SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, 11AM
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO
474 VALENCIA STREET
(NEAR 16TH STREET IN SAN FRANCISCO)
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STOP THE WAR ON IRAQ! BRING OUR TROOPS HOME NOW!
ALL OUT JANUARY 20TH, 5:00 P.M., CIVIC CENTER, S.F.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Kkk1928.jpg
This link brings you to a photo of the KKK marching down Pennsylvania
Avenue in Washington, DC in 1928. Evidently they were able to get
a permit.
(With many thanks to Kwame Somburu for supplying the link. This site
has a plethora of information about the KKK.... Bonnie Weinstein,
Bay Area United Against War)
The U.S. government is not allowing antiwar/anti-Bush protestors
onto Pennsylvania Ave. along the inauguration route Jan. 20th.
We have a constitutional right to protest the inauguration. BAUAW
encourages all to show up in DC and come to Pennsylvania Avenue
with your signs and banners and express your opposition to Bush
and to the War.
We demand equal access along the rout for all. We have a right to
protest our government or any of its official representatives.
Nothing gives the government the right to disallow legal and
peaceful protest.
If you can't go to DC, come out Jan. 20, 5pm, Civic Center, SF. in
solidarity with all protestors in Washington and everywhere who
oppose this war.
We are encouraging everyone to participate somehow by wearing
buttons and signs at work, at school and on the bus; hold banners
at freeway entrances, and crowded shopping areas etc. on Jan. 20.
Students should hold rallies and march to the Civic Center.
Come to our next meeting and pick a place to flyer or table for
Jan. 20 or hold a sign during the day, on Jan. 20 if you can.
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Mass Mailing for January 20th Counter-Inaugural
Tonight, Tuesday, December 28, we will have a mass mailing for
Jan. 20th a potluck dinner at the ANSWER office at 2489 Mission St,
Rm 30 in San Franciso. The mailing will start at 1pm; we will eat at
6pm and continue the mailing through the evening.
To subscribe to the list, send a message to:
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Let's Hit the Streets
To Defend Abortion Rights!
Saturday, January 22
Emboldened rightwing abortion foes have had the nerve to announce
a march in San Francisco on the anniversary of the historic Roe v. Wade
decision! Show them that San Francisco is a reproductive rights town --
save the date and plan to attend a counter demonstration!
What is needed in response is a multi-issue, militant, united front of
women, people of all colors, queers, immigrants, workers and everyone
targeted by the rightwing to show that the anti-abortionists are not
welcome in San Francisco!
Make your opinion heard!
Details of assembly time and place will be announced soon.
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PICTURES OF WAR
PLEASE ACCESS:
** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches **
** http://dahrjamailiraq.com **
I have obtained the originals of the photos I recently posted which were
taken from inside Fallujah.
These are of much higher quality.
Some of the comments have been updated, and there are some additional
pictures added which I did not have before.
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=album28&page=
1
More writing, photos and commentary at http://dahrjamailiraq.com
You can visit http://dahrjamailiraq.com/email_list/ to subscribe or
unsubscribe to the email list.
(c)2004 Dahr Jamail.
All images and text are protected by United States and international
copyright law. If you would like to reprint Dahr's Dispatches on the
web, you need to include this copyright notice and a prominent link
to the DahrJamailIraq.com website. Any other use of images and
text including, but not limited to, reproduction, use on another
website, copying and printing requires the permission of Dahr Jamail.
Of course, feel free to forward Dahr's dispatches via email.
Iraq_Dispatches mailing list
http://lists.dahrjamailiraq.com/mailman/listinfo/iraq_dispatches
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/
view_album.php?set_albumName=album28&page=1
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coalitionforfreethoughtinmedia/message/26138
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coalitionforfreethoughtinmedia/message/26138
Virginion Pilot via AP - Photos - click here
http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?story=79598&ran=187050
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ITALIAN.QUEER.DANGEROUS
a one-man show featuring Tommi Avicolli Mecca
directed by Francesca Prada
(The most important thing is for folks to make reservations ASAP.
Seating is limited. Please take a moment to call 554-0402 if you plan
to come to the show.)
JANUARY 14-29 (Friday and Saturday nights only: 14, 15; 21, 22; 28, 29)
JON SIMS CENTER, 1519 Mission/between Van Ness and 11th
8pm, $5-10 sliding scale (no one turned away)
seating is limited, for reservations: 415-554-0402
to volunteer to help with the show, call 415-552-6031
Through monologue and spoken word, well-known San Francisco
queer activist and writer Tommi Avicolli Mecca tells his story of
growing up in South Philly's working-class Little Italy. At age 19,
fired up with new pride in being gay, he came out to the world--
and his traditional Roman Catholic southern Italian famiglia--on
a TV talk show. The rest is history, and the subject of this performance.
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1) Rebels Strike Iraqi Forces After Bin Laden Call
By Aimer al-Aimery
TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters)
Tue Dec 28, 2004 09:20 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7192277&src=eD
ialog/GetContent§ion=news
2) Asia Struggles with Tsunami Death, Destruction
By David Fox
Tue Dec 28, 2004 07:32 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7191565&src=eD
ialog/GetContent§ion=news
3) U.S. to Pledge $15 Million for Tsunami Aid
WASHINGTON (Reuters)
Tue Dec 28, 2004 12:42 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7188968&src=eD
ialog/GetContent§ion=news
[With almost 40,000 deaths, so far in Asia, the U.S. government is
willing to spend a paltry $15 million for Tsunami Aid. Yet the U.S.
has spent $200+ billion to kill over 100,000 Iraqi's in their quest
for oil!...bw]
4) Israeli Missile Hits Car, Militants Escape
GAZA (Reuters)
Tue Dec 28, 2004 08:13 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7191853&src=eD
ialog/GetContent§ion=news
5) US, Britain holding 10,000 prisoners in Iraq
Last Update: Tuesday, December 28, 2004. 11:42am (AEDT)
ABC News Online
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200412/s1273053.htm
6) Homeland Security education at Community Colleges
A consortium of community colleges in various states across
the country are planning to offer programs in homeland
security leading to professional certificates in that area.
7) COLLEGES LAUNCH NATIONAL HOMELAND SECURITY EFFORT
First-Response Experts to Lead Coordinating Task Force
"A consortium of community colleges in various states across
the country are planning to offer programs in homeland
security leading to professional certificates in that area..."
8) Supermarket Giants Crush Central American Farmers
THE FOOD CHAIN | SURVIVAL OF THE BIGGEST
By CELIA W. DUGGER
December 28, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/international/americas/28guatemala.html?ex
=1105243990&ei=1&en=31a0faebf603a8ca
9) Being Sold a Bill of Goods: (very interesting...bw)
10) How Nonprofit Careerism Derailed the "Revolution"
Greens and Greenbacks
Counterpunch, December 27, 2004
By MICHAEL DONNELLY
full:
http://www.counterpunch.org/donnelly12272004.html
11) Bob Herbert: How the Iraq tragedy is hitting home
Bob Herbert The New York Times
Monday, December 27, 2004
http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/26/opinion/edherb.html
12) A Third of the Dead in Undersea Quake Are Said to Be Children
By SETH MYDANS
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka
December 28, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/international/asia/28CND_quake.html?hp&ex=
1104296400&en=eee9dda7fec47a7a&ei=5094&partner=homepage
13) That Line at the Ferrari Dealer? It's Bonus Season on Wall Street
By JENNY ANDERSON
December 28, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/business/28bonus.html?hp&ex=1104296400&en=
9dbbb1a2157e9ffa&ei=5094&partner=homepage
14) AIN'T WE GOT FUN?
Words by Gus Kahn and Raymond B. Egan
Music by Richard Whiting,1921
http://www.rienzihills.com/SING/aintwegotfun.htm
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1) Rebels Strike Iraqi Forces After Bin Laden Call
By Aimer al-Aimery
TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters)
Tue Dec 28, 2004 09:20 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7192277&src=eD
ialog/GetContent§ion=news
TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters) - Insurgents overran a police post near Saddam
Hussein's home town on Tuesday, hauled 12 men outside and shot
them in a dramatic show of force, a day after Osama bin Laden declared
holy war on the U.S.-backed election.
The dawn massacre in Tikrit, where the guerrillas also blew up the
police station, was the bloodiest in a spate of attacks in Iraq's Sunni
minority heartlands north of Baghdad; at least five other policemen
were killed and several National Guards.
In Samarra, U.S. forces imposed an immediate daytime curfew after
an attack on a police station and a car bomb attack on a U.S. convoy,
residents said. A suicide car bomber failed in a bid to assassinate
a National Guard general in Baghdad.
The timing of the attacks and broadcast of the al Qaeda leader's
audiotape seemed coincidental but together they racked up the
pressure on Iraqi voters to stay at home on Jan. 30 and seemed
aimed to instil fear in Iraq's new security forces.
Both have grave implications for U.S. prospects in Iraq.
Bin Laden's call for a boycott of the election and his endorsement
of Islamist ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's campaign of bombing and
kidnap will find few willing supporters in Iraq. But the threat of
being killed will put many off voting anyway.
The most prominent party from Saddam's long dominant Sunni
minority already pulled out of the election on Monday, saying
violence in Sunni areas meant the vote could not be fair.
The chances have risen that an assembly will be elected
that gives Shi'ites an exaggerated majority, and so finds
little legitimacy among Sunnis. That will upset Washington's
hopes for a representative government that can handle its own
security.
Security may also have to remain in U.S. hands if Iraqi
forces succumb to the relentless intimidation of the insurgents.
EXECUTION-STYLE KILLINGS
Hours after the purported bin Laden audiotape was broadcast
on Al Jazeera television, calling anyone who voted an
"infidel," gunmen swarmed over the Mukashifa police compound,
just south of Tikrit, after dawn, police and a U.S. military
spokesman said.
Rounding up the dozen officers in the compound, they shot
them execution-style, gunning down one who tried to flee, a
police source told Reuters. They then blew up the station.
Five other policemen were killed in four other attacks
south of Tikrit around the same time. At Baquba, northeast of
Baghdad, a suicide car bomber killed five people and wounded
22, most of them National Guards attending the scene of an
earlier bomb.
"Jihad in Iraq is a duty and shirking it is baseless," a
voice, apparently bin Laden's, said, calling also for financial
contributions to flow in to back Zarqawi's al Qaeda operations.
"Happy is he who takes part in this war with his wealth or
his body," he said. "As ... the expenses of al Qaeda in Iraq
are 200,000 euros ($272,800) a week, not counting the expense
of other groups."
At Samarra, where clashes have resumed since a major U.S.
offensive in October, two civilians died and eight were wounded
when a suicide car bomber hit a U.S. convoy, witnesses said.
A policeman was killed and four wounded when rebels then
attacked a police station in broad daylight. U.S. vehicles and
mosque minarets announced an immediate daytime curfew.
At Sineeya, near the northern oil refining town of Baiji,
the town council resigned after the assassination of its
leader.
POWELL CAUTION
The day's bloodshed was a reminder of the potency of the
alliance between international Sunni Islamists, like Zarqawi
and Iraqi nationalists from the 20-percent Sunni Arab minority,
who see elections handing power to the 60-percent Shi'ite
community.
If Sunni areas fail to vote, Secretary of State Colin
Powell said the resulting assembly should at least give a nod
to the Sunni minority when it appoints a new government: "For
the government to be representative and for the government to
be effective, the transitional national assembly would
certainly have to take into account the ethnic mix," Powell
said.
U.S. officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
on a Christmas visit to soldiers in Iraq last week, stress the
need to expand and improve Iraq's security forces as a means of
ensuring U.S. troops, now numbering 150,000, can go home.
But the performance of Iraqi forces has been patchy and
they are prone to infiltration by militants like the suicide
bomber who killed 21 people in a U.S. mess hall in Mosul a week
ago -- the bloodiest single incident of the war for the Americans.
Large, paramilitary assaults on police posts have become a
feature of the increasingly sophisticated insurgency in recent
months. In the northern city of Mosul, most of the U.S.-trained
police fled and many stations were destroyed last month while
U.S. forces were fighting in the rebel bastion of Falluja.
That has left Iraq's third largest city in near anarchy,
making elections there highly problematic.
The attack on Falluja was intended to quell the insurgency
before the election. But though statistics are not easily
available, rebel attacks appear to have picked up after a lull.
(Additional reporting by Sabah al-Bazee in Samarra, Faris
al-Mehdawi in Baquba and Khaled Yacoub Oweis and Alastair
Macdonald in Baghdad)
($1=.7332 Euro)
(c) Reuters 2004
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2) Asia Struggles with Tsunami Death, Destruction
By David Fox
Tue Dec 28, 2004 07:32 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7191565&src=eD
ialog/GetContent§ion=news
GALLE, Sri Lanka (Reuters) - Survivors in seven countries
on the shores of the Indian Ocean scrabbled frantically through
debris and devastation for their loved ones on Tuesday as the
death toll climbed inexorably toward 40,000.
The scale of the destruction caused by Sunday's monster
tsunami left governments helpless and groping for succor. On
coastline after coastline, the sea disgorged the dead and
rescuers fought through a morass of wreckage, mud and body
parts.
The United Nations said the disaster was unique in
encompassing such a large area and so many countries.
Aid agencies struggled to cope with the enormity of the
disaster. The International Red Cross said it may have to
treble its appeal for funds.
"The enormity of the disaster is unbelievable," said Bekele
Geleta, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and
Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in Southeast Asia.
The United Nations said hundreds of relief planes packed
with emergency goods would arrive in the region from about two
dozen countries within the next 48 hours.
Authorities waited in trepidation for the outbreak of
diseases caused by polluted drinking water and the sheer scale
of thousands of putrefying bodies.
Many of the dead were children, and television screens and
newspapers were full of images of grief-stricken parents.
Sunday's giant 9.0-magnitude earthquake cracked the seabed
off the Indonesian island of Sumatra. That tectonic movement
triggered a tsunami that raced across the Andaman Sea and
struck Sri Lanka, southern India, the Maldives, Malaysia,
Myanmar and resorts packed with Christmas vacationers in
Thailand.
In Sri Lanka, which appeared worst hit, the government said
more than 18,700 people were confirmed dead and officials fear
the toll will hit 25,000.
Indonesia said the death toll on Aceh island had reached
7,072. Along Khao Lak beach on the Thai mainland north of
Phuket island, a magnet for Scandinavian and German tourists,
miles of shattered hotels began yielding up their dead,
bloated, gashed and mangled bodies -- at least 770 dead, many
of them Thai.
Officials fear the figure could rise above 60,000.
Indonesia said its toll could hit 25,000, while Sri Lankan
officials warned up to 25,000 people may have died there.
Thailand said its toll may exceed 2,000.
"There are lots of dead foreigners because it is during our
high season and Christmas. It is a family vacation time," Thai
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra told reporters.
Only 112 dead foreigners had been identified. They included
22 French people, 13 Norwegians, 12 Britons, 11 Italians and 10
Swedes, 9 Japanese and 8 Americans, as well as tourists from
Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, New
Zealand, Singapore, South Africa and Taiwan.
CATASTROPHE EVIDENT AS RESCUERS REACH NEW GROUND The extent
of the catastrophe and the human toll became clearer as rescue
teams began to reach remote areas.
On some of India's Andaman and Nicobar islands, located
almost atop the epicenter of Sunday's earthquake, rescuers
found only a third of inhabitants still alive. A hundred air
force officers and their families vanished from one island
base.
Police say at least 5,000 people are confirmed or presumed
dead in the group of more than 550 islands bordering Myanmar
and Indonesia. The death toll across India is estimated at 9,500.
On the island of Chowra, rescuers found only 500 survivors
from 1,500 residents, the territory's deputy police chief, C.
Vasudeva Rao, said. "We thought the entire island was washed
away. But we found 500 survivors."
Residents in Sri Lanka's southern port city of Galle,
strewn with the twisted wreckage of buses, toppled buildings
and the debris of people's lives, surveyed the scene in disbelief.
"Look around," said jeweller Ifti Muaheed, who lost tens of
thousands of dollars' worth of precious gems to the deluge and
faced restarting his generations-old business from scratch.
"This will take months, maybe years to sort out."
Bodies littered the streets in northern Indonesia, closest
to Sunday's giant earthquake. About 1,000 people lay where they
were killed when a tsunami struck as they watched a sports
event.
"I was in the field as a referee. The waves suddenly came
in and I was saved by God -- I got caught in the branches of a
tree," said Mahmud Azaf, who lost his three children to the
tsunami.
"This was the worst day in our history," said Sri Lankan
businessman Y.P. Wickramsinghe as he picked through the rubble
of his sea-front dive shop in the devastated southwestern town
of Galle. "I wish I had died. There is no point in living."
"The cost of the devastation will be in the billions of dollars,"
said Jan Egeland, head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination
of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
"However, we cannot fathom the cost of these poor societies
and the nameless fishermen and fishing villages ... that have
just been wiped out. Hundreds of thousands of livelihoods have
gone."
ARC OF DESTRUCTION
Thousands of miles of coastline from Indonesia to Tanzania
were battered by deadly waves. Fishing villages were
devastated, power and communications cut and homes destroyed.
Dozens perished in Malaysia, Myanmar and the Maldives and
in far-away Somalia, 6,000 km (3,600 miles) to the west of the
epicenter, 38 people were killed. At least 10 people were
killed in Tanzania.
"My son is crying for his mother," said Bejkhajorn
Saithong, 39, searching for his wife at a hotel on Khao Lak
beach. The hotel had been knocked off its foundations and
a few body parts jutted from the wreckage.
"I think this is her. I recognize her hand, but I'm not sure,"
Bejkhajorn said.
Television pictures taken from the air showed bodies
tangled in debris littering a beach. Other bodies floated in
the sea.
In Sri Lanka about 1.5 million people -- or 7.5 percent of
the population -- were homeless, many sheltering in Buddhist
temples and schools.
Throughout the region, people fearing another wave
sheltered in public buildings, schools and on high ground.
There was a shortage of clean water and provisions. Those not
searching for survivors hastened to bury the dead.
The U.N.'s Egeland said there could be epidemics of
intestinal and lung infections unless health systems in the
stricken countries got help.
Countries on the Pacific Ocean have tsunami warning systems
but those on the Indian Ocean, where tsunamis hit about once a
century, do not.
Sunday's huge waves were tracked by U.S. seismologists who
said they had had no way of warning governments in the region.
(c) Reuters 2004
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3) U.S. to Pledge $15 Million for Tsunami Aid
WASHINGTON (Reuters)
Tue Dec 28, 2004 12:42 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7188968&src=eD
ialog/GetContent§ion=news
[With almost 40,000 deaths, so far in Asia, the U.S. government is
willing to spend a paltry $15 million for Tsunami Aid. Yet the U.S.
has spent $200+ billion to kill over 100,000 Iraqi's in their quest for
oil!...bw]
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States expects to provide an
initial $15 million in aid for victims of a devastating tsunami in Asia
and has already released $400,000, a top U.S. aid official said on
Monday.
"You also have to see this not just as a one-time thing. Some
20,000-plus lives have been lost in a few moments but the lingering
effects will be there for years," Secretary of State Colin Powell said
at a news conference with the assistant administrator of the U.S.
Agency for International Development, Ed Fox.
Powell said $100,000 had already been given to each of India,
Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, and the United States was
in talks to contribute $4 million to the International Red Cross.
"It's anticipated that we'll add -- at least immediately -- another
probably $10 million for a total of about $15 million in our initial
response to this tragedy," Fox said.
He said it was still unknown how the aid would be disbursed.
President Bush, who is vacationing at his Crawford, Texas, ranch
had been monitoring the tragedy in Asia, White House spokesman
Trent Duffy said.
"The United States, at the president's direction, will be a leading
partner in one of the most significant relief, rescue and recovery
challenges the world has ever known," Duffy said.
Powell also said the United States Pacific Command had
dispatched P-3 Orion long-range maritime surveillance aircraft
from Kadena, Japan, to Thailand to take part in damage survey
operations. He said the Pacific Fleet was examining "what else
they might be able to do to help in this situation."
Lt. Col. Bill Bigelow, a spokesman for U.S. Pacific Command,
said separately the U.S. military was loading six large C-130
Hercules cargo planes with relief supplies including food,
clothing and shelter at Yokota Air Base in Japan, headed for
Thailand.
He said Pacific Command was also assembling three teams
of about 10-15 people to fly to the region to assess disaster
relief needs in the wake of the deadly earthquake and tsunami
that slammed coasts from India to Indonesia, killing more than
22,700 people.
(Additional reporting by Caren Bohan, Will Dunham, David
Morgan and Saul Hudson)
(c) Reuters 2004
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
4) Israeli Missile Hits Car, Militants Escape
GAZA (Reuters)
Tue Dec 28, 2004 08:13 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7191853&src=eD
ialog/GetContent§ion=news
GAZA (Reuters) - An Israeli drone aircraft fired a missile
into a car carrying two Hamas militants in Gaza on Tuesday but
both escaped without serious injury, witnesses said.
Some passersby suffered minor wounds, they said, in the
incident in the city of Khan Younis, a bastion of militants who
often fire mortar bombs and rockets at nearby Jewish
settlements in the occupied territory.
Palestinian militant sources said the Hamas men were
apparently en route to staging an attack on part of the
fortified Gush Katif settlement bloc nearby when they were
spotted by a patrolling drone and targeted.
In a statement, the Israeli army said aircraft had fired on
gunmen blamed for mortar attacks from Khan Younis, including 40
in the past week.
Israeli tanks and troops have raided Khan Younis repeatedly
to kill or capture militants behind constant rocket and mortar
salvoes against settlements.
But the attacks by the elusive, mobile mortar squads have
persisted, although they only rarely cause casualties.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon intends to evacuate all
8,000 settlers from among 1.3 million Palestinians in Gaza next
year under his plan to "disengage" from conflict in some
occupied territory, but vows to smash militant groups first.
(c) Reuters 2004
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
5) US, Britain holding 10,000 prisoners in Iraq
Last Update: Tuesday, December 28, 2004. 11:42am (AEDT)
ABC News Online
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200412/s1273053.htm
Over 350 foreigners are among about 10,000 detainees being held
in US-run prisons in Iraq, Iraq's Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar
Amin Over says.
"US forces told us on December 23 that they are holding 353 foreign
terrorists," Mr Amin said.
He says they include: 61 Egyptians, 59 Saudis, 56 Syrians,
40 Jordanians, 35 Sudanese, 22 Iranians, 10 Tunisians,
10 Yemenis, eight Palestinians and five Lebanese, among others.
US military detainee operations spokesperson Lieutenant
Colonel Barry Johnston refused to comment on the figures.
"I will not confirm numbers of specific nationalities held among
foreign fighters," Lt Col Johnston said.
"As a matter of policy, we only share those numbers with
government officials."
Both the Iraqi and US governments blame foreigners mainly
from Syria and Iran for much of the violence in the country.
Mr Amin says 4,691 prisoners were being held in Camp Bucca
near the southern port city of Umm Qasr, 3,411 in Abu Ghraib
west of Baghdad and 818 in Al-Shuaiba British controlled Basra.
He also says that 104 are being held in Camp Cropper, near
Baghdad's airport, where Saddam and other so-called "high-value"
detainees are located.
Lt Col Johnson says the numbers were "generally correct" except
for Abu Ghraib where the number is "closer to 2,500 at the moment".
Following revelations about prisoner abuse earlier this year in
Abu Ghraib, the US military instituted several changes in the way
detainees are held and interrogated.
The ranks of prisoners may have shot up again after hundreds
were detained during major operations against insurgents south
of the capital, in Samarra and Mosul, north of Baghdad and the
massive assault on the former rebel stronghold of Fallujah,
west of Baghdad.
-AFP
(c) 2004 Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Copyright information: http://abc.net.au/common/copyrigh.htm
Privacy information: http://abc.net.au/privacy.htm
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
7) COLLEGES LAUNCH NATIONAL HOMELAND SECURITY EFFORT
First-Response Experts to Lead Coordinating Task Force
"A consortium of community colleges in various states across
the country are planning to offer programs in homeland
security leading to professional certificates in that area..."
A consortium of community colleges in various states across the country are
planning to offer programs in homeland security leading to professional
certificates in that area. Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC),
which is part of the City University of N Y (CUNY) is a member of that
consortium. (see the press release, included below, for more information on
all the participants) At BMCC a "letter of intent" supporting the program
was originally passed by the Faculty Council, but students and some faculty
(especially members of the campus chapter of the PSC, the CUNY union) have
been organizing opposition to the program. Thus, when the matter was fully
debated at a Faculty Council meeting this past week, the result was the
postponement of a decision about implementing the program. The matter of
course is not settled. It will be presented to the trustees of the Bd. of
Higher Education (in February probably) and then will come back to the BMCC
faculty for a final decision. The program might be defeated entirely, or it
might be modified. Those of us who are involved hope for defeat. And we are
hoping that activists around the country will initiate research into the
programs at the other campuses -- and, of course, actions opposing those
programs.
The program in Homeland Security has some very disturbing aspects to it, as
noted in the following excerpts from a talk given by a member of the
International Committee of the union:
"The task force has a Homeland Security Management Institute at Monroe
Community College near Rochester and is headed by Colonel John J. Perrone
Jr. who previously commanded the Joint Detainee Operations Group in
Guantanamo Bay.
On the Advisory Board for the BMCC program, William J. Daly represents the
British Control Risks Group, which has offices in several parts of the
world, notably Iraq and Colombia. It recruits from BritainÂ’s Special Air
Services, which is reputed to have operated as assassination squads in
Northern Ireland and North Yemen. An Israeli firm, International Security
and Defense Systems affiliated with Smith & Wesson gun makers, is
represented on the BMCC Advisory Board by Leo Gleser, formerly a MOSSAD
operative. A Chilean news magazine has linked him to the training of death
squads of the Honduran Army in the 1980s."
"Some troubling topics include: natural surveillance, interrogation,
profiles of terrorists and their organizations. The course on Terrorism and
Counterterrorism defines terrorism as "any violent act against persons or
property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian populations, or
any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives."
This is a very broad definition indeed. It could include a student
overturning a military recruitment table.
A career ladder is offered in the field of private security that is
expected to grow faster than all other occupations due to the threat of
terrorism,and to duties formerly handled by government police officers and
marshals. HereÂ’s another example of the public sector being handed over to
private industry. "
press release from the AACC on the formation of the "Ad Hoc Task Force on
Homeland Security"
COLLEGES LAUNCH NATIONAL HOMELAND SECURITY EFFORT
First-Response Experts to
Lead Coordinating Task Force
Washington, D.C. - In response to a growing national need to develop better
training and new programs related to homeland security, the American
Association of Community Colleges (AACC) announces the appointment of a
21-member task force to define a long-range strategy for the nation's 1,173
two-year colleges.
The AACC Ad Hoc Task Force on Homeland Security comprises 18 community
college presidents and three senior specialists at institutions with
advanced programs and demonstrated expertise in defense and security.
Members were also chosen based on well-established relationships they have
built with four-year colleges and universities, as well as with state and
local security providers.
Community colleges represent the largest, fastest growing sector of higher
education, currently educating the majority of the nation's
"first-responders." Over half of new nurses and close to 85 percent of law
enforcement officers, firefighters and EMTs are credentialed by the
colleges. In addition, the colleges are rapidly establishing or expanding
programs to prepare professionals in related fields such as environmental
safety, cyber security, power grid management and emergency response
management.
"Because of their numbers and their close collaboration at local and state
levels, community colleges represent a tested resource to help the nation
ramp up its security effort in the most cost-effective way," said AACC
President George R. Boggs. "This new, strategic collaboration will
significantly accelerate our national preparedness."
The AACC Task Force began its work this week to prepare for a Feb. 8
meeting in Washington, D.C., to coalesce and coordinate extant homeland
security efforts already well underway at community colleges around the
nation. The group will also draw on the expertise of a newly-created
Homeland Security and Public Safety Network, made up of community college
faculty/staff specialists nationwide. Task Force members will serve for
approximately two years; the Network will be ongoing.
Task Force members include the following community college
presidents/chancellors: David Buettner (Fox Valley Technical College,
Wis.), Vernon Crawley (Moraine Valley Community College, Ill.), Larry
Devane (Redlands Community Colleges, Okla.), Mary Ellen Duncan (Howard
Community College, Md.), Thomas Flynn (Monroe Community College, N.Y.),
Margaret Forde (Houston Community College System - Northeast College,
Texas), Herlinda Glasscock (Dallas County Community College District -
North Lake College), Patricia Keir (San Diego Miramar College, Calif.),
Carl Kuttler (St. Petersburg College, Fla.), Antonio Perez (Borough of
Manhattan Community College, N.Y.), Donald Snyder (Lehigh Carbon Community
College, Penn.), Mary Spangler (Oakland Community College, Mich.),
Gwendolyn Stephenson (Hillsborough Community College, Fla.), Robert Templin
(Northern Virginia Community College), Frank Toda (Columbia Gorge Community
College, Ore.),Steven Wall (Pierce College, Wash.), Frances White (Skyline
College,Calif.), P. Anthony ("Tony") Zeiss (Central Piedmont Community
College,
(N.C.).
Also selected to serve on the Task Force are: George Coxey, chair, Criminal
Justice/Fire Science Technologies (Owens Community College, Ohio); Douglas
Feil director, Environmental Health & Safety Training (Kirkwood Community
College, Iowa); and Arthur Tyler, vice president, Administrative Services &
Budget (Los Angeles City College, Calif.).
The current AACC Board Chair, Jesus ("Jess") Carreon (chancellor, Dallas
County Community College District, Texas), Chair-elect Henry Shannon
(chancellor, St. Louis Community College, Mo.) and AACC President George R.
Boggs will serve as ex officio members of the Task Force.
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ufpj-rights/
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8) Supermarket Giants Crush Central American Farmers
THE FOOD CHAIN | SURVIVAL OF THE BIGGEST
By CELIA W. DUGGER
December 28, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/international/americas/28guatemala.html?ex
=1105243990&ei=1&en=31a0faebf603a8ca
PALENCIA, Guatemala - Mario Chinchilla, his face shaded by a battered
straw hat, worriedly surveyed his field of sickly tomatoes. His hands and
jeans were caked with dirt, but no amount of labor would ever turn his
puny crop into the plump, unblemished produce the country's main
supermarket chain displays in its big stores.
For a time, the farmer's cooperative he heads managed to sell
vegetables to the chain, part owned by the giant Dutch multinational,
Ahold, which counts Stop & Shop among its assets. But the co-op's
members lacked the expertise, as well as the money to invest in the
modern greenhouses, drip irrigation and pest control that would have
helped them meet supermarket specifications.
Squatting next to his field, Mr. Chinchilla's rugged face was a portrait
of defeat. "They wanted consistent supply without ups and downs,"
he said, scratching the soil with a stick. "We didn't have the capacity
to do it."
Across Latin America, supermarket chains partly or wholly owned by
global corporate goliaths like Ahold, Wal-Mart and Carrefour have
revolutionized food distribution in the short span of a decade and
have now begun to transform food growing, too.
The megastores are popular with customers for their lower prices,
choice and convenience. But their sudden appearance has brought
unanticipated and daunting challenges to millions of struggling,
small farmers.
The stark danger is that increasing numbers of them will go bust
and join streams of desperate migrants to America and the urban
slums of their own countries. Their declining fortunes, economists
and agronomists fear, could worsen inequality in a region where the
gap between rich and poor already yawns cavernously and the
concentration of land in the hands of an elite has historically fueled
cycles of rebellion and violent repression.
"It's like being on a train with a glass on a table and it's about to fall
off and break," said Prof. Thomas Reardon, an agricultural economist
at Michigan State University. "Everyone sees the glass on the table -
but do they see it shaking? Do they see the edge? The edge is the
structural changes in the market."
In the 1990's supermarkets went from controlling 10 to 20 percent
of the market in the region to dominating it, a transition that took
50 years in the United States, according to researchers at Michigan
State and the Latin American Center for Rural Development in
Santiago, Chile.
Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica and Mexico are furthest along.
While the changes have happened more slowly in poorer, more rural
Central American countries, they have begun to quicken here, too.
In Guatemala, the number of supermarkets has more than doubled
in the past decade, as the share of food they retail has reached
35 percent.
The hope that small farmers would benefit by banding together
in business-minded associations has not been borne out. Some
like Aj Ticonel, in the city of Chimaltenango, have succeeded.
But the evidence suggests that the failure of Mr. Chinchilla's
co-op is the more common fate.
Its feeble attempts to sell to major supermarkets illustrate how
the odds are stacked against small farmers, as well as the uneven
effects of globalization itself. Many small farmers in the region
are getting left behind, while medium-sized and larger growers,
with more money and marketing savvy, are far more likely to benefit.
Most fruits and vegetables in the region are still sold in small
shops and open-air markets, but the value of supermarket
purchases from farmers has soared and now surpasses that
of produce exports by two and half times, researchers say.
The bottom line: supermarkets and their privately set standards
already loom larger for many farmers than the rules of the
World Trade Organization.
Still, stiff competition from foreign growers is also quite real.
To enter the supermarkets of Guatemala's dominant
supermarket chain, La Fragua - part of a holding company
one-third owned by Ahold - is to understand why Professor
Reardon likens them to a Trojan horse for foreign goods.
At La Fragua's immense distribution center in Guatemala City,
trucks back into loading docks, where electric forklifts unload
apples from Washington State, pineapples from Chile, potatoes
from Idaho and avocados from Mexico.
The produce is trucked from here to the chain's supermarkets,
which now span the country. Scenes at a mall in Guatemala
City anchored by Maxi Bodega, one of the company's stores,
suggest the evolving nature of grocery shopping for Latin
America's 512 million people.
On the ground floor was a sprawling, old-fashioned produce
market. At the entry, there was a shrine to its patron saint,
the Virgin of Rosario, who had plastic flowers sprinkled at
her queenly feet.
The sound of women patting out tortillas and the sweet smells
of ripe tropical fruits drifted through the market as people
stopped to squeeze the avocados, sniff the pineapples and
haggle for cheaper oranges.
To go upstairs was to leave Guatemala behind and enter
a mall that could be in Bangkok or New York, with its synthetic
Christmas wreaths, cheap clothing stores and oversized discount
packages of napkins and symmetrical tomatoes in plastic trays
at the Maxi Bodega.
The Baldetti family exemplified the generational change
unfolding here.
Delia Baldetti, an 81-year-old housewife, will only shop for
produce amid the heaps of tomatoes, chilies and papayas where
she can bargain to her heart's content. Her daughter Elsa,
a 56-year-old painter, shops both here and at Maxi Bodega,
while Elsa's daughter, a 36-year-old business administrator,
only has time for the supermarket.
Elsa wistfully predicted that while the country's fragrant, raucous
markets will never disappear, they will diminish. "We'll lose
some of our identity," she said. "We're copying the foreigners."
Farmers who do not or cannot afford to change fast enough
to meet the standards set by supermarkets are threatened.
The tiny farming community of Lo de Silva clings to a steep,
verdant hillside. Slanting cornstalks look as if they would slide
into the valley if they were not rooted to the earth.
Some of the more than 300 farmers who originally belonged to
Mr. Chinchilla's co-op, the Association of Small Irrigation Users
of Palencia - known by its Spanish acronym, Asumpal - were
from this village. Only eight remain. The only product they still
sell is salad tomatoes - and they sell to middlemen, not supermarkets.
José Luis Pérez Escobar, 44, a member of the co-op, scratched
out a living for 20 years from his small field, perched in the
clouds here.
But after his potato crop failed last year, he migrated to the United
States to save his land from foreclosure by the bank, leaving his
wife, MarÃa Graciela Lorenzana, and their five children behind.
He now works the graveyard shift at a golf course in Texas for
$6 an hour so he can pay his debts.
He had dreamed his cooperative would help him escape poverty by
selling directly to the supermarkets. "It would be magnificent,"
Mrs. Lorenzana recalled of that more hopeful time. "The small
farmer would not need a middleman. But he was never able to
achieve it."
A Transformation Begins
The transformation of Latin America's food retailing system
began in the 1980's and accelerated in the 1990's as countries
opened their economies, often to satisfy conditions for loans
from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. As
foreign investment flooded in, multinational retailers bought
up domestic chains or entered joint ventures with them.
Most concern about the perils of globalization for local farmers
has focused on unfair trade competition from heavily subsidized
American and European producers.
But increasingly, supermarkets also leave small farmers exposed
as the stores spread from big cities to small towns, from well-
to-do enclaves to working-class neighborhoods, from richer
countries to poorer ones.
The chains now dominate sales of processed foods and their
share of produce sales is growing. In Guatemala, supermarkets
still control only 10 to 15 percent of fruit and vegetable sales.
But in Argentina, their slice has grown to as much as 30 percent,
while in Brazil they control half the market, according to
Professor Reardon.
As the chains' market share expands, farmers who are shut
out find themselves forced to retreat to shrinking rural markets.
The changes would not be so troubling if the region's
economies were growing robustly and generating decent
jobs for globalization's losers. After all, supermarkets are
providing consumers with cheaper, cleaner places to buy
food, economists say.
"It would be an appealing transformation of the sector if
alternative jobs could be made available," said Samuel Morley,
an economist at the International Food Policy Research Institute
in Washington.
But economic growth has not kept pace with rising populations.
The number of people living below poverty lines in Latin America
has risen from 200 million in 1990 to 224 million this year.
More than 6 in 10 people living in rural areas are still poor.
Given the difficulties small farmers face in doing business
with multinational corporations, traditional strategies,
like providing peasants with fertilizer and improved seeds,
now seem quaint here.
Professor Reardon and Julio A. Berdegué, an agronomist
who heads the Latin American Center for Rural Development,
are collaborating with supermarket researchers across Asia
and Africa, as well as Latin America, to document the trends.
In addition, a team at Michigan State has financing from the
United States Agency for International Development to help
small farmers in Central America, India and Kenya sell to
supermarkets. They and other development experts are
brainstorming about what to do.
Among the ideas: Regulations requiring that farmers be
paid promptly. Enforcement of laws meant to curtail
monopolies and oligopolies, including mergers of supermarket
chains. Improved security and cleanliness at open-air markets.
Infusions of credit and technical expertise for co-ops.
But while such cooperatives are almost certainly necessary
if small growers are to amass the clout and scale to sell to
multinational chains, they have been a disappointment so far.
Even in economically vibrant Chile, which has invested
$1.5 billion in small-scale farming since 1990, a study of
750 farmer organizations found that 8 of 10 had failed or
survived only with continuous infusions of government aid.
Mr. Berdegué, author of the Chile study, had sought to make
the associations work in the 1990's when he was a senior
government official there. The pressure from the I.M.F. and
the World Bank to allow greater foreign investment was
intended to make Latin American economies more competitive.
"But the model did not have a social dimension at the real
center," he said. "It was trickle-down economics."
An Experiment Disappoints
Mr. Chinchilla, 46, drove his battered, 20-year-old pickup,
laden with crates of tomatoes, into his cooperative's spacious
packing shed. The building and the business are in decay.
The water had been cut off. Toilets no longer flushed. The
roof was missing over the bathroom, its floor covered with
bird droppings. The live-in caretakers who sort the co-op's
tomatoes had only an open pail of rainwater to wash their
hands. They wore no gloves while handling the fruit.
Typically, each farmer is growing less than an acre of salad
tomatoes in rustic greenhouses that are fast deteriorating.
Their production has plummeted because of the blight that
dries out the plants, which then yield very small tomatoes.
"We haven't found a solution," MarÃa Antonietta Muralles,
a co-op member, said with a shrug. "Maybe it's the water."
Mr. Chinchilla treated his plants with pesticides to no effect.
"You can't fight it with chemicals," he said. Maybe the soil itself
is infected, they speculated.
"Everything costs money," he explained - money he does not
have and cannot afford to borrow at the going rate of 21 percent.
"When you don't have access to credit, you can't expand," he said.
"We don't want anything given to us, but we need a hand."
As the farmers talked, two workers separated tomatoes by size,
with the shrunken ones far too numerous. But their co-op's hopes
of selling to big supermarket chains withered well before the plants.
The co-op got started in the late 1990's, with a small grant from
the government to upgrade the packing shed. An agronomist,
Candelario López, was given a two-year contract, also at
government expense, to advise them.
Over the next couple of years, Mr. López helped the co-op get
its foot in the door with La Fragua and C.S.U., another major
supermarket chain. The chains have since united to become
the Central American Retail Holding Company, with 332 stores
and almost $2 billion in sales in 2003. It is one-third owned by
Ahold, which had more than $68 billion in sales last year.
But the co-op did not manage to supply the big chains for long.
The farmers themselves were uncomfortable with the rules of the
supermarket game. They found it difficult to wait weeks to get
paid. They did not want to sell their vegetables on the books
and pay taxes that sharply cut profits. And some of what they
supplied was rejected as too bruised or too limp or too ripe.
The co-op's leaders said they quit selling to C.S.U. through its
dedicated wholesaler in 2000 after two container loads of
vegetables got held up for days at the Nicaraguan border,
severely damaging the produce. "We weren't prepared to absorb
that kind of loss," said Marco Tulio Alvizures, who then headed
the co-op.
Perhaps more fundamental, co-op members had trouble
consistently delivering the quantity and quality of produce
the supermarkets demanded, a problem Mr. Chinchilla readily
acknowledged.
In the case of La Fragua, Mr. Alvizures contended that the
chain never gave the co-op a chance to sell the amount it was
capable of. But Jorge González, the chain's manager for vegetables,
said the small orders likely reflected La Fragua's judgment, based
on weekly evaluations, that the co-op was not up to the task. The
co-op was such a small supplier that Mr. González could not recall
all the details of their dealings.
The corporate imperative is to reward suppliers who consistently
provide what the chain requires. If the vegetables do not arrive,
shelves stand empty. "We punish farmers very hard if they don't
deliver what we order," said Bernardo Roehrs, a spokesman for
the chain.
As the co-op members sought to navigate the difficult new world
of supermarkets, they lost the critical guidance of Mr. López, the
agronomist, when his contract expired in 2001. He is now
a salesman for a company that makes high-tech greenhouses
the co-op's farmers could never afford.
A Rare Success Story
Not too far from Palencia, in the city of Chimaltenango, is Aj Ticonel,
an association of small farmers that has thrived because it has
something Mr. Chinchilla's co-op lacked: a shrewd and enterprising
businessman to run it.
But even for a savvy company like Aj Ticonel, success came not
from supplying choosy supermarket chains but rather from its
ability to exploit a global market.
Aj Ticonel sells three million pounds of mini-vegetables and snow
peas for export to the United States, but only 80,000 pounds to
supermarkets. Alberto Monterroso said he gave up on growing
broccoli for La Fragua. He found the chain bought inconsistent
amounts. "There are a lot of competitors here," he said, "a lot of
small farmers trying to sell to them, so the prices are low."
The company's success has been built instead on sales of pricey
vegetables for export. It now sells the same to La Fragua, and its
membership has risen from 40 families in 1999 to 2,000 today.
Its plant sparkles. Its 53 packers wear gloves, face masks and
hairnets as they sort slender French beans on stainless steel tables.
Each box produce is marked with a bar code traceable to the
family that grew it.
Aj Ticonel sold $2.5 million worth of vegetables last year, but
Mr. Monterroso, a sociologist and deal maker with a passion for
justice, paid himself only $18,000. Most of the company's profits
are plowed back into the plant, marketing campaigns and
agricultural education for the farmers.
"I want a different country for my sons," Mr. Monterroso said.
"I'm trying to redistribute the wealth so people will live in
harmony."
One recent afternoon, a big Aj Ticonel truck took a meandering
path into the hilly countryside, stopping for peasants waiting
roadside with crates of vegetables to load.
Many of them grumbled that Aj Ticonel does not pay enough and
rejects too many of their vegetables, but most had been selling
to the company for years. The evidence of their profit could be
seen in new roofs, freshly painted homes and well-clothed
children.
Still, Mr. Monterroso acknowledged how hard it will be to replicate
Aj Ticonel. Three times, the company loaned money to farmers
to clone itself. Three times the farmers went out of business.
For Latin America's millions of small farmers, he offered this
sobering fact of life: "The client buys from us not because
poor people produce it, but because it's a good product."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
9) Being Sold a Bill of Goods: (very interesting...bw)
Derek Seidman
Richard Ohmann's Selling Culture is a rigorously intelligent study of
the emergence of a national mass culture in the United States at the
turn of the nineteenth century as seen through the rise of
widely-consumed popular magazines. Ohmann argues that the economic
crisis of the early 1890s compelled the capitalist class to devise new
and more stable profit-making avenues, and that this was done through
orchestrating the emergence of a consumer culture targeting the rising
"professional-managerial class" (PMC). At the vanguard of this project
was the rise of cheap, mass-circulated magazines, and this story is at
the center of Ohmann's work: "I propose to consider what conjunction of
interests, needs, activities, and forces led to the invention and
success of the modern magazine industry" (32). Not only were magazines
the vehicles for advertisements (both direct and indirect
profit-makers), but more importantly, they helped to solidify the
identity of the rising PMC and generally shape a new consumer-oriented
mass culture.
Here's a good companion volume:
The New York Times
December 1, 1993, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final
Books of The Times;
The Department Store and the Culture It Created
BYLINE: By MARGO JEFFERSON
Land of Desire
Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture
By William Leach
Illustrated. 510 pages. Pantheon. $30.
Like No Other Store . . .
The Bloomingdale's Legend and the Revolution in American Marketing
By Marvin Traub and Tom Teicholz
Illustrated. 428 pages. Times Books/ Random House. $25.
To mark the start of the holiday shopping season, some stores are opening
their doors at 7:30 A.M., earlier than most schools do, and others are
offering free massages to overstimulated patrons. One is providing callers
with a "Santa's Hotline," and another is supplying non-English-speaking
shoppers with translators.
This is consumer culture operating at full blast, and it is a culture made
in America just a century ago: a vast network of department stores, mail
order catalogues, credit services, advertising and public relations, all
set in motion by a group of businessmen who saw themselves as explorers and
empire builders. As one of the savviest, John Wanamaker, put it in 1906
when the store that bore his name was taking off: "Everyone who starts a
new thing has to stand where Columbus did when he set sail. Few had faith
that he could ever reach the Land of Desire."
Wanamaker is a pivotal figure in William Leach's history of this ruthless
and dazzling new world. Wanamaker's of Philadelphia was quickly joined by
Marshall Field of Chicago, May's of St. Louis, Filene's of Boston,
Bullock's of Los Angeles and Macy's of New York. Like nation-states, they
competed and collaborated to gain financial power, social influence and the
loyalty of their public. All were beneficiaries of a post-Civil War shift
that had turned a largely agrarian economy into an industrial behemoth.
With this economic shift came equally potent shifts in people's habits,
tastes, wants, needs and pleasures.
"Land of Desire" follows these changes with scholarly exactness and
writerly elegance. Mr. Leach takes in the full range of motives and
responses at work in consumer culture, from greed and manipulation to
idealism and inventiveness.
These men were nothing if not inventive. They devised bargain basements for
"the masses" and upper-floor salons for "the classes." They cultivated
friendly relations with museums and hired designers who used painting,
sculpture and theater decor to create show windows that were visions of
color, fabric and light. They lobbied city governments for favorable zoning
laws, easy-access mass transit stops and high-visibility signs and
billboards. They mined the worlds of the exotic and the primitive to stage
fashion shows with "Garden of Allah" themes and Mayan "motifs."
By World War I, these stores had all the services a town or small city
could offer. A shopper could purchase clothes, furniture and housewares;
mail letters at an in-house post office; lunch in a tearoom; send the nanny
and the children off to a Happyland and refresh her spirit in a meditative
"Silence Room" before rejoining them.
Department store founders, as Mr. Leach perceptively notes, like to speak
of their business in religious terms: Wanamaker called his store the Garden
of Merchandise and his goods "beautiful fields of necessities." Designers
liked to invoke art: L. Frank Baum, the most influential window designer in
the country (before he wrote "The Wizard of Oz" and retired), said that
lamps and tin pots must be made to come alive as if they were figures on
the stage.
Advertising experts preferred a political or psychological discourse. The
ability to want and choose was an equal right for all citizens. Public
relations was, as Mr. Leach puts it, "a nonjudgmental technique similar to
psychoanalysis, to be applied to any institution, person or commodity that
needed its 'image' (ego) refurbished in the public arena." Even the 1928
economic study produced by Herbert Hoover sounded Freudian when it declared
that the economy had proved conclusively the theory that "wants are nearly
insatiable." In "Civilization and Its Discontents," published two years
later, Freud wrote that humans are ruled by the pleasure principle, and by
desires that can never be met. The merchants of consumer culture set out to
prove that those desires can, should and must be met -- or at least lived
out fully -- at the department store.
In this light, Marvin Traub's "Like No Other Store . . .: The
Bloomingdale's Legend and the Revolution in American Marketing" makes very
interesting reading. Mr. Traub came to Bloomingdale's in 1950, a year out
of the Harvard Business School. His goal was to give "the chic woman" a
reason to shop there: at that time it was known as the store where the
maids of chic women shopped.
Mr. Traub made his way from the bargain basement to the company presidency,
and this book explains the merchandising techniques he used so well. When
business got slow in the basement, he and a fellow employee would put on
their coats and hats, rush to the bargain counter tables and pretend to be
customers, "tossing through them as if there was hidden gold. Once we
attracted a crowd, we would quietly slip back to our offices."
By the 70's and 80's, Mr. Traub was concentrating on boutiques that
featured the ready-to-wear clothes of Yves Saint Laurent and Ralph Lauren,
and mounting updated "Garden of Allah" spectacles titled "India: The
Ultimate Fantasy," "Israel: The Dream" and "China: Heralding the Dawn of a
New Era." A hostile takeover and a declaration of bankruptcy forced him out
of Bloomingdale's in 1991. He now has a consulting firm involved, among
other things, in the fast-developing cable-television shopping networks.
Mr. Traub is cheerfully and egotistically convinced that every trend, from
high-visibility advertising to the hard sell of women's cosmetics, began in
the 60's when he came to power. Perhaps he and Mr. Leach should exchange
books for Christmas. "Land of Desire" will show Mr. Traub the history that
made him. "Like No Other Store . . .," with sales advice and
self-congratulation on every page, will show Mr. Leach what a very good
social historian he is.
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
10) How Nonprofit Careerism Derailed the "Revolution"
Greens and Greenbacks
Counterpunch, December 27, 2004
By MICHAEL DONNELLY
full: http://www.counterpunch.org/donnelly12272004.html
My good friend Lisa Goldrosen is a veteran of many left causes. Lisa has
spent her entire adult life working in various coop endeavors. She has a
wonderful collection of buttons and posters from back when America rose
from the slumber of the Eisenhower years. She has buttons from the early
days of the clean-up of the Hudson River - Pete Seeger's precursor to
Greenpeace. More are from the early Civil Rights Movement. Others are from
the anti-Vietnam War effort and the SDS era on campus. She has one anti-war
poster that could be recycled as is and still be useful today.
Lisa has arranged them all in a wonderful historic collage. She regularly
uses it to give history lessons to young radicals here in Oregon. Someone
always asks, "Why didn't I ever hear about this in school?"
Being a 60s activist myself, having grown up in Flint -- steeped in the
history of the Labor Movement, a Civil Rights activist at fourteen, a UAW
member at eighteen and a draft resister/ Conscientious Objector/anti-war
activist later -- I always enjoy my discussions with Lisa.
Recently, she put my frustrations with the current state of activism in
full perspective.
The Three-legged Stool of Counterrevolution
Lisa notes, "The Revolution was derailed by three things: the end of the
draft; Roe v. Wade and the rise of the nonprofit sector. Once the children
of privilege were no longer subject to any personal pain, it was over. It
was a brilliant strategy by predatory capitalism."
While I'm not sure if Revolution, or even Reform, was/is inevitable, I
agree. Once the draft and the possibility that middle-to-upper class kids
would be sent to fight Imperial Wars was over, it's easy to see how the
bottom fell out of the anti-war movement. Recent Imperial Wars, fought
predominantly with "volunteers," are just as heinous as Vietnam, but with
few highly-educated, comfortable kids' lives being on the line, we have yet
to see anything approaching the across-the-board, massive opposition that
Vietnam engendered. (Astonishingly, this very year during yet another
ill-fated Imperial misadventure, we saw the "Peace" Movement line up
vociferously behind a proudly-stated "I'll hunt 'em down and kill 'em"
warmonger for president!)
Same with Roe v Wade. A whole lot of steam went out of progressive social
efforts once this same socioeconomic group could gain access to affordable,
legal abortion. (It appears to be the sole bottom line litmus test still
applied to the Democratic Party.) Remove the pain and the rulers gain.
It really did become -- remove the personal pain from these me firsters and
the hiccup of resistance vanishes. I already felt that way about these two
issues. But, Lisa's expansion of the concept to include the rise of the
"Nonprofit Sector" put the final piece of the puzzle in place.
Nonprofit Careerism
Back there in Eisenhower days, an educated, middle class American youth
could look forward to a future laid out lockstep towards either a position
in the "Private Sector" (read: corporate drone) or in the "Public Sector"
(read: political hack).
Those who got too far out there protesting the War or Racism or any other
outrage soon found themselves with a blot on the resume. Not to worry; soon
corporate America set up the "third" leg of the stool. The entire domain of
nonprofit institutions (arts, culture, environment, etc.) found and
embraced a collective identity as the "Nonprofit Sector" sometime in the
early 1970s. Ludicrously, their self-declared title has recently become
"The Independent Sector."
Prior to that time, most of these types of organizations, were for-profit
entities. With the advent of tax incentives, a plethora of corporate-funded
grant-making foundations arose as companies morphed from private to
nonprofit to take advantage of the tax rules. For example: In 1930, only a
quarter of hospitals were nonprofit, about 35% government run and another
40% were private for-profits. By 1970, over half were nonprofit and just
12% privately owned.
Entire college programs have sprung up, such as Wayne State University's
Nonprofit Sector Studies Program (NPSS). The NPSS mission sates, "The
nation's fastest growing sector needs administrators, policy makers,
program managers, and advocates who will guide them into the future"
According to The NonProfit Times survey, the mean salaries for top
nonprofit employees for 2003 were:
Executive director/CEO/president- $88,749
Chief financial officer- $60,675
Program director- $52,253
Planned giving officer- $62,019
Development director- $55,807
Major gifts officer- $56,850
Chief of direct marketing- $52,812
Director of volunteers- $35,267
Webmaster- $38,498
Chief of technology- $58,595.
Lisa is correct. People could have their little impact antiauthority flings
as a college youth and still have a well-compensated career as one of those
administrators, etc. And corporate America could continue its depredations
and whitewash its impacts by sending out an army of increasingly
ineffective nonprofit professionals.
Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
11) Bob Herbert: How the Iraq tragedy is hitting home
Bob Herbert The New York Times
Monday, December 27, 2004
http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/26/opinion/edherb.html
NEW YORK 'It's like watching your son playing in traffic, and there's
nothing you can do." - Janet Bellows, mother of a soldier who has
been assigned to a second tour in Iraq.
Back in the 1960s, when it seemed as if every other draftee in the
army was being sent to Vietnam, I was sent off to Korea, where I was
assigned to the intelligence office of an engineer battalion.
Twenty years old and half a world away from home, I looked forward
to mail call the way junkies craved their next fix. My teenage sister,
Sandy, got all of her high school girlfriends to write to me, which led
some of the guys in my unit to think I was some kind of Don Juan.
I considered it impolite to correct any misconceptions they might
have had.
You could depend on the mail for an emotional lift - most of the time.
But there were times when I would open an envelope and read, in the
inky handwriting of my mother or father or sister, that a friend of
mine, someone I had grown up with or gone to school with, or
a new friend I had met in the army, had been killed in Vietnam.
Just like that. Gone. Life over at 18, 19, 20.
I can still remember the weird feelings that would come over me
in those surreal moments, including the irrational idea that I was
somehow responsible for the death. In the twisted logic of grief,
I would feel that if I had never opened the envelope, the person
would still be alive. I remember being overwhelmed with the desire
to reseal the letter in the envelope and bring my dead friend back
to life.
Last week's hideous attack in Mosul reminded me of those long
ago days. Once again American troops sent on a fool's errand are
coming home in coffins, or without their right arms or left legs,
or paralyzed, or so messed up mentally they'll never be the same.
Troops are being shoved two or three times into the furnace of
Iraq by astonishingly incompetent leaders who have been unable
or unwilling to provide them with the proper training, adequate
equipment or even a clearly defined mission.
It is a mind-boggling tragedy. And the suffering goes far beyond
the men and women targeted by the insurgents. Each death in Iraq
blows a hole in a family and sets off concentric circles of grief that
touch everyone else who knew and cared for the fallen soldier. If
the human stakes were understood well enough by the political
leaders of this country, it might make them a little more reluctant
to launch foolish, unnecessary and ultimately unwinnable wars.
Lisa Hoffman and Annette Rainville of the Scripps Howard News
Service have reported, in an extremely moving article, that nearly
900 American children have lost a parent to the war in Iraq. More
than 40 fathers died without seeing their babies.
The article begins with a description of a deeply sad 4-year-old
named Jack Shanaberger, whose father was killed in an ambush
in March. Jack told his mother he didn't want to be a father when
he grew up.
"I don't want to be a daddy," he said, "because daddies die."
Six female soldiers who died in the war left a total of 10 children.
This is a new form of wartime heartbreak for the United States.
We have completely lost our way with this fiasco. The president
seems almost perversely out of touch. "The idea of democracy
taking hold in what was a place of tyranny and hatred and
destruction is such a hopeful moment in the history of the
world," he said last week.
The truth, of course, is that we can't even secure the road to
the Baghdad airport, or protect our own troops lining up for
lunch inside a military compound. The coming elections are
a slapstick version of democracy. International observers won't
even go to Iraq to monitor the elections because it's too
dangerous. They'll be watching, as if through binoculars,
from Jordan.
Nobody has a plan. We don't have enough troops to secure the
country, and the Iraqi forces have shown neither the strength
nor the will to do it themselves. Election officials are being
murdered in the streets. The insurgency is growing in both
strength and sophistication. At least three more Marines and
one soldier were killed Thursday, ensuring the grimmest of
holidays for their families and loved ones.
One of the things that President George W. Bush might consider
while on his current vacation is whether there are any limits
to the price our troops should be prepared to pay for his
misadventure in Iraq, or whether the suffering and dying
will simply go on indefinitely.
Copyright (c) 2004 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
12) A Third of the Dead in Undersea Quake Are Said to Be Children
By SETH MYDANS
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka
December 28, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/international/asia/28CND_quake.html?hp&ex=
1104296400&en=eee9dda7fec47a7a&ei=5094&partner=homepage
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Dec. 28 - Survivors of the gigantic undersea
earthquake on Sunday that swallowed coastlines from Indonesia
to Africa - which officials now describe as one of the worst natural
disasters in recent history - recovered bodies today, hurriedly
arranged for mass burials and searched for tens of thousands
of the missing in countries thousands of miles apart.
The reported deaths from the disaster - which climbed today to
about 44,000, with many still unaccounted for, as Sri Lanka and
Indonesia increased their confirmed tolls - came into sharper
relief on a day when it seemed increasingly clear that at least
a third of the dead were children, according to estimates by aid
officials.
The International Committee of the Red Cross and government
officials here, as well as those in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand,
India, the Maldives and as far away as Somalia, warned that
with hundreds of thousands of people stranded in the open
without clean drinking water, epidemics of cholera and other
waterborne diseases could take as many lives as the initial waves.
Images from around the region presented a tableau of
unrelenting grief. Fathers and mothers wailed over drowned
children. Bodies were arrayed in long rows in hastily dug
trenches. Villagers sat by ruined homes, stunned. Hotels in
some of Thailand's most luxurious resorts were turned into
morgues.
"This may be the worst natural disaster in recent history
because it is affecting so many heavily populated coastal
areas," said Jan Egeland, the emergency relief coordinator for
the United Nations, speaking at a news conference in New York.
"Usually a natural disaster strikes one or two or three countries,
not eight or nine enormous coastlines like they've done here,"
he added. "Bigger waves have been recorded. But no wave has
affected so many people." Nearly half the reported deaths were
here in Sri Lanka, where estimates jumped Monday to more than
12,000 killed, and where more than a million people were
reported to have lost their homes.
Today the estimate of deaths jumped even higher, with an official
with the state-run National Disaster Management Center, D. N.
Wanigasooriya, telling Reuters, "At the moment they have
recovered 18,706 bodies."
The realization began to emerge today that the dead included
an exceptionally high number of children who, aid officials
suggested, were least able to grab onto trees or boats when
the deadly waves smashed through villages and over beaches.
Children make up at least half the population of Asia.
On the western tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, the
destruction was doubly fierce, caused by both the earthquake
itself 150 miles away and the tsunamis that followed.
Emergency workers who reached Aceh Province found that 10,000
people had been killed in a single town, Meulaboh, said Purnomo
Sidik, national disaster director at the Social Affairs Ministry, news
agencies reported.
Another 9,000 were confirmed dead so far in the provincial capital,
Banda Aceh, and surrounding towns, he said. India reported more
than 4,000 dead on the mainland. Hundreds were dead or missing
in the southern resort islands of Thailand, many of them foreign
vacationers.
Mr. Egeland said the big problem now was to coordinate the huge
international aid effort, a particularly daunting challenge given how
widespread the devastation is. He said the total damage would
"probably be many billions of dollars."
"We cannot fathom the cost of these poor societies and the
nameless fishermen and fishing villages and so on that have
just been wiped out," he said. "Hundreds of thousands of
livelihoods have gone."
Amateur videotape played on television showed terrifying scenes
from several countries of huge walls of water crashing through
palm trees and over the tops of buildings and roaring up coastal
streets with cars and debris bobbing on the surface.
To backdrops of screams and shouts, people were shown clinging
to buildings, being swept away by the current, running for their
lives, weeping, carrying the injured and cradling dead children.
As the water receded, almost as quickly as it had arrived, bodies
were seen in the branches of trees, and broken cars and houses
littered the shores as if a tornado had struck. Some of the bodies
and debris were sucked back out to sea.
Fears of thousands more deaths on India's Andaman and Nicobar
Islands, where most communications have been cut off, came
closer to being realized today, when Indian officials said at least
7,000 people may have died.
The territory administration's relief chief, Puneet Goel, said
20 percent of the 30,000 people living on the island of Car
Nicobar are feared lost, Reuters reported.
Smaller numbers of deaths were reported in Malaysia, the Maldives,
Myanmar, Bangladesh and the Seychelles, as well as along the
distant African coastline, particularly Somalia, where entire
villages were reported to have disappeared.
"All of the fishermen who went to sea haven't come back," said
Yusuf Ismail, a spokesman for the president.
In Thailand, the government put the death toll at 1,516 and said
8,432 people were injured. About 200 people are confirmed dead
in Phuket and 950 in Phangnga, two resort provinces. Prime Minister
Thaksin Shinawatra said the number of deaths might rise to 2,000.
Thousand are missing, mostly on small resort islands or among
boatloads of recreational divers who had headed out to sea in the
morning before the wave struck.
Many of those killed there were foreigners, but the most prominent
of the dead was Poom Jensen, 21, the Thai-American grandson of
King Bhumipol Adulyadej.
The smaller island of Phi Phi Lei, which was the scene of the movie
"The Beach," starring Leonardo DiCaprio, was reported to have been
mostly leveled. On another small island, the proprietors of the elite
Phra Thong Resort said only 70 of 170 guests were accounted for.
Apart from the huge death toll, it was the presence of large number
of foreign tourists that distinguished this disaster from the many
floods and typhoons that take a heavy toll in the region every year.
Sri Lanka's air force evacuated former Chancellor Helmut Kohl of
Germany from the hotel where he was stranded in the hard-hit
south to the German Embassy in Colombo. Mr. Kohl, 74, was
vacationing and escaped injury, a spokesman, Ulrich Pohlmann,
told news agencies in Berlin.
The Sri Lankan government said as many as 200 foreign tourists
had been killed. In Thailand, an official estimated that 20 to 30
percent of those killed were foreigners, but that estimate is
expected to grow. The victims were reported to include people
from Germany, Japan, Italy, Sweden, France, Britain, the United
States, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, the
Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey, Spain and Russia.
The number of Americans dead stood at eight.
Sweden's foreign minister, Laila Freivalds, said at a news
conference in Stockholm today that 1,500 Swedes are missing.
"We are afraid that we will never find many of them," she said,
declining to give a clearer estimate of how many died.
Those numbers were tiny, though, compared with the
devastation suffered by the mostly poor fishermen, farmers
and laborers who populate the low-lying coasts of these
South Asian and Southeast Asian nations.
In Sri Lanka, Susil Premajayantha, a senior minister, said
the homes of about 1.5 million people had been destroyed
or damaged. Few have the resources to resume their lives
without help.
He said 890 miles of railway track running south from the
capital, Colombo, had been washed away. Local officials told
The Associated Press that some 1,500 passengers had been
trapped in railroad cars as an entire train was caught in the
rushing tide and swept away.
At least 400 prisoners were reported to have escaped during
the chaos from two jails in the southern area, and officials
offered them an amnesty to turn themselves in. Across the
region, police officers and soldiers patrolled in an effort to
halt looting. The United States Geological Survey said the
9.0 magnitude earthquake on Sunday morning was the
fourth-largest in a century and the largest in the world
since 1964, when an earthquake measuring 9.2 hit Alaska.
A number of strong aftershocks have followed. "We have
ordered 15,000 troops into the field to search for survivors,"
said Edy Sulistiadi, a spokesman for the Indonesian military,
which is fighting separatist rebels in the area. "They are
mostly retrieving corpses."
Warren Hoge contributed reporting from the United Nations
for this article, and Wayne Arnold from Lhokseumawe, Indonesia.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
13) That Line at the Ferrari Dealer? It's Bonus Season on Wall Street
By JENNY ANDERSON
December 28, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/business/28bonus.html?hp&ex=1104296400&en=
9dbbb1a2157e9ffa&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Samantha Kleier Forbes, a 30-year-old real estate broker, was
getting ready to leave for a vacation to Florida with her mother
and sister when she got an urgent call. It was a client who had
spent the summer scouring the Upper East Side of Manhattan
for an apartment priced between $4 million and $5 million.
The client insisted on seeing more apartments that day, but now
she wanted to look in the $6 million range. Her husband, a banker
at Goldman Sachs in his late 30's, had just received his year-end
bonus.
"Normally this time of year is dead," said Ms. Forbes, a vice
president at Gumley Haft Kleier, a residential real estate brokerage.
But this winter there is unusual buying interest that she attributes
to rich Wall Street bonuses. She is cutting her end-of-the-year
vacation short, so she can prepare for an onslaught of clients
eager to see apartments.
The year-end bonus is a Wall Street tradition, and for a second
consecutive year, the amounts are significant. Three major Wall
Street firms - Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns
- have reported record profits for the year and all are said to have
given out handsome bonuses.
The totals in 2003 were already impressive: Lloyd S. Blankfein, the
president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs made $20.1
million, of that only $600,000 was salary; and E. Stanley O'Neal, the
chief executive of Merrill Lynch , received a bonus of $13.5 million
and restricted stock worth $11.2 million on top of his $500,000
salary. At the other end of the compensation spectrum, an
investment banking analyst right out of college would have made
a $65,000 salary and a $35,000 bonus last year. An associate just
out of business school might have made $85,000 in salary and a
$115,000 bonus.
This year, investment bankers are expected to see gains in bonuses
of 10 to 15 percent, amid a year-end flurry of mergers. Fixed-income
traders, who have been the best compensated Wall Street
professionals in recent years, will also be amply rewarded, but
their percentage gains may be smaller than those of bankers.
Bonuses, of course, vary by bank, by division and by individual.
They reflect the firm's profitability and the group's performance,
as well as the individual's contribution.
This year's bonuses do not quite reach the heights touched by star
bankers and traders in the heyday of the late 1990's technology
bubble. But they are rich enough to persuade many of Wall Street's
elite to rediscover conspicuous consumption.
One senior trader is building a sports complex for triathlon
training at his house in upstate New York. It will include a swim-
in-place lap pool, a climbing wall and a fitness center. Another
bought an Aston Martin. For some, upgrading real estate is the
first order of business.
But many Wall Street professionals are urging caution, given that
the bonus typically constitutes the majority of their compensation.
More than a dozen bankers, all of whom would talk about their
spending only on the condition of anonymity, said they were all
too aware that the good times could end as quickly as they did
after 2000, when a $2.5 million income could turn to $800,000
overnight.
"Given the last two to three years when people figured out that
this business is pretty volatile, they are going to try and bank
a lot of their bonuses," said one managing director at a firm where
bonuses have been announced. "They've seen too many people
laid off and they realize they can't just spend all their money."
It should be noted that this same banker just bought a $150,000
Aston Martin to park in his garage in Greenwich, Conn.
Another senior banker at a different firm, who is set to receive a
$2.8 million bonus, said he had bought his wife a mink coat and
was planning a weeklong skiing vacation out West. But he also
said he intended to save most of the money. "We're not buying
homes or boats, we're not spending on the big things," he said.
"We are more relaxed and generous on the small things."
Of course, small is in the eye of the beholder. While the Maybach,
an exclusive line of luxury cars made by Mercedes-Benz that starts
at $315,000, appears on the wish lists of many bankers, relatively
less expensive models from Aston Martin, Bentley and Maserati
have also been popular. Michael Parchment, general manager
for Miller Motorcars, a luxury dealership in Greenwich, said
demand had been soaring.
"It's probably up 20 to 30 percent from the same time period
last year," he said. "Unfortunately, production isn't up." The
result, he said, are some unhappy bankers.
Wall Street bonuses are expected to total $15.9 billion in 2004
- second only to $19.5 billion in 2000- according to Alan G.
Hevesi, the state comptroller of New York. In 2003, bonuses
totaled $15.8 billion. Mr. Hevesi said bonuses of that magnitude
were "good news for New York."
"It's all taxable income and it means that folks have more
disposable income so they will spend money," he said.
Bonus season is always a particularly angst-ridden time for
Wall Street. Managers haggle for more money for their employees,
divisions fight for a bigger piece of the pie and bankers try to
portray themselves as indispensable. In the end, few admit to
being happy, at least to their bosses.
"We used to say there's no amount of compensation that amounts
to people saying thank you," said Roy C. Smith, a former Goldman
Sachs partner who is now a professor of finance at New York
University. "They are either sullen or mutinous, but never quite
happy."
Midlevel employees did especially well this year. Three senior-
level managers at Wall Street firms said that the people who were
enjoying the biggest percentage increases over all were second-
and third-level associates and junior-level vice presidents.
The ranks of those managers had been thinned after the stock
market bubble burst. But this year, a reinvigorated market meant
there were too few associates and managing directors to put
together client pitches. At least three banks had to guarantee
bonus increases of 25 to 50 percent to prevent defections to
other firms. The result is that a third-year associate who might
have made $200,000 in income last year could receive
$350,000 this year.
The manager with the Aston Martin said that last year's
compensation packages for associates were ridiculously
low. "You had third-year associates making $210,000 to
$225,000; a lot of these guys are married and have young
kids and they are working" very hard, he said.
Many of those associates are expected to use their new wealth
to pay off debts incurred from three years of relatively meager
bonuses.
But real estate will draw, as usual, a significant portion
of the bonuses.
"Usually we get five phone calls a week," said Richard Steinberg,
a managing director at Warburg Realty Partnership who shows
apartments priced from $10 million to $20 million. "Since
bonuses, we've gotten double that from hedge funds, Wall
Streeters and money managers. I've gotten more phone
calls since Dec. 15 than from any other year."
Late-night entertainment may also benefit from the rise in
bonuses, given Wall Street's reputation as something of
a boys' club.
"Certainly the Wall Street crowd is very special to us," said
Lonnie Hanover, a representative for Scores, a high-end
strip club in Manhattan. "December is an amazing month
for our business, but it's everything, it's Christmas bonuses,
Christmas spirit. They have their official parties and then the
unofficial party here."
Even the cautious are probably going to treat at least part of
their bonus as play money.
One senior investment banker at a big Wall Street firm said he
was putting this year's money "directly into the bank."
"I have a sailboat, a motor boat, an apartment, an S.U.V.," he
said. "What could I possibly need?" After brief reflection,
however, he continued: "Maybe a little Porsche for the Hamptons
house, but probably not."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
14) AIN'T WE GOT FUN?
Words by Gus Kahn and Raymond B. Egan
Music by Richard Whiting,1921
http://www.rienzihills.com/SING/aintwegotfun.htm
Bill collectors gather 'round and rather haunt
the cottage next door,
Men the grocer and butcher sent,
Men who call for the rent.
But within, a happy chappy, and his bride of only a year,
Seem to be so cheerful,
Here's an ear full of the chatter you hear:
Ev'ry morning
Ev'ry evening
Ain't we got fun?
Not much money,
Oh but honey,
Ain't We Got Fun?
The rent's unpaid dear,
We haven't a bus
In the winter, in the summer,
Don't we have fun?
Times are bum and getting bummer,
Still we have fun.
There's nothing surer:
The rich get rich and the poor get poorer
In the meantime,
In between time,
Ain't we got fun?
Just to make their trouble nearly double,
Something happen'd last night.
To their chimney a gray bird came,
Mr. Stork is his name.
And I'll bet two pins
A pair of twins just happen'd in with the bird.
Still they're very gay and merry,
Just at dawning I heard:
Ev'ry morning
Ev'ry evening
Don't we got fun?
Twins and cares dear, come in pairs, dear,
Don't we have fun?
We've only started,
As mommer and pop,
Are we downhearted,
I'll say that we're not!
Landlords mad and getting madder,
Ain't we got fun?
Times are bad and getting badder,
Still we have fun!
There's nothing surer,
The rich get rich and the poor get laid off
In the meantime,
In between time,
Ain't we got fun?
When the man who sold 'em carpets told 'em,
He would take them away,
They said "Wonderful! here's our chance!
Take them up, and we'll dance!"
And when burglars came and robb'd them
Taking all their silver, they say.
Hubby yell'd "We're famous,
For they'll name us in the papers today!"
Night or daytime,
It's all playtime,
Ain't we got fun?
Hot or cold days,
Any old days,
Ain't we got fun?
If wifie wishes,
To go to a play,
Don't wash the dishes,
Just throw them away!
Street car seats are awful narrow,
Ain't we got fun?
They won't smash up our Pierce Arrow,
They've cut my wages,
But my income tax will be so much smaller,
When I'm paid off,
I'll be laid off
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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