.S. Aid to Israel! End U.S. Aid to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine! End the Siege of Gaza! No to Threats of War Against Iran! End the Sanctions Now!
• Trillions for Jobs, Housing, Education, Health Care, Pensions and the Environment! No to Attacks on Unions, Cutbacks, Layoffs, Mortgage Foreclosures and Austerity! Bring the War Dollars Home!
• Tax the Rich, Not Working People! No to Corporate and Bank Bailouts!
• Civil liberties for All! End Racist Attacks on Muslim and Arab Communities! End Racist Attacks on Blacks, Latinos and Immigrants! Full Legal Rights for All! No to FBI Repression and Grand Jury Subpoenas to Antiwar and Social Justice Activists!
THE RIGHT TO PROTEST:
We will demand that our guaranteed civil liberties and democratic rights be respected - that our right to peaceful assembly and political protest be honored - that the voices of the people not be stifled!
The following organizations/individuals are among the initial Chicago-area endorsers:
Hatem Abudayyeh, *US Palestinian Community Network, Chicago • Dave Bernt, Shop Stewart, Teamsters Local 705 •_Bill Chambers, Committee Against Political Repression • _Sarah Chambers, Executive Board Member, Chicago Teachers Union • _Mark Clements, Campaign to End the Death Penalty • _Vince Emmanuelle, *Iraq Veterans Against the War_ • Randy Evans, Global Reach, Inc. • Chris Geovanis, Hammerhard Media Works • _PatHunt, Chicago Area Code Pink, Chicago Area Peace Action • _Joe Isobaker, Committee to Stop FBI Repression • Dennis Kosuth, *National Nurses United, union steward • Kait McIntyre, Students for a Democratic Society, University of Illinois - Chicago_ • Jorge Mujica, March 10th Immigrant Rights Activist_ • Kathy Kelly, Voices for Creative Nonviolence • _Eric Ruder, Chicago Network to Send US Boat to Gaza • _Adam Shills, *Illinois Educational Association • Newland Smith, Episcopalian Peace Fellowship • _Sarah Smith, Committee to Stop FBI Repression • _Students for Justice in Palestine at School of the Art Institute of Chicago • Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, *Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign • _Andy Thayer, Gay Liberation Network and Chicago Coalition Against War and Racism_ *Organization for identification purposes only.
The May 15 and 19, 2012 mobilizations were initiated by the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC) in partnership with antiwar and social justice groups in Chicago, across the U.S. and internationally. At the June 18, NYC National Coordinating Committee meeting of UNAC the 49 groups present unanimously adopted a resolution to protest the NATO/G8 meetings. They are listed as follows:
Action for a Progressive Pakistan • Al-Awda Palestine Right to Return Coalition - NY • BAYAN-USA • Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace • Bail Out the People Movement • Black Agenda Report • Black is Back • Boston Stop the Wars • Boston UNAC • Code Pink • Committee to Stop FBI Repression • Ct. United for Peace • Fellowship of Reconciliation • Green Party • Haiti Liberte' • Hampshire Students for Justice in Palestine • Honduras Resistencia - USA • International Action Center •_International Support Haiti Network • International League of People's Struggle_• International Socialist Organization • Islamic Leadership Council of Metropolitan NY • Jersey City Peace Movement_• May 1st Workers and Immigrant Rights Coalition • Mobilization Against War and Occupation - Canada • Metro West Peace Action • Middle East Crisis Committee • Muslim Peace Coalition • New England United • Nodutdol Korean Community Development • Pakistan Solidarity Network • Philly Against War • Project Salam • Rhode Island Mobilization Committee • Rochester Against War • SI - Solidarity with Iran • Socialist Action • Socialist Party USA • Thomas Merton Center Pittsburgh • Veterans for Peace • Voices for Creative Nonviolence • West Hartford Citizens for Peace • WESPAC • Women's International League for Peace and Freedom • Workers World • World Can't Wait
A national coordinating committee and its Chicago counterpart, open to and inclusive of the direct and democratic participation of all antiwar and social justice organizations is in formation. Join us! Endorse the May 15 and May 19, 2012 Chicago mobilizations against the NATO-G-8 warmakers.
Contact: No to NATO/G-8 Warmakers: A National Network Opposing War and Austerity
email: NATOG8protest@gmail.com
Chicago: 773-301-0109 or 773-209-1187
National: 518-227-6947
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Commemorate the 40th Anniversary of the Attica Prison Uprising
Friday, September 9th - 7pm Sharp
518 Valencia Street - San Francisco
Attica - The Restored 1974 Film
Discussion with:
Azadeh Zohrabi - Hastings Race & Poverty Law Journal
Dennis Cunningham - Original Attica Attorney
Manuel Fontaine - about connecting the dots to
Georgia, Ohio and California prison strikes
Prison unrest in the United States hit a boiling point on September 9, 1971, when inmates at Attica State Prison after months of protesting inhumane living conditions rebelled, seizing part of the prison and taking 35 hostages. The uprising was met with a military attack and the murder of 43 people after NY State troopers assaulted the prisoners. Attica - released 3 years later - is an investigation of the rebellion and its aftermath, piecing together documentary footage of the occupation and ensuing assault. Especially significant today as prisoners from Georgia, Ohio, California and other states fight for their human rights in the face of increased imprisonment and the brutality and torture of long-term solitary confinement.
$10 Donation - $5 youth - No one turned away
Sponsored by the Freedom Archives & the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
www.Freedomarchives.org
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Palestine Is Coming to the U.N.!
Rally, Thursday, September 15, 5 pm: Gather at Times Square
6 pm: March to Grand Central and then over to the U.N. to demand:
Palestine: Sovereignty Now!
Palestine: Enforce the Right of Return!
Palestine: Full Equality for All!
5 pm: Gather at Times Square
6 pm: March to Grand Central and then over to the U.N., as we say:
End All U.S. Aid to Israel!
End the Occupation!
Support Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions!
For more information, email palestineun@gmail.com
Sponsored by the Palestine U.N. Solidarity Coalition
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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
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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(Please forward widely)
Save the dates of October 6, 15 to protest wars; and May 15-22, 2012--Northern California UNAC will be discussing plans for solidarity actions around the Chicago G-8 here.
United National Antiwar Committee
UNACpeace@gmain.com or UNAC at P.O. Box 123, Delmar, NY 12054
518-227-6947
www.UNACpeace.org
UNITED NATIONAL ANTIWAR COMMITTEE (UNAC) CALLS FOR ACTIONS IN OCTOBER
TO MARK 10 YEARS OF WAR ON AFGHANISTAN
On June 22, the White House defied the majority of Americans who want an end to the war in Afghanistan. Instead of announcing the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops, contractors, bases, and war dollars, Obama committed to removing only one twentieth of the US forces on the ground in Afghanistan over the next eight months. Another 23,000 will supposedly be withdrawn just in time to influence the 2012 elections. Even if the President follows thru on this plan, nearly 170,000 US soldiers and contractors will remain in Afghanistan. All veterans and soldiers will be raising the question, "Who will be the last U.S. combatant to die in Afghanistan?"
In truth, the President's plan is not a plan to end the war in Afghanistan. It was, instead, an announcement that the U.S. was changing strategy. As the New York Times reported, the US will be replacing the "counterinsurgency strategy" adopted 18 months ago with the kind of campaign of drone attacks, assassinations, and covert actions that the US has employed in Pakistan.
At a meeting of the United National Antiwar Committee's National Coordinating Committee, held in NYC on June 18, representatives of 47 groups voted to endorse the nonviolent civil resistance activities beginning on October 6 in Washington, D.C. and to call for nationally coordinated local actions on October 15 to protest the tenth anniversary of the US war in Afghanistan. UNAC urges activists in as many cities as possible to hold marches, picket lines, teach-ins, and other events to say:
· Withdraw ALL US/NATO Military Forces, Contractors, and Bases out of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya NOW!
· End drone attacks on defenseless populations in Pakistan and Yemen!
· End US Aid to Israel! Hands Off Iran!
· Bring Our War Dollars Home Now! Money for Jobs and Education, Not for War and Incarceration!
Note these dates of upcoming significant events:
· November 11-13 UNAC National Conference - a gathering of all movement activists to learn, share, plan future actions.
· May 15-22, 2012 International Protest Actions against war criminals attending NATO meeting and G-8 summit in Chicago.
Challenge the NATO War Makers in Chicago May 15-22, 2012
NATO and the G8 are coming to Chicago - so are we!
The White House has just announced that the U.S. will host a major international meeting of NATO, the US-commanded and financed 28-nation military alliance, in Chicago from May 15 to May 22, 2012. It was further announced that at the same time and place, there will be a summit of the G-8 world powers. The meetings are expected to draw heads of state, generals and countless others.
At a day-long meeting in New York City on Saturday, June 18, the United National Antiwar Committee's national coordinating committee of 69 participants, representing, 47 organizations, unanimously passed a resolution to call for action at the upcoming NATO meeting.
UNAC is determined to mount a massive united outpouring in Chicago during the NATO gathering to put forth demands opposing endless wars and calling for billions spent on war and destruction be spent instead on people's needs for jobs, health care, housing and education.
CHALLENGE THE NATO WAR MAKERS
Whereas, the U.S. is the major and pre-eminent military, economic and political power behind NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), and
Whereas, the U.S. will be hosting a major NATO gathering in the spring of 2012, and
Whereas, U.S. and NATO-allied forces are actively engaged in the monstrous wars, occupations and military attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, the Middle East and elsewhere,
Be it resolved that:
1) UNAC, in conjunction with a broad range of groups and organizations that share general agreement with the major demands adopted at our 2010 Albany, NY national conference, initiate a mass demonstration at the site of the NATO gathering, and
2) UNAC welcomes and encourages the participation of all groups interested in mobilizing against war and for social justice in planning a broad range of other NATO meeting protests including teach-ins, alternative conferences and activities organized on the basis of direct action/civil resistance, and
3) UNAC will seek to make the NATO conference the occasion for internationally coordinated protests, and
4) UNAC will convene a meeting of all of the above forces to discuss and prepare initial plans to begin work on this spring action.
Resolution passed unanimously by the National Coordinating Committee of UNAC on Saturday, June 18, 2011
click here to donate to UNAC:
https://nationalpeaceconference.org/Donate.html
Click here for the Facebook UNAC group.
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_157059221012587&ap=1
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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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Cracked Fukushima: Radioactive steam escapes danger zone
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fimRJocH_90
Workers at Japan's Fukushima plant say the ground under the facility is cracking and radioactive steam is escaping through the cracks. The cooling system at the plant failed after the devastating tsunami hit Japan in March, sparking a nuclear crisis. But new evidence suggests that Fukushima reactors were doomed to cripple even before the massive wave reached them. RT's Anissa Naouai talks to Dr. Robert Jacobs, a Professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute.
RT on Twitter: http://twitter.com/RT_com
RT on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/RTnews
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London Riots. (The BBC will never replay this. Send it out)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biJgILxGK0o
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Police Beat Homeless Fullerton Man Kelly Thomas To Death
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1ljYNgLnpxM
A video has surfaced that documents Fullerton police beating a homeless man near the Fullerton Bus Depot in early July, reports Gawker. The video above does not show much of the fight, but you can hear a man's screams and people talking about a Taser. The man being beaten also cries out for his father.
On July 5, Fullerton police received reports of someone breaking into cars in the area around the bus depot, according to the LA Times. Police subsequently tried to arrest 37-year-old transient Kelly Thomas on suspicion of possessing the stolen items.
When Thomas resisted, it took several minutes for him to be subdued. Sgt. Andrew Goodrich told the OC Register that it took "an upwards of five, maybe six officers to subdue him."
ABC says that Thomas was unarmed during the incident. Thomas sustained severe injuries to the head and neck, as evidenced in the photo here (WARNING: EXTREMELY GRAPHIC). He was hospitalized at UCI Medical Center, when he fell into a coma and died less than a week later.
Thomas' father Ron Thomas told the OC Register that his son had been diagnosed with schizophrenia in his early twenties and was homeless by choice. His sister, Christina Kinser, described him as a "quiet, gentle soul" to Fullerton Stories.
Currently, the Fullerton Police Department is performing an inquiry into the incident, and the case is being examined by the Orange County District Attorney's office, reports the LA Times. There have been several protests, and a vigil for Kelly was held in downtown Fullerton, the OC Register tells us.
In an open letter, City Council Member Bruce Whitaker has called for the police to offer a clear explanation and to release a video that apparently shows the actual beating.
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New Trailer: Battle for Brooklyn
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwq78l6SPUs&feature=share
Battle for Brooklyn explores the poorly understood phenomenon of eminent domain abuse. A feature-length documentary from filmmakers Michael Galinsky, Suki Hawley, and David Beilinson, this film investigates how real estate developers, local government, community activists, and the media have clashed over the largest single-source development project ever proposed in New York City. Widely known as the Atlantic Yards project, this undertaking has for the past four years been a major source of contention as local residents resist a billionaire developers attempt to use eminent domain to seize their homes and businesses. Done in the name of "development," schemes such as this one eviscerate private property rights and make a mockery of the Fifth Amendment--and yet they freely exploit lucrative taxpayer subsidies, easements, and tax abatements.
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A Classic: With great TV visuals common during the War in Vietnam--cleansed for us today.
Bruce Springsteen - War
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn91L9goKfQ&feature=share
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Verizon Strike in Albany, New York
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jwa0LrjUl8s
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Protest which sparked Tottenham riot
Hours before the riot which swept the area demonstrators gather outside Tottenham Police Station in North London demanding "justice" for the killing of a 29-year-old man, Mark Duggan, who was shot dead by police.
By Alastair Good
August 7, 2011
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newsvideo/8687058/Protest-which-sparked-Tottenham-riot.html
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Visualizing a Trillion: Just How Big That Number Is?
"1 million seconds is about 11.5 days, 1 billion seconds is about 32 years while a trillion seconds is equal to 32,000 years."
Digital Inspiration
http://www.labnol.org/internet/visualize-numbers-how-big-is-trillion-dollars/7814/
How Much Is $1 Trillion?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPfY0q-rEdY&feature=player_embedded
Courtesy the credit crisis and big bailout packages, the figure "trillion" has suddenly become part of our everyday conversations. One trillion dollars, or 1 followed by 12 zeros, is lots of money but have you ever tried visualizing how big that number actually is?
For people who can visualize one million dollars, the comparison made on CNN should give you an idea about a trillion - "if you start spending a million dollars every single day since Jesus was born, you still wouldn't have spend a trillion dollars".
Another mathematician puts it like this: "1 million seconds is about 11.5 days, 1 billion seconds is about 32 years while a trillion seconds is equal to 32,000 years".
Now if the above comparisons weren't really helpful, check another illustration that compares the built of an average human being against a stack of $100 currency notes bundles.
A bundle of $100 notes is equivalent to $10,000 and that can easily fit in your pocket. 1 million dollars will probably fit inside a standard shopping bag while a billion dollars would occupy a small room of your house.
With this background in mind, 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) is 1000 times bigger than 1 billion and would therefore take up an entire football field - the man is still standing in the bottom-left corner. (See visuals -- including a video -- at website:
http://www.labnol.org/internet/visualize-numbers-how-big-is-trillion-dollars/7814/
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One World One Revolution -- MUST SEE VIDEO -- Powerful and beautiful...bw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE3R1BQrYCw&feature=player_embedded
"When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty." Thomas Jefferson
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Support the Pelican Bay Hunger Strike!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ifepv8s3nRE#at=101
This video explains what the Pelican Bay Hunger Strike is all about, with former prisoners detailing why prisoners are protesting, how this action relates to a history of prisoner-led resistance, and what people outside prison can do to support the hunger strike.
This video was made by a coalition called Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity. For updates on the hunger strike, check out: prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com
[The footage near the end of the video is of youth in Oakland organizing to stop gang injunctions, another struggle you should definitely stay informed on. Visit: stoptheinjunction.wordpress.com]
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Hayes Carll performs his new song "KMAG YOYO" (a military acronym for "Kiss My Ass Guys, You're On Your Own") from his new album also called KMAG YOYO on SiriusXM Outlaw Country.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElnaO3WQkZc&feature=player_embedded
http://www.couragetoresist.org/
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Very reminiscent of Obama's address last night (July 25, 2011) ...bw
Pat Paulsen 1968
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oiQhhdz8ys
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Japan: angry Fukushima citizens confront government (video)
Posted by Xeni Jardin on Monday, Jul 25th at 11:36am
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVuGwc9dlhQ&feature=player_embedded
The video above documents what I am told is a meeting between Fukushima residents and government officials from Tokyo, said to have taken place on 19 July 2011. The citizens are demanding their government evacuate people from a broader area around the Fukushima nuclear plant, because of ever-increasing fears about the still-spreading radiation. They are demanding that their government provide financial and logistical support to get out. In the video above, you can see that some participants actually brought samples of their children's urine to the meeting, and they demanded that the government test it for radioactivity.
When asked by one person at the meeting about citizens' right to live a healthy and radioactive-free life, Local Nuclear Emergency Response Team Director Akira Satoh replies "I don't know if they have that right."
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Roseanne Grills Politician About Taxes, Wages, Unions, Etc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fveEKxzfXk&feature=channel_video_title
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Japanese Nuclear Reactors Still A Major Problem
http://vodpod.com/watch/13616904-japanese-nuclear-reactors-still-a-major-problem?u=ampedstatuscom&c=ampedstatus
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BART protest
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIw1Z-H1WIA&feature=player_embedded
Uploaded by TheBayCitizen on Jul 11, 2011
Protesters heckled deputy BART police chief Daniel Hartwig as he tries to get them to close the door on the BART train. About 50 gathered at Civic Center Station to protest the BART police shooting of Charles Hill.
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Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class [Full Film]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6ZS91cqpa8
Narrated by Ed Asner
Based on the book by Pepi Leistyna, Class Dismissed navigates the steady stream of narrow working class representations from American television's beginnings to today's sitcoms, reality shows, police dramas, and daytime talk shows.
Featuring interviews with media analysts and cultural historians, this documentary examines the patterns inherent in TV's disturbing depictions of working class people as either clowns or social deviants -- stereotypical portrayals that reinforce the myth of meritocracy.
Class Dismissed breaks important new ground in exploring the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality intersect with class, offering a more complex reading of television's often one-dimensional representations. The video also links television portrayals to negative cultural attitudes and public policies that directly affect the lives of working class people.
Featuring interviews with Stanley Aronowitz, (City University of New York); Nickel and Dimed author, Barbara Ehrenreich; Herman Gray (University of California-Santa Cruz); Robin Kelley (Columbia University); Pepi Leistyna (University of Massachusetts-Boston) and Michael Zweig (State University of New York-Stony Brook). Also with Arlene Davila, Susan Douglas, Bambi Haggins, Lisa Henderson, and Andrea Press.
Sections: Class Matters | The American Dream Machine | From the Margins to the Middle | Women Have Class | Class Clowns | No Class | Class Action
http://www.mediaed.org
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Let's torture the truth out of suicide bombers says new CIA chief Petraeus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sm02UbKNCKQ
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Stop Police Brutality: Justice for Eric Radcliff
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB8GpiXuSV4&NR=1
22 year old Eric Radcliff was shot and killed by police officers from the 35th district on the morning of Saturday May 21st, 2011. According to witnesses he was unarmed. The incident took place on the 5800 Block of Mascher Street in the 5th and Olney Section.
OUR COMMUNITY DEMANDS JUSTICE
WE THE FAMILIES AND FRIENDS OF ERIC RADCLIFF ARE CONCERNED THAT JUSTICE HAS NOT BEEN SERVED. WE BELIEVE THAT THE POLICE OFFICERS USED EXCESSIVE FORCE. ERIC DID NOT HAVE TO DIE.
OUR DEMANDS
1. Open An Investigation Into the May 21st Shooting Death of 22 year old Eric Radcliff by officers of the Philadelphia Police Department's 35th District.
2. End Police Brutality! Serve and Protect, Not Disrespect and Victimize!
3. LETS GET OUR HOUSE IN ORDER. Let's Unite for Real Security and To Build a Better Future for Ourselves
Please come Join in UNITY AND LOVE! God is Good, We ARE winning!
JusticeforEricRadcliff@gmail.com
215-954-2272 for more information
VIA Justice for Eric Radcliff
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Stop Police Brutality: Justice for Albert Pernell Jr.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGyR9Y2LPss
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Autopsy Released in Police Shooting of Man Holding Nozzle
Douglas Zerby was shot 12 times, in the chest, arms and lower legs.
Watch Mary Beth McDade's report
http://www.ktla.com/news/landing/ktla-long-beach-belmont-shore-shooting,0,2471345.story
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I Wanna Be A Pirate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppynM1lcst8
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Kim Ives & Dan Coughlin on WikiLeaks Cables that Reveal "Secret History" of U.S. Bullying in Haiti
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL0Dk21dC-M
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Operation Empire State Rebellion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJvBlQcaaaU&feature=player_embedded#at=10
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20 Facts About U.S. Inequality that Everyone Should Know
Click an image to learn more about a fact!
http://www.stanford.edu/group/scspi/cgi-bin/facts.php
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Licensed to Kill Video
http://nirs.org/multimedia/video/l2k.htm
Gundersen Gives Testimony to NRC ACRS from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.
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Guy on wheelchair taken down by officers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdkJxw1mPoM
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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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Tier Systems Cripple Middle Class Dreams for Young Workers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09pQW6TW8m4&feature=youtu.be
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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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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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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 environment 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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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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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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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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STOP BART CENSORSHIP!
This is San Francisco, not Egypt.
Sign the Petition:
http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/bart_censorship/?r=231035&id=25860-3083065-U6EApmx
The petition reads:
"A government agency cannot shut down an entire cell phone communications network just because it is being used to express dissent. BART Police must be held accountable for their actions. Stop the heavy handed tactics that violate free speech rights in an attempt to quell dissent."
You don't lose your First Amendment rights when you decide to take public transit. But that's what happened last week when BART Police turned off for three hours the underground network that allows passengers to communicate by cell phone on trains and on underground station platforms.
The BART Police suspended cell phone service in order to silence dissent. It was the first time ever in the United States that a government agency shut down cell phone service in order to suppress a public protest.
"All over the world, people are using mobile devices to protest oppressive regimes, and governments are shutting down cell phone towers and the Internet to stop them," said Michael Risher of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. "It's outrageous that in San Francisco, BART is doing the same thing."1
Tell the BART Board of Directors: Stop the BART Police from suspending cell phone service and violating free speech rights.
A government agency cannot shut down an entire cell phone communications network just because it's being used to express dissent.
It's shocking that a transit agency would go rogue and shut down a cell phone network in a major U.S. city. The incident, not surprisingly has sparked outrage from local elected officials and civil liberties groups and garnered national and international attention.
In the light of pressure from elected officials and national and international news coverage, the elected board that governs the Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority cannot ignore this blatant and mass violation of civil rights. We must take advantage of this moment to pressure the BART Board of Directors to step in and take action to hold the BART Police accountable and stop them from suspending our First Amendment rights.
Tell the BART Board of Directors: The BART Police must be held accountable for their actions -- stop the heavy handed tactics that violate free speech rights in an attempt to quell dissent.
BART Police have been the center of controversy in recent years and have a history of cover ups in response to public outrage over its use of deadly force. Last week's cell phone disruption was aimed at disrupting protests of a fatal July 3 shooting of a knife-wielding homeless man.
Despite local, national and international outrage, BART officials haven't gotten the message yet. BART spokesman Linton Johnson said that the agency may cut cell phone service again in the future, explaining that riders "don't have the right to free speech inside the fare gates."2 It's up to the elected BART Board of Directors, who are accountable directly to the voters, to hold BART officials accountable.
Sign our petition and we will deliver your signatures to the elected members of the BART Board of Directors. And please share this petition with your Bay Area friends and family so they can take action, too.
1 BART admits halting cell service to stop protests, San Francisco Chronicle, August 13, 2011
2 Cell service stays on during BART protest in SF, San Francisco Chronicle, August 16, 2011
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Since last week, more than 45,000 ColorOfChange members have demanded that Illinois State officials overturn the convictions of men who were arrested as teens and forced to confess to murders they did not commit. Recent DNA testing has proven the innocence of the 10 Black men, some of whom have been imprisoned for nearly 20 years. Despite this overwhelming evidence, which has even linked the crimes to the real killers, the state of Illinois refuses to correct these injustices.
Our goal is to reach 70,000 signers before we deliver the petitions to Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez. Can you help us get there by clicking the link below? It takes just a moment. And when you do, please invite your friends and family to do the same.
http://act.colorofchange.org/go/936?akid=2118.46097.ZuOnCc&t=2
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Statement by Angela Davis regarding Troy Davis
I urgently appeal to Georgia Governor Nathan Deal and to the members of the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole - L. Gale Buckner , Robert E. Keller, James E. Donald, Albert Murray, and Terry Barnard - to spare the life of Troy Davis, a young African American citizen of your state.
I hope everyone within sight or sound of my words or my voice will likewise urgently call and fax Gov. Neal and the members of the Board. Under Georgia law, only they can stop the execution of Troy Davis.
First of all, there is very compelling evidence that Troy Davis may be innocent of the murder of Police Officer Mark MacPhail in 1989 in Savannah. The case against Davis has all but collapsed: seven of nine witnesses against him have recanted their testimony and said that they were pressured by police to lie; and nine other witnesses have implicated one of the remaining two as the actual killer. No weapon or physical evidence linking Davis to the murder was ever found. No jury has ever heard this new information, and four of the jurors who originally found him guilty have signed statements in support of Mr. Davis.
More importantly, the planned execution of a likely innocent young Black man in the state of Georgia has become a terrible blot on the status of the United States in the international community of nations. All modern industrial and democratic nations and 16 states within the United States have abolished capital punishment. The fact that the overwhelming majority of the men and women on death rows across the country are Black and other people of color, and are universally poor, severely undermines our country's standing in the eyes of the people of the world.
Most importantly, the execution of Troy Davis will contribute to an atmosphere of violence and racism and a devaluation of life itself within our country. If we can execute anyone, especially a man who may be innocent of any crime, it fosters disrespect for the law and life itself. This exacerbates every social problem at a time when the people of our country face some of the most difficult challenges regarding our economic security and future.
I urge everyone to join with me in urging Governor Neal and the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole to stay the execution of Troy Davis and commute his death sentence. Give this young man a life, and an opportunity to prove his innocence.
Please, call or fax today. Stop the execution of Troy Davis!
Gov. Nathan Deal
Tel: (404)651-1776
Fax: (404)657-7332
Email: georgia.governor@gov.state.ga.us
Web contact form: web: http://gov.state.ga.us/contact.shtml
Georgia Board of Parsons and Parole
L. Gale Buckner
Robert E. Keller
James E. Donald
Albert Murray
Terry Barnard
Tel: (404) 656-5651
Fax: (404) 651-8502
Angela Y. Davis
July 14, 2011
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Say No to Police Repression of NATO/G8 Protests
http://www.stopfbi.net/get-involved/nato-g8-police-repression
The CSFR Signs Letter to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel
The CSFR is working with the United National Antiwar Committee and many other anti-war groups to organize mass rallies and protests on May 15 and May 19, 2012. We will protest the powerful and wealthy war-makers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Group of 8. Mobilize your groups, unions, and houses of worship. Bring your children, friends, and community. Demand jobs, healthcare, housing and education, not war!
Office of the Mayor
City of Chicago
To: Mayor Rahm Emanuel
We, the undersigned, demand that your administration grant us permits for protests on May 15 and 19, 2012, including appropriate rally gathering locations and march routes to the venue for the NATO/G8 summit taking place that week. We come to you because your administration has already spoken to us through Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy. He has threatened mass arrests and violence against protestors.
[Read the full text of the letter here: http://www.stopfbi.net/get-involved/nato-g8-police-repression/full-text]
For the 10s of thousands of people from Chicago, around the country and across the world who will gather here to protest against NATO and the G8, we demand that the City of Chicago:
1. Grant us permits to rally and march to the NATO/G8 summit
2. Guarantee our civil liberties
3. Guarantee us there will be no spying, infiltration of organizations or other attacks by the FBI or partner law enforcement agencies.
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LEONARD PELTIER NEEDS OUR HELP!
On June 27, Leonard Peltier was removed from the general population at USP-Lewisburg and thrown in the hole. Little else is known at this time. Due to his age and health status, please join us in demanding his immediate return to general population.
Thomas Kane, Acting Director
Federal Bureau of Prisons
E-Mail: info@bop.gov
Web Site: www.bop.gov
Phone: (202) 307-3198
Fax: (202) 514-6620
Address: 320 1st Street, NW
Washington, DC 20534
Launched into cyberspace by the
Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee
PO Box 7488, Fargo, ND 58106
http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info
contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info
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CAMPAIGN TO END THE DEATH PENALTY SPECIAL CIRCULAR: PELICAN BAY HUNGER STRIKE BEGINS JULY 1
(Please post widely)
CONTENTS:
-- Introduction
-- Campaign to End the Death Penalty Solidarity Statement
-- CEDP Statement of Solidarity with Pelican Bay Hunger Strikers
-- Solidarity Statement from Corcoran State Prisoners
-- Take Action!
INTRODUCTION
Prisoners in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) of California's Pelican Bay state prison have announced that they will begin an indefinite hunger strike on July 1. Although prison officials aim to keep prisoners silenced and divided, the hunger strike has shown solidarity across racial, ethnic and religious lines and demands improvements in cruel and inhumane prison conditions.
In his statement "Why Prisoners are Protesting", prisoner Mutop DuGuya states, "Effective July 1st we are initiating a peaceful protest by way of an indefinite hunger strike in which we will not eat until our core demands are met.....we have decided to put our fate in our own hands. Some of us have already suffered a slow, agonizing death in which the state has shown no compassion toward these dying prisoners. Rather than compassion they turn up their ruthlessness. No one wants to die. Yet under this current system of what amounts to intense torture, what choice do we have? If one is to die, it will be on our own terms."
Prisons in this country stand as silent tombs. Millions are warehoused in "correctional" facilities that serve only to punish and dehumanize. These prisoners in Pelican Bay are standing bravely against tortuous conditions and those of us on the outside must stand with them and shine a light into the dark cages that politicians want us to forget.
CAMPAIGN TO END THE DEATH PENALTY SOLIDARITY STATEMENT
The Campaign to End the Death Penalty (CEDP) stands in solidarity with the prisoners of Pelican Bay State Prison (PBSP) who will be engaged in a hunger strike on July 1 in protest of their deplorable conditions.
The prisoners at Pelican Bay prison in California live in a world in which collective punishment is common, sunlight is rare, and food is used as a tool of coercion. They live in a world that is so unlike the world that most of us take for granted that it strains our comprehension. The world of the prisoners has one goal, to create passive, compliant prisoners; prisoners who will not clamor for more; prisoners who will not rock the boat; prisoners who will not threaten to expose just how rotten the prison system is.
This world has failed. While these demands show us a world turned upside down, they also show us a prison population that is fighting back against their appalling conditions. The prisoners have stated that their hunger strike will be indefinite until their demands are met. This means they could face serious health issues or even death. For them, a fighting death is preferable to the hell they are living.
The Campaign to End the Death Penalty supports the Pelican Bay hunger strikers and stand with all prisoners who seek to better their lives. We stand in solidarity with these brave fighters in their quest for justice and humanity.
The demands of the prisoners clearly show the capricious and dehumanizing conditions in which they the prisoners are calling for:
1. Eliminate group punishments. Instead, practice individual accountability. When an individual prisoner breaks a rule, the prison often punishes a whole group of prisoners of the same race. This policy has been applied to keep prisoners in the SHU indefinitely and to make conditions increasingly harsh.
2. Abolish the debriefing policy and modify active/inactive gang status criteria.
Debriefing produces false information - wrongly landing other prisoners in SHU, and can endanger the lives of debriefing prisoners and their families.
3. End long-term solitary confinement. Segregation should be used as a last resort and prisoners require access to adequate healthcare and natural sunlight.
4. Provide wholesome, nutritious meals and access to vitamins.
5. Expand and provide constructive programming such as photos of loved ones, weekly phone calls, extension of visitation time, calendars, and radios, etc.
You can read the prisoner's full text of their demands here: http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/take-action/
SOLIDARITY STATEMENT FROM CORCORAN STATE PRISONERS
Statement of Solidarity with the Pelican Bay Collective Hunger Strike on July 1st.
From: the N.C.T.T. Corcoran SHU
Greetings to all who support freedom, justice, and equality. We here of the N.C.T.T. SHU stand in solidarity with, and in full support of the July 1st hunger strike and the 5 major action points and sub-points as laid out by the Pelican Bay Collective in the Policy Statements (See, "Archives", P.B.S.P.-SHU-D corridor hunger strike).
What many are unaware of is that facility 4B here in Corcoran SHU is designated to house validated prisoners in indefinite SHU confinement and have an identical ultra-super max isolation unit short corridor modeled after corridor D in Pelican Bay, complete with blacked out windows a mirror tinted glass on the towers so no one but the gun tower can see in [into our cells], and none of us can see out; flaps welded to the base of the doors and sandbags on the tiers to prevent "fishing" [a means of passing notes, etc. between cells using lengths of string]; IGI [Institutional Gang Investigators] transports us all to A.C.H. [?] medical appointments and we have no contact with any prisoners or staff outside of this section here in 4B/1C C Section the "short corridor" of the Corcoran SHU. All of the deprivations (save access to sunlight); outlines in the 5-point hunger strike statement are mirrored, and in some instances intensified here in the Corcoran SHU 4B/1C C Section isolation gang unit.
Medical care here, in a facility allegedly designed to house chronic care and prisoners with psychological problems, is so woefully inadequate that it borders on intentional disdain for the health of prisoners, especially where diabetics and cancer are an issue. Access to the law library is denied for the most mundane reasons, or, most often, no reason at all. Yet these things and more are outlined in the P.B.S.P.-SHU five core demands.
What is of note here, and something that should concern all U.S. citizens, is the increasing use of behavioral control (torture units) and human experimental techniques against prisoners not only in California but across the nation. Indefinite confinement, sensory deprivation, withholding food, constant illumination, use of unsubstantiated lies from informants are the psychological billy clubs being used in these torture units. The purpose of this "treatment" is to stop prisoners from standing in opposition to inhumane prison conditions and prevent them from exercising their basic human rights.
Many lawsuits have been filed in opposition to the conditions in these conditions ... [unreadable] yet the courts have repeatedly re-interpreted and misinterpreted their own constitutional law ... [unreadable] to support the state's continued use of these torture units. When approved means of protest and redress of rights are prove meaningless and are fully exhausted, then the pursuit of those ends through other means is necessary.
It is important for all to know the Pelican Bay Collective is not (emphasis in original) alone in this struggle and the broader the participation and support for this hunger strike, the other such efforts, the greater the potential that our sacrifice now will mean a more humane world for us in the future. We urge all who reads these words to support us in this effort with your participation or your voices call your local news agencies, notify your friends on social networks, contact your legislators, tell your fellow faithful at church, mosques, temple or synagogues. Decades before Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Pelican Bay and Corcoran SHUs were described by Congressman Ralph Metcalfe as "the control unit treatment program is long-term punishment under the guise of what is, in fact, pseudo-scientific experimentation."
Our indefinite isolation here is both inhumane and illegal and the proponents of the prison industrial complex are hoping that their campaign to dehumanize us has succeeded to the degree that you don't care and will allow the torture to continue in your name. It is our belief that they have woefully underestimated the decency, principles, and humanity of the people. Join us in opposing this injustice without end. Thank you for your time and support.
In Solidarity,
N.C.T.T. Corcoran - SHU
4B/1C - C Section
Super-max isolation Unit
TAKE ACTION!
Pelican Bay Prisoners Go On Hunger Strike to Protest Grave Conditions July 1, 2011
Lawyers, Advocates, Organizations Hold Press Conference, Voice Prisoner Demand
Press Contact: Isaac Ontiveros
Communications Director, Critical Resistance
Office: 510 444 0484; Cell: 510 517 6612
The Hunger Strikers need support from outside of prison bars. Here are a few things you can do:
Sign the Petition. http://www.change.org/petitions/support-prisoners-on-hunger-strike-at-pelican-bay-state-prison
Get the word out about the hunger strike and the prisoner's demands to your family, friends, church, community groups, and over social networking sites.
Attend protests in solidarity. Rallies planned in San Francisco, Eureka, CA, Montreal, Toronto and New York. Send protest info to: http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/take-action/ to be listed!
Stay informed. Check the blog regularly for updates http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/.
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Keep the Arboretum Free
Dear Arboretum Supporter,
It's been a few months since the Board of Supervisors extended the non-resident fee at the Arboretum until September 30th, 2013. Such policy and ongoing decisions are continuing to greatly impact our neighborhoods and city resources and out of this widespread concern a new coalition has formed - Take Back Our Parks. Community and park advocates have joined together from across the city, including representatives from Keep Arboretum Free, with the common goals of keeping parks and recreation facilities open and accessible to all, stopping privatization of public park properties, protecting the natural character of our parklands and ensuring inclusive community input in planning and decision-making.
This past week a key effort was made towards some of these goals when four City Supervisors placed a measure on the November ballot to put a moratorium on fees for park resources and the long-term leasing of club-houses to private organizations. The Parks For The Public measure can be an important step towards ending the loss of access and growing privatization that is a fallout of the Recreation and Park Department's strategy of using parks as a revenue source and which has imposed policies such as the Arboretum fee.
Please visit the TBOP website to learn more about the Parks For The Public ordinance available for voters on the ballot this fall: http://www.takebackourparks.org/
It is vital that the public have a chance to shape the issues regarding our parks. We encourage you to write to the four sponsoring Supervisors (Avalos, Campos, Mar and Mirkarimi) to thank them for introducing Parks For The Public and let them know that you support limiting the privatization and unwarranted commercialization of our parks.
Ross.Mirkarimi@sfgov.org
John.Avalos@sfgov.org
Eric.L.Mar@sfgov.org
David.Campos@sfgov.org
Please help spread the news about this measure to your community in the city and thank you very much for your continued support.
Sincerely,
The Campaign to Keep The Arboretum Free
www.keeparboretumfree.org
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Supporter of Leak Suspect Is Called Before Grand Jury
By SCOTT SHANE
June 15, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/us/politics/16brfs-Washington.html?ref=world
A supporter of Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, who is accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks, was called before a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Va., on Wednesday, but he said he declined to answer any questions. The supporter, David M. House, a freelance computer scientist, said he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, because he believes the Justice Department is "creating a climate of fear around WikiLeaks and the Bradley Manning support network." The grand jury inquiry is separate from the military prosecution of Private Manning and is believed to be exploring whether the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, or others in the group violated the law by acquiring and publishing military and State Department documents.
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Justice for Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace: Decades of isolation in Louisiana state prisons must end
Take Action -- Sign Petition Here:
http://www.amnesty.org/en/appeals-for-action/justice-for-albert-woodfox-and-herman-wallace
For nearly four decades, 64-year-old Albert Woodfox and 69-year-old Herman Wallace have been held in solitary confinement, mostly in the Louisiana State Penitentiary (known as Angola prison). Throughout their prolonged incarceration in Closed Cell Restriction (CCR) Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace have endured very restrictive conditions including 23 hour cellular confinement. They have limited access to books, newspapers and TV and throughout the years of imprisonment they have been deprived of opportunities for mental stimulation and access to work and education. Social interaction has been restricted to occasional visits from friends and family and limited telephone calls.
Louisiana prison authorities have over the course of 39 years failed to provide a meaningful review of the men's continued isolation as they continue to rubberstamp the original decision to confine the men in CCR. Decades of solitary confinement have had a clear psychological effect on the men. Lawyers report that they are both suffering from serious health problems caused or exacerbated by their years of close confinement.
After being held together in the same prison for nearly 40 years, the men are now held in seperate institutions where they continue to be subjected to conditions that can only be described as cruel, inhuman and degrading.
Take action now to demand that Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace be immediately removed from solitary confinement
Sign our petition which will be sent to the Governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, calling on him to:
* take immediate steps to remove Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace from close confinement
* ensure that their treatment complies with the USA's obligations under international standards and the US Constitution.
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WITNESS GAZA
http://www.witnessgaza.com/
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Stop Coal Companies From Erasing Labor Union History
http://www.change.org/petitions/stop-coal-companies-from-erasing-labor-union-history
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One year after Bradley's detainment, we need your support more than ever.
Dear Friends,
One year ago, on May 26, 2010, the U.S. government quietly arrested a humble young American intelligence analyst in Iraq and imprisoned him in a military camp in Kuwait. Over the coming weeks, the facts of the arrest and charges against this shy soldier would come to light. And across the world, people like you and I would step forward to help defend him.
Bradley Manning, now 23 years old, has never been to court but has already served a year in prison- including 10 months in conditions of confinement that were clear violation of the international conventions against torture. Bradley has been informally charged with releasing to the world documents that have revealed corruption by world leaders, widespread civilian deaths at the hands of U.S. forces, the true face of Guantanamo, an unvarnished view of the U.S.'s imperialistic foreign negotiations, and the murder of two employees of Reuters News Agency by American soldiers. These documents released by WikiLeaks have spurred democratic revolutions across the Arab world and have changed the face of journalism forever.
For his act of courage, Bradley Manning now faces life in prison-or even death.
But you can help save him-and we've already seen our collective power. Working together with concerned citizens around the world, the Bradley Manning Support Network has helped raise worldwide awareness about Manning's torturous confinement conditions. Through the collective actions of well over a half million people and scores of organizations, we successfully pressured the U.S. government to end the tortuous conditions of pre-trial confinement that Bradley was subjected to at the Marine Base at Quantico, Virginia. Today, Bradley is being treated humanely at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. T hanks to your support, Bradley is given leeway to interact with other pre-trial prisoners, read books, write letters, and even has a window in his cell.
Of course we didn't mount this campaign to just improve Bradley's conditions in jail. Our goal is to ensure that he can receive a fair and open trial. Our goal is to win Bradley's freedom so that he can be reunited with his family and fulfill his dream of going to college. Today, to commemorate Bradley's one year anniversary in prison, will you join me in making a donation to help support Bradley's defense?
http://bradleymanning.org/donate
We'll be facing incredible challenges in the coming months, and your tax-deductible donation today will help pay for Bradley's civilian legal counsel and the growing international grassroots campaign on his behalf. The U.S. government has already spent a year building its case against Bradley, and is now calling its witnesses to Virginia to testify before a grand jury.
What happens to Bradley may ripple through history - he is already considered by many to be the single most important person of his generation. Please show your commitment to Bradley and your support for whistle-blowers and the truth by making a donation today.
With your help, I hope we will come to remember May 26th as a day to commemorate all those who risk their lives and freedom to promote informed democracy - and as the birth of a movement that successfully defended one courageous whistle-blower against the full fury of the U.S. government.
Donate now: bradleymanning.org/donate
In solidarity,
Jeff Paterson and Loraine Reitman,
On behalf of the Bradley Manning Support Network Steering Committee
www.bradleymanning.org
P.S. After you have donated, please help us by forwarding this email to your closest friends. Ask them to stand with you to support Bradley Manning, and the rights of all whistleblowers.
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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Drop the Charges Against Carlos Montes, Stop the FBI Attack on the Chicano and Immigrant Rights Movement, and Stop FBI Repression of Anti-War Activists NOW!Call Off the Expanding Grand Jury Witchhunt and FBI Repression of Anti-War Activists NOW!
Cancel the Subpoenas! Cancel the Grand Juries!
Condemn the FBI Raids and Harassment of Chicano, Immigrant Rights, Anti-War and International Solidarity Activists!
STOP THE FBI CAMPAIGN OF REPRESSION AGAINST CHICANO, IMMIGRANT RIGHTS, ANTI-WAR AND INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY ACTIVISTS NOW!
Initiated by the Committee to Stop FBI Repression stopfbi.net stopfbi@gmail.com
http://iacenter.org/stopfbi/
Contact the Committee to Stop FBI Repression
at stopfbi.net
stopfbi@gmail.com
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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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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!
Take Action! Tweet for Troy!
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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"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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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!
http://lynnestewart.org/
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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In earnest support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange:
http://readersupportednews.org/julian-assange-petition
rsn:Petition
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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
Petition:
http://www.gopetition.com/petition/41467.html
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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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Courage to Resist needs your support
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
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
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) NYPD riot units conduct drills
EMILY ANNE EPSTEIN/METRO
NEW YORK
August 14, 2011
http://www.metro.us/newyork/local/article/942885--nypd-riot-units-conduct-drills
2) Looting With the Lights On
"We keep hearing England's riots weren't political - but looters know that their elites have been committing daylight robbery"
By Naomi Klein, Guardian UK
August 17, 2011
http://www.readersupportednews.org/opinion2/357-europe/7066-looting-with-the-lights-on
3) Civil rights groups file suit to shed sunlight on police surveillance operations
Submitted by Communications
ACLU of Massachusetts
Thu, 08/18/2011 - 08:05
http://aclum.org/news_8.18.11
4) "The Global Plutocracy Is Terrified of Dissent. In Some Places, The War On Dissent Is Being Fought With Bullets. In Others, The War On Dissent Targets Social Media And Mobile Communications"
Washington's Blog
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/08/global-plutocracy-is-terrified-of.html
5) Wrong Answers in Britain
New York Times Editorial
August 17, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/18/opinion/wrong-answers-in-britain.html?_r=1
6) Foreign Students in Work Visa Program Stage Walkout at Plant
"Ms. Ozer and other students said they were paid $8.35 an hour. After fees are deducted from her paychecks as well as $400 a month for rent, she said, she often takes home less than $200 a week. 'We are supposed to be here for cultural exchange and education, but we are just cheap laborers,' Ms. Ozer said."
By JULIA PRESTON
August 17, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/18/us/18immig.html?ref=world
7) Jobless Rate Holds at 8.7%, but Many Have Given Up Looking
"A rise in gas prices of nearly 40 percent over the last year has taken the biggest bite out of paychecks, but the cost of groceries also has risen more than 5 percent, according to the bureau's report."
By PATRICK MCGEEHAN
August 18, 2011, 4:04 pm
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/18/jobless-rate-holds-at-8-7-but-many-have-given-up-looking/?ref=nyregion
8) No Cause for Marijuana Case, but Enough for Child Neglect
[Nothing is said here about the harm caused to the children by being ripped away from their parents by the State and taken to some stranger's home--not sure when and if they will ever see their parents again. It's disgusting. ...bw]
By MOSI SECRET
August 17, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/18/nyregion/parents-minor-marijuana-arrests-lead-to-child-neglect-cases.html?ref=nyregion
9) New Economic Reports Dash Hopes for Economic Revival
By REUTERS
August 18, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/business/economy/consumer-prices-rose-more-than-forecast-last-month.html?ref=business
10) Rabble with a Cause: Were the London Riots a Spontaneous Mass Reaction or a Rational Response?
Contrary to popular wisdom, mobs are not mindless. In fact, they act rationally-a characteristic that suggests ways to prevent riots
By Lauren F. Friedman
Friday, August 12, 2011 | 31
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=rabble-with-a-cause&WT.mc_id=SA_WR_20110818
11) Higher Bridge, Tunnel and PATH Rates Approved
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
August 19, 2011, 10:27 am
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/higher-bridge-tunnel-and-path-rates-approved/?hp
12) Quake in Japan Is Causing a Costly Shift to Fossil Fuels
By HIROKO TABUCHI
August 19, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/20/business/energy-environment/quake-in-japan-is-causing-a-costly-shift-to-fossil-fuels.html?ref=world
13) Japan Finds First Case of Radioactive Contamination in Rice
By MARTIN FACKLER
August 19, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/20/world/asia/20rice.html?ref=world
14) Companies Point Fingers as Students Protest Conditions at Chocolate Plant
By JULIA PRESTON
August 18, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/us/19students.html?ref=world
15) Deal May Free 'West Memphis Three'
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
August 19, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/20/us/20arkansas.html?ref=us
16) Alabama Nuclear Reactor, Partly Built, to Be Finished
By MATTHEW L. WALD
August 18, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/science/earth/19nuclear.html?ref=us
17) As Economy Tanks, "New Normal" Police State Takes Shape
Posted by Antifascist at 11:42 AM
August 14, 2011
http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/2011/08/as-economy-tanks-new-normal-police.html
18) Unemployment Is Killing People
Posted By Jeffrey Kaye
August 18, 2011
http://pubrecord.org/nation/9628/unemployment-is-killing-people/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=unemployment-is-killing-people
19) Study: Recession Has Dramatically Increased Percentage of Poor Children in America
child poverty has grown
By Lynnel Hampton-Bott, Your Black World
August 20, 2011
http://yourblackworld.com/2011/08/20/study-recession-has-dramatically-increased-percentage-of-poor-children-in-america/
20) Shadow Warriors: Movin' On Up
By Conn Hallinan
August 17, 2011
http://dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com/
21) Verizon Workers Plan to End Strike, Agreeing to Revive Talks Toward a Contract
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
August 20, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/technology/verizon-workers-end-strike-though-without-new-contract.html?hp
22) Britain: Prison Population Hits Record
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
August 19, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/20/world/europe/20briefs-London.html?ref=world
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1) NYPD riot units conduct drills
EMILY ANNE EPSTEIN/METRO
NEW YORK
August 14, 2011
http://www.metro.us/newyork/local/article/942885--nypd-riot-units-conduct-drills
In the wake of the London riots, the NYPD Disorder Control Unit held a "mobilization exercise" on Randall's Island on Friday to rehearse its response should out-of-control riots break out here, Metro has learned.
Approximately 180 police officers total from each borough's task force, including the horseback and aviation units, came out for the drill, according to police.
"The London response wasn't that great - they were outnumbered and taken by surprise," said Mike Codella, a retired NYPD detective. When he was on the force, riot drills happened once a year at most, he said.
The training exercise comes the same week the NYPD has stepped up its monitoring of social media, used to organize mayhem across England and also to coordinate teen mobs in Philadelphia.
Police will now troll sites like Twitter and Facebook for suspicious activity, gang feuds and house parties as part of a new juvenile justice unit.
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2) Looting With the Lights On
"We keep hearing England's riots weren't political - but looters know that their elites have been committing daylight robbery"
By Naomi Klein, Guardian UK
August 17, 2011
http://www.readersupportednews.org/opinion2/357-europe/7066-looting-with-the-lights-on
--We keep hearing England's riots weren't political - but looters know that their elites have been committing daylight robbery.--
keep hearing comparisons between the London riots and riots in other European cities - window-smashing in Athens or car bonfires in Paris. And there are parallels, to be sure: a spark set by police violence, a generation that feels forgotten.
But those events were marked by mass destruction; the looting was minor. There have, however, been other mass lootings in recent years, and perhaps we should talk about them too. There was Baghdad in the aftermath of the US invasion - a frenzy of arson and looting that emptied libraries and museums. The factories got hit too. In 2004 I visited one that used to make refrigerators. Its workers had stripped it of everything valuable, then torched it so thoroughly that the warehouse was a sculpture of buckled sheet metal.
Back then the people on cable news thought looting was highly political. They said this is what happens when a regime has no legitimacy in the eyes of the people. After watching for so long as Saddam Hussein and his sons helped themselves to whatever and whomever they wanted, many regular Iraqis felt they had earned the right to take a few things for themselves. But London isn't Baghdad, and the British prime minister, David Cameron, is hardly Saddam, so surely there is nothing to learn there.
How about a democratic example then? Argentina, circa 2001. The economy was in freefall and thousands of people living in rough neighbourhoods (which had been thriving manufacturing zones before the neoliberal era) stormed foreign-owned superstores. They came out pushing shopping carts overflowing with the goods they could no longer afford - clothes, electronics, meat. The government called a "state of siege" to restore order; the people didn't like that and overthrew the government.
Argentina's mass looting was called el saqueo - the sacking. That was politically significant because it was the very same word used to describe what that country's elites had done by selling off the country's national assets in flagrantly corrupt privatisation deals, hiding their money offshore, then passing on the bill to the people with a brutal austerity package. Argentines understood that the saqueo of the shopping centres would not have happened without the bigger saqueo of the country, and that the real gangsters were the ones in charge. But England is not Latin America, and its riots are not political, or so we keep hearing. They are just about lawless kids taking advantage of a situation to take what isn't theirs. And British society, Cameron tells us, abhors that kind of behaviour.
This is said in all seriousness. As if the massive bank bailouts never happened, followed by the defiant record bonuses. Followed by the emergency G8 and G20 meetings, when the leaders decided, collectively, not to do anything to punish the bankers for any of this, nor to do anything serious to prevent a similar crisis from happening again. Instead they would all go home to their respective countries and force sacrifices on the most vulnerable. They would do this by firing public sector workers, scapegoating teachers, closing libraries, upping tuition fees, rolling back union contracts, creating rush privatisations of public assets and decreasing pensions - mix the cocktail for where you live. And who is on television lecturing about the need to give up these "entitlements"? The bankers and hedge-fund managers, of course.
This is the global saqueo, a time of great taking. Fuelled by a pathological sense of entitlement, this looting has all been done with the lights on, as if there was nothing at all to hide. There are some nagging fears, however. In early July, the Wall Street Journal, citing a new poll, reported that 94% of millionaires were afraid of "violence in the streets". This, it turns out, was a reasonable fear.
Of course London's riots weren't a political protest. But the people committing night-time robbery sure as hell know that their elites have been committing daytime robbery. Saqueos are contagious. The Tories are right when they say the rioting is not about the cuts. But it has a great deal to do with what those cuts represent: being cut off. Locked away in a ballooning underclass with the few escape routes previously offered - a union job, a good affordable education - being rapidly sealed off. The cuts are a message. They are saying to whole sectors of society: you are stuck where you are, much like the migrants and refugees we turn away at our increasingly fortressed borders.
Cameron's response to the riots is to make this locking-out literal: evictions from public housing, threats to cut off communication tools and outrageous jail terms (five months to a woman for receiving a stolen pair of shorts). The message is once again being sent: disappear, and do it quietly.
At last year's G20 "austerity summit" in Toronto, the protests turned into riots and multiple cop cars burned. It was nothing by London 2011 standards, but it was still shocking to us Canadians. The big controversy then was that the government had spent $675m on summit "security" (yet they still couldn't seem to put out those fires). At the time, many of us pointed out that the pricey new arsenal that the police had acquired - water cannons, sound cannons, teargas and rubber bullets - wasn't just meant for the protesters in the streets. Its long-term use would be to discipline the poor, who in the new era of austerity would have dangerously little to lose.
This is what Cameron got wrong: you can't cut police budgets at the same time as you cut everything else. Because when you rob people of what little they have, in order to protect the interests of those who have more than anyone deserves, you should expect resistance - whether organised protests or spontaneous looting. And that's not politics. It's physics.
A version of this column was first published in The Nation.
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3) Civil rights groups file suit to shed sunlight on police surveillance operations
Submitted by Communications
ACLU of Massachusetts
Thu, 08/18/2011 - 08:05
http://aclum.org/news_8.18.11
* First Amendment
* police power
* surveillance
* surveillance centers
Monitoring of political activity has become a serious concern in light of expanded police activities and capabilities. The ACLU of Massachusetts and the National Lawyers Guild of Massachusetts have filed suit on behalf of eight Boston-area political groups and four individual activists.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, August 18, 2011
CONTACT:
Laura Rótolo, Staff Attorney, 617-482-3170 x311, lrotolo@aclum.org
Christopher Ott, Communications Director, 617-482-3170 x322, cott@aclum.org
BOSTON -- In a move to compel disclosure of information that has been withheld from the public about the Boston Police Department's expanded surveillance operations, including the scope of its monitoring of political activities, the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts and the National Lawyers Guild of Massachusetts have filed suit on behalf of eight Boston-area political groups and four individual activists, seeking public disclosure of records detailing the BPD's practice of monitoring political organizations and activists.
The suit, filed under the Massachusetts Public Records law, seeks disclosure of BPD records regarding the Department's surveillance and recording of protest activities and assemblies, the monitoring of political groups and activists, as well as records relating to the collection and sharing of information with the Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies.
"There have been significant changes in the surveillance operations of the BPD," said Laura Rótolo, ACLU of Massachusetts staff attorney. "For years, the BPD has conducted surveillance of political protests, openly recording legal rallies, marches and demonstrations in public areas. But now that information can be centrally monitored, indexed, and stored electronically, and shared through state and national surveillance networks. We brought this suit because we believe the public should know what information is being collected about political activities, how it is being used, and what policies, if any, are in place to protect privacy and individual liberty."
The plaintiffs are organizations and individuals whose previous requests for information on surveillance practices and privacy protections have been rejected by the BPD, including: the ACLU of Massachusetts, Political Research Associates, the National Lawyers Guild of Massachusetts, Veterans for Peace-Chapter 9 Smedley Butler Brigade, CodePink of Greater Boston, the Boston Coalition for Palestinian Rights, the Greater Boston Stop the Wars Coalition, and United for Justice with Peace. The four individual plaintiffs seeking information about BPD surveillance practices were detained and interrogated by the BPD in 2009 following a non-violent protest at the Israeli consulate in Boston. Although officers acknowledged during their interrogation that the activists had been under surveillance at previous political protests, the BPD subsequently asserted that it had no record of interrogating them.
"The public has a right to know the scope of surveillance of protected First Amendment activity," said David Kelston, an attorney who represents the National Lawyers Guild of Massachusetts and represented the four individual activists who were detained and questioned. "The BPD's claim that they have no record of interrogating these activists defies belief and must be challenged."
This action seeks information on the surveillance policies and practices of the Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), which was created by the BPD and federal Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice in 2005, ostensibly to collect and share information on terrorist threats and subversive activities in Boston. It also seeks public information on the BPD's participation in the FBI's so-called "Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative", a pilot program that directs local police officers to collect and share information on broadly defined "suspicious activities" that may include lawful political activity and protected political speech. It does not seek information on individual cases or investigations.
"Boston is using tax dollars to participate in what is billed as a 'pilot program' that authorizes local police to create dossiers on ordinary citizens, essentially criminalizing protected political activities, so why is all information about this test program hidden from the public?" said Thom Cincotta, an attorney and researcher with Political Research Associates, a Somerville-based research organization.
"Democracy dies behind closed doors," said the ACLU's Rótolo. "Shedding sunlight on police surveillance practices is the best way to guard against abuses of power and to ensure that law enforcement doesn't hide behind anti-terrorism rhetoric to justify programs and practices that chill legal dissent and quash protected political speech and assembly."
For legal documents about the case, see:
http://aclum.org/aclu_v_davis
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4) "The Global Plutocracy Is Terrified of Dissent. In Some Places, The War On Dissent Is Being Fought With Bullets. In Others, The War On Dissent Targets Social Media And Mobile Communications"
Washington's Blog
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/08/global-plutocracy-is-terrified-of.html
The Most Liberal Part of the Country Takes a Page from Dictator's Playbook
The most liberal part of the country - the San Francisco Bay Area - is taking a page from Egyptian dictator Mubarak's playbook.
As leading free speech organization Electronic Frontier Foundation reports:
This week, EFF has seen censorship stories move closer and closer to home - first Iran, then the UK, and now San Francisco, an early locus of the modern free speech movement. Operators of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART) shut down cell phone service to four stations in downtown San Francisco yesterday in response to a planned protest.
***
BART said today that it had instituted the following rules, including:
No person shall conduct or participate in assemblies or demonstrations or engage in other expressive activities in the paid areas of BART stations, including BART cars and trains and BART station platforms.
What does that mean? We can't talk?
One thing is clear, whether it's BART or the cell phone carriers that were responsible for the shut-off, cutting off cell phone service in response to a planned protest is a shameful attack on free speech. BART officials are showing themselves to be of a mind with the former president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, who ordered the shutdown of cell phone service in Tahrir Square in response to peaceful, democratic protests earlier this year.
U.S. and Britain Attack Social Media
It's not just cell phones.
For example, the Pentagon is trying to manipulate social media for propaganda purposes. And the government is trying to censor any suggestions on the web and other media that powerful people might actually be acting in their own interests (and not necessarily in the interests of the little guy).
And in Britain, the government is blaming the protests in that country on social media (here are the two real causes).
But as professor of media psychology Dr. Pam Rutledge writes in a post entitled, "Social Media Did Not Cause the London Riots":
After four days of looting and rioting across the UK, people are looking for answers. The violence that started in London, spread rapidly across not only Greater London, but most of the country, not as single oozing mass, but more like an outbreak of the measles. Its speed and range is attributed to the rioters' use of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Blackberry Messenger. Information and disinformation alike travel fast in social networks. As people try to make sense in the aftermath, an emerging theme is the culpability of social media. Focusing blame on social media is akin to killing the messenger and is both naïve and dangerous.
Social media is just a tool. It's a powerful one, but a tool nonetheless. It can be used in good ways and bad ways, just like a hammer or a baseball bat.
***
Social media is an easy target. When you're a politician, it's great to have something to blame that can't vote. Prime Minister Cameron almost immediately offloaded the blame onto social networking sites for fueling the riots and hinted at intervention. "When people are using social media for violence, we need to stop them."
UK Home Secretary, Theresa May, is scheduling meetings with Facebook, Twitter and Research In Motion (RIM) to "discuss their responsibilities in this area." Suggestions have ranged from banning suspected rioters from social media networks to the wholesale shutdown of social media in times of unrest without regard to individual freedoms in order to "catch the bad guys." The key unanswered question is who gets to decide who's a 'troublemaker' or what's 'unrest.'
***
We should learn from history, as well as from current societies that we do not want to emulate. Can anyone say "China" or "McCarthyism"?
Beyond rights violations, any government that thinks they can totally suppress information flows is kidding themselves. Even if it were possible, shutting down social media will not stop anything. In countries where people do not have easy Internet access or rights like freedom of speech, resourceful, persistent, and effective citizens continue to find ways around Great Fire Walls and information blackouts. Suppressing information these days is like holding a balloon under water. It will absolutely pop up somewhere else.
***
Social media may have accelerated the pace of information travel, bringing groups together faster, but it did not put bricks and fire bombs into the hands of the looters. Social media did not create the anger or sense of powerlessness against authorities. It did not create the heightened emotions of the group, crowd leaders, the adrenalin that comes from a sense of danger and risk, the lack of empathy for others, or the sense of no consequences. Emotion may be contagious, but social media is not.
***
The real danger from these events is ... the wholesale liquidation of personal freedoms as a solution to deal with fear. When people are scared, they are willing to surrender individual rights to whomever tells them they can "fix" the problem. Whenever we give away our power so that we no longer have access or due process, we are on a slippery slope indeed.
The Use of Heavy-Handed Tactics Is Actually a Sign That We're Winning
But the use by government's worldwide of the iron fist of repression is actually a sign that we are winning.
As Truthout's Matt Renner writes today:
Recently I sat down with two of the young adults who organized and led the Egyptian resistance movement that overthrew Hosni Mubarak. The media narrative said it took 18 days, when in fact, they had been organizing for over five years.
According to these young men, the moment they knew they had won was the day Mubarak's government shut off the Internet and blocked cellphone communications. When people could no longer get updates about what was happening in Tahrir Square, they had to come out of their homes and see for themselves, tripling the size of the protests in one fell swoop.
The global plutocracy is terrified of dissent. In some places, the war on dissent is being fought with bullets. In others, the war on dissent targets social media and mobile communications, while repressing and deceiving communities of struggle. It's already happening.
Indeed, the use of heavy-handed tactics - taking the velvet glove off of the iron fist - will backfire, as it will show the "emperor's ruthlessness" for all to see.
Our Voices Are More Important Than We've Realized
Renner is right: the plutocracy is terrified of dissent.
Indeed, the Asch Conformity Experiment showed that even one dissenting voice can give people permission to think for themselves.
And a new study shows that when only 10% of a population have strongly-held beliefs, their belief will often be adopted by the majority of the society.
So our voices are more important than we've realized.
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5) Wrong Answers in Britain
New York Times Editorial
August 17, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/18/opinion/wrong-answers-in-britain.html?_r=1
Nothing can justify or excuse the terrifying wave of violent lawlessness that swept through London and other British cities earlier this month. Hardworking people in struggling neighborhoods were its principal victims. Public support for racial and ethnic coexistence also suffered a damaging, and we fear lasting, blow.
The perpetrators must be punished, the police must improve their riot control techniques, and Prime Minister David Cameron's government must do all it can to make such episodes less likely in the future. We are more confident about the first two happening than the third.
Mr. Cameron, a product of Britain's upper classes and schools, has blamed the looting and burning on a compound of national moral decline, bad parenting and perverse inner-city subcultures.
Would he find similar blame - this time in the culture of the well housed and well off - for Britain's recent tabloid phone hacking scandals or the egregious abuse of expense accounts by members of Parliament?
Crimes are crimes whoever commits them. And the duty of government is to protect the law-abiding, not to engage in simplistic and divisive moralizing that fails to distinguish between criminals, victims and helpless relatives and bystanders.
The thousands who were arrested last week for looting and for more violent crimes should face the penalties that are prescribed by law. But Mr. Cameron is not content to stop there. He talks about cutting off government benefits even to minor offenders and evicting them - and, in a repellent form of collective punishment, perhaps their families, too - from the publicly supported housing in which one of every six Britons lives.
He has also called for blocking access to social networks like Twitter during future outbreaks. And he has cheered on the excessive sentences some judges have been handing out for even minor offenses.
Such draconian proposals often win public applause in the traumatized aftermath of riots. But Mr. Cameron, and his Liberal Democrat coalition partners, should know better. They risk long-term damage to Britain's already fraying social compact.
Making poor people poorer will not make them less likely to steal. Making them, or their families, homeless will not promote respect for the law. Trying to shut down the Internet in neighborhoods would be an appalling violation of civil liberties and a threat to public safety, denying vital real-time information to frightened residents.
Britain's urban wastelands need constructive attention from the Cameron government, not just punishment. His government's wrongheaded austerity policies have meant fewer public sector jobs and social services. Even police strength is scheduled to be cut. The poor are generally more dependent on government than the affluent, so they have been hit the hardest.
What Britain's sputtering economy really needs is short-term stimulus, not more budget cutting. Unfortunately, there is no sign that Mr. Cameron has figured that out. But, at a minimum, burdens need to be more fairly shared between rich and poor - not as a reward to anyone, but because it is right.
Fair play is one traditional British value we have always admired. And one we fear is increasingly at risk.
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6) Foreign Students in Work Visa Program Stage Walkout at Plant
"Ms. Ozer and other students said they were paid $8.35 an hour. After fees are deducted from her paychecks as well as $400 a month for rent, she said, she often takes home less than $200 a week. 'We are supposed to be here for cultural exchange and education, but we are just cheap laborers,' Ms. Ozer said."
By JULIA PRESTON
August 17, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/18/us/18immig.html?ref=world
PALMYRA, Pa. - Hundreds of foreign students, waving their fists and shouting defiantly in many languages, walked off their jobs on Wednesday at a plant here that packs Hershey's chocolates, saying a summer program that was supposed to be a cultural exchange had instead turned them into underpaid labor.
The students, from countries including China, Nigeria, Romania and Ukraine, came to the United States through a long-established State Department summer visa program that allows them to work for two months and then travel. They said they were expecting to practice their English, make some money and learn what life is like in the United States.
In a way, they did. About 400 foreign students were put to work lifting heavy boxes and packing Reese's candies, Kit-Kats and Almond Joys on a fast-moving production line, many of them on a night shift. After paycheck deductions for fees associated with the program and for their rent, students said at a rally in front of the huge packing plant that many of them were not earning nearly enough to recover what they had spent in their home countries to obtain their visas.
Their experience of American society has been very different from what they expected.
"There is no cultural exchange, none, none," said Zhao Huijiao, a 20-year-old undergraduate in international relations from Dalian, China. "It is just work, work faster, work."
Each summer, the State Department brings many thousands of foreign students to the United States on the international work-travel program, with visas that are known as J-1. Over the years, the program has successfully given university students from distant countries a chance to be immersed in everyday America and to make lasting friends.
But in recent years, the program has drawn complaints from students about low wages and unexpectedly difficult work conditions. It appears, however, that the walkout at the Palmyra plant is the first time that foreign students have engaged in a strike to protest their employment.
John Fleming, a State Department spokesman, said officials were aware of the students' protest and had sent staff members to Hershey, Pa., where the candy company is based, to investigate. "It is our job to ensure that all J-1 visa holders are accorded their rights under all provisions of the Summer Work Travel program," Mr. Fleming said.
The arrangements that brought the foreign students to work at the Eastern Distribution Center III, a vast warehouse in a trim industrial park near Hershey, the American chocolate capital, involved layers of contractors.
The students said they mainly placed blame on the organization that manages the J-1 visa program for the State Department, the Council for Educational Travel, U.S.A., which is based in California.
Rick Anaya, chief executive of the council, said he had brought about 6,000 J-1 visa students to the United States this summer. Mr. Anaya said he had tried to respond to the Palmyra workers' complaints. "We are not getting any cooperation," he said. "We are trying to work with these kids. All this negativity is hurting an excellent program. We would go out of our way to help them, but it seems like someone is stirring them up out there."
A spokesman for Hershey's, Kirk Saville, said the chocolate company did not directly operate the Palmyra packing plant, which is managed by a company called Exel. A spokeswoman for Exel said it had found the student workers through another staffing company.
The spokeswoman, Lynn Anderson, said: "We contract with a staffing agency to provide temporary employees, some from the local work force and some J-1 visa holders. We don't have a lot of influence over some of those issues that they've raised."
A labor organization, the National Guestworker Alliance, which has been working with the students, presented a complaint on Wednesday to the State Department asking for the Council for Educational Travel, U.S.A. to be removed from its list of sponsoring organizations.
In the protest on Wednesday, about 200 students who were scheduled to start work on an evening shift at 3 p.m. walked into the plant and presented a petition with several hundred signatures to a management representative. Then, together with some students coming off the daytime shift, they marched out.
They came down the driveway to the plant, with semi-trailer trucks wheeling by, chanting, "We are the students, the mighty, mighty students!" and labor slogans in English as well as their own languages. The students said they believed that so many of them walking off their jobs would stop some production on their shifts.
"We want to own our rights," Ms. Zhao said, speaking in English. She and three other Chinese students held out their arms, pointing to bruises they said they had from moving large boxes.
Representatives from two American labor unions participated in the rally at an intersection outside the plant. Three labor officials, including Rick Bloomingdale, president of the Pennsylvania State Federation of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and Neal Bisno, president of a Pennsylvania branch of the Service Employees International Union, staged a brief sit-in at the plant entrance and were arrested.
Harika Duygu Ozer, 19, a second-year medical student from a university in Istanbul, said she had heard from friends that the summer exchange program would be fun and that she would earn enough money to pay for her medical school tuition.
"I said, 'Why not?' This is America," Ms. Ozer said.
When she was offered a contract for a job at a plant with Hershey's chocolates, she said, she was excited. "We have all seen Charlie's chocolate factory," she said. "We thought, 'This is good.' "
Like many other students, Ms. Ozer said she invested about $3,500, which included the program costs, to obtain the J-1 visa and travel to the United States.
Several Chinese students, including Ms. Zhao, said they had paid more than $6,000 in the process of securing visas.
Ms. Ozer said she worked an eight-hour shift that began at 11 p.m.
"You stand for the entire eight hours," she said. "It is the worst thing for your fingers and hands and your back; you are standing at an angle."
At one of the sites where she worked, she said, cameras were trained on her, and supervisors told her that if she did not want to maintain the pace of work, she should leave.
Godwin Efobi, 26, a third-year medical student from Nigeria who is studying at a university in Ukraine, said his job was moving boxes. "Since I came here, I have a permanent ache in my back," Mr. Efobi said. "Holding a pen is now a big task for me; my muscles ache."
The students said they decided to protest when they learned that neighbors in the apartments and houses where they were staying were paying significantly less rent.
"The tipping point was when we found out about the rent," Mr. Efobi said.
Ms. Ozer and other students said they were paid $8.35 an hour. After fees are deducted from her paychecks as well as $400 a month for rent, she said, she often takes home less than $200 a week. "We are supposed to be here for cultural exchange and education, but we are just cheap laborers," Ms. Ozer said.
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7) Jobless Rate Holds at 8.7%, but Many Have Given Up Looking
"A rise in gas prices of nearly 40 percent over the last year has taken the biggest bite out of paychecks, but the cost of groceries also has risen more than 5 percent, according to the bureau's report."
By PATRICK MCGEEHAN
August 18, 2011, 4:04 pm
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/18/jobless-rate-holds-at-8-7-but-many-have-given-up-looking/?ref=nyregion
New York City's job market continued to putter along in July, as thousands of residents gave up looking for work and the unemployment rate held steady at 8.7 percent, the state's Labor Department reported on Thursday.
The city's unemployment rate is lower than it was a year ago, but essentially has not changed since March, when the relatively strong rebound in hiring stalled. The number of unemployed people in the city has been stuck above 340,000 for several months, after dropping from a high of more than 400,000 during the worst of the recession in late 2009, according to the state.
"It's been three or four months of going sideways," said James Brown, principal economist for the department.
It's still an uneven job market, he said, adding, "It's very strong if you are in some of the office industries, but construction remains with significant losses and it's really not a good picture in social services."
A separate report from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that even those New Yorkers with jobs were losing ground financially. The bureau reported that the price of consumer goods in the metropolitan region rose more than twice as fast as wages did in the last 12 months.
The main gauge of inflation, the consumer price index, last month had increased 3.3 percent from a year before. That was the highest annualized inflation rate in the region since just after the Lehman Brothers investment bank collapsed in 2008 and the recession took hold.
Over the same period, wages rose just 1.5 percent, according to the state's Labor Department. It reported that the average hourly wage for private-sector workers in the city was $30.78 in July, up from $30.32 in July 2010 and essentially the same level - $30.33 - as three years ago.
A rise in gas prices of nearly 40 percent over the last year has taken the biggest bite out of paychecks, but the cost of groceries also has risen more than 5 percent, according to the bureau's report.
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8) No Cause for Marijuana Case, but Enough for Child Neglect
[Nothing is said here about the harm caused to the children by being ripped away from their parents by the State and taken to some stranger's home--not sure when and if they will ever see their parents again. It's disgusting. ...bw]
By MOSI SECRET
August 17, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/18/nyregion/parents-minor-marijuana-arrests-lead-to-child-neglect-cases.html?ref=nyregion
The police found about 10 grams of marijuana, or about a third of an ounce, when they searched Penelope Harris's apartment in the Bronx last year. The amount was below the legal threshold for even a misdemeanor, and prosecutors declined to charge her. But Ms. Harris, a mother whose son and niece were home when she was briefly in custody, could hardly rest easy.
The police had reported her arrest to the state's child welfare hot line, and city caseworkers quickly arrived and took the children away.
Her son, then 10, spent more than a week in foster care. Her niece, who was 8 and living with her as a foster child, was placed in another home and not returned by the foster care agency for more than a year. Ms. Harris, 31, had to weather a lengthy child neglect inquiry, though she had no criminal record and had never before been investigated by the child welfare authorities, Ms. Harris and her lawyer said.
"I felt like less of a parent, like I had failed my children," Ms. Harris said. "It tore me up."
Hundreds of New Yorkers who have been caught with small amounts of marijuana, or who have simply admitted to using it, have become ensnared in civil child neglect cases in recent years, though they did not face even the least of criminal charges, according to city records and defense lawyers. A small number of parents in these cases have even lost custody of their children.
New York City's child welfare agency said that it was pursuing these cases for appropriate reasons, and that marijuana use by parents could often hint at other serious problems in the way they cared for their children.
As states and localities around the country loosen penalties for marijuana, for both recreational and medical uses, they are increasingly grappling with how to handle its presence in homes with children. California, where the medical marijuana movement has flourished, now requires that child welfare officials demonstrate actual harm to a child from marijuana use in order to bring neglect cases, and defense lawyers there say the authorities are now bringing fewer of them.
But in New York, the child welfare agency has not shied from these cases. For these parents, the child welfare system has become an alternate system of justice, with legal standards on marijuana that appear to be tougher than those of criminal courts or, to some extent, of society at large. In interviews, lawyers from the three legal services groups that the city hires to defend parents said they saw hundreds of marijuana cases each year, most involving recreational users.
The lawyers said they currently had more than a dozen cases on their dockets involving parents who had never faced neglect allegations and whose children were placed in foster care because of marijuana allegations.
Lauren Shapiro, director of the Brooklyn Family Defense Project, which defends most parents facing neglect charges in Family Court in Brooklyn, said more than 90 percent of the cases alleging drug use that her lawyers handle involve marijuana, as opposed to other drugs.
"There is not the same use of crack cocaine as there used to be, so they are filing these cases instead," Ms. Shapiro said.
Marijuana is the most common illicit drug in New York City: 730,000 people, or 12 percent of people age 12 and older, use the drug at least once annually, according to city health data.
Over all, the rate of marijuana use among whites is twice as high as among blacks and Hispanics in the city, the data show, but defense lawyers said these cases were rarely if ever filed against white parents.
Michael Fagan, a spokesman for the Administration for Children's Services, said the defense lawyers were offering a simplistic portrayal of these cases.
"Drug use itself is not child abuse or neglect, but it can put children in danger of neglect or abuse," Mr. Fagan said. "We think the argument that use of cocaine, heroin or marijuana by a parent of young children should not be looked into or should simply be ignored is just plain wrong."
Mr. Fagan said most of the cases involved additional forms of neglect, like a child who is not going to school or who has been left unattended.
"In other times, we find that admitted marijuana use masks other substance abuse," Mr. Fagan said.
But lawyers for parents countered that the agency often brought neglect charges based solely on recreational marijuana use, then searched later for other grounds to bolster cases.
"In some cases, there are other allegations, but we think they are add-ons," said Susan Jacobs, executive director of the Center for Family Representation, which works in Manhattan and Queens. "The reason the person is being brought into Family Court is the marijuana use."
Ms. Jacobs cited the case of a former client, Jose Gunnell, 23, of Harlem, who lost custody of his 1-year-old daughter in March after an employee at a homeless shelter where he was staying found a $5 bag of marijuana in his room during an inspection.
Mr. Gunnell said in an interview that he stopped smoking marijuana in 2010 but that he used it again in March after having an infected tooth pulled. "The wound wouldn't close," he said. "I was getting hungry, but I couldn't eat. I bought weed."
The neglect petition that the Administration for Children's Services filed against Mr. Gunnell shows that he admitted to smoking marijuana to develop an appetite.
The agency's petition also said that his daughter did not always have adequate clothing, that shelter workers once smelled alcohol on Mr. Gunnell's breath and that his room was dirty and had an odor.
The agency would not comment on Mr. Gunnell's case or on others described by defense lawyers, citing confidentiality rules.
Ms. Jacobs acknowledged that the Administration for Children's Services might at times correctly determine that marijuana use was one of many serious problems in a family, but she contended that those were only a minority of the cases.
State law makes possession of as much as 25 grams of marijuana - enough for 20 or 30 marijuana cigarettes - a violation similar to a traffic offense, punishable by a fine of up to $100. The Administration for Children's Services does not track the number of parents facing marijuana allegations. It compiles statistics only on the total number of neglect cases for drugs and alcohol, rather than for individual drugs. There were 4,891 such cases in 2010.
State law considers a child neglected if his or her well-being is threatened by a parent who "repeatedly misuses" a drug. But the law does not distinguish marijuana from heroin or other drugs. The law says that if parents have "substantial impairment of judgment," then there is a presumption of neglect, but it does not refer to quantities of drugs.
Furthermore, the law does not require child welfare authorities to catch parents while they are high or with drugs in their possession. Simply admitting past use to a caseworker is grounds for a neglect case.
In marijuana cases, as in all others, caseworkers have the obligation to remove children who they believe are in imminent danger, but they can recommend that the agency file neglect charges against the parents without removing the children. They can also close cases for unsubstantiated allegations.
Neglect findings, while sometimes allowing parents to keep their children, can have serious repercussions. They prohibit parents from taking jobs around children, like driving a school bus or working in day care, or from being foster care parents or adopting. And they make it easier for Family Court judges to later remove children from their homes.
The findings stay on parents' records with the Statewide Central Register until their youngest child turns 28.
The policy of the Administration for Children's Services to pursue marijuana cases is not widely known. But when told of it, some lawmakers said the agency was overstepping its authority.
"I would hope that A.C.S., knowing what a wide-net strategy the N.Y.P.D. is using, would treat marijuana arrests with a grain of salt," said Brad Lander, a Democratic city councilman from Brooklyn. "A neglect charge should not be leveled."
Ms. Harris, the woman briefly held in custody in the Bronx, said the police had searched her apartment because they believed drugs were being sold there, an allegation that she denied. She said the small bags of marijuana the police found belonged to her boyfriend and were for his personal use. She tested negative for drugs after she was released.
The Administration for Children's Services filed neglect charges about a week after Bronx prosecutors declined to press charges. Ms. Harris was represented by the Bronx Defenders, a nonprofit organization that provides legal assistance to Bronx residents.
In a hearing the next day, the agency agreed to return Ms. Harris's son on the condition that her boyfriend not return to the home, that she enroll in therapy and submit to random drug screenings, and that caseworkers could make announced and unannounced visits to her home. Ms. Harris's case was closed in April without a finding of neglect.
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9) New Economic Reports Dash Hopes for Economic Revival
By REUTERS
August 18, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/business/economy/consumer-prices-rose-more-than-forecast-last-month.html?ref=business
Factory activity in the mid-Atlantic region slumped to a nearly 2-1/2 year low in August and home resales unexpectedly dropped in July, dashing hopes for a quick revival in economic growth.
Other data on Thursday also pointed to a darker outlook for the economy, with consumer inflation rising at its fastest rate in four months in July and more Americans than expected claiming new jobless benefits last week.
Stock markets worldwide tumbled on the weak economic data, which stoked concerns that recovery is on the rocks.
Still, economists did not believe that the sharp drop in manufacturing activity signaled that the nation's economy was sliding back into recession.
"Without a strong rebound in the coming months this will be taken as a very worrying development for policy makers charting the outlook for the second half of the year," said Peter Newland, a senior economist at Barclays Capital in New York.
"That said, 'hard' data so far available for the third quarter have taken a clearly stronger tone and timely jobless claims data are not indicative of a dramatic weakening in the economy," he added.
So far, data ranging from retail sales to industrial production suggest the economy found some momentum early in the third quarter after barely growing in the first half of the year.
The New York Federal Reserve president, William Dudley, said on Thursday that the risk of a double-dip recession was "quite low."
"The risks have risen a little bit, but I think we very much still expect the economy to recover." The agency expects growth to be significantly firmer than it was during the first half of the year, he told New Jersey business leaders.
In one positive report, the Conference Board said its index of leading economic indicators rose 0.5 percent in July. The increase, which followed a gain of 0.3 percent in June, was lifted by the money supply and interest rate components, the board said.
Ken Goldstein, an economist at the board, said noted that growth was modest, especially in nonfinancial indicators.
Despite the risks, he said, "the economy should continue to expand at a modest pace through the fall."
The Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank's business activity index plummeted to minus 30.7 in August, the lowest level since March 2009 when the economy was in recession, from 3.2 in July.
That was much worse than economists' expectations for a reading of plus 3.7. Any reading below zero indicates a contraction in the region's manufacturing.
"This report clearly reflects the fact that businesses cut their outlook as a result of the debt limit crises and the resulting downgrade of the U.S. credit rating," said Steven Ricchiuto, chief economist at Mizuho Securities in New York.
"I would not read too much into this in terms of the outlook on the economy since manufacturing had been on the rebound in autos and exports and the economy was stuck in first gear for two years."
A second report showed sales of previously owned homes fell 3.5 percent to an annual rate of 4.67 million units, the lowest in eight months. Economists had expected home resales to rise to a 4.90 million-unit pace.
Separate data from the Labor Department showed initial claims for state unemployment benefits increased 9,000 to 408,000. Another report from the department showed the Consumer Price Index increased 0.5 percent in July, the largest gain since March, after falling 0.2 percent in June.
Gasoline, which rose 4.7 percent after falling 6.8 percent the prior month, accounted for about half of the rise in C.P.I. last month.
But core C.P.I. - excluding food and energy - rose 0.2 percent after rising 0.3 percent in June.
Morgan Stanley cut its global growth forecast and said that the United States and its major export partner the euro zone were "dangerously close to recession." In a research note that spooked investors, it lowered its United States estimate to 1.8 percent GDP growth for 2011 from 2.6 percent and for next year to 2.1 percent from 3.0 percent.
The jobless claims data covers the survey week for August nonfarm payrolls. Claims dropped by 14,000 between the July and August survey periods, but there are fears that financial markets turbulence could have slowed hiring this month.
"Initial claims were a bit higher than expected, indicating a generally sluggish trend for hiring although still better than where we stood during the second quarter," said Avery Shenfeld, an economist at CIBC World Markets in Toronto.
Despite the spike in consumer inflation last month, which also reflected a 0.4 percent rise in food prices, inflation generally remains contained.
New motor vehicle costs were unchanged after five straight months of hefty gains. This probably reflects an improvement in supplies as disruptions caused by the March earthquake in Japan fade. Motor vehicle production rebounded sharply in July.
In the 12 months to July, core C.P.I. increased 1.8 percent - the largest increase since December 2009. This measure has rebounded from a record low of 0.6 percent in October and Fed would like to see that closer to 2 percent.
Overall consumer prices rose 3.6 percent year-on-year, rising by the same amount for a third straight month.
Within the core C.P.I. basket, shelter costs rose 0.3 percent, the largest gain since June 2008, after advancing 0.2 percent in June. Shelter has increased since October as a persistently weak housing market drives Americans into renting.
The increase in apparel prices slowed to 1.2 percent from June's 1.4 percent increase.
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10) Rabble with a Cause: Were the London Riots a Spontaneous Mass Reaction or a Rational Response?
Contrary to popular wisdom, mobs are not mindless. In fact, they act rationally-a characteristic that suggests ways to prevent riots
By Lauren F. Friedman
Friday, August 12, 2011 | 31
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=rabble-with-a-cause&WT.mc_id=SA_WR_20110818
The deadly mob violence that wracked England this past week has abated, as police came out in force and used surveillance images to track down and arrest some 1,900 alleged rioters. As London and other cities in the nation recover, officials and the public may be left wondering how to prevent such rioting in the first place. A key misunderstanding, however, seems to pervade popular thinking: that mobs are irrational and are driven to violence by a few bad apples. In fact, the scientific evidence shows that individuals in mobs do behave rationally, although not always wisely. The findings suggest that understanding the logic behind mob behavior may offer ways to short-circuit riots before they start.
The recent riots broke out across England after the shooting of north Londoner Mark Duggan by police last weekend. Many official and media accounts place the blame on "a violent few" who swept thousands of others into a destructive frenzy. These analyses echo the 1896 work of
Gustave Le Bon , who published The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. "Crowds, after a period of excitement, enter upon a purely automatic and unconscious state, in which they are guided by suggestion," he wrote.
That idea, however, is a myth; social psychologists debunked it in the 1980s. "When people form a psychological group, what happens isn't that they lose a sense of identity but that they think of themselves in terms of group membership," explains social psychologist Stephen Reicher of the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland.
Individuals cannot act with group goals in mind until they see themselves as members of that group. In situations such as the recent London riots, this group identity seems to form spontaneously, but studies of the riots in England 30 years ago suggest a more complex buildup.
"Riots are the endpoint of a very long and entrenched process of social sense-making," Reicher says. "When an event comes along that clicks in perfectly to this broader social understanding, then suddenly it's much more likely to make you see yourself as a group member."
If the residents of Tottenham, where the first riot broke out, had the general feeling that they were being mistreated by the police, then the Mark Duggan incident provided an egregious and highly public example to confirm that. (Other social and economic factors, of course, were also at play as the rioting spread in the days that followed to other neighborhoods and cities.) When people gathered in the streets to protest, the physical group began to take the form of a psychological group, with shared values and a clearly defined out-group-the police.
The Londoners eventually turned to violence, but not necessarily because of mob madness or because the group was made up of individuals with a tendency toward unfettered aggression. ("While the trouble has been largely blamed on feral teenagers," The Daily Mail reported, "many of those paraded before the courts yesterday led apparently respectable lives.")
"One thing science does tell us is that we can't understand it if we treat it as irrational [or] if we think of these people as a gathering of people with individual predispositions to violence," says Clifford Stott, a social psychologist at the University of Liverpool.
Stott's previous research with John Drury of the University of Sussex (pdf) and others (pdf) has demonstrated that a crowd of nonviolent individuals can become a violent, and not-as previously thought-because a few violent protestors take control of an impressionable mob. Instead, the unilateral force that is sometimes used against a mostly nonviolent crowd can backfire, cementing the unity of the group against the now-violent authorities. This newly combative dynamic can change what's considered acceptable group behavior for everyone and leave group members with an intoxicating feeling of empowerment.
Reicher explains: "Crowd events tend to be mixed events with some people who do intend to be violent and some who don't. The response of authorities is to see the group as a whole as dangerous. At that point, precisely those people not originally violent have the experience of being treated with hostility and often physical force. Under those circumstances, they see the police as illegitimate and violence escalates."
Within this context, a violent crowd is not necessarily out of control but may be acting meaningfully and deliberately, with the "us versus them" values of the group in mind. This behavior is not irrational, Stott says, and "is consistent with how the social identity of the group is defined."
Even what appears to be a clear case of crowd violence can be misleading. A recent review of crowd behavior theories (pdf) pointed to the old idea of a mob, where "individuals lose all sense of self-responsibility... and primitive behavior results." But in reality, any riot includes both collective action and individual acts of opportunism, and these are hard to tease apart. Some individuals, Reicher explains, will use a crowd as a "cover," to do things they would not normally do. These single-minded actions do not necessarily represent the behavior of the group as a whole, even though it can appear so.
In the end, group identity is a precondition for a riot: people will only riot when they think their actions are aligned with the worldview of the group as a whole. Reicher suggests then that the key to preventing riots may be for authorities to regularly engage community members who will publicly oppose violence and looting, shifting the perception of group's needs and desires in advance. This early intervention-similar to approaches used to combat gang violence-could intercept the possibility of a violent group identity before it can begin to form.
"You can only take part in these events to the extent that you believe you have collective support from others," Reicher says. "Nobody riots on their own."
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11) Higher Bridge, Tunnel and PATH Rates Approved
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
August 19, 2011, 10:27 am
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/higher-bridge-tunnel-and-path-rates-approved/?hp
A steep toll increase on the bridges and tunnels that cross the Hudson River was approved Friday morning by the board of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the culmination of a two-week dance among the agency, politicians and the public.
The increase, to be phased in, will raise peak-time E-ZPass tolls to $9.50 from $8 beginning next month. By 2015, that toll will be $12.50. The cash toll will go up 50 percent in September, to $12 a car; by 2015, the cash toll will be $15.
The board also voted to raise the single-fare ride on PATH trains, which travel between Manhattan and New Jersey, by 25 cents in September and in each of the following three years.
The toll increases, although significant and sure to be criticized by drivers, are smaller than in an initial proposal floated by the Port Authority earlier this month, and few who follow the Port Authority were surprised by the change.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey publicly expressed surprise at the initial plan - a stance that raised some eyebrows as the governors jointly control the agency, whose every public action, particularly one as significant as a toll or fare increase, is rarely announced without some form of prior approval from the two executives.
The governors, who each can overrule board votes, had pledged to review the proposal with the agency, and nine public hearings were held, all on Tuesday. (Few, if any, authority board members attended those sessions.)
Late Thursday, as predicted, the governors issued a joint statement that took credit for the lower increases. "We are pleased that our work together" led to the lower rates, the governors wrote.
Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Christie have called for a significant audit of the Port Authority and blamed "fiscal mismanagement" for the raising of tolls and fares. The governors promised to reduce the agency's budget for maintenance and expansion.
The authority, like many sprawling bureaucracies, has its share of waste and inefficiencies, like spiraling overtime. But the agency has trimmed its operating budget in the past few years and reduced staffing to the lowest level in decades. The creditworthiness of its bonds recently received an upgrade from a rating agency.
The need for higher tolls is based more on the declining economy, which reduced the number of commuters (and thus, toll and fare revenue) using the agency's crossings. And the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site has siphoned billions away from the agency's budget for improving and expanding its bridges, tunnels, airports, shipping ports and the PATH system.
Mr. Christie, who has pledged to not raise taxes on his constituents, called for the agency to use part of its budget for New Jersey road and highway repairs, which are traditionally financed by the state. Some of Mr. Christie's political opponents say the higher rates are a de facto tax increase on commuters.
At Friday's board hearing, representatives of several civic groups expressed support for the higher tolls, saying the money was necessary to help pay for the region's transportation infrastructure to stay in good repair.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, on his Friday morning radio program, also endorsed the plan, warning that without additional revenue, the region's economy would be at risk.
"The bridges would eventually fall down, we wouldn't fix anything, we wouldn't make the commute better," the mayor said. "If you want services, you've got to pay for them."
The proposals were approved 9 to 0 by the agency's board of commissioners, all of whom are appointed by the two states' governors.
A few commuters and civic activists spoke at the meeting against the new rates, saying the working public was being asked to subsidize the agency's foul-ups.
None of the commissioners would speak to reporters after the meeting. "I speak to the public, but not under these circumstances," one commissioner, David S. Steiner, said as he walked past reporters into a private side room.
Mr. Steiner, an appointee of former Gov. James E. McGreevey of New Jersey, had not appeared to have listened to the public, either. He could be seen resting, with his eyes shut, during significant portions of Friday's board meeting.
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12) Quake in Japan Is Causing a Costly Shift to Fossil Fuels
By HIROKO TABUCHI
August 19, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/20/business/energy-environment/quake-in-japan-is-causing-a-costly-shift-to-fossil-fuels.html?ref=world
YOKOSUKA, Japan - The half-century-old, oil-fueled power generators here had been idle for more than a year when, a day after the nuclear accident in March, orders came from Tokyo Electric Power headquarters to fire them up.
"They asked me how long it would take," said Masatake Koseki, head of the Yokosuka plant, which is 40 miles south of Tokyo and run by Tokyo Electric. "The facilities are old, so I told them six months. But they said, 'No, you must ready them by summer to prepare for an energy shortage.' "
Now, at summer's peak, Yokosuka's two fuel-oil and two gas turbines are cranking out a total of 900,000 kilowatts of electricity a day - and an abundance of fumes.
The generators are helping to replace the 400 million kilowatt-hours of daily electricity production lost this summer because of the shutdown of all but 15 of Japan's 54 nuclear reactors in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. Across the country, dozens of other fossil-fuel plants have been fired up, and Japan is importing billions of dollars worth of liquefied natural gas, coal and oil to keep them running.
Japan, the world's third-largest user of electricity behind China and the United States, had counted on an expansion of nuclear power to contain energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, its nuclear program is in retreat, as the public and government officials urge a sharp reduction in the nation's reliance on nuclear power and perhaps an end to it altogether.
As its nuclear program implodes, Japan is grappling with a jump in fuel costs, making an economic recovery from the March earthquake and tsunami all the more difficult. Annual fuel expenses could rise by more than 3 trillion yen, or about $39 billion, the government says.
The country, until recently a vocal proponent of measures to curb climate change, is also leaving a bigger carbon footprint. According to government calculations, Japan's greenhouse gas emissions could rise by as much as 210 million metric tons, or 16 percent, by 2013 from 1990 levels if its nuclear reactors were shut permanently. Under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, a global agreement on greenhouse gas emissions, Japan promised to reduce its emissions by 6 percent over that period.
"Can nuclear be eliminated?" asked Adam Schatzker, an energy analyst at RBC Capital Markets. "It's possible, but very costly."
If necessary, Japan could replace the energy capacity lost in the shutdown of its nuclear fleet by increasing the use of natural gas and coal, Mr. Schatzker said. "But even if fossil fuel facilities can make up for the loss of nuclear, it would likely take time, cost a great deal more money and pollute significantly," he said.
For resource-poor Japan, it is an energy shift of an unprecedented scale and speed. A generation ago, the oil shock of 1973, which exposed the country's overdependence on Middle Eastern oil, forced Japanese companies to focus on energy efficiency and prompted the government to invest heavily in nuclear power.
But as it doubled down on nuclear power plants, Japan was slow to develop alternative forms of energy, like solar or wind power, which account for just 1 percent of its electricity supply.
Prime Minister Naoto Kan has called for a gradual move away from nuclear energy, and proposed a goal of generating 20 percent of Japan's electricity from renewable sources, including hydroelectric plants, by the early 2020s. The Parliament is debating legislation to spur that change.
A nuclear-free future could come much sooner, however. Nervous local governments have blocked the restart of reactors idled for routine inspections. If no reactors can restart, Japan's entire nuclear fleet, which provided 30 percent of its electricity in 2009, could be closed by spring.
The shutdowns are already causing an energy squeeze. At least three utilities have come close to full capacity during peak demand hours this summer. The government has warned that eastern Japan, including Tokyo, could face an electricity shortage of about 10 percent next summer if no nuclear plants are running.
A 10 percent shortage may not be disastrous. This summer, for example, a major energy-saving drive by households and companies drove down peak electricity demand in July by about 20 percent, to 46.3 million kilowatts, averting blackouts despite the energy shortfall, according to Tokyo Electric, the operator of the stricken Fukushima plant.
Still, "we take this situation very seriously," Toshio Nishizawa, chief executive of Tokyo Electric, said this month. Only three of the company's 17 nuclear reactors are running.
A protracted increase in fossil fuel costs is possible to make up for the shortfall, traders say.
Japan's liquefied natural gas imports have jumped for three consecutive months, squeezing global supplies amid strong demand from China and other emerging economies. Imports of coal, which still accounts for 25 percent of Japan's energy, are also rising.
Analysts at RBC Capital Markets predict that in Japan, the world's largest importer of coal, coal-fired generation could climb as much as 20 percent, equivalent to 3 percent of global supply.
Last month, Japan's power utilities said they would raise electricity prices in September to make up for higher fuel costs.
Some businesses worry about the impact of a long-term energy deficit.
"We could see Japanese companies start to move overseas," Hiromasa Yonekura, chairman of Sumitomo Chemical and head of Japan's largest business lobby, the Keidanren, told reporters last month. "A prolonged energy shortage could harm business and investment."
Meanwhile, the sharply higher energy costs are helping to undermine Japan's formerly rock-solid balance of trade, which swung into the red for three straight months after the earthquake as exporters struggled to restart production. The country's trade surplus for July was down 90 percent from a year earlier, on a combination of weak exports and rising energy imports.
Elon Musk, the American entrepreneur and founder of the electric car company, Tesla Motors, was in tsunami-stricken Soma late last month to donate $250,000 to build a solar farm there. He said he saw potential for renewable energy in Japan, but that cumbersome regulations and government foot-dragging were holding the industry back.
"The cost of solar power has dropped in recent years, but government policy hasn't caught up to that," Mr. Musk said in a telephone interview.
One roadblock for renewable power in Japan has been the inability of producers to get a sufficient price for their electricity on the market, where they must compete with cheaper power from coal, natural gas and nuclear power.
Lawmakers are debating a law that would require utilities to buy electricity from solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric and other renewable power sources, even if it means paying a premium. According to Japan's Trade Ministry, the move would raise average home electricity bills by about 200 yen (more than $2) a month.
"If we, as a society, are willing to pay more, this technology will most certainly spread," said Norihiro Okumura, an economist with the Tokyo-based Institute of Energy Economics. "And though some in industry say this hurts competitiveness, renewable energy will create new businesses, too."
Until then, the huge generators at the Yokosuka power plant will continue to pick up the slack, fumes notwithstanding.
"People once called this the No. 1 power plant in the Orient," Mr. Koseki said. "We are back, doing what we can."
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13) Japan Finds First Case of Radioactive Contamination in Rice
By MARTIN FACKLER
August 19, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/20/world/asia/20rice.html?ref=world
TOKYO - Japanese inspectors found the first case of radioactive contamination in rice on Friday, adding the national grain to the list of foods harmed by the accident at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
Inspectors in Ibaraki Prefecture, just north of Tokyo, found radioactive cesium in a sample of rice from the city of Hokota, about 90 miles south of the radiation-spewing nuclear plant. The prefecture said the radiation was well within safe levels: It measured 52 becquerels per kilogram, about one-tenth of the government-set limit for grains.
The prefecture said two other samples tested at the same time showed no contamination.
The Agriculture Ministry said this was the first time that more than trace levels of cesium had been found in rice, though it said there was no health risk. Still, the discovery won wide attention here. Rice is the staple in most Japanese dishes and holds a place in the collective national heart that exceeds that of apple pie for Americans, or baguettes for the French.
Fears of atomic contamination of the rice crop had been building ahead of this year's autumn harvest, the first since the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident in March. Adding to the anxiety is the fact that Japan's mountainous northeast, which bore the brunt of the triple disaster, is one of the nation's most productive rice-growing regions.
The discovery Friday was also likely to fan growing fears here about the safety of Japan's food supply. Radiation exceeding safe levels has already been found in products including beef, spinach and green tea.
On Friday, the Agriculture Ministry decided to keep in place a ban on sales of beef from Fukushima Prefecture, site of the nuclear accident, after another sample of beef was found to contain high levels of radioactive cesium. The ban was imposed a month ago after the detection of radioactive cesium in beef that exceeded safe levels.
The ministry said it would lift a similar on ban on beef from Miyagi Prefecture, which borders Fukushima to the north, after farmers there took measures to limit radiation exposure to cows, such as not feeding them locally grown rice straw.
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14) Companies Point Fingers as Students Protest Conditions at Chocolate Plant
By JULIA PRESTON
August 18, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/us/19students.html?ref=world
HERSHEY, Pa. - A day after hundreds of foreign exchange students walked off their jobs at a plant packing Hershey's chocolates to protest low pay and physically draining work, executives at the Hershey Company and three other companies involved in the plant scrambled to sort out which one was responsible for the conditions that prompted the students' complaints.
Among the four companies with a role in the huge plant where the foreign students were employed, each one pointed to another as being the primary manager in charge of monitoring the students' work.
One of the companies, the Council for Educational Travel U.S.A., the nonprofit organization based in California that recruited the college students in their home countries and found the jobs for them at Hershey's Eastern Distribution Center III, said it was "reaching out" to the students to address their concerns.
But on Thursday the students staged another protest, this time in the heart of America's chocolate capital. About 150 of them held a rally in front of the Hershey Story Museum in the center of town, then they walked through the streets chanting - with a chorus of Turkish students singing in their own language - to passers-by. Many people driving through this working-class town honked and waved.
About 400 students, mainly from universities in China, Turkey and Eastern Europe, came to work at the packing plant under a summer cultural exchange program offered by the State Department. With visas called J-1, the students work for several months and then may travel around the country.
The students, including many from medical and engineering graduate schools, said they were expecting a relaxing summer job and opportunities to befriend Americans. They were encouraged, they said, by the Web site of the council, which shows laughing students on a highway before a panoramic mountain landscape, promising a chance to "live your dream."
Instead, the students were dropped into the middle of a transformed American workplace, doing fast-paced production line and lifting work in round-the-clock shifts for wages of $7.25 to $8.35 an hour, under multiple layers of contractors. The students said they rarely saw American employees in their area of the plant, where they were packing Reese's, Kit-Kat and other candies.
Their cultural exchange has been an unlikely connection with the American labor movement. A group called the National Guestworker Alliance helped them to organize, and they were joined by leaders from the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the Service Employees International Union.
The Hershey Company said it had contracted day-to-day operations at the packing plant to Exel, a logistics company. "The Hershey Company expects all its vendors, including Exel, to treat employees fairly and equitably," said Kirk Saville, a spokesman.
Exel contracted with a local labor supplier, SHS Staffing Solutions, to provide temporary workers, including the J-1 students, for the summer months when work is at a peak, said Lynn Anderson, a spokeswoman for Exel.
SHS Staffing said its main function was to handle payroll and schedules for the students. Exel announced late Thursday that it had instructed the staffing company not to hire any more J-1 visa student workers for the packing plant after the end of this summer. Rick Anaya, chief executive of the council, said every student had signed a job offer specifying what they would do before going to work at the plant. The packing job offer stated "frequent lifting of 24 kilograms," boxes weighing more than 50 pounds. Mr. Anaya said that students had done the jobs in past years and he did not regard the lifting as inappropriate for them.
"One of the complaints students have raised is that it is hard work," Mr. Anaya said in a statement. "That may be; we're not sure. But the job offer is self-explanatory."
One of the protesting students, Peng Lu, 21, an economics student from Yunan, China, said he struggled to lift the boxes. "Very heavy, sometimes we can't do," Mr. Peng said, in imperfect English. "But they ask, faster, faster," he said. "If you can't, they say, 'Go home.' "
In a meeting at the plant last week, which a student recorded on a mobile phone, a manager advised them they could be fired and the council might send them back home if they engaged in a protest. After their meetings with the guest worker group, the students said, they had begun to worry that they had been used for jobs that local Americans could do, but for less pay.
They found sympathy from labor leaders. Dennis Bomberger, the business manager of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. local union that represents Hershey's chocolate workers, said they had no direct part in the protest because they do not represent the packing plant. Mr. Bomberger noted that while that plant has grown, Hershey's has reduced its full-time union employees by 700 since 2007, to a total of 1,500, with 500 more layoffs expected next year.
Rick Bloomingdale, the president of the Pennsylvania A.F.L.-C.I.O., said he admired the students' risk-taking, especially since they were not in their own countries. Mr. Bloomingdale and two other labor leaders were arrested briefly during the protest in front of the packing plant on Wednesday.
He said he thought the conditions the students described were "a throwback to the company town of 100 years ago."
Mr. Anaya said that the involvement of the unions had made the students less inclined to cooperate with his organization. He said he planned to offer all the students trips paid by the council to Philadelphia and Washington to visit tourist attractions.
"We believe that the experiences they have, while not always easy, will help to shape their views of the world and the U.S.," Mr. Anaya said. "Most certainly they will have improved their English and their understanding of America."
The students said one way they had learned English in Hershey was by inventing new protest slogans. "Who are we? The J-1 students. We are proud," they chanted on Thursday on the street in heavily accented English.
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15) Deal May Free 'West Memphis Three'
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
August 19, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/20/us/20arkansas.html?ref=us
JONESBORO, Ark. - Lawyers representing three men convicted of killing three 8-year-old boys in a notorious 1993 murder case have reached a potential deal that could allow the men, known as the West Memphis Three, to walk free on Friday, people familiar with the deal said.
The men, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, Jr., have been in prison since 1993, Mr. Echols on death row and the other two serving life sentences, despite numerous appeals and post conviction hearings, and a committed army of supporters who have insisted on their innocence.
The deal being discussed would not technically result in a full exoneration; some of the convictions would stand, though the men would not admit guilt. Should Mr. Echols be freed, it would be the highest profile release of a death row inmate in recent memory.
The deal comes five months before a scheduled hearing as to whether the men should be granted a new trial in light of DNA evidence that surfaced in the past few years. None of their DNA has been found in tests of evidence at the scene. The Arkansas Supreme Court ordered the new hearing in November, giving new life to efforts to exonerate the three men.
In May 1993, the bodies of the boys, Christopher Byers, Steve Branch and James Michael Moore, were found in a drainage ditch in a wooded area of West Memphis, Ark., called Robin Hood Hills. The bodies appeared to have been mutilated, their hands tied to their feet.
The grotesque nature of the murders led to a theory about satanic cult activity. Investigators focused their attention on Mr. Echols, at the time a troubled yet gifted teenager who practiced Wicca, a rarity in the town of West Memphis. Efforts to learn more about him, spearheaded by a single mother cooperating with the police, led to Mr. Misskelley, a passing acquaintance of Mr. Echols, who is borderline mentally retarded.
After a nearly 12-hour interrogation by the police, Mr. Misskelley confessed to the murders and implicated Mr. Echols and Mr. Baldwin, though his confession diverged in significant details with the facts known by the police.
Largely on the strength of that confession, Mr. Misskelley was convicted in February 1994. Mr. Echols and Mr. Baldwin soon after were convicted in a separate trial, largely on the testimony of witnesses who said they heard the teenagers talk of the murders and on the prosecution's theory that the defendants had been motivated as members of a satanic cult. Mr. Misskelley's confession was not admitted at their trial, though recently a former lawyer for the jury foreman, filed an affidavit saying that the foreman, determined to convict, had brought the confession up in deliberations to sway undecided jurors.
An award-winning documentary, "Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills," was released after their convictions, bringing them national attention. Benefit concerts were held, books were written a follow-up documentary was made and the men's supporters continued to pursue their freedom. Many residents of West Memphis resented the presumption that outsiders knew the details of the horrific case better than they did. But in recent years some, though not all, of the victims' families have begun to doubt the guilt of the three men.
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16) Alabama Nuclear Reactor, Partly Built, to Be Finished
By MATTHEW L. WALD
August 18, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/science/earth/19nuclear.html?ref=us
The directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority unanimously approved a plan on Thursday to finish the partly built Bellefonte 1 nuclear reactor, a project on which the authority spent billions of dollars in the 1970s and '80s but dropped in 1988 because of cost overruns and declining estimates of power demand.
The revived reactor, in Hollywood, Ala., is not expected to be completed before 2018 to 2020 - or about a half-century after the project was first announced, and following nearly a quarter-century of limbo.
"The T.V.A, has wrestled with the fate of Bellefonte since 1988," said Marilyn A. Brown, a board member who is a professor of energy policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Public Policy. The decision comes at a time when other countries, Germany and Switzerland, for example, are leaning away from nuclear power and closing older plants, after the meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex in Japan in March.
The long-anticipated "nuclear renaissance" in the United States appears to have stalled as well, with only four reactors currently being built, two in Georgia and two in South Carolina.
T.V.A. planners said they were expecting continued growth in their service territory of nine million people across seven states. That, and the agency's plans to retire or idle about 2,700 megawatts of coal-fired power plants helped inform the decision. Equipping those coal-fired generators with the antipollution equipment that the government will soon require would be more expensive, they said, than building a plant from scratch or finishing Bellefonte, which will have a capacity of 1,260 megawatts.
The board took an unusual step to try to prevent the agency from getting mired in its former nuclear ambitions, as occurred in the 1980s when the T.V.A. set out to build 17 reactors but finished only 5. The board amended its staff's plan and voted not to resume construction on Bellefonte until after another stop-and-start reactor project, Watts Bar 2, was up and running in Tennessee.
Watts Bar was, with Bellefonte, dropped in the '80s, but the T.V.A. went back and finished the first unit there, Watts Bar 1, in 1996, making that plant the youngest of the 103 power reactors currently operating in the United States.
The board was told by the agency's staff at the meeting on Thursday that the construction work done to date on Bellefonte 1 would cost about $1.6 billion at today's prices. The agency said it had spent $2.5 billion on Bellefonte 1 and 2, which was originally envisioned as a twin-unit plant. The agency has spent hundreds of millions of dollars more maintaining and securing the site since then. Completion of unit one is expected to cost another $4.9 billion, the staff said.
When work stopped in 1988, the staff said unit one was 87 percent complete. But some parts were removed for salvage, and others would need to be rebuilt to accommodate computer control. So the plant is now considered to be about 55 percent complete, the agency estimated.
One member of the board, Dennis Bottorff, questioned whether it was smart to revive four decades later a plant that met the safety standards of the 1970s.
William R. McCollum Jr., the chief operating officer, replied that the T.V.A. would have to demonstrate to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the plant met the standards in force when it got its construction permit in 1974, and complied with all the bulletins and rule updates since then.
The board also approved adding pollution-control devices to several coal plants, and the purchase of an existing gas-fired plant, and approved a 2 percent rate increase.
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17) As Economy Tanks, "New Normal" Police State Takes Shape
Posted by Antifascist at 11:42 AM
August 14, 2011
http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/2011/08/as-economy-tanks-new-normal-police.html
Forget your rights.
As corporate overlords position themselves to seize what little remains of a tattered social net (adieu Medicare and Medicaid! Social Security? Au revoir!), the Obama administration is moving at break-neck speed to expand police state programs first stood-up by the Bush government.
After all, with world share prices gyrating wildly, employment and wages in a death spiral, and retirement funds and publicly-owned assets swallowed whole by speculators and rentier scum, the state better dust-off contingency plans lest the Greek, Spanish or British "contagion" spread beyond the fabled shores of "old Europe" and infect God-fearin' folk here in the heimat.
Fear not, they have and the lyrically-titled Civil Disturbances: Emergency Employment of Army and Other Resources, otherwise known as Army Regulation 500-50, spells out the "responsibilities, policy, and guidance for the Department of the Army in planning and operations involving the use of Army resources in the control of actual or anticipated civil disturbances." (emphasis added)
With British politicians demanding a clampdown on social media in the wake of London riots, and with the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) agency having done so last week in San Francisco, switching off underground cell phone service to help squelch a protest against police violence, authoritarian control tactics, aping those deployed in Egypt and Tunisia (that worked out well!) are becoming the norm in so-called "Western democracies."
Secret Law, Secret Programs
Meanwhile up on Capitol Hill, Congress did their part to defend us from that pesky Bill of Rights; that is, before 81 of them--nearly a fifth of "our" elected representatives--checked-out for AIPAC-funded junkets to Israel.
Secrecy News reported that the Senate Intelligence Committee "rejected an amendment that would have required the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence to confront the problem of 'secret law,' by which government agencies rely on legal authorities that are unknown or misunderstood by the public."
That amendment, proposed by Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO) was rejected by voice vote, further entrenching unprecedented surveillance powers of Executive Branch agencies such as the FBI and NSA.
As Antifascist Calling previously reported, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Justice Department "demanding the release of a secret legal memo used to justify FBI access to Americans' telephone records without any legal process or oversight."
The DOJ refused and it now appears that the Senate has affirmed that "secret law" should be guiding principles of our former republic.
Secrecy News also disclosed that the Committee rejected a second amendment to the authorization bill, one that would have required the Justice Department's Inspector General "to estimate the number of Americans who have had the contents of their communications reviewed in violation of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 [FAA]."
As pointed out here many times, FAA is a pernicious piece of Bushist legislative detritus that legalized the previous administration's secret spy programs since embellished by our current "hope and change" president.
During the run-up to FAA's passage, congressional Democrats, including then-Senator Barack Obama and his Republican colleagues across the aisle, claimed that the law would "strike a balance" between Americans' privacy rights and the needs of security agencies to "stop terrorists" attacking the country.
If that's the case, then why can't the American people learn whether their rights have been compromised?
Perhaps, as recent reports in Truthout and other publications suggest, former U.S. counterterrorism "czar" Richard Clarke leveled "explosive allegations against three former top CIA officials--George Tenet, Cofer Black and Richard Blee--accusing them of knowingly withholding intelligence ... about two of the 9/11 hijackers who had entered the United States more than a year before the attacks."
Clarke's allegations follow closely on the heels of an investigation by Truthout journalists Jeffrey Kaye and Jason Leopold.
"Based on on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and an interview with a former high-ranking counterterrorism official," Kaye and Leopold learned that "a little-known military intelligence unit, unbeknownst to the various investigative bodies probing the terrorist attacks, was ordered by senior government officials to stop tracking Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda's movements prior to 9/11."
As readers are well aware, the 9/11 provocation was the pretext used by the capitalist state to wage aggressive resource wars abroad while ramming through repressive legislation like the USA Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act that targeted the democratic rights of the American people here at home.
But FAA did more then legitimate illegal programs. It also handed retroactive immunity and economic cover to giant telecoms like AT&T and Verizon who profited handily from government surveillance, shielding them from monetary damages which may have resulted from a spate of lawsuits such as Hepting v. AT&T.
This raises the question: are other U.S. firms similarly shielded from scrutiny by secret annexes in FAA or the privacy-killing USA Patriot Act?
Echelon Cubed
Last week, Softpedia revealed that "Google has admitted complying with requests from US intelligence agencies for data stored in its European data centers, most likely in violation of European Union data protection laws."
"At the center of this problem," reporter Lucian Constantin wrote, "is the USA PATRIOT ACT, which states that companies incorporated in the United States must hand over data administered by their foreign subsidiaries if requested."
"Not only that," the publication averred, "they can be forced to keep quiet about it in order to avoid exposing active investigations and alert those targeted by the probes."
In other words, despite strict privacy laws that require companies operating within the EU to protect the personal data of their citizens, reports suggest that U.S. firms, operating under an entirely different legal framework, U.S. spy laws with built-in secrecy clauses and gag orders, trump the laws and legal norms of other nations.
Given the widespread corporate espionage carried out by the National Security Agency's decades-long Echelon communications' intercept program, American firms such as Google, Microsoft, Apple or Amazon may very well have become witting accomplices of U.S. secret state agencies rummaging about for "actionable intelligence" on EU, or U.S., citizens.
Indeed, a decade ago the European Union issued its final report on the Echelon spying machine and concluded that the program was being used for corporate and industrial espionage and that data filched from EU firms was being turned over to American corporations.
In 2000, the BBC reported that according to European investigators "U.S. Department of Commerce 'success stories' could be attributed to the filtering powers of Echelon."
Duncan Campbell, a British journalist and intelligence expert, who along with New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager, helped blow the lid off Echelon, offered two instances of U.S. corporate spying in the 1990s when the newly-elected Clinton administration followed-up on promises of "aggressive advocacy" on behalf of U.S. firms "bidding for foreign contracts."
According to Campbell, NSA "lifted all the faxes and phone-calls between Airbus, the Saudi national airline and the Saudi Government" to gain this information. In a second case which came to light, Campbell documented how "Raytheon used information picked up from NSA snooping to secure a $1.4bn contract to supply a radar system to Brazil instead of France's Thomson-CSF."
As Softpedia reported, U.S.-based cloud computing services operating overseas have placed "European companies and government agencies that are using their services ... in a tough position."
With the advent of fiber optic communication platforms, programs like Echelon have a far greater, and more insidious, reach. AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein noted on the widespread deployment by NSA of fiber optic splitters and secret rooms at American telecommunications' firms:
What screams out at you when examining this physical arrangement is that the NSA was vacuuming up everything flowing in the Internet stream: e-mail, web browsing, Voice-Over-Internet phone calls, pictures, streaming video, you name it. The splitter has no intelligence at all, it just makes a blind copy. There could not possibly be a legal warrant for this, since according to the 4th Amendment warrants have to be specific, "particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." ...
This was a massive blind copying of the communications of millions of people, foreign and domestic, randomly mixed together. From a legal standpoint, it does not matter what they claim to throw away later in their secret rooms, the violation has already occurred at the splitter. (Mark Klein, Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine... And Fighting It, Charleston, South Carolina: BookSurge, 2009, pp. 38-39.)
What was Google's response?
In a statement to the German publication WirtschaftsWoche a Google corporate spokesperson said: "As a law abiding company, we comply with valid legal process, and that--as for any U.S. based company--means the data stored outside of the U.S. may be subject to lawful access by the U.S. government. That said, we are committed to protecting user privacy when faced with law enforcement requests. We have a long track record of advocating on behalf of user privacy in the face of such requests and we scrutinize requests carefully to ensure that they adhere to both the letter and the spirit of the law before complying." (translation courtesy of Public Intelligence)
Is the Senate Intelligence Committee's steadfast refusal to release documents and secret legal memos that most certainly target American citizens also another blatant example of American exceptionalism meant to protect U.S. firms operating abroad from exposure as corporate spies for the government?
It isn't as if NSA hasn't been busy doing just that here at home.
As The New York Times reported back in 2009, the "National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year."
Chalking up the problem to "overcollection" and "technical difficulties," unnamed intelligence officials and administration lawyers told journalists Eric Lichtblau and James Risen that although the practice was "significant and systemic ... it was believed to have been unintentional."
As "unintentional" as ginned-up intelligence that made the case for waging aggressive war against oil-rich Iraq!
In a follow-up piece, the Times revealed that NSA "appears to have tolerated significant collection and examination of domestic e-mail messages without warrants."
A former NSA analyst "read into" the illegal program told Lichtblau and Risen that he "and other analysts were trained to use a secret database, code-named Pinwale, in 2005 that archived foreign and domestic e-mail messages."
Email readily handed over by Google, Microsoft or other firms "subject to lawful access" by the Pentagon spy satrapy?
The Times' anonymous source said "Pinwale allowed N.S.A. analysts to read large volumes of e-mail messages to and from Americans as long as they fell within certain limits--no more than 30 percent of any database search, he recalled being told--and Americans were not explicitly singled out in the searches."
Nor, were they excluded from such illicit practices.
As Jane Mayer revealed in The New Yorker, "privacy controls" and "anonymizing features" of a program called ThinThread, which would have complied with the law if Americans' communications were swept into NSA's giant eavesdropping nets, were rejected in favor of the "$1.2 billion flop" called Trailblazer.
And, as previously reported, when Wyden and Udall sought information from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on just how many Americans had their communications monitored, the DNI stonewalled claiming "it is not reasonably possible to identify the number of people located in the United States whose communications may have been reviewed under the authority."
Why? Precisely because such programs act like a giant electronic sponge and soak-up and data mine huge volumes of our communications.
As former NSA manager and ThinThread creator Bill Binney told The New Yorker, that "little program ... got twisted" and was "used to eavesdrop on the whole world."
Three years after Barack Obama promised to curb Bush administration "excesses," illegal surveillance programs continue to expand under his watch.
A Permanent "State of Exception"
Under our current political set-up, "states of exception" and national security "emergencies" have become permanent features of social life.
Entire classes of citizens and non-citizens alike are now suspect; anarchists, communists, immigrants, Muslims, union activists and political dissidents in general are all subject to unprecedented levels of scrutiny and surveillance.
From "enhanced security screenings" at airports to the massive expansion of private and state databases that archive our spending habits, whom we talk to and where we go, increasingly, as the capitalist system implodes and millions face the prospect of economic ruin, the former American republic takes on the characteristics of a corporate police state.
Security researcher and analyst Christopher Soghoian reported on his Slight Paranoia blog, that according to "an official DOJ report, the use of 'emergency', warrantless requests to ISPs for customer communications content has skyrocketed over 400% in a single year."
This is no trifling matter.
As CNET News disclosed last month, "Internet providers would be forced to keep logs of their customers' activities for one year--in case police want to review them in the future--under legislation that a U.S. House of Representatives committee approved today."
Declan McCullagh reported that "the 19 to 10 vote represents a victory for conservative Republicans, who made data retention their first major technology initiative after last fall's elections."
Significantly, CNET noted that this is also a "victory" for Democratic appointees of Barack Obama's Justice Department "who have quietly lobbied for the sweeping new requirements."
According to CNET, a "last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers' names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses."
However, by "a 7-16 vote, the panel rejected an amendment that would have clarified that only IP addresses must be stored."
Consider the troubling implications of this sweeping bill. While ultra-rightist "Tea Party" Republicans vowed to get "the government off our backs," when it comes to illicit snooping by securocrats whose only loyalty is to a self-perpetuating security bureaucracy and the defense grifters they serve (and whom they rely upon for plum positions after government "retirement"), all our private data is now up for grabs.
The bill, according to Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), who spearheaded opposition to the measure said that if passed, it would create "a data bank of every digital act by every American" that would "let us find out where every single American visited Web sites."
To make the poison pill legislation difficult to oppose, proponents have dubbed it, wait, the "Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011" even though, as CNET noted, "the mandatory logs would be accessible to police investigating any crime and perhaps attorneys litigating civil disputes in divorce, insurance fraud, and other cases as well."
Soghoian relates that the 2009 two-page Justice Department report to Congress took 11 months (!) to release under a Freedom of Information Act request.
Why the Justice Department stonewall?
Perhaps, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation disclosed last year, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security and presumably other secret state satrapies, ordered "an extra layer of review on its FOIA requests."
EFF revealed that a 2009 policy memo from the Department's Chief FOIA Officer and Chief Privacy Officer, Mary Ellen Callahan, that DHS components "were required to report 'significant FOIA activities' in weekly reports to the Privacy Office, which the Privacy Office then integrated into its weekly report to the White House Liaison."
Included amongst designated "significant FOIA activities" were requests "from any members of 'an activist group, watchdog organization, special interest group, etc.' and 'requested documents [that] will garner media attention or [are] receiving media attention'."
Despite the appearance of reporting "emergency" spying requests to congressional committees presumably overseeing secret state activities (a generous assumption at best), "it is quite clear" Soghoian avers, "that the Department of Justice statistics are not adequately reporting the scale of this form of surveillance" and "underreport these disclosures by several orders of magnitude."
As such, "the current law is largely useless." It does not apply to "state and local law enforcement agencies, who make tens of thousands of warrantless requests to ISPs each year," and is inapplicable to "to federal law enforcement agencies outside DOJ."
"Finally," Soghoian relates, "it does not apply to emergency disclosures of non-content information, such as geo-location data, subscriber information (such as name and address), or IP addresses used."
And with Congress poised to pass sweeping data retention legislation, it should be clear that such "requirements" are mere fig leaves covering-up state-sanctioned lawlessness.
War On Terror 2.0.1: Looting the Global Economy
Criminal behavior by domestic security agencies connect America's illegal wars of aggression to capitalism's economic warfare against the working class, who now take their place alongside "Islamic terrorists" as a threat to "national security."
Despite efforts by the Obama administration and Republican congressional leaders to "balance the books" on the backs of the American people through massive budget cuts, as economist Michael Hudson pointed out in Global Research, the manufactured "debt ceiling" crisis is a massive fraud.
The World Socialist Web Site averred that "as concerns over a double-dip recession in the US and the European debt crisis sent global markets plunging--including a 512-point sell-off on the Dow Jones Industrial Average Thursday--financial analysts and media pundits developed a new narrative. Concern that Washington lacked the 'political will' to slash long-standing entitlement programs was exacerbating 'market uncertainty'."
Leftist critic Jerry White noted that "in fact, the new cuts will only intensify the economic crisis, while the slashing of food stamps, unemployment compensation, health care and education will eliminate programs that are more essential for survival than ever."
Indeed, as Marxist economist Richard Wolff pointed out in The Guardian, while the "crisis of the capitalist system in the US that began in 2007," may have "plunged millions into acute economic pain and suffering," the "recovery" that began in 2009 "benefited only the minority that was most responsible for the crisis: banks, large corporations and the rich who own the bulk of stocks. That so-called recovery never 'trickled down' to the US majority: working people dependent on jobs and wages'."
And despite mendacious claims by political officials and the media alike, the Pentagon will be sitting pretty even as Americans are forced to shoulder the financial burden of U.S. imperial adventures long into an increasingly bleak future.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta "warned Thursday of dire consequences if the Pentagon is forced to make cuts to its budget beyond the $400 billion in savings planned for the next decade," The Washington Post reported.
The Post noted that "senior Pentagon officials have launched an offensive over the past two days to convince lawmakers that further reductions in Pentagon spending would imperil the country's security."
"Instead of slashing defense," Panetta urged lawmakers to "rely on tax increases and cuts to nondiscretionary spending, such as Medicare and Social Security, to provide the necessary savings."
But as Hudson points out, "war has been the major cause of a rising national debt." After all, it was none other than bourgeois icon Adam Smith who argued that "parliamentary checks on government spending were designed to prevent ambitious rulers from waging war."
Hudson writes that "if people felt the economic impact of war immediately--rather than postponing it by borrowing--they would be less likely to support military adventurism."
But therein lies the rub. Since "military adventurism" is the only "growth sector" of an imploding capitalist economy, the public spigot which finances everything from cost-overrun-plagued stealth fighter jets to multibillion dollar spy satellites, along with an out-of-control National Surveillance State, will be kept open indefinitely.
On this score, the hypocrisy of our rulers abound, especially when it comes to the mantra that "we" must "live within our means."
As Wolff avers, "where was that phrase heard when Washington decided to spend on an immense military (even after becoming the world's only nuclear superpower) or to spend on very expensive wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya (now all going on at the same time)? No, then the talk was only about national security needed to save us from attacks."
"Attacks," it should be duly noted, that may very well have been allowed to happen as the World Socialist Web Site recently reported.
Driving home the point that war, and not social- and infrastructure investment fuel deficits, Hudson averred that "the present rise in in U.S. Treasury debt results from two forms of warfare. First is the overtly military Oil War in the Near East, from Iraq to Afghanistan (Pipelinistan) to oil-rich Libya. These adventures will end up costing between $3 and $5 trillion."
"Second and even more expensive," the economist observed, "is the more covert yet more costly economic war of Wall Street against the rest of the economy, demanding that losses by banks and financial institutions be passed onto the government balance sheet ('taxpayers'). The bailouts and 'free lunch' for Wall Street--by no coincidence, Congress's number one political campaign contributor--cost $13 trillion."
"Now that finance is the new form of warfare," Hudson wrote, "where is the power to constrain Treasury and Federal Reserve power to commit taxpayers to bail out financial interests at the top of the economic pyramid?"
And since "cutbacks in federal revenue sharing will hit cities and states hard, forcing them to sell off yet more land, roads and other assets in the public domain to cover their budget deficit as the U.S. economy sinks further into depression," Hudson wrote that "Congress has just added fiscal deflation to debt deflation, slowing employment even further."
While the global economy circles the drain, with ever more painful cuts in so-called "entitlement" programs meant to cushion the crash now on the chopping block, the corporate and political masters who rule the roost are sharpening their knives, fashioning administrative and bureaucratic surveillance tools, the better to conceal the "invisible hand" of that bitch-slaps us all.
And they call it "freedom."
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18) Unemployment Is Killing People
Posted By Jeffrey Kaye
August 18, 2011
http://pubrecord.org/nation/9628/unemployment-is-killing-people/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=unemployment-is-killing-people
When considering the effects of unemployment, and the desultory, really uncaring response of the current Democratic administration, as well as Republicans in Congress, to the human devastation of joblessness, it is important to consider the terrible emotional and psychological effects of such unemployment. Such effects are well-documented, but rarely mentioned in articles or blog postings.
A well-regarded 2010 study by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, "The Anguish of Unemployment," quantified the tremendous emotional suffering engendered by unemployment. "'The lack of income and loss of health benefits hurts greatly, but losing the ability to provide for my wife and myself is killing me emotionally,' wrote one respondent to the survey." (See PDF for Powerpoint presentation of results.)
Just last April, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released a study that showed that suicide rates rise and fall in tandem with the business cycle. The study covered the years 1928-2007. According to the CDC press release:
The overall suicide rate rises and falls in connection with the economy, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study released online today by the American Journal of Public Health. The study, "Impact of Business Cycles on the U.S. Suicide Rates, 1928-2007_ is the first to examine the relationships between age-specific suicide rates and business cycles. The study found the strongest association between business cycles and suicide among people in prime working ages, 25-64 years old.
"Knowing suicides increased during economic recessions and fell during expansions underscores the need for additional suicide prevention measures when the economy weakens," said James Mercy, Ph.D., acting director of CDC's Injury Center's Division of Violence Prevention. "It is an important finding for policy makers and those working to prevent suicide."
As a practicing psychologist, seeing clients for almost 20 years, I can say that the current economic depression has had a terrible effect on the people I see. I have also heard about more suicides in a short period of time than I have in years - actually, ever. While this could be a statistical fluke, and I myself would never draw stark conclusions from the sample of one clinician, the spike in reported suicides is certainly something that fits the known epidemiological risks that accompany high unemployment.
Because of confidentiality issues, I can't talk about my own clients, but let's consider some other academic studies over the years about the effects of economic stressors, such as unemployment.
"After unemployment, symptoms of somatization, depression, and anxiety were significantly greater in the unemployed than employed." - Effects of unemployment on mental and physical health. American Journal of Public Health, May 1985.
"Controlling for a number of individual characteristics, unemployed individuals are found to suffer significantly higher odds of experiencing a marked rise in anxiety, depression and loss of confidence and a reduction in self-esteem and the level of general happiness even compared with individuals in low-paid employment. This finding highlights the involuntary nature of unemployment." - "The effects of low-pay and unemployment on psychological well-being: A logistic regression approach." Journal of Health Economics, January 1998.
"Unemployment was associated with an increased risk of suicide and death from undetermined causes. Low education, personality characteristics, use of sleeping pills or tranquilizers, and serious or long-lasting illness tended to strengthen the association between unemployment and early mortality." - "Unemployment and Early Cause-Specific Mortality: A Study Based on the Swedish Twin Registry." American Journal of Public Health, January 2004.
"Unemployed individuals had lower psychological and physical well-being than did their employed counterparts." - "Psychological and Physical Well-Being During Unemployment: A Meta-Analytic Study." Journal of Applied Psychology, Jan. 2005.
"SPRC conducted a literature review of relevant research published in the past two decades. The review shows that a strong relationship exists between unemployment, the economy, and suicide. A common "chain of adversity" can begin with job loss and move toward depression through financial strain and loss of personal control. In fact, this chain leads to myriad financial, social, health and mental health outcomes-all of them negative. The most common (but by no means the only) mental health outcome is depression, which significantly increases suicide risk. The associated financial outcomes (such as mortgage foreclosures and loss of retirement security) have not been researched with respect to suicide. However, the potential link is that for vulnerable individuals, losses (whether real or anticipated) that result in humiliation, shame, or despair can trigger suicide attempts." - "Relationship between the Economy, Unemployment and Suicide." Suicide Prevention Resource Center (SPRC), November 2008.
"There was a strong independent association between suicide and individuals who were unemployed (odds ratio 2.6; 95% confidence interval 2.0 to 3.4) and permanently sick (2.5; 1.6 to 4.0).... The association between suicide and unemployment is more important than the association with other socioeconomic measures." - "Suicide, deprivation, and unemployment: record linkage study." British Medical Journal, Nov. 1998.
"Socioeconomic events are known to produce important fluctuations in suicide mortality. Unemployment, in particular, seems related to suicide risk along direct and indirect pathways. Blakely and co- workers' paper in this issue adds to evidence indicating a causal association between unemployment and suicide. Their results indicate that this association is not attributable to confounding factors linked to the socioeconomic status and that it is only partly related to health selection or mental disorders." - "Unemployment and Suicide." Journal of Epidemiological Community Health, 2003.
Anemic Jobs Help from Washington Assures More Suffering
According to news reports, President Barack Obama has announced that he will be proposing in September a "jobs package" meant to stimulate job growth. The program, which reportedly will include yet more tax cuts, along with some infrastructure spending, appears yet another tepid approach to a problem that is seriously affecting millions of people. In fact, the government has sat and twiddled its thumbs while millions have languished in despair.
Unemployment is deadly. The effects of the capitalist boom-and-bust system seriously damage millions of lives. But with an almost daily bombast of propaganda about terrorism, the populace lives in fear, while wondering how they will make their bills, ground down between anxiety over ghostly terrorists and eviction, or how to put gas in their car, or afford a bus pass. Hopelessness stalks the land, not Al Qaeda. And yet the politicians in D.C. care little or nothing about the suffering their policies cause. Indeed, their pockets are lined with campaign donations from corporations that routinely layoff hundreds of thousands, and ship many thousands more jobs overseas.
Callous disregard for human lives is what links the terrible policies of war and torture with the policies of neglect and indifference towards the jobless. Such callousness is the by-product of a get-rich-quick ethos that worships profit over all else, over worship of a capitalist system that has brought about terrible world wars, massive depressions, colonial atrocities, and even genocide. U.S. society awaits its turn through the meat-grinder of history.
Meanwhile, the politicians only care about getting re-elected. Indeed, the blogosphere is too infected with following the minutiae of the fake political campaigns, while daily, minute by minute, people's lives are destroyed. Somewhere today, perhaps while you were reading this, someone has taken their life because they felt useless, with no hope of gainful employment, their self-esteem ground down, the sense of meaning and connection severed by redundancy and societal disconnection.
We need dramatic, radical change in this country, and we need it now. For many thousands, however, it will come too late. How many more individual lives, how many more families lives will be shattered by mental illness and suicide due to joblessness? The right to a job is the most fundamental of human rights.
Originally published on Firedoglake.
Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California and a regular contributor to Truthout, blogs about civil liberties and issues revolving around the US government's torture program at The Dissenter. He can be reached at sfpsych at gmail dot com. Follow Jeff on Twitter: @Jeff_Kaye
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19) Study: Recession Has Dramatically Increased Percentage of Poor Children in America
child poverty has grown
By Lynnel Hampton-Bott, Your Black World
August 20, 2011
http://yourblackworld.com/2011/08/20/study-recession-has-dramatically-increased-percentage-of-poor-children-in-america/
Research conducted by the Annie E. Casey Foundation shows child poverty in the US has increased from 2000 - 2009, with 38 states being particularly hard hit, according to a national study to be published this week. The report also noted that 14.7 million children, 20 percent, were poor in 2009 - a 2.5 million increase from 2000, when 17 percent of U.S. youth resided in low-income conditions.
For example, the percentage of Georgia's children living in poverty in 2000 increased from 18 % to 22% in 2009 or approximately 568,000 youth by the end of the decade.
Nevada another state significantly impacted by the recession, has the most children living in households with jobless or underemployed parents. The state also has the most children affected by foreclosures, with 13% having been evicted from their homes due to unpaid mortgages.
This study was the Casey Foundation's first assessment of how the current recession has affected the nation's children. In a sobering discovery, the Foundation has found that low-income children continue to feel the effects of the economic downturn long after their parents have recovered.
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20) Shadow Warriors: Movin' On Up
By Conn Hallinan
August 17, 2011
http://dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com/
For decades the U.S. military has waged clandestine war on virtually every continent on the globe, but, for the first time, high-ranking Special Operations Forces (SOF) officers are moving out of the shadows and into the command mainstream. Their emergence suggests the U.S. is embarking on a military sea change that will replace massive deployments, like Iraq and Afghanistan, with stealthy night raids, secret assassinations, and death-dealing drones. Its implications for civilian control of foreign policy promises to be profound.
Early this month, Vice Adm. Robert Harward-a former commander of the SEALs-the Navy's elite SOF that recently killed al-Qaeda leader Osma bin Laden-was appointed deputy commander of Central Command, the military region that embraces the Middle East and Central Asia. Another SEAL commander, Vice Adm. Joseph Kernan, took over the number two spot in Southern Command, which covers Latin America and the Caribbean.
The Obama Administration has been particularly enamored of SOFs, and, according to reporters Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post, is in the process of doubling the number of countries where such units are active from 60 to 120. U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman Col. Tim Nye told Nick Turse of Salon that SOF forces would soon be deployed in 60 percent of the world's nations: "We do a lot of traveling."
Indeed they do. U.S. Special Operations Command (SOC) admits to having forces in virtually every country in the Middle East, Central Asia, as well as many in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America. But true to its penchant for secrecy, SOC is reluctant to disclose every country to which its forces are deployed. "We're obviously going to have some places where it's not advantageous for us to list where were at," Nye told Turse.
SOF forces have almost doubled in the past two decades, from some 37,000 to close to 60,000, and major increases are planned in the future. Their budget has jumped from $2.3 billion to $9.8 billion over the last 10 years
These Special Forces include the Navy's SEALs, the Marines Special Operations teams, the Army's Delta Force, the Air Force's Blue Light and Air Commandos, plus Rangers and Green Berets. There is also the CIA, which runs the clandestine drone war in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
It is increasingly difficult to distinguish civilian from military operatives. Leon Panetta, former director of the CIA, is now Defense Secretary, while Afghanistan commander Gen. David Petraeus-an expert on counterinsurgency and counter terror operations-is taking over the CIA. Both have worked closely with SOF units, particularly Petraeus, who vastly increased the number of "night raids" in Iraq and Afghanistan. The raids are aimed at decapitating insurgent leadership, but have caused widespread outrage in both countries.
The raids are based on intelligence that many times comes from local warlords trying to eliminate their enemies or competition. And, since the raids are carried out under a cloak of secrecy, it is almost impossible to investigate them when things go wrong.
A recent CIA analysis of civilian casualties from the organization's drone war in Pakistan contends that attacks since May 2010 have killed more than 600 insurgents and not a single civilian. But a report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism at City University in Londonfound "credible evidence" that at least 45 non-combatants were killed during this period. Pakistani figures are far higher.
Those higher numbers, according to Dennis C. Blair, retired admiral and director of national intelligence from 2009 to 2010, "are widely believed [in Pakistan] and, Blair points out, "our reliance on high-tech strikes that pose no risk to our soldiers is bitterly resented."
Rather than re-examining the policy of night raids and the use of armed drones, however, those tactics are being expanded to places like Yemen, Somalia, and Libya. The question is, who's next?
Latin America is one candidate.
A recent WikiLeak release demonstrates that there was close coordination between right wing, separatist groups in eastern Bolivia-where much of that country's natural gas reserves are located-and the U.S. Embassy. The cables indicate that the U.S. Embassy met with dissident generals, who agreed to stand aside in case of a right-wing coup against the left-leaning government of Evo Morales. The coup was thwarted, but Bolivia expelled American Ambassador Philip Goldberg over U.S. meddling in its domestic politics.
The U.S. has a long and sordid history of supporting Latin American coups-at times engineering them- and many in the region are tense over the recent re-establishment of the U.S. Fourth Fleet. The latter, a Cold War artifact, will patrol 30 countries in the region. Given the Obama administration's support for the post-2009 coup government in Honduras, its ongoing hostility to the Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and now the WikiLeak revelations about Bolivia, the idea of appointing a "shadow warrior" the number two leader in South Command is likely to concern governments in the region.
SOFs have become almost a parallel military. In 2002, Special Operations were given the right to create their own task forces, separate from military formations like Central and Southern Command. In 2011 they got the okay to control their budgets, training and equipment, independent of the departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. If one reaches for an historical analogy, the Praetorian Guard of Rome's emperors comes to mind.
There is a cult-like quality about SOFs that the media and Hollywood has done much to nurture: Special Forces are tough, independent, competent and virtually indestructible. The gushy New Yorker magazine story about SEAL Team Six, "Getting Bin Laden," is a case in point. According to New York Timescolumnist Maureen Dowd, the story will be made into a movie-for-TV and released just before the 2012 elections.
There is a telling moment in that story that captures the combination of bravado and arrogance that permeates SOF units. An unidentified "senior Defense Department official" told author Nicholas Schmidle that the bin Laden mission was just "one of almost two thousand missions that have been conducted over the last couple of years, night after night." And then adds that these raids were routine, no big thing, "like mowing the lawn."
But war is never like "mowing the lawn," as 38 American and Afghan SOFs found out the night of Aug. 6 when their U.S. CH-47 "Chinook" helicopter flew into a carefully laid ambush just south of the Afghan capital of Kabul.
"It was a trap that was set by a Taliban commander," a "senior Afghan government official" told Agence France Presse. According to the official, the Taliban commander, Qari Tahir, put out a phony story that a Taliban meeting was taking place. When Army Rangers went in to attack the "meeting," they found the Taliban dug in and waiting. Within minutes the Rangers were pinned down and forced to send for help.
The Taliban had spent several years practicing for just such an event in the Korengal Valley that borders Pakistan. According to a 2009 Washington Poststory-"Taliban Surprising U.S. Forces With Improved Tactics"-the Valley is a training ground to learn how to gauge the response time for U.S. artillery, air strikes and helicopter assaults. "They know exactly how long it takes before...they have to break contact and pull back," a Pentagon officer told the Post.
"The Taliban knew which route the helicopter would take," said the Afghan official, because "that is the only route, so they took position on either side of the valley on mountains and as the helicopter approached, they attacked it with rockets." According to Wired, the insurgents apparently used an "improvised rocket-assisted rocket," essentially a rocket-propelled grenade with a bigger warhead.
As soon as the chopper was down, the Taliban broke off the attack and vanished. According to the U.S., many of those Taliban were later killed in a bombing raid, but believing what the military says these days about Afghanistan is a profound leap of faith.
SOFs are not invulnerable, nor are they a solution to the dangerous world we live in. And the qualities that make them effective- stealth and secrecy-are in fundamental conflict with a civilian controlled armed forces, one of the cornerstones of our democracy.
As Adm. Eric Olson, former head of Special Operations, recently said at the Aspen Institute's Security Forum, having Special Forces in 120 countries "depends on our ability to not talk about it," and what the military most wanted was "to get back into the shadows."
Which is precisely the problem.
Conn Hallinan can be read at dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com.
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21) Verizon Workers Plan to End Strike, Agreeing to Revive Talks Toward a Contract
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
August 20, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/technology/verizon-workers-end-strike-though-without-new-contract.html?hp
Leaders of the unions that have been on strike against Verizon Communications announced on Saturday that they were ending the walkout even though the two sides had not reached an overall settlement for a new contract.
Beginning with the evening shift on Monday, the 45,000 striking workers will return to their jobs, posts that they left on Aug. 7 in the nation's largest strike since 2007, when workers at General Motors held a two-day strike.
Union leaders are ending the walkout, they said, because Verizon management had finally agreed to engage in serious bargaining on the contentious issues after the company had originally insisted on negotiating more than 100 proposals for concessions.
Officials from the two unions that called the strike - the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers - made the announcement on Saturday.
The strike was a painful one, forcing thousands of workers and their families to live without paychecks for two weeks and hurting Verizon's image, as many customers complained of major delays for repairs and installations. The walkout involved workers from Massachusetts to Virginia in Verizon's traditional landline operations and in its new FiOS Internet and cable operations, but not workers at Verizon Wireless, which is largely nonunion.
Union officials said they had originally called the strike because they felt they were not being taken seriously and because Verizon was insisting on so many and such sweeping concessions. Verizon was hardly budging from its original position, the unions said, another point of contention. Verizon is pushing for, among other things, a pension freeze for current workers, fewer sick days, an end to all job security provisions, far larger employee contributions toward health coverage, and freedom to do as much outsourcing as it wants.
Larry Cohen, the communications workers' president, said in an interview Saturday that under an agreement reached Friday, the bargaining was being restructured to focus on major issues, with top Verizon officials indicating that there would be real progress in bargaining. Mr. Cohen said another factor that helped persuade the unions to return to work was that Verizon had agreed to keep the expired contract in force until a settlement is reached.
"Everybody knew we faced a long list of management demands and that's why there was a strike, and we would go back into bargaining when the talks could be meaningful," Mr. Cohen said. "We don't consider this a victory in any way. We consider it progress toward a good process at Verizon."
In a statement issued on Saturday, Verizon said the parties had agreed on a process "for moving forward to negotiate the major issues regarding benefits, cost structure, work flexibility and job security."
Marc C. Reed, Verizon's executive vice president for human resources, said Verizon believed that ending the strike "is in the best interest of our customers and our employees."
"The company hasn't conceded any of its proposals," Mr. Reed said in an interview. "At the end of the day we still have health care on the table. We still have proposals on job security and moving work on the table."
Mr. Reed said the unions had ended the strike because of "the pressure of having people not working in this tough economy." He added, "This is a situation where the purpose of the strike may not have any need."
Mr. Cohen acknowledged that the bargaining ahead might still be lengthy. He said Verizon initially seemed so dismissive of the two unions' position and so unwilling to budge from its original stance that union negotiators felt the company was seeking in effect to wipe out the unions' bargaining rights.
"The unions have been working with Verizon to restructure bargaining in a way that represents progress for everyone," he said. "We believe that Verizon management shares the goal of meaningful bargaining."
Jim Spellane, chief spokesman for the electrical workers' union, said the unions went on strike to get management's attention and to show that the workers could not be pushed around.
"The workers felt very strongly that their whole standard of living was under attack, that everything we've worked for for decades was under threat and wasn't being taken seriously," Mr. Spellane said. "They felt backed into a corner and so the strike was called."
Verizon officials have repeatedly said they needed major concessions from the landline division employees to keep that business competitive and to increase its lagging profitability. The company said its traditional landline business had declines in profits and in its customer base, even though that division was slowly rebounding thanks to growth of Verizon's FiOS fiber-optic business.
The two unions condemned Verizon's push for large-scale concessions, saying the demands were inappropriate because the company's overall profitability had been strong, totaling $22 billion over the last four years.
While many C.W.A. members voiced relief that they were returning to work, others posted complaints that their union had knuckled under by ending the walkout without a settlement and with Verizon's concession demands remaining on the table.
Throughout the strike, a big question that union leaders faced was whether Verizon had proposed scores of concessions in the hope of narrowing them down to win just two or three major ones, or whether it was intent on winning dozens of concessions and seriously weakening the two unions.
More than any other union leader in the country, Mr. Cohen has sought to promote and preserve bargaining rights, and he often said that Verizon's truculent approach to negotiations resembled those of state governors who wanted to abolish collective bargaining.
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22) Britain: Prison Population Hits Record
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
August 19, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/20/world/europe/20briefs-London.html?ref=world
Figures released Friday showed that the English prison population had hit a record high following the jailing of hundreds of people involved in the country's recent riots. Statistics released by the Ministry of Justice showed that the population in England and Wales reached 86,654 - just 1,500 places below operational capacity. About 700 people were added to the prison system in the past week.
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