Extraordinary Rendition of the Truth
email: johnpkirk@comcast.net
web: http://www.thejkirks.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaK3a3XSPA8
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STOP THE WAR NOW! BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
MONEY FOR HUMAN NEEDS NOT WAR!
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ALL OUT SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27, 11:00 A.M., CIVIC CENTER, S.F.
MARCH AND RALLY SPONSORED BY THE OCTOBER 27 COALITION
oct27sf.org
Program Committee Meeting
Sunday,Oct. 14, 1:00 P.M.
Steering Committee Meeting, 3:00 P.M.
474 Valencia Street, SF
South Bay Oct. 27 Organizing Committee
Thursday, Oct. 18, 7:00 P.M.
San Jose Peace Center
48 Seventh Street
Iraq Moratorium Day
Friday, Oct. 19, 12:00 A.M. - 11:30 P.M.
Pots and Pans rally at noon at the SF Federal Bldg.
Solemn vigil at Post & Market (Montgomery Street BART) at 5.
At Diablo Canyon College there will be an action, and Strawberry Creek Lodge there will be a demonstration at 2.
There will be bannering at the Golden Gate Bridge in the early morning.
The postal workers who had flyers and ribbons at 27 SF post offices on Sept 21, will cover the remaining 13 on October 19. New unions are being approached for participation as well.
More at http://www.iraqmoratorium-sfbay.org
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FILM: "NO VOLVERAN!" SUNDAY, OCT. 14, 7 P.M.
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Hands Off Venezuela Campaign
PO Box 4244 St. Paul, MN 55104
*** PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY***
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
What: Bay Area Premiere of "No Volveran!" A new film on the Venezuelan Revolution
When: Sunday, October 14, 7 PM
Where: Mission Cultural Center -- 2868 Mission Street (near 25th Street) San Francisco, 94110
The Hands Off Venezuela Campaign is proud to announce a new film on the Venezuelan Revolution. Filmed during an international delegation to Venezuela during last year's historic Presidential elections, the film makers take us on a journey through the fervor of those days in December 2006, traveling deep into the shanty towns (barrios), and to several factories under workers' control, to find out why there is a movement to overthrow capitalism, what Socialism of the 21st Century is, and how it is changing people's lives.
Also covering alternative community run media like CatiaTV, and Radio Negro Primero, and the social projects called misiones, the film helps explain why Venezuela has become a symbol of liberation for those in struggle around the world. With fantastic footage of the elections, demonstrations and the people and streets of Caracas, the revolution is brought to our screens in a rich tapestry of action and interview that gives us real insight into the process taking place, and the challenges that lie ahead. A must see!
Melanie McDonald, the film maker, will give a short presentation and answer questions. For more information visit www.handsoffvenezuela.org.
Admission: $5; For seniors and students: $3. Copies of the film and other materials will be available for purchase after the screening.
***Please distribute widely***
For more information, please call 415-821-1155 or write contact@handsoffvenezuela.org
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ENVIRONMENTAL DISTRUCTION:
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Toxic West Virginia: Mountaintop Removal- Episode 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziuFW-7h1LM
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LABOR CONFERENCE TO STOP THE WAR, OCT. 20, S.F.
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Labor Conference to Stop the War!
October 20, 2007
ILWU Local 10 400 North Point Street, San Francisco, California @ Fisherman's Wharf
As the war in Iraq and Afghanistan enters its seventh year, opposition to the war among working people in the United States and the world is massive and growing. The "surge" strategy of sending in more and more troops has become a -asco for the Pentagon generals, while thousands of Iraqis are killed every month. Before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, millions marched against the war in Britain, Italy and Spain as hundreds of thousands took to the streets in the U.S. to oppose it. But that didn't stop the invasion. In the U.S., this "war on terror" has meant wholesale assault on civil liberties and workers' rights, like the impending imposition of the hated TWIC card for port workers. And the war keeps going on and on, as Democrats and Republicans in Congress keep on voting for it.
As historian Isaac Deutscher said during the Vietnam War, a single strike would be more effective than all the peace marches. French dockworkers did strike in the port of Marseilles and helped bring an end to the war in Vietnam. To put a stop to this bloody colonial occupation, labor must use its power.
The International Warehouse and Longshore Union has opposed the war on Iraq since the beginning. In the Bay Area, ILWU Local 10 has repeatedly warned that the so-called "war on terror" is really a war on working people and democratic rights. Around the country, hundreds of unions and labor councils have passed motions condemning the war, but that has not stopped the war. We need to use labor's muscle to stop the war by mobilizing union power in the streets, at the plant gates and on the docks to force the immediate and total withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq.
The clock is ticking. It's time for labor action to bring the war machine to a grinding halt and end this slaughter. During longshore contract negotiations in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, Bush cited port security and imposed the slave-labor Taft-Hartley Law against the ILWU in collusion with the maritime employers group PMA and with the support of the Democrats. Yet, he did nothing when PMA shut down every port on the U.S. West Coast by locking out longshore workers just the week before!
In April 2003, when antiwar protesters picketed war cargo shippers, APL and SSA, in the Port of Oakland, police -red on picketers and longshoremen alike with their "less than lethal" ammo that left six ILWU members and many others seriously injured. We refused to let our rights be trampled on, sued the city and won. Democratic rights were reasserted a month later when antiwar protesters marched in the port and all shipping was stopped. This past May, when antiwar protesters and the Oakland Education Association again picketed war cargo shippers in Oakland, longshoremen honored the picket line. This is only the beginning.
Last year, Local 10 passed a resolution calling to "Strike Against the War ï¿∏ No Peace, No Work." The motion emphasized the ILWU's proud history in opposing wars for imperial domination, recalling how in 1978 Local 10 refused to load bombs for the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. In the 1980's, Bay Area dock workers highlighted opposition to South African apartheid slavery by boycotting ("hot cargoing") the Nedlloyd Kimberly, while South African workers waged militant strikes to bring down the white supremacist regime.
Now Locals 10 and 34 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union have called for a "Labor Conference to Stop the War" to hammer out a program of action. We're saying: Enough! It's high time to use union power against the bosses' war, independent of the "bipartisan" war party. The ILWU can again take the lead, but action against the war should not be limited to the docks. We urge unions in the San Francisco Bay Area and throughout the country to attend the conference and plan workplace rallies, labor mobilizations in the streets and strike action against the war.
For further information contact: Jack Heyman jackheyman@comcast.net
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FREE SPEECH:
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Stop Government Attacks
Against the Anti-War Movement!
Take Action to Defend Free Speech
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Advocacy?JServSessionIdr004=k763kwy604.app2a&cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=205
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DOMESTIC WORKERS:
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Domestic workers are one of the most invisible and exploited categories of workers in the United States. Many of them work for diplomats, who enjoy legal immunity and can exploit their domestic workers without any consequences. Employees of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank are the largest group of employers of domestic workers in the U.S. The institutions have some direct responsibility in this regard, since they sponsor visas for domestic workers for their employees, but do not monitor the work situations of the domestic workers to make sure that they are being treated fairly.
Please watch the video, share it, and spread it far and wide!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBDwK_zOMRE
And come to Washington DC October 19-21 to protest the IMF and World Bank annual meetings!
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) The Whole World Will Be Watching
By Bill Simpich
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Saturday 06 October 2007
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/100607Z.shtml
2) On Torture and American Values
Editorial
October 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/opinion/07sun1.html?hp
3) For Schools, Lottery Payoffs Fall Short of Promises
By RON STODGHILL and RON NIXON
"...a New York Times examination of lottery documents, as well as interviews with lottery administrators and analysts, finds that lotteries accounted for less than 1 percent to 5 percent of the total revenue for K-12 education last year in the states that use this money for schools."
October 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/business/07lotto.html?hp
4) A Heavy Toll From Disease Fuels Suspicion and Anger
By MICHELE MORGAN BOLTON
October 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/us/07middle.html?ref=us
5) Iraq Says Blackwater Killed 17, Shooting "Deliberate"
By REUTERS
October 7, 2007
Filed at 1:42 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-iraq-blackwater.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
6) Thou Shalt Not Kill, Except in a Popular Video Game at Church
By MATT RICHTEL
October 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/us/07halo.html?hp
7) Immigration, Black Sheep and Swiss Rage
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
October 8, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/08/world/europe/08swiss.html?ref=world
8) High-Stakes Flimflam
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
October 9, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/opinion/09herbert.html?hp
9) 2 Iraqi Women Killed in Security Shooting
By ANDREW E. KRAMER
October 10, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/world/middleeast/10iraq.html?hp
10) Democrats Seem Ready to Extend Wiretap Powers
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and CARL HULSE
October 9, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/washington/09nsa.html?hp
11) A Revolutionary Icon, and Now, a Bikini
By MARC LACEY
October 9, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/world/americas/09che.html?ref=world
12) Licenses for Immigrants Finds Support
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and DANNY HAKIM
October 9, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/nyregion/09license.html?ref=nyregion
13) Union Tells Chrysler Workers to Prepare for Strike
By NICK BUNKLEY
October 9, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/business/09auto.html?ref=business
14) Distribution of Nets Splits Malaria Fighters
By REUBEN KYAMA and DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
"Recently, Dr. Arata Kochi, the blunt new director of the World Health Organization’s malaria program, declared that as far as he was concerned, “the debate is at an end.” Virtually the only way to get the nets to poor people, he said, is to hand out millions free.In doing so, Dr. Kochi turned his back on an alternative long favored by the Clinton and Bush administrations — distribution by so-called social marketing, in which mosquito nets are sold through local shops at low, subsidized prices — $1 or so for an insecticide-impregnated net that costs $5 to $7 from the maker — with donors underwriting the losses and paying consultants to come up with brand names and advertise the nets."
October 9, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/health/09nets.html?ref=health
15) HEALTH CARE: Who pays?
(The following article appeared in the March 1993 issue of Socialist Action newspaper, Shannon Sheppard is a registered nurse who is conducting a study on urban health policy.)
By SHANNON SHEPPARD
Roland Sheppard
Visit my web site at:
http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret
16) Auto Union Workers Walk Out at Chrysler
By MICHELINE MAYNARD and NICK BUNKLEY
October 10, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/business/10cnd-auto.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
18) Hate-Crime Investigation at Columbia
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR
October 10, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/nyregion/10cnd-columbia.html?hp
19) Palestinians Return to Lebanese Camp
By THANASSIS CAMBANIS
October 11, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/world/middleeast/11lebanon.html?ref=world
20)Faster Army Expansion Plan Approved
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
October 10, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/washington/10army.html?ref=world
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1) The Whole World Will Be Watching
By Bill Simpich
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Saturday 06 October 2007
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/100607Z.shtml
Until today, the story about the impending second trial of United States v. Lt. Ehren Watada was how the Army was planning on a proceeding with very little publicity and almost no witnesses.
It almost worked. In a last-minute ruling at 4:48 pm on Friday, the Hon. Benjamin Settle stayed the Watada trial from beginning on Tuesday, October 9 and set a hearing for Friday, October 19. His ruling also states that the trial cannot begin until at least October 26. The bigger question is whether it will ever happen at all. Now there is no chance that this case is going to escape strict international scrutiny. None.
Antiwar activists are jubilant at this unexpected turn of events, as the anticipated media coverage of this clash will inevitably encourage participation in the nationwide "Iraq Moratorium" community events on October 19 and the national mobilization against the war in eleven major cities on Saturday, October 27. (Source: http://www.unitedforpeace.org/
During the first trial in February 2007, Lt. Watada and his defense team put on a stunning display of resistance before a bull-headed judge in the heart of Fort Lewis and in the eyes of the mainstream media. Every prosecution witness had attested to the stout heart and integrity of the defendant. Lt. Watada was about to tell his story about his belief in the illegality of the war in Iraq, based on his officer's oath to the United States Constitution, (Source: http://www.thankyoult.org/content/view/1039/74/
Abruptly, the judge halted the trial. Lt. Watada had submitted a document in open court at the beginning of the trial admitting that he had knowingly not boarded a plane to Iraq. The judge ruled that the lieutenant had made a fatal admission that would prejudice his defense.
It was the kind of argument that one might expect from a desperate defense attorney, but not from a judge. To top it off, Lt. Watada's own lawyer was asking for the trial to go forward even while the judge had ruled out all of Watada's defenses! It was apparent to observers that there was a real possibility that the military jury would be extremely lenient in deciding on Watada's guilt and sentence.
Since then, the question in activist and legal circles has been whether Lt. Watada should be forced to endure a second trial. The basis of the doctrine of double jeopardy is to ensure that the prosecution doesn't get a "mulligan" ( i.e., "do-over") whenever things aren't going their way.
The word was out that the Army Court of Criminal Appeals had granted a stay, and the assumption was that judges would spend years hoping that this would all somehow go away.
However, when the Army Court of Criminal Appeals ruled this summer in favor of the prosecution, the army saw an opening for a "snap trial". Activists were not following the case closely, believing that the stay was still in effect. Although the appellate court's decision dissolved the stay, that word didn't get out due to lack of publicity.
Two weeks ago, Watada's lawyers had gone to the next level - the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces - and that court was apparently happy to do nothing and watch Lt. Watada go down. (Source: 10/5 Seattle P-I.)
The general rule is that a civilian judge will not interfere with a military proceeding. That's apparently why Watada's legal team waited until Wednesday to file their motion for stay. At that point, they could legitimately argue that they had exhausted their remedies.
The squeeze play to avoid publicity was in full effect. Early on Friday, Fort Lewis Public Affairs announced that media wanting to cover the trial had until Saturday at 4:30 pm to register with their office. (Source: David Mitchell and Gerry Condon, Courage to Resist; CtR organizer Jeff Paterson's letter.)
Rather than seek the testimony of journalists as in the initial trial - which only resulted in even further publicity - the Army subpoenaed regional anti-war organizers in an attempt to use their testimony against Lt. Watada.
It was a big moment for Northwest activists, who had been struggling to ensure at least a respectable showing of support for this unexpected trial. Their hands were already full in handling the campaign for Iraq war resister Robin Long, who was arrested on Monday in a small town just north of the Washington state line. Will Iraq War resisters be given sanctuary in Canada, like the Vietnam war resisters? The question is not yet settled, but the outpouring of support persuaded Canadian officials to temporarily release Long on Wednesday rather than deport him back to the US. The Watada victory was their second big win of the week. (Source: Courage to Resist, 10/3)
What has not changed is that Lt. Watada is facing six years in prison. One year of his looming prison term is based on a "conduct unbecoming an officer" charge , solely for a few well-chosen words in a historic speech last year to the Veterans For Peace Convention, with fifty Iraq War veterans standing by his side:
"Today, I speak with you about a radical idea. It is one born from the very concept of the American soldier (or service member). It became instrumental in ending the Vietnam War - but it has been long since forgotten. The idea is this: that to stop an illegal and unjust war, the soldiers can choose to stop fighting it ...
"I tell this to you because you must know that to stop this war, for the soldiers to stop fighting it, they must have the unconditional support of the people. I have seen this support with my own eyes. For me it was a leap of faith.
"For other soldiers, they do not have that luxury. They must know it and you must show it to them. Convince them that no matter how long they sit in prison, no matter how long this country takes to right itself, their families will have a roof over their heads, food in their stomachs, opportunities and education."
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2) On Torture and American Values
Editorial
October 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/opinion/07sun1.html?hp
Once upon a time, it was the United States that urged all nations to obey the letter and the spirit of international treaties and protect human rights and liberties. American leaders denounced secret prisons where people were held without charges, tortured and killed. And the people in much of the world, if not their governments, respected the United States for its values.
The Bush administration has dishonored that history and squandered that respect. As an article on this newspaper’s front page last week laid out in disturbing detail, President Bush and his aides have not only condoned torture and abuse at secret prisons, but they have conducted a systematic campaign to mislead Congress, the American people and the world about those policies.
After the attacks of 9/11, Mr. Bush authorized the creation of extralegal detention camps where Central Intelligence Agency operatives were told to extract information from prisoners who were captured and held in secret. Some of their methods — simulated drownings, extreme ranges of heat and cold, prolonged stress positions and isolation — had been classified as torture for decades by civilized nations. The administration clearly knew this; the C.I.A. modeled its techniques on the dungeons of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union.
The White House could never acknowledge that. So its lawyers concocted documents that redefined “torture” to neatly exclude the things American jailers were doing and hid the papers from Congress and the American people. Under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Mr. Bush’s loyal enabler, the Justice Department even declared that those acts did not violate the lower standard of “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”
That allowed the White House to claim that it did not condone torture, and to stampede Congress into passing laws that shielded the interrogators who abused prisoners, and the men who ordered them to do it, from any kind of legal accountability.
Mr. Bush and his aides were still clinging to their rationalizations at the end of last week. The president declared that Americans do not torture prisoners and that Congress had been fully briefed on his detention policies.
Neither statement was true — at least in what the White House once scorned as the “reality-based community” — and Senator John Rockefeller, chairman of the Intelligence Committee, was right to be furious. He demanded all of the “opinions of the Justice Department analyzing the legality” of detention and interrogation policies. Lawmakers, who for too long have been bullied and intimidated by the White House, should rewrite the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act to conform with actual American laws and values.
For the rest of the nation, there is an immediate question: Is this really who we are?
Is this the country whose president declared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” and then managed the collapse of Communism with minimum bloodshed and maximum dignity in the twilight of the 20th century? Or is this a nation that tortures human beings and then concocts legal sophistries to confuse the world and avoid accountability before American voters?
Truly banning the use of torture would not jeopardize American lives; experts in these matters generally agree that torture produces false confessions. Restoring the rule of law to Guantánamo Bay would not set terrorists free; the truly guilty could be tried for their crimes in a way that does not mock American values.
Clinging to the administration’s policies will only cause further harm to America’s global image and to our legal system. It also will add immeasurably to the risk facing any man or woman captured while wearing America’s uniform or serving in its intelligence forces.
This is an easy choice.
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3) For Schools, Lottery Payoffs Fall Short of Promises
By RON STODGHILL and RON NIXON
"...a New York Times examination of lottery documents, as well as interviews with lottery administrators and analysts, finds that lotteries accounted for less than 1 percent to 5 percent of the total revenue for K-12 education last year in the states that use this money for schools."
October 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/business/07lotto.html?hp
Last year, North Carolina’s governor, Mike Easley, finally delivered on his promise to start a lottery, making his state the most recent of the 42 states and the District of Columbia to cash in on legalized gambling.
If some voters in this Bible Belt state frowned on Mr. Easley’s push to bring gambling here, others were persuaded by his argument that North Carolina’s students were missing out on as much as $500 million in aid annually as residents crossed the border to buy lottery tickets elsewhere.
“Our people are playing the lottery,” the governor said in an address two years ago that was a prelude to the creation of the North Carolina Education Lottery. “We just need to decide which schools we should fund, other states’ or ours.”
Pitches like this have become popular among lawmakers who, since states began legalizing lotteries more than 40 years ago, have sold gambling as a savior for cash-starved public schools and other government programs. Lotteries have raised billions of dollars, and of the 42 states that have them, 23 earmark all or some of the money for education.
For years, those states have heard complaints that not enough of their lottery revenue is used for education. Now, a New York Times examination of lottery documents, as well as interviews with lottery administrators and analysts, finds that lotteries accounted for less than 1 percent to 5 percent of the total revenue for K-12 education last year in the states that use this money for schools.
In reality, most of the money raised by lotteries is used simply to sustain the games themselves, including marketing, prizes and vendor commissions. And as lotteries compete for a small number of core players and try to persuade occasional customers to play more, nearly every state has increased, or is considering increasing, the size of its prizes — further shrinking the percentage of each dollar going to education and other programs.
In some states, lottery dollars have merely replaced money for education. Also, states eager for more players are introducing games that emphasize instant gratification and more potentially addictive forms of gambling.
Of course, the question of how much lotteries contribute to education has been around for years. But the debate is particularly timely now that at least 10 states and the District of Columbia are considering privatizing their lotteries, despite assurances decades ago that state involvement would blunt social problems that might emerge from an unregulated expansion of lotteries. These trends fly in the face of marketing campaigns that often emphasize lotteries’ educational benefits, like a South Carolina lottery slogan, “Big Fun, Bright Futures,” or an ad campaign in North Carolina featuring a thank-you note passed through schools and signed “The Students.” The New York Lottery’s Web site includes the tagline, “Raising billions to educate millions.”
Promotions like these have taken root. Surveys and interviews indicate that many Americans in states with lotteries linked to education think their schools are largely supported by lottery funds — so much so that they even mention this when asked to vote for tax increases or bond authorizations to finance their schools.
A Growing Industry
Long a mainstay of American life, lotteries began as raffles in the 1700s to finance the Continental Army, bridges and roads, and Columbia University. But modern lotteries are big businesses, run by streamlined enterprises with managers and consultants from Fortune 500 companies.
State lotteries raised more than $56 billion and returned $17 billion to the state governments last year. They spent more than $460 million last year on advertising, making them one of the nation’s largest marketers. The 197,000 retailers that sell lottery products earned $3.3 billion in commissions in 2006.
Lottery advocates say the games live up to their public mandate. According to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries, $234 billion has gone into state coffers since the first modern lottery was started in New Hampshire in 1964.
“Lotteries bring additional money to states that can be used very effectively to fund special projects without raising taxes,” said Charles Strutt, executive director of the Multi-State Lottery Association, a nonprofit group.
But among the states that earmark lottery money for education, lottery dollars accounted for 1 percent or less of the total K-12 education financing (including all state, federal and local revenue) last year in at least five states, including New Jersey. New York had the highest percentage, 5.3 percent.
(Five states — Georgia, Kentucky, New Mexico, South Carolina and Tennessee — direct lottery dollars primarily to college scholarships. North Carolina and Florida also give some money to scholarships.)
At least five states — California, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio and Washington — channel lottery money to higher education as well as elementary and secondary schools. In these states, too, lottery proceeds amount to less than 5 percent of the total education financing.
In at least four states — California, Illinois, Michigan and Texas — lottery dollars as a percentage of K-12 education money has declined or remained flat over the last decade.
In California, for example, the lottery in 1985 accounted for almost 5 percent of all K-12 education dollars. Today, it makes up less than 2 percent, or about $1 billion, of the $54 billion the state spends on in K-12 education, according to the California Budget Project, a nonprofit research group in Sacramento.
The California Department of Education addressed this in its State Fact Book two years ago: “Although the public still perceives the lottery as making a significant difference in the funds available for education,” the book read, “it is a minor source that cannot be expected to provide major improvements in K-12 education.”
Some state lotteries have fallen short of projections. In North Carolina, where officials expected the lottery to generate $400 million to $500 million a year for education, revenue reached just over $300 million in its first full year of operations. In Oklahoma, officials expected schools to receive $52 million last year from the lottery, but the final tally was $15 million less.
Also, the portion of lottery money going to state programs is shrinking. When Missouri passed its lottery in 1985, it required that at least 45 percent of all proceeds go to the state, and the number went as high as 52 percent. Legislators revised the law, and now the state gets about 30 percent of proceeds.
The Times review of documents from all 42 states with lotteries and the District of Columbia found that nearly all have increased payouts and lowered the percentage going to programs. And those that have not changed their payout formulas are considering it.
Lawmakers and lottery officials defend the practices, saying schools and other programs will still benefit from the extra money raised by lotteries.
“Too much of the focus is on percentages,” said Gardner Gurney, acting director of the New York lottery. “My focus is on dollars. You can’t spend percentages.”
In 2000, New York State kept 38 percent of its lottery revenue for education. That share has dropped to 32 percent, but the dollar amount rose from $1.3 billion in 2000 to $2.2 billion last year.
But Jerry McPeak, a Democratic state representative in Oklahoma, said states that have committed to a percentage should not later lower that number.
“I think if you pass a lottery and tell people that a certain proportion of those dollars are going to something like education, then you ought to keep your word,” Mr. McPeak said.
School Budgets in Flux
In some states, lottery dollars are pooled with other funds, making it impossible to determine how much the lottery benefits schools. That is the case in Michigan, Texas and Illinois.
Because legislators in these states decide school budgets well in advance of knowing what lottery revenue will be, lottery money is just another part of the overall budget. If the lottery dollars are below projections, the state makes up the shortfall with money from other sources, or in some cases, simply gives schools less money. If the lottery dollars exceed projections, the state uses some of the money for other programs.
“Legislators merely substitute general revenue funds with lottery dollars so the schools don’t really gain any additional funding,” said O. Homer Erekson, dean of the business school at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, who co-wrote a national study on lottery money and school financing.
States including Georgia, Oklahoma and South Carolina have enacted laws that prohibit substituting lottery dollars for money that would have otherwise gone to education. But such laws have not stopped legislators.
Oklahoma, for example, used lottery money last year for a portion of promised teacher raises that were supposed to come from the general fund. The move provoked an angry response from education officials and some legislators.
In Nebraska, from 2002 through the last fiscal year, legislators diverted lottery dollars from the state’s K-12 education and other programs into the general fund to make up for a shortfall.
“Diverting lottery funds into the general fund was one of many ways to make up for the lost revenues,” said Bruce Snyder, a supervisor in the accounting office at the Nebraska Department of Administrative Services.
Lottery officials say they are unfairly blamed for legislators’ decisions. “Our job is to raise money for the things the legislators want,” said Clint Harris, director of the Minnesota lottery. “We don’t have any control over what happens to the money.”
But Brett McFadden, a budget analyst with the Association of California School Administrators, said: “It makes it harder for us to convince people that they still need to support education.” He added, “They think the lottery is taking care of education. We have to tell them we’re only getting a few sprinkles; we’re not even getting the icing on the cake.”
New Games and Gimmicks
As player interest has flagged, some lotteries have responded with aggressive marketing and new products that critics say can undermine public trust.
In an effort to attract younger customers, several states have introduced video lottery terminals, in which players wager against a computer, and Keno, a bingo-like video game. Critics have labeled both kinds of games “video crack” because of their addictive nature. Fifteen states offer electronic gambling machines, and several more are considering adding them.
This year in Florida, state officials estimated that the state could raise an additional $1 billion from video terminals and $39 million to $241 million from Keno. The report also noted that both games “are considered to be more addictive than traditional lottery games and could contribute to a problem of pathological gambling.”
While introducing Keno in Florida would require legislative approval because of potential problems associated with gambling, Florida officials view the issue through an economic lens.
“We will determine which, of the products legally available to us, fits in fulfilling that mission,” said Jackie Barreiros, a spokeswoman for the Florida lottery.
Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, said many states are also introducing higher-price games, underscoring a Vegas-style rivalry among states for gambling dollars.
California’s contract with its instant ticket vendor, Scientific Games, calls for the introduction of 30 to 45 new games a year. Kansas, Texas and Michigan recently introduced a $50 scratch ticket, the most expensive in the nation.
States are also trying to bolster the number of “core” players, according to interviews with lottery officials in several states. Such players typically represent only 10 percent to 15 percent of all players but account for 80 percent of sales, according to Independent Lottery Research, which does research and marketing for state lotteries.
In North Carolina, Mr. Easley faces a battle in proving that the lottery will be a winner for voters. After its first full year, revenue was 25 percent less than projected, giving critics ammunition in their case that lottery revenue is an unreliable source of money for schools.
The governor declined to be interviewed, but Dan Gerlach, his senior policy adviser for fiscal affairs, said lottery officials had overestimated the market size of rival lotteries in Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia when developing the state’s gambling efforts. But Mr. Gerlach said he expected the state to sell millions more tickets in coming months than it did last year.
That is because Mr. Easley recently persuaded his legislature to increase lottery prizes. The move will reduce the percentage of lottery dollars going to education. But North Carolina is choosing a tried and true formula: raising payouts increases customer traffic.
“People like to win big,” Mr. Gerlach said. “Now, the pot is bigger.”
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4) A Heavy Toll From Disease Fuels Suspicion and Anger
By MICHELE MORGAN BOLTON
October 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/us/07middle.html?ref=us
MIDDLEBOROUGH, Mass., Oct. 6 — The big news in this struggling southeastern Massachusetts community is a proposed $1 billion casino complex that many hope will bring financial salvation.
But for a small group of residents, the hope for economic revival is overshadowed by health concerns. They are awaiting a report later this year that could reveal whether the dozens of cases of Lou Gehrig’s disease centered around a downtown industrial area were caused by pollution.
The cases, which both state and federal officials call a disease cluster, are located within a mile of Everett Square — a densely settled neighborhood adjacent to the town’s onetime factory row. It is now home to two Superfund sites.
The study, which was financed by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and conducted by state health scientists, will be followed by the creation of a statewide registry to track cases of the disease, formally known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the cause of which is not fully understood.
State Senator Marian Walsh, a Democrat from West Roxbury, said it was understandable that most residents were more interested in the prospect of obtaining a casino, which would be built by the Mashpee Wampanoag Indians and is expected to create as many as 10,000 jobs.
“It’s human nature that we move toward pleasure and away from pain,” Ms. Walsh said. “But here, if we can understand the genesis, the registry will bring in money, information and resources that will help get to a cure.”
Word about the A.L.S. cluster surprised Scott Ferson, a spokesman for the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe.
“We didn’t know about it,” Mr. Ferson said, asserting, however, that the revelation was not an issue in choosing to locate the project in the town. Middleborough residents voted to accept the casino in July.
In early September, Gov. Deval Patrick, a Democrat, announced a plan to license three casinos, including one here in southeastern Massachusetts.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a neurodegenerative disease that destroys the ability to control movement. Patients lose their ability to move or speak, but their minds remain unaffected. It is nearly always fatal, usually within a few years of diagnosis.
Some residents, like Victor and Marion Sylvia, married 57 years, have spent years trying to prove that heavy metals and solvents from plating and shoe factories — and the toxic chemical cocktails of other industries — are to blame for the illnesses here.
Mr. Sylvia, a former town selectman, knew many of the dead and dying. Others seem like friends, though he knows them only on paper. “Our hearts go out to these poor souls,” he said. “There is no cure.”
Now dependent on a cane, Mr. Sylvia conducts much of his activism from the kitchen table, where 40 years of research fans out in yellowing stacks of maps, newspaper clippings and obituaries. He remembers a pivotal moment in winter 1976 that intensified his suspicions about toxins when he drove around a curve near the factories and found a multicolored mess of melting snow and ice.
Offending sites, like the abandoned Middleborough Plating Company and Rockland Industries, a chemical plant, are either already capped or under remediation.
But Mr. Sylvia, a farmer who once grew watercress and mint near waterways he insists are tainted, said it was not enough.
“People are still getting sick — that’s what bothers me more than anything,” he said. “But I’m getting tired. I’m 78 years old. I don’t know if they’ll ever prove that one company caused a problem.”
Town Selectman Wayne Perkins said: “For years, there’s been a fear that something was here creating more of an instance of A.L.S. I’m concerned. I’ve always been concerned. It can’t be undone, but it can be cleaned up.”
Suzanne K. Condon, director of the state’s Center for Environmental Health, said an environmental link may emerge from the report. “About 10 percent of the time we do these types of cluster investigations we tend to see that the environment may have played a role,” she said.
High incidences of breast cancer in some affluent communities may not so much be attributed to a cluster, for example, but rather better screening processes for early detection, she said.
“But with A.L.S., we don’t really have a surveillance system in place,” Ms. Condon said, because there is still no definitive answer to what causes it.
Investigations into such cases are often inconclusive, and what appear to be clusters often cannot be proven to be anything other than coincidence.
Donna Jordan and Mary Ann Singersen were co-founders of the A.L.S. Family Charitable Foundation in Buzzards Bay. Ms. Jordan’s brother, Clifford Jordan Jr., fell ill and died in his 30s, after living and working less than a mile from the plating factory.
Ten years after his death, her pain remains intense.
“I can’t believe they’re worried about a casino,” Ms. Jordan said. “We’re not messing around with something like a cold or a bug here. Here was a dad who rode his bike 20 miles a day. He didn’t drink. He didn’t smoke. And then he couldn’t do anything but wither away.”
There are other stories, Ms. Jordan said, like the owner of a three-family home in the square who died of A.L.S. “Then someone else moved in, and they died from A.L.S.”
“We’ve been screaming about this for years,” Ms. Singersen added. “But for whatever reason, it keeps getting swept under the rug.”
Rick Arrowood, president of the state chapter of the national A.L.S. Association, said few officials had any idea there were so many cases in Middleborough before advocates brought the crisis to the state’s attention.
“What else didn’t they know?” Mr. Arrowood asked. “Unfortunately, it’s all an unknown. We can’t urge people to take steps to avoid something because we don’t know what that unknown is.”
Suzanne Dube lost a cousin to A.L.S. in 2000, after he worked much for of his life as an accountant in Everett Square. In August, an uncle who was a mechanic in the same area also died.
“Until the registry is in place, we are just shooting in the dark,” Ms. Dube said. “We need it. So history doesn’t repeat itself.”
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5) Iraq Says Blackwater Killed 17, Shooting "Deliberate"
By REUTERS
October 7, 2007
Filed at 1:42 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-iraq-blackwater.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq said on Sunday security guards from the U.S. firm Blackwater "deliberately killed" 17 Iraqis in last month's shooting incident in Baghdad and that it would take legal steps against them.
Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said an investigation set up by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki found no evidence that the U.S. security firm had come under fire during the incident.
"What they committed is considered a crime of deliberate killing and they must be held accountable according to the law," Dabbagh said, adding the company itself could face legal action.
Dabbagh's toll from the shooting was higher than the 11 deaths previously reported by Iraqi officials and the tone of his statement suggested Iraqi anger over the September 16 still burns strongly.
Blackwater, which employs 1,000 people in Iraq to protect U.S. State Department officials, has said its guards reacted lawfully to an attack on one of its convoys.
Blackwater's founder, Erik Prince, said in remarks prepared for a Congressional hearing last week that his men came under small-arms fire, including from people wearing police uniforms, and "returned fire at threatening targets."
Dabbagh said there was "no evidence that the Blackwater convoy came under any direct or indirect fire, or that it was even hit by stones."
His statement was released on the same day a separate committee made up of U.S. and Iraqi officials met for the first time to review the operations of foreign security firms in Iraq.
A U.S. embassy statement said the joint commission, headed by Iraq's defence minister and a senior U.S. diplomat, will put forward proposals to ensure that security firms guarding U.S. officials "do not endanger public safety."
It did not say when the committee would complete its work.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has ordered tighter controls on Blackwater including putting cameras on its convoys. The State Department also plans to send diplomatic security agents to accompany each convoy protected by Blackwater guards.
Iraq says there are more than 180 mainly U.S. and European security companies in Iraq, with estimates of the number of private contractors ranging from 25,000 to 48,000.
Many Iraqis resent their presence, seeing them as private armies which have shot and killed civilians with impunity.
A U.S. Congressional report released last week said Blackwater had been involved in at least 195 shooting incidents in Iraq since 2005. In 84 percent of those cases, it said Blackwater personnel were the first to open fire.
Under a 2004 ruling issued by the U.S.-led authority which ruled Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the firms are immune from Iraqi law.
But Dabbagh said Iraq's cabinet would look at recommendations from Maliki's committee and the joint U.S.-Iraqi investigation and "take the legal steps to hold the company to account."
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6) Thou Shalt Not Kill, Except in a Popular Video Game at Church
By MATT RICHTEL
October 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/us/07halo.html?hp
First the percussive sounds of sniper fire and the thrill of the kill. Then the gospel of peace.
Across the country, hundreds of ministers and pastors desperate to reach young congregants have drawn concern and criticism through their use of an unusual recruiting tool: the immersive and violent video game Halo.
The latest iteration of the immensely popular space epic, Halo 3, was released nearly two weeks ago by Microsoft and has already passed $300 million in sales.
Those buying it must be 17 years old, given it is rated M for mature audiences. But that has not prevented leaders at churches and youth centers across Protestant denominations, including evangelical churches that have cautioned against violent entertainment, from holding heavily attended Halo nights and stocking their centers with multiple game consoles so dozens of teenagers can flock around big-screen televisions and shoot it out.
The alliance of popular culture and evangelism is challenging churches much as bingo games did in the 1960s. And the question fits into a rich debate about how far churches should go to reach young people.
Far from being defensive, church leaders who support Halo — despite its “thou shalt kill” credo — celebrate it as a modern and sometimes singularly effective tool. It is crucial, they say, to reach the elusive audience of boys and young men.
Witness the basement on a recent Sunday at the Colorado Community Church in the Englewood area of Denver, where Tim Foster, 12, and Chris Graham, 14, sat in front of three TVs, locked in violent virtual combat as they navigated on-screen characters through lethal gun bursts. Tim explained the game’s allure: “It’s just fun blowing people up.”
Once they come for the games, Gregg Barbour, the youth minister of the church said, they will stay for his Christian message. “We want to make it hard for teenagers to go to hell,” Mr. Barbour wrote in a letter to parents at the church.
But the question arises: What price to appear relevant? Some parents, religious ethicists and pastors say that Halo may succeed at attracting youths, but that it could have a corroding influence. In providing Halo, churches are permitting access to adult-themed material that young people cannot buy on their own.
“If you want to connect with young teenage boys and drag them into church, free alcohol and pornographic movies would do it,” said James Tonkowich, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a nonprofit group that assesses denominational policies. “My own take is you can do better than that.”
Daniel R. Heimbach, a professor of Christian ethics at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, believes that churches should reject Halo, in part because it associates thrill and arousal with killing.
“To justify whatever killing is involved by saying that it’s just pixels involved is an illusion,” he said.
Focus on the Family, a large evangelical organization, said it was trying to balance the game’s violent nature with its popularity and the fact that churches are using it anyway. “Internally, we’re still trying to figure out what is our official view on it,” said Lisa Anderson, a spokeswoman for the group.
There is little doubting Halo’s cultural relevance. Even as video games have grown in popularity, the Halo series stands out. The first Halo and Halo 2 sold nearly 15 million copies combined. Microsoft says that Halo 3 “is on track to become the No. 1 gaming title of all time.”
Hundreds of churches use Halo games to connect with young people, said Lane Palmer, the youth ministry specialist at the Dare 2 Share Ministry, a nonprofit organization in Arvada, Colo., that helps churches on youth issues.
“It’s very pervasive,” Mr. Palmer said, more widespread on the coasts, less so in the South, where the Southern Baptist denomination takes a more cautious approach. The organization recently sent e-mail messages to 50,000 young people about how to share their faith using Halo 3. Among the tips: use the game’s themes as the basis for a discussion about good and evil.
At Sweetwater Baptist Church in Lawrenceville, Ga., Austin Brown, 16, said, “We play Halo, take a break and have something to eat, and have a lesson,” explaining that the pastor tried to draw parallels “between God and the devil.”
Players of Halo 3 control the fate of Master Chief, a tough marine armed to the teeth who battles opponents with missiles, lasers, guns that fire spikes, energy blasters and other fantastical weapons. They can also play in teams, something the churches say allows communication and fellowship opportunities.
Complicating the debate over the appropriateness of the game as a church recruiting tool are the plot’s apocalyptic and religious overtones. The hero’s chief antagonists belong to the Covenant, a fervent religious group that welcomes the destruction of Earth as the path to their ascension.
Microsoft said Halo 3 was a “space epic” that was not intended to make specific religious references or be more broadly allegorical. Advocates of using the game as a church recruiting tool say the religious overtones are sufficiently cartoonish and largely overlooked by players.
Martial images in literature or movies popular with religious people are not new. The popular “Left Behind” series of books — it also spawned a video game — dealt with the conflict preceding the second coming of Christ. Playing Halo is “no different than going on a camping trip,” said Kedrick Kenerly, founder of Christian Gamers Online, an Internet site whose central themes are video games and religion. “It’s a way to fellowship.”
Mr. Kenerly said the idea that Halo is inappropriately violent too strictly interpreted the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” “I’m not walking up to someone with a pistol and shooting them,” he said. “I’m shooting pixels on a screen.”
Mr. Kenerly’s brother, Ken Kenerly, 43, is a pastor who recently started a church in Atlanta and previously started the Family Church in Albuquerque, N.M., where quarterly Halo nights were such a big social event that he had to rent additional big-screen TVs.
Ken Kenerly said he believed that the game could be useful in connecting to young people he once might have reached in more traditional ways, like playing sports. “There aren’t as many kids outdoors as indoors,” he said. “With gamers, how else can you get into their lives?”
John Robison, the current associate pastor at the 300-member Albuquerque church, said parents approached him and were concerned about the Halo games’ M rating. “We explain we’re using it as a tool to be relatable and relevant,” he said, “and most people get over it pretty quick.”
David Drexler, youth director at the 200-member nondenominational Country Bible Church in Ashby, Minn., said using Halo to recruit was “the most effective thing we’ve done.”
In rural Minnesota, Mr. Drexler said, the church needs something powerful to compete against the lure of less healthy behaviors. “We have to find something that these kids are interested in doing that doesn’t involve drugs or alcohol or premarital sex.” His congregation plans to double to eight its number of TVs, which would allow 32 players to compete at one time.
Among parents at the Colorado Community Church, Doug Graham, a pediatric oncologist with a 12-year-old son, said that he was not aware of the game’s M rating and that it gave him pause. He said he felt that parents should be actively involved in deciding whether minors play an M-rated game. “Every family should have a conversation about it,” he said.
Mr. Barbour, the youth pastor at the church, said the game had led to a number of internal discussions prompted by elders who complained about its violent content. Mr. Barbour recently met for several hours with the church’s pastor and successfully made his case that the game was a crucial recruiting tool.
In one letter to parents, Mr. Barbour wrote that God calls ministers to be “fishers of men.”
“Teens are our ‘fish,” he wrote. “So we’ve become creative in baiting our hooks.”
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7) Immigration, Black Sheep and Swiss Rage
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
October 8, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/08/world/europe/08swiss.html?ref=world
SCHWERZENBACH, Switzerland, Oct. 4 — The posters taped on the walls at a political rally here capture the rawness of Switzerland’s national electoral campaign: three white sheep stand on the Swiss flag as one of them kicks a single black sheep away.
“To Create Security,” the poster reads.
The poster is not the creation of a fringe movement, but of the most powerful party in Switzerland’s federal Parliament and a member of the coalition government, an extreme right-wing party called the Swiss People’s Party, or SVP. It has been distributed in a mass mailing to Swiss households, reproduced in newspapers and magazines and hung as huge billboards across the country.
As voters prepare to go to the polls in a general election on Oct. 21, the poster — and the party’s underlying message — have polarized a country that prides itself on peaceful consensus in politics, neutrality in foreign policy and tolerance in human relations.
Suddenly the campaign has turned into a nationwide debate over the place of immigrants in one of the world’s oldest democracies, and over what it means to be Swiss.
“The poster is disgusting, unacceptable,” Micheline Calmy-Rey, the current president of Switzerland under a one-year rotation system, said in an interview. “It stigmatizes others and plays on the fear factor, and in that sense it’s dangerous. The campaign does not correspond to Switzerland’s multicultural openness to the world. And I am asking all Swiss who do not agree with its message to have the courage to speak out.”
Interior Minister Pascal Couchepin, of the Liberal Democratic Party, has even suggested that the SVP’s worship of Christoph Blocher, the billionaire who is the party’s driving force and the current justice minister, is reminiscent of that of Italian fascists for Mussolini.
[On Saturday, a march of several thousand SVP supporters in Bern ended in clashes between hundreds of rock-throwing counterdemonstrators and riot police officers, who used tear gas to disperse them. The opponents of the rally, organized by a new group called the Black Sheep Committee, had tried to prevent the demonstrators from marching to Parliament.]
The message of the party resonates loudly among voters who have seen this country of 7.5 million become a haven for foreigners, including political refugees from places like Kosovo and Rwanda. Polls indicate that the right-wing party is poised to win more seats than any other party in Parliament in the election, as it did in national elections in 2003, when its populist language gave it nearly 27 percent of the vote.
“Our political enemies think the poster is racist, but it just gives a simple message,” Bruno Walliser, a local chimney sweep running for Parliament on the party ticket, said at the rally, held on a Schwerzenbach farm outside Zurich. “The black sheep is not any black sheep that doesn’t fit into the family. It’s the foreign criminal who doesn’t belong here, the one that doesn’t obey Swiss law. We don’t want him.”
More than 20 percent of Swiss inhabitants are foreign nationals, and the SVP argues that a disproportionate number are lawbreakers. Many drug dealers are foreign, and according to federal statistics, about 70 percent of the prison population is non-Swiss.
As part of its platform, the SVP party has begun a campaign seeking the 100,000 signatures necessary to force a referendum to let judges deport foreigners after they serve prison sentences for serious crimes. The measure also calls for the deportation of the entire family if the convicted criminal is a minor.
Human rights advocates warn that the initiative is reminiscent of the Nazi practice of Sippenhaft, or kin liability, under which relatives of criminals were held responsible and punished for their crimes.
The party’s political campaign has a much broader agenda than simply fighting crime. Its subliminal message is that the influx of foreigners has somehow polluted Swiss society, straining the social welfare system and threatening the very identity of the country.
Unlike the situation in France, where the far-right National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen campaigned for president in the spring alongside black and ethnic Arab supporters, the SVP has taken a much cruder us-against-them approach.
In a short three-part campaign film, “Heaven or Hell,” the party’s message is clear. In the first segment, young men inject heroin, steal handbags from women, kick and beat up schoolboys, wield knives and carry off a young woman. The second segment shows Muslims living in Switzerland — women in head scarves; men sitting, not working.
The third segment shows “heavenly” Switzerland: men in suits rushing to work, logos of Switzerland’s multinational corporations, harvesting on farms, experiments in laboratories, scenes of lakes, mountains, churches and goats. “The choice is clear: my home, our security,” the film states.
The film was withdrawn from the party’s Web site after the men who acted in it sued, arguing they were unaware of its purpose. But over beer and bratwurst at the Schwerzenbach political rally, Mr. Walliser screened it for the audience, saying, “I’m taking the liberty to show it anyway.”
For Nelly Schneider, a 49-year-old secretary, the party’s approach is “a little bit crass,” but appealing nevertheless. “These foreigners abuse the system,” she said after Mr. Walliser’s presentation. “They don’t speak any German. They go to prostitution and do drugs and drive fancy cars and work on the black market. They don’t want to work.”
As most of the rest of Europe has moved toward unity, Switzerland has fiercely guarded its independence, staying out of the 27-country European Union and maintaining its status as a tax haven for the wealthy. It has perhaps the longest and most arduous process to become a citizen in all of Europe: candidates typically must wait 12 years before being considered.
Three years ago the SVP blocked a move to liberalize the citizenship process, using the image of dark-skinned hands snatching at Swiss passports. And though the specter of terrorism has not been a driving issue, some posters in southern Switzerland at the time showed a mock Swiss passport held by Osama bin Laden.
Foreigners, who make up a quarter of the Swiss work force, complain that it is harder to get a job or rent an apartment without a Swiss passport and that they endure everyday harassment that Swiss citizens do not.
James Philippe, a 28-year-old Haitian who has lived in Switzerland for 14 years and works for Streetchurch, a Protestant storefront community organization, and as a hip-hop dance instructor, said he is regularly stopped by the police and required to show his papers and submit to body searches. He speaks German, French, Creole and English, but has yet to receive a Swiss passport.
“The police treat me like I’m somehow not human,” he said at the Streetchurch headquarters in a working-class neighborhood of Zurich. “Then I open my mouth and speak good Swiss German, and they’re always shocked.
“We come here. We want to learn. We clean their streets and do all the work they don’t want to do. If they kick us out, are they going to do all that work themselves? We need them, but they need us too.”
SVP officials insist that their campaign is not racist, just anticrime. “Every statistic shows that the participation of foreigners in crime is quite high,” said Ulrich Schlüer, an SVP Parliament deputy who has also led an initiative to ban minarets in Switzerland. “We cannot accept this. We are the only party that addresses this problem.”
But the SVP campaign has begun to have a ripple effect, shaking the image of Switzerland as a place of prosperity, tranquillity and stability — particularly for doing business. On Thursday, a coalition of business, union and church leaders in Basel criticized the SVP for what they called its extremism, saying, “Those who discriminate against foreigners hurt the economy and threaten jobs in Switzerland.”
“In the past,” said Daniele Jenni, a lawyer and the founder of the Black Sheep Committee who is running for Parliament, “people were reluctant to attack the party out of fear that it might only strengthen it. Now people are beginning to feel liberated. They no longer automatically accept the role of the rabbit doing nothing, just waiting for the snake to bite.”
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8) High-Stakes Flimflam
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
October 9, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/opinion/09herbert.html?hp
It’s time to rein in the test zealots who have gotten such a stranglehold on the public schools in the U.S.
Politicians and others have promoted high-stakes testing as a panacea that would bring accountability to teaching and substantially boost the classroom performance of students.
“Measuring,” said President Bush, in a discussion of his No Child Left Behind law, “is the gateway to success.”
Not only has high-stakes testing largely failed to magically swing open the gates to successful learning, it is questionable in many cases whether the tests themselves are anything more than a shell game.
Daniel Koretz, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, told me in a recent interview that it’s important to ask “whether you can trust improvements in test scores when you are holding people accountable for the tests.”
The short answer, he said, is no.
If teachers, administrators, politicians and others have a stake in raising the test scores of students — as opposed to improving student learning, which is not the same thing — there are all kinds of incentives to raise those scores by any means necessary.
“We’ve now had four or five different waves of educational reform,” said Dr. Koretz, “that were based on the idea that if we can just get a good test in place and beat people up to raise scores, kids will learn more. That’s really what No Child Left Behind is.”
The problem is that you can raise scores the hard way by teaching more effectively and getting the students to work harder, or you can take shortcuts and start figuring out ways, as Dr. Koretz put it, to “game” the system.
Guess what’s been happening?
“We’ve had high-stakes testing, really, since the 1970s in some states,” said Dr. Koretz. “We’ve had maybe six good studies that ask: ‘If the scores go up, can we believe them? Or are people taking shortcuts?’ And all of those studies found really substantial inflation of test scores.
“In some cases where there were huge increases in test scores, the kids didn’t actually learn more at all. If you gave them another test, you saw no improvement.”
There is not enough data available to determine how widespread this problem is. “We know it doesn’t always happen,” said Dr. Koretz. “But we know it often does.”
He said his big concern is where this might be happening. “There are a lot of us in the field,” he said, “who think that if we ever really looked under the covers, what we’d find is that the shortcuts are particularly prevalent in lower-achieving schools, just because the pressure is greater, the community supports are less and the kids have more difficulties. But we don’t know.”
One aspect of the No Child Left Behind law that doesn’t get enough attention is that while it requires states to make progress toward student proficiency in reading and math, it leaves it up to the states themselves to define “proficiency” and to create the tests that determine what constitutes progress.
That’s absurd. With no guiding standard, the states’ tests are measurements without meaning.
A study released last week by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Northwest Evaluation Association found that “improvements in passing rates on state tests can largely be explained by declines in the difficulty of those tests.”
The people in charge of most school districts would rather jump from the roof of a tall building than allow an unfettered study of their test practices. But that kind of analysis is exactly what’s needed if we’re to get any real sense of how well students are doing.
Five years ago, President Bush and many others who had little understanding of the best ways to educate children were crowing about the prospects of No Child Left Behind. They were warned then about the dangers of relying too much on test scores.
But those warnings didn’t matter in an era in which reality was left behind.
“No longer is it acceptable to hide poor performance,” said Mr. Bush, as if those who were genuinely concerned about the flaws in his approach were in favor of poor performance.
During my interview with Dr. Koretz, he noted that by not rigorously analyzing the phenomenon of high-stakes testing, “we’re creating an illusion of success that is really nice for everybody in the system except the kids.”
That was a few days before the release of the Fordham Institute Study, which used language strikingly similar to Dr. Koretz’s. The study asserted that the tests used by states to measure student progress under No Child Left Behind were creating “a false impression of success.”
The study was titled, “The Proficiency Illusion.”
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9) 2 Iraqi Women Killed in Security Shooting
By ANDREW E. KRAMER
October 10, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/world/middleeast/10iraq.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Oct. 9 — Two women were killed in central Baghdad today when a security convoy of white sport utility vehicles opened fire on a sedan carrying four people, witnesses and police officials said.
The incident occurred at about 3 p.m., along Karrada Street, a well-known shopping district in the Babel neighborhood, after the several white S.U.V.s blocked an intersection, the witnesses said. A white Oldsmobile approaching the back of the convoy was shot once in the radiator, they said, in front of a plumbing supply shop. But as it kept rolling, a barrage of gunfire ripped into the car.
Multiple gunshots hit the hood, roof, windshield and passenger side of the car. The driver was struck in the head, according to witnesses, and blood covered the driver’s side door. The woman sitting next to her was also killed, while two passengers in the rear of the automobile survived.
The incident comes at a high point of tension between the Iraqi and American governments over the issue of private security companies that operate inside Iraq but are protected from Iraqi law.
The issue came to the forefront three weeks ago, after a shooting in another Baghdad square involving the American security company, Blackwater USA. In that shooting, Blackwater security guards opened fire on civilians, killing 17 and wounding 27, Iraqis say.
Today, an Iraqi government spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, was quoted by Reuters as saying: “There has been an incident, an attack on civilians. Two Iraqi women were killed and an investigation is going on to find which security company it was.”
A United States embassy spokeswoman said the embassy was checking media reports of the shooting, Reuters reported.
A man who works in the plumbing store on Karrada, who gave his name only as Muhammad, said he heard no warning of any kind before the shooting. “They shot from the back door,” he said. “The door opened and they fired.”
He said the convoy moved out right away without checking to see what damage had been done. “They left immediately and did not give any help,” he said.
He pointed out where the convoy had parked. The Oldsmobile’s radiator began leaking from the first gunshot about 50 yards from that point, and the marks of blood from where the car same to a stop was about 12 yards from it.
The Oldsmobile was towed to a nearby police station, where a priest who had apparently been notified by the two survivors said that the two dead women were Armenian Christians.
The witness on Karrada Street, Muhammed, said he was angry, but not at the contractors. “We can’t blame the contractors,” he said. “We blame our officials for this. We blame the American government. They’re working here under the authority of the Iraqi government. They did not come here without authority.”
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10) Democrats Seem Ready to Extend Wiretap Powers
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and CARL HULSE
October 9, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/washington/09nsa.html?hp
WASHINGTON, Oct. 8 — Two months after insisting that they would roll back broad eavesdropping powers won by the Bush administration, Democrats in Congress appear ready to make concessions that could extend some crucial powers given to the National Security Agency.
Administration officials say they are confident they will win approval of the broadened authority that they secured temporarily in August as Congress rushed toward recess. Some Democratic officials concede that they may not come up with enough votes to stop approval.
As the debate over the eavesdropping powers of the National Security Agency begins anew this week, the emerging measures reflect the reality confronting the Democrats.
Although willing to oppose the White House on the Iraq war, they remain nervous that they will be called soft on terrorism if they insist on strict curbs on gathering intelligence.
A Democratic bill to be proposed on Tuesday in the House would maintain for several years the type of broad, blanket authority for N.S.A. eavesdropping that the administration secured in August for six months.
In an acknowledgment of concerns over civil liberties, the bill would require a more active role by the special foreign intelligence court that oversees the interception of foreign-based communications by the security agency.
A competing proposal in the Senate, still being drafted, may be even closer in line with the administration plan, with the possibility of including retroactive immunity for telecommunications utilities that participated in the once-secret program to eavesdrop without court warrants.
No one is willing to predict with certainty how the question will play out. Some Congressional officials and others monitoring the debate said the final result might not be much different from the result in August, despite the Democrats’ insistence that they would not let stand the extension of the powers.
“Many members continue to fear that if they don’t support whatever the president asks for, they’ll be perceived as soft on terrorism,” said William Banks, a professor who specializes in terrorism and national security law at Syracuse University and who has written extensively on federal wiretapping laws.
The August bill, known as the Protect America Act, was approved in the final hours before Congress went on its summer recess after heated warnings from the administration that legal loopholes in wiretapping coverage had left the country vulnerable to another terrorist attack. The measure significantly reduced the role of the foreign intelligence court and broadened the security agency’s ability to listen to foreign-based communications without court warrants.
“We want the statute made permanent,” a spokesman for the Justice Department, Dean Boyd, said Monday. “We view this as a healthy debate. We also view it as an opportunity to inform Congress and the public that we can use these authorities responsibly. We’re going to go forward and look at any proposals that come forth. But we’ll look at them very carefully to make sure they don’t have any consequences that hamper our abilities to protect the country.”
House Democrats overwhelmingly opposed the bill in August and said the administration had been forced them into a corner.
As Congress takes up the new bills, a senior Democratic aide said, House leaders are working hard to ensure that the administration does not succeed in pushing through a bill that would make permanent all the powers it secured in August.
“That’s what we’re trying to avoid,” the aide said. “We have that concern too.”
The bill to be proposed on Tuesday by the Democratic leaders of the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees would impose more controls over the powers of security agency, including quarterly audits by the Justice Department inspector general. The measure would also give the foreign intelligence court a role in approving, in advance, “basket” or “umbrella” warrants for bundles of overseas communications, a Congressional official said.
“We are giving the N.S.A. what it legitimately needs for national security but with far more limitations and protections than are in the Protect America Act,” said Brendan Daly, a spokesman for Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California.
Perhaps most important in the eyes of Democratic supporters, the House bill would not give retroactive immunity to the telecommunications utilities that participated in the eavesdropping. That has been a top priority of the administration. The temporary measure gave the utilities immunity for future acts, but not past deeds.
Private groups are trying to prove in federal court that the utilities violated the law by participating in the program.
A former senior Justice Department lawyer, Jack Goldsmith, seemed to bolster their case last week when he told Congress that the program was a “legal mess” and strongly suggested that it was illegal.
The House bill would also require the administration to disclose details of the program. Democrats say they plan to push the administration to turn over internal documents laying out the legal rationale for the program, something the administration has refused to do.
In the Senate, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, is working with his Republican counterpart, Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, a main proponent of the August plan, to come up with a compromise.
Wendy Morigi, a spokeswoman for Mr. Rockefeller, said that retroactive immunity for the utilities was “under discussion” but that no final proposal had been developed.
The immunity issue may prove to be the crucial sticking point between whatever proposals the House and Senate ultimately pass. Representative Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat who was among the harshest critics of the temporary bill, said in an interview he would vigorously oppose any effort to grant retroactive legal protection to telecommunications utilities.
“There is heavy pressure on the immunity, and we should not cave an inch on that,” Mr. Nadler said.
Mr. Nadler said that he was worried the Senate would give too much ground to the administration in its proposal, but that he was satisfied with the bill to be proposed on Tuesday in the House.
“It is not perfect, but it is a good bill,” he said. “It makes huge improvements in the current law. In some respects it is better than the old FISA law,” a reference to the foreign intelligence court.
Civil liberties advocates and others who met House officials on Monday on the proposed bill agreed that it was an improvement over the August plan but were less charitable in their overall assessment.
‘This still authorizes the interception of Americans’ international communications without a warrant in far too many instances, and without adequate civil liberties protections,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, who was in the group that met House officials.
Caroline Frederickson, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union, said she was troubled by the Democrats’ acceptance of broad, blanket warrants for the security agency rather than the individualized warrants traditionally required by the intelligence court.
“The Democratic leadership, philosophically, is with us,” Ms. Frederickson said. “But we need to help them realize the political case, which is that Democrats will not be in danger if they don’t reauthorize this Protect America Act. They’re nervous.
“There’s a ‘keep the majority’ mentality, which is understandable,” she said, “But we think they’re putting themselves in more danger by not standing on principle.”
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11) A Revolutionary Icon, and Now, a Bikini
By MARC LACEY
October 9, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/world/americas/09che.html?ref=world
SANTA CLARA, Cuba, Oct. 8 — Aleida Guevara March, the 46-year-old daughter of Che Guevara, says she can bear the Che T-shirts, the Che keychains, the Che postcards and Che paintings sold all over Cuba, not to mention the world.
At least some of the purchasers truly cherish Che, she says. On Monday she was surrounded by thousands of Che fans wearing his image here in Santa Clara, where her father’s remains are kept, and where she sat in the front row of a ceremony to observe the 40th anniversary of his death.
Raúl Castro, the acting president, attended. A message was read from his older brother Fidel, who ceded power in August 2006 after emergency surgery, likening his former comrade-in-arms to “a flower that was plucked from his stem prematurely.”
But amid all the ceremony, what really gets to Ms. Guevara is the use of the man she calls Papi in ways that she says are completely removed from his revolutionary ideals, like when a designer recently put Che on a bikini.
In fact, 40 years after his death, Che — born Ernesto Guevara de la Serna — is as much a marketing tool as an international revolutionary icon. Which raises the question of what exactly does the sheer proliferation of his image — the distant gaze, the scraggly beard and the beret adorned with a star — mean in a decidedly capitalist world?
Even in Cuba, one of the world’s last Communist bastions, Che is used both to make a buck and to make a point. “He sells,” acknowledged a Cuban shop clerk, who had Che after Che staring down from a wall full of T-shirts.
But at least here he is also used to inspire the next generation of Cubans. Schoolchildren invoke his name every morning, declaring with a salute, “We want to be like Che.” His quotations are recited almost as often as those of Fidel Castro.
“There’s no doubt that when Fidel dies someday, his image will be just like Che’s,” said Enrique Oltuski, the vice minister of fishing and a contemporary of both men. But Che’s mythic status as a homegrown revolutionary does not extend everywhere, even if his image does. When Target stores in the United States put his image on a CD carrying case last year, critics who consider him a murderer and symbol of totalitarianism pressed the retailer to pull the item.
“What next? Hitler backpacks? Pol Pot cookware? Pinochet pantyhose?” Investor’s Business Daily said in an editorial, calling the use of the image an example of “tyrant-chic.”
That famous image of Che, by a Cuban photographer, Alberto Korda Díaz, was taken at a March 5, 1960, funeral rally for dozens of Cubans killed in a boat explosion for which Cuba blamed the United States. The picture became famous after appearing in Paris Match magazine in 1967, just weeks before Che was killed by soldiers in Bolivia, apparently aided by the C.I.A.
Mr. Korda, who died in 2001 at age 72, never received royalties but did sue a British advertising agency over the use of the photo for a campaign promoting vodka. He won $50,000, which he donated toward buying medicine for children.
Ms. Guevara and her family, too, have tried to stop the marketing of Che’s image in ways that they find abhorrent. She says they have reached out to lawyers in New York, whom she would not identify, to pursue companies the family thinks are misusing the image, not to sue them for damages, but to ask them to stop.
“We’re not after money,” she said. “We just don’t want him misused. He can be a universal person, but respect the image.”
Some of Che’s star power has rubbed off on his four surviving children, one of whom is named Ernesto Guevara and drove to the memorial on a motorcycle, just like Dad. Cubans hug the Guevaras in the street, and tourists are giddy when they learn who they are.
“I have goose bumps,” said Alfredo Moreno, 32, a Mexican who posed for a picture with Ms. Guevara, clearly overcome with emotion. “I can’t describe to you what this moment means to me.”
As Mr. Moreno went on and on, Ms. Guevara told him to stop his fawning words.
“I’m a child of Che,” she explained, “but I’m not Che.”
Ms. Guevara is in fact a pediatrician and mother of two who favors pantsuits over military fatigues. She resembles a Cuban soccer mom more than a revolutionary.
Her sister is a veterinarian. One brother manages a center devoted to Che in Havana. Then there is Ernesto, a Harley-Davidson aficionado. All are called on by the Cuban government from time to time to help continue their father’s legacy.
It is not hard to detect a bit of exhaustion in all this, particularly now, when Cuba and much of Latin America are holding major events to honor both his death and, next June, what would have been his 80th birthday.
“I can’t be everywhere,” Ms. Guevara said. “I can’t multiply myself.”
Ms. Guevara travels the world speaking at conferences dealing with Che. At one in Italy, she learned after signing T-shirts for some young people that they were fascists. “They knew nothing about him,” she said with a sigh.
Once, she said, she bumped into John F. Kennedy Jr. in Europe and discussed with him the challenges of being the offspring of a famous man.
She called him “a beautiful person,” and said she was able to separate him from his father, who ordered the Bay of Pigs invasion to try to topple the government that Che had helped put in place in Cuba.
But bring up United States foreign policy, and the resemblance to her father really emerges. The fiery speech flows when she discusses the war in Iraq. She calls the economic embargo of Cuba that has stretched on for 50 years “so brutal, so stupid, so irrational.”
And don’t even get her started about the Bush administration.
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12) Licenses for Immigrants Finds Support
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and DANNY HAKIM
October 9, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/nyregion/09license.html?ref=nyregion
ALBANY, Oct. 8 — Opponents have decried Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s move to grant driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants as a “passport to terror” and a “frightening” policy shift that is “dangerous and inconceivable.”
They suggest that the policy will shield illegal immigrants from scrutiny by law enforcement and airport security personnel and make them appear to be in the United States legally.
But the governor’s policy is drawing support from some terrorism and security experts, who, like Mr. Spitzer, regard it as a way of bringing a hidden population into the open and ultimately making the system more secure, not to mention getting more drivers on the road licensed and insured.
The success of the policy, they say, will rest on the reliability of new technology that Mr. Spitzer wants installed in Department of Motor Vehicles offices to verify the authenticity of passports and other documents that the illegal immigrants will be required to submit when applying for licenses.
Some of the new security problems predicted by critics appear unlikely, several security experts said. Having a driver’s license should not make it easier to board a domestic airplane flight, because foreign passports are already accepted as identification at airports. Moreover, a spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration said, neither a foreign passport nor an American driver’s license is among the criteria used to determine whether the bearer will be subject to extra security screening.
Further, while critics have made much of the fact that several of the Sept. 11 terrorists used driver’s licenses to rent vehicles and board airplanes, they were able to obtain licenses as apparently legal immigrants, if in some cases by presenting fraudulent documentation. As a result, the federal commission that investigated the attacks specifically declined to make recommendations on whether licenses should be granted to illegal immigrants, saying it was not germane to their inquiry.
“If you talk to people in the intelligence and law enforcement communities, when they’re investigating terrorists or crimes or unlawful activity, they want people to be in the system, because that’s how you find them,” said Margaret D. Stock, an associate professor at West Point who also works for the Army as an immigration lawyer.
“I’m a Republican,” she added. “I find it disturbing that people who claim to be law and order types want to let hundreds of thousands of people run around the country without any oversight when there’s a war going on.”
But critics of the policy see it as a retreat.
“There will no longer be any security,” said Frank J. Merola, a Republican and the county clerk in Rensselaer County. A license, he said, “will no longer be different than a fraudulent document on the street.”
“When a police officer walks up to a routine traffic stop,” he said, “he doesn’t know if someone is here legally or illegally.”
Mr. Merola added that his concerns would have been allayed if the governor had proposed creating a second class of driver’s license for the illegal immigrants. Chuck Canterbury, the national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, said his group has generally opposed giving licenses to people who cannot prove they are here legally. However, he said he would not necessarily object to a system like the one Mr. Spitzer is proposing, as long as the verification technology was adequate to prevent fraud.
“We just need to know who we’re stopping, and have some degree of confidence that the information is accurate,” Mr. Canterbury said. “As long as they have proof of who they are, I don’t think that we would object to something like that.”
Under the new policy, someone applying for a license without a Social Security number would need a valid, current foreign passport, in addition to other documents that would aid in establishing the applicant’s identity.
The passport’s authenticity would be verified through new scanners installed at all Department of Motor Vehicles offices or at a central location by a new unit of specially trained personnel. In addition, under the policy, photo-comparison software will be tested in hopes of keeping people from getting multiple licenses under different names.
“If the photo-comparison technology works and if the D.M.V. uses effective methods for authenticating and verifying foreign-source identity documents, the future New York license will be more robust than today’s driver’s licenses, and of much greater use in screening and investigations involving terrorism,” said Susan Ginsburg, a former staff member of the 9/11 Commission who is now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and an adviser to the federal Department of Homeland Security.
The most important thing for investigators and intelligence officials, she added, was to be able to track suspects, legal or not.
“Consistency of identity is critical to law enforcement and counterterrorism, and it’s the consistency of identity that the New York system is designed to increase,” she said.
But James M. Staudenraus, an adviser to the groups 9/11 Families for a Secure America and the Coalition for a Secure Driver’s License, argued that forgoing a requirement for Social Security numbers meant forgoing the only reliable method for verifying someone’s true identity. Foreign passports varied so widely in quality and antifraud protection, he said, that it was dangerous to rely on them.
“We can’t rely on technology for verifying people’s true identity,” Mr. Staudenraus said.
He worries that once would-be terrorists had access to valid state driver’s licenses, they would raise less suspicion. “Everyone who sees it assumes that the individual carrying it has gone under some sort of a background check,” he said.
The Spitzer policy means that New York driver’s licenses are unlikely to meet the federal guidelines being phased in by 2013 for a federally recognized license known as a “Real ID,” which will require, among other things, proof of legal residency. Under the federal law, at that time, the Real ID or a passport would be needed to board an airplane in the United States. In that case, New York and other states may opt to offer both Real IDs for those who want them, as well as standard driver’s licenses.
The dispute over the Spitzer policy appears headed for the courts.
In most upstate counties, county clerks operate centers for the Department of Motor Vehicles, and a dozen Republican clerks have threatened to defy the policy, even though they act as agents of the governor’s administration. Republican lawmakers have threatened to sue to block the policy, saying the governor did not have the statutory authority to act on his own; the Spitzer administration argues that previous litigation on the matter supports their position.
Mr. Spitzer, a Democrat, has called the response hysterical.
“We are not talking about letting more people into this country,” he said, “we are talking about being practical about those who are already here.”
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13) Union Tells Chrysler Workers to Prepare for Strike
By NICK BUNKLEY
October 9, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/business/09auto.html?ref=business
AUBURN HILLS, Mich., Oct. 8 — Before last month’s walkout at General Motors, the United Automobile Workers had not staged a major strike during contract talks for more than two decades.
But Detroit is facing the possibility of two strikes within just three weeks if talks between the union and Chrysler fail to produce a deal by 11 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday.
Chrysler confirmed Monday that the union had set the strike deadline after a weekend of intense talks that resulted in progress in some areas, but left many issues unresolved. Talks continued into the evening.
When the union’s previous contract with Chrysler expired Sept. 14, it agreed to an indefinite extension while it focused on G.M. But the union said the extension would end at midnight Eastern time Tuesday.
If there is no deal, workers presumably will walk off the job in the middle of Wednesday’s first shift.
Chrysler, which was sold in August to Cerberus Capital Management, has not been the subject of a significant strike since 1985, when 80,000 American and Canadian workers staged walkouts that lasted a total of 12 days. Only a handful of plants did not take part.
Chrysler also was the target of a landmark 104-day strike in 1950, when the union walked out over pension demands.
A short strike against Chrysler this week would have only a mild effect on the company’s production. Five of Chrysler’s nine United States assembly plants, in Detroit and Warren, Mich.; Toledo, Ohio; Newark, Del.; and Belvedere, Ill., are shut this week, to balance inventories with slow sales.
Three of those factories are set to be closed next week, too. One engine plant, in Dundee, Mich., also is temporarily shut down.
The strike deadline is intended “to move things faster,” said Gary N. Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.
U.A.W. negotiators sent an e-mail message to local leaders on Monday, telling them that they should to prepare their members for a strike and that workers should walk out if the deadline passed without notification of a deal.
The union gave out similar instructions when it set a Sept. 24 strike deadline against G.M.
“The company has thus far failed to make an offer that adequately addresses the needs of our membership,” said Monday’s e-mail message from the U.A.W.’s president, Ron Gettelfinger, and its vice president in charge of Chrysler, General Holiefield.
A Chrysler spokeswoman, Michele Tinson, confirmed the strike deadline but declined to comment further on the talks.
A U.A.W. spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.
There is a chance the U.A.W. could extend the deadline on an hour-by-hour basis, as it initially did with G.M., one of the people with knowledge of the talks said. The union also could suspend talks with Chrysler and switch its focus to Ford Motor, said this person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks are private.
The strike against G.M. was called off after 41 hours, when Mr. Gettelfinger announced that a tentative four-year contract had been reached.
Professor Chaison said the deadline also effectively served as a warning to Ford, which lost $12.6 billion last year and is in the worst shape financially of the Detroit automakers.
Analysts had predicted that the union would not strike any companies this year, given Detroit’s woes, and certainly not Ford, which has had warm relations with U.A.W. leaders, particularly Mr. Gettelfinger, who started out at Ford’s plant in Louisville and headed the U.A.W.’s Ford department.
But a Chrysler walkout on top of a G.M. strike would be a way for Mr. Gettelfinger to show Ford that it would not receive special treatment, they said.
Meanwhile, G.M. workers are continuing to vote on the tentative deal with the company. It appears to be headed toward approval, although some union locals said that their members voted against it.
Voting at G.M. is to be finished by Wednesday.
The G.M. contract would create a health care trust, known as a voluntary employee benefits association. It would assume the liability for health care benefits for current and retired workers and their families, which G.M. estimates at about $55 billion. The liability at Chrysler is around $18 billion.
Micheline Maynard contributed reporting.
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14) Distribution of Nets Splits Malaria Fighters
By REUBEN KYAMA and DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
"Recently, Dr. Arata Kochi, the blunt new director of the World Health Organization’s malaria program, declared that as far as he was concerned, “the debate is at an end.” Virtually the only way to get the nets to poor people, he said, is to hand out millions free.In doing so, Dr. Kochi turned his back on an alternative long favored by the Clinton and Bush administrations — distribution by so-called social marketing, in which mosquito nets are sold through local shops at low, subsidized prices — $1 or so for an insecticide-impregnated net that costs $5 to $7 from the maker — with donors underwriting the losses and paying consultants to come up with brand names and advertise the nets."
October 9, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/health/09nets.html?ref=health
MAENDELEO, Kenya — Veronica Njeri, 45, says she has “never healed” since losing two of her six children to malaria 20 years ago, and she still feels vulnerable. While her oldest are adults or teenagers, and have presumably built up immunity to the disease, she worries about her youngest, Anthony, who is 4.
But since hundreds of free mosquito nets came to Maendeleo, her rice-farming village in west-central Kenya, “malaria epidemics have become rare,” she said happily, even though the village sits amid stagnant paddies where swarms of mosquitoes breed.
Villages like Maendeleo are at the center of a debate that has split malaria fighters: how to distribute mosquito nets.
Recently, Dr. Arata Kochi, the blunt new director of the World Health Organization’s malaria program, declared that as far as he was concerned, “the debate is at an end.” Virtually the only way to get the nets to poor people, he said, is to hand out millions free.
In doing so, Dr. Kochi turned his back on an alternative long favored by the Clinton and Bush administrations — distribution by so-called social marketing, in which mosquito nets are sold through local shops at low, subsidized prices — $1 or so for an insecticide-impregnated net that costs $5 to $7 from the maker — with donors underwriting the losses and paying consultants to come up with brand names and advertise the nets.
“The time for social marketing of bed nets in a big way is over,” Dr. Kochi said in an interview. “It can become a supplemental strategy for urban areas and middle-income countries.”
Two years ago, social marketing was at the heart of a scandal when it was revealed that the United States Agency for International Development, or USAid, which distributes foreign aid, was spending 95 percent of its malaria budget on consultants and 5 percent on goods like nets, drugs and insecticide. Under attack from several senators championing the fight against malaria, the agency later announced that it would spend at least half its budget on goods.
Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, called the new W.H.O. policy “a great move,” adding, “We knew social marketing doesn’t work.”
In practice, nothing much had been working. In 2000, a world health conference in Abuja, Nigeria, set a goal: by 2005, 60 percent of African children would be sleeping under nets. By 2005, only 3 percent were.
The theory behind social marketing, which is also used to distribute condoms and oral rehydration salts, is that the poor see more value in brand-name goods they pay for than handouts they get free, and that the trade creates small entrepreneurs.
The usual comparison made is to Coca-Cola, which reaches Africa’s remotest corners. But Dr. Kochi rejected that model, saying, “I’m not sure whether the poorest of the poor actually drink Coca-Cola.”
He argues that the insecticide-filled nets, when used by 80 percent or more of a village, create a barrier that kills or drives off mosquitoes, protecting everyone in the area, including those without nets. Individual nets tended to just drive mosquitoes next door, to bite someone else. As such, he said, nets ought to be treated as a public good, like the measles or polio vaccines, which the world does not charge the poor for.
Free net distributions are usually done in a week or two, by armies of workers who are paid a few dollars a day by the Red Cross or health ministry to cover a country or other large region. Distributions have been tried in Sierra Leone, Niger, Togo and elsewhere, sometimes in conjunction with measles shots or deworming drugs.
The new model is beginning to prevail but has not completely swept the field. Some donors still use some social marketing. Unicef, the world’s largest buyer of nets, distributed 25 million last year, of which 92 percent were given away, said its medical director, Dr. Peter Salama. The main American program, the President’s Malaria Initiative, plans to hand out more than 15 million nets by 2008, of which about 75 percent will be free, said its coordinator, Rear Adm. Tim Ziemer.
In June, Admiral Ziemer and the first lady, Laura Bush, who has made malaria her crusade, helped hand out 500,000 free nets in Mozambique and Zambia.
Social marketing may be useful during gaps between mass distributions, said Trent Ruebush, a malaria expert at the initiative and USAid. The best insecticide-filled nets last three to five years, but babies will be born in that time, or new families will move into an area. “We feel it is one of various effective ways to go,” Dr. Ruebush said.
Experiences in Kenya played a large part in persuading the W.H.O. to change its policy, said Dr. Peter Olumese, a medical officer in the agency’s malaria program.
Maendeleo, a village of about 140 mud-walled shacks with tin roofs, was part of a five-year study of 40 health districts. When it started in 2002, the only nets were those for sale in small shops, Dr. Olumese said, and only about 7 percent of people had them.
Social marketing was introduced by Population Services International, a large aid contractor. That increased coverage to about 21 percent by early 2006.
Then, late last year, the health ministry got a big grant from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria that allowed it to hand out 3.4 million free nets in two weeks. Coverage rose to 67 percent, and distribution became more equitable. Under social marketing, Dr. Olumese said, the “richest of the poor” had 38 percent coverage, while the “poorest of the poor” — like Maendeleo’s rice farmers — had only 15 percent. After the handouts, they were about equal.
Deaths of children dropped 44 percent.
It also turned out to be cheaper, Dr. Olumese said. With consultant fees, transportation, advertising and shipping, social marketing added about $10 to the cost of each net beyond the $5 to $7 that Danish or Japanese makers charged. But even with payments to volunteers, the added cost of free distribution was only about $1.25 per net.
“There has been a paradigm shift,” Dr. Olumese said. “We need to use the momentum we have right now.”
Between the giveaways, he said, nets should be handed out free to all pregnant women and mothers who visit health clinics. Some women struggle to afford even the 10 cents per child cost of identity cards that let them visit clinics. “Asking a mother to make a decision to feed her child or buy a net is not fair,” he said.
In Maendeleo, a village elder, Benson Gacu, confirmed that price was a major impediment. “Our people are poor, and very few could afford to buy a mosquito net even for 50 shillings,” or about 75 cents, he said. “We are happy that the nets are free.”
Francis Mureithi, a local shopkeeper, said he still had some 50-shilling nets for sale because the government had given free ones only to families with children under 5.
But, Mr. Mureithi noted, sales of malaria pills were way down.
Reuben Kyama reported from Maendeleo, Kenya, and Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York.
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15) HEALTH CARE: Who pays?
(The following article appeared in the March 1993 issue of Socialist Action newspaper, Shannon Sheppard is a registered nurse who is conducting a study on urban health policy.)
By SHANNON SHEPPARD
Roland Sheppard
Visit my web site at:
http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret
The health care crisis has been designated by both the media and President Clinton as the second most important political issue in America today-second only to the so-called "deficit crisis." Over the last year, numerous articles on the high cost of health care have appeared in virtually every newspaper.
Undoubtedly, there is a health care crisis in this country today. Health care costs are rising at a staggering rate despite a variety of "cost-containment" efforts initiated in the 19808. Total health spending in the United States now exceeds $900 billion annually. That is more than double the amount spent in 1980.
The U.S. health care system is the most expensive in the world. Forty percent more is spent on health care in the United States than in Canada, the country with the second most expensive health care system.
However, the money being spent here doesn't correlate with quality. For example~, the United States is 22nd in infant mortality rate, which puts it behind countries-like Cuba-that have far less resources.
Between 1978 and 1988, the amount Americans spent on health care insurance premiums rose an average of 12.3 percent a year-twice the inflation rate.
The medical industry is growing 50 percent faster than the overall U.S. economy. In 1983, the pharmaceutical industry made $5.6 billion in profits; the medical equipment suppliers made $1.8 billion; and health insurance and related financial institutions made $2.1 billion. Income for physicians increased by 30 percent in the last half of the 1980s.
Other side of the ledger
In glaring contradiction to the burgeoning growth of the medical industry is the fact that more Americans than ever before have little or no access to quality health care. While the medical industry has been reaping fabulous profits, the other side of the ledger for working people is a column of negative statistics.
Over 37 million Americans are without health insurance -- an increase of 1.3 million in one year (1991). Eleven percent of white Americans are uninsured; 22.2 percent of African Americans are uninsured; and 26.5 percent of Latinos are uninsured. According to a recent study, uninsured hospital patients die at up to three times the rate of insured patients.
Furthermore, over 60 million Americans have what is called inadequate health insurance coverage. Medicaid only covers approximately 50 percent of poor and unemployed Americans; each state sets its own limits on who is eligible for Medicaid.
Medicare, which supposedly covers all medical expenses for anyone over 65, usually pays only 50 percent of the medical costs to senior citizens.
Those who have health insurance coverage have seen their benefits cut while costs have risen. Since 1985, members of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW) at Chevron have seen their share of hospital and medical insurance premiums rise by 47 percent. In 1988, 61 percent of employers paid full premiums for their employees; in 1991 only 40 percent paid premiums in full for their workers.
As a result, the issue of health care coverage was on the cutting edge of many strikes. In 1989, for example, 78 percent of strikes involved medical coverage as an issue as employers attempted to shift a higher percentage of premium payments onto workers.
When the Oil Workers Union polled its membership about the issue of health care, 73 percent of the respondents supported the idea of a national health care system.
Why is health care on the agenda?
The deterioration of health care access for American workers is nothing, new. This process has been going on for decades as, ironically, fewer people have access to an expanding system. Yet there has been no organized political movement for a national health care system.
The social class that has put this important question on the social agenda, unfortunately, is not the working class-through its own organizations, the unions-but the capitalist class-through; its own organizations, the media and the Democratic and Republican parties.
Why is the ruling class prioritizing the issue of health care? It certainly isn't for humanitarian reasons. The reason rising health care costs have become such an issue is because they have an effect on big business and the ability of American capitalists to compete on the international market.
Health care is costing employers about $3000 per year per employee. In the 1960s, the capitalists spent four to eight cents of each dollar of profit on health care. Today, they are forced to spend 25 to 50 cents of each dollar. Health care costs to businesses are rising at an average of 18 percent per year.
A 1984 survey indicated that 66 percent of employers implemented five or more "cost containment" provisions in coverage for their workers. This was commonly done by increasing the cost to workers (increasing deductibles, co-payments, and employees' share).
In a survey of CEOs of the country's largest corporations, 91 percent said that fundamental changes or a complete restructuring of the health care system was needed.
A majority of these "free marketers" said that government intervention was necessary. This is certainly a new position, coming from a social stratum that was ideologically opposed to government intervention in every other sphere of profit-gouging.
Two years ago, then-Chrysler President Lee Iacoca called for a national health care system because of the health care benefits won by the United Auto Workers Union (UAW). Iacoca stated that these benefits made it difficult to compete with Japanese automakers like Toyota, who, because of Japan's health care system, had a $300 to $500 cost advantage for every car they built.
Ruling-class proposals
And when big business speaks, both Democrats and Republican~ listen. Last year alone, 30 health care reform proposals were put before Congress. Today, Hillary Clinton heads a high-powered task force that is mandated to come up with a plan to curb health care costs by this spring.
Clinton and leading Democrats favor a plan called "managed competition." Under this scheme, employers would be required to offer a "basic minimum" package of health insurance benefits or pay into an insurance pool (known as "pay or play"). Tax breaks or other rewards would go to employers and insurance companies who offer the cheapest plans.
Clinton is also pushing for "global budgeting"; that is, capping all health care expenditures at a rate below inflation, thus compelling continuous cuts in the level of service provided. And again, working people would continue to pay for the losses-most likely through "sharing" the cost of premiums, co-insurance, and/or out of-pocket expenses for the many services that won't be included by the "basic minimum" plan, and higher taxes.
Increasing various sales taxes is already being discussed to fund the plan--hitting the poor, the elderly, and working people the hardest.
In addition, business has already been reassured by "health policy experts" that any additional costs to them will be offset by slowed growth in wages and other fringe benefits.
"Lowered expectations"
In order to sell their cut-rate plan, the capitalist class has begun promoting two concepts key to their plan to contain health care costs --"lowered expectations" and questioning the use of medical technology.
For example, an ad firm for a managed-care provider in the San Francisco Bay Area explained their need to "convince working families they need to reconsider expectations if they're too unwilling to pay continually rising prices for health care. "
The state of Oregon recently came up with a Medicaid rationing system that ranked a list of 709 medical conditions and treatments on the basis of "cost-effectiveness" and "social value" and determined that only the first 587 would be paid for.
Oregon's Medicaid system would not pay for liver transplants or liver cancer, medical treatment for Lou Gehrig's disease, or treatment for "end-stage" HIV disease--among other examples.
The mass media, in their role as mouthpieces for the capitalist class, have begun a campaign to sell these concepts. Newspaper articles and television reports have exposed, with missionary zeal, "waste" in the current health care system.
There is no denying that many physicians have prescribed tests, medications, and procedures, for the express purpose of lining their own pockets and those of laboratories and pharmaceutical companies.
However, it is conversely true that many more uninsured and underinsured people do not receive needed tests, medications, and procedures because they cannot afford to pay.
Science, not costs should be the defining factor in health care. As long as we have health care for profit, however, we will be unable to determine what are the most effective proposals.
All the current proposals are band-aids on a rotten, system. What is needed is a mass working-class movement for free quality health care for all.
We should look to the Cuban health care system, where--despite a U.S.-led 30-year blockade, quality health care for all residents is a priority and reality.
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HEALTH CARE DEBATE:
More Profits for Industry, Higher Costs for Workers
(The following article appeared in the July 1993 issue of Socialist Action newspaper)
By SHANNON SHEPPARD
Although President Clinton's long-awaited health care proposal has yet to be released, two things are certain: Health care industry profits will continue to soar, and working people will pay dearly.
"Managed competition" and "global budgeting" form the framework for the plan. We have been told both are supposed to stem skyrocketing health care costs.
This is necessary, says the Clinton team, because too much money is being spent on health care since too many people want the benefits of the latest advanced technology and scientific research. Furthermore, they are trying to convince us that it is wasteful to see a cardiologist when we have heart disease or a pulmonary specialist when we have lung disease.
The theory behind managed competition is that costs can supposedly be controlled by pitting health insurance plans against each other in order to provide a given package of benefits at the cheapest price.
But some wings of the capitalist class disagree that this scheme will have the desired effect. Even the Congressional Budget Office, whose figures Clinton loves to cite, reports that there is scant evidence that managed competition can control health care costs.
A New England Journal of Medicine editorial stated it was "highly doubtful that managed competition would contain costs while maintaining quality." And it went on to question what was to stop the insurance companies from colluding to increase costs.
After all, the health insurance industry is seeking to extend its immunity from antitrust laws. The Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, the American Medical Association, and the American Hospital Association are following their lead and seeking exemptions from antitrust laws as well.
Are you being served?
For consumers, a key concern must be the quality of service provided by these discount health care plans. If insurance companies do lower the price of their plans, they will do so at the expense of consumers, not at the expense of profits.
We have already seen examples of this with the abundant Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) that have sprung up. Appointments are hard to set, and once you are there, you are rushed in and out. Treatments prescribed are those that are the least costly-not necessarily those that will provide the greatest benefit.
The worries deepen when you add Clinton's other ingredient-global budgeting-to the mix. This concept proposes to limit total health care expenditures by establishing a national health care budget divided into regions. The regions would be able to spend their allotment any way they choose.
It is similar to the way hospitals are now reimbursed by Medicare. Under the current Prospective Payment System, hospitals are paid a predetermined fixed amount per patient admission based on diagnosis (DRGs), regardless of the number of services utilized or number of days a patient stays in the hospital.
As a result, hospitals have a financial incentive to discharge patients as quickly as possible', in some cases prematurely, and provide as few services as are absolutely necessary. Hospitals have also used it as an excuse to lay off hospital staff and attempt to lower wages and benefits, and thus worsen working conditions.
Pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment companies will not be asked to freeze their profits, but it is certain that health care workers will be asked to freeze their wages.
As a corollary, the specter of rationing health care has been put on the agenda. In an article in The New York Times, Gregory Pence wonders, "Should quarter million dollar liver transplants be given to people whom some consider unrepentant alcoholics'?" Later, the author praises former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm for proposing "that medical costs be, a fixed pie, where a bigger slice for transplants means a smaller slice for something else."
Who pays?
The question arises: Who is going to pay for the cut-rate insurance plans, reduced quality, and rationed care'? Hillary Rodham Clinton answered for the administration when she told a Democratic Governors Association meeting that every American will bear "their fair share of responsibility."
There is "no more free lunch," she emphasized. "We're going to tell individuals who think they can get by without coverage because they're 25 and think they're immortal ... that when they end up in the emergency room and stick us with the bill, that we're not going to let them go on anymore."
The working class will bear the brunt of the costs because the major incentive for health care reform is to reduce employer-paid medical costs in order to make U.S. corporations more competitive on world markets.
Taxation is likely in the form of payroll taxes. These would be similar to the current health insurance premiums deducted from workers' paychecks or negotiated into wage packages.
In addition, workers are likely to be taxed on their health care benefits if the benefits are considered "extremely generous." This will hit especially hard many unionized workers who have fought for comprehensive health coverage in the past.
A "sin tax," most likely on cigarettes, is also favored. Of course, no mention is made of going after the cigarette manufacturers and advertisers for promoting this "sin" and continuing to addict millions of Americans. And it is unlikely that a massive free stop-smoking program will be launched.
In addition, in order to generate support from physicians, they will be permitted to bill patients extra, that is, on top of fees covered by the standard package. MDs are already able to do this with their Medicare patients. It has provided a financial boon not only to doctors, but to the insurance industry as well, allowing them to sell "medi-gap" insurance plans to cover these additional costs. Universal and comprehensive?
The Clinton administration has paid lip service to universal coverage with a comprehensive package of benefits. But exactly who is included in "universal" has not been made clear. Hints have been given that this part of the health care program may be phased in gradually. However, the sentiment against "illegal aliens" that the administration continues to whip up gives an indication of who will not be covered.
The comprehensiveness of the benefits is also questionable. The administration is already backing down on full mental health coverage and on coverage of long-term care. They are only talking of "trying" to include prescription drugs and are not certain they will be able to provide abortion coverage.
Barriers to health care such as the lack of medical facilities in rural and minority communities are not addressed. Nor is anything said about barriers to good health such as 'pollution, industrial and agricultural conditions, poverty, and inadequate nutrition.
Being able to "get it through Congress" is the excuse that is most often heard. However, with both a Democratic administration and a Democratic majority in Congress, that line is exposed for what it is--a shell game played at the expense of the working class.
The only thing the Democrats and Republicans can guarantee is that health care in the United States will remain in the hands of the profit-driven drug companies, medical equipment companies, insurance companies, and other health care-related corporations.
Merely tinkering with the existing production-for-profit system and relying on '*hat is "politically feasible" will not solve our "health care crisis." Health care as a right, not a privilege was won in Europe by the mobilization of mass working-class-parties. That is what is necessary in this country.
One only has to look at Cuba to see what is possible when human need is the priority instead of private profit. Prior to the 1959 Revolution, the infant mortality rate was 60-70 per every 1000 live births. Today, it has been reduced to 12.
The overall U.S. infant mortality rate is 8.9. For African Americans, however, it is 16.5. Even more telling a comparison is the infant mortality rates in other Latin American capitalist countries. In Brazil, the infant mortality rate is 26. In Peru, it is 66. How can a tiny island, isolated by a 30-year U.S.-led blockade, achieve such stunning statistics? "We learned perfectly that the life of a single human being is worth millions of times more than all the property of the richest man on earth," is Fidel Castro's answer. "We uphold the ethical principle of giving the best possible attention to any human being in any condition."
###
Universal, Comprehensive Health Care
for Everyone Residing in the U.S.
(The following is an editorial that appeared in the October 1993 issue of Socialist Action newspaper)
President Clinton's "managed competition" scheme for providing universal health insurance is a scam. The real purpose and function of his proposal is to cut the overall cost of health care to the capitalist class-and raise the cost to everyone else. The cuts in costs, moreover, are designed to cut medical services, such as they are, now provided to many workers. ,
Another key aim is to add revenue to the for-profit health care industry. Despite themselves, hospitals find it difficult, sometimes, to refuse treatment to mortally sick or dying patients who can't pay. It is virtually certain that Clinton's health plan will emerge from Congress with compensation to hospitals who have been compelled by social pressure to provide a modicum of treatment to some of those unable to pay.
Another big gainer from Clinton's plan, we can be certain, will be the parasitical billionaire insurance companies.
The Clinton Administration's scheme is part and parcel with the ongoing generalized offensive to cut the cost of production for American capitalists so that they can compete more effectively against their competitors on the world market.
Neither the Clinton Administration nor the Congress has any intention of providing basic medical care for everyone. Especially excluded, as the proposal now stands, will be those immigrant workers without "proper" documentation. Also excluded from some vital medical coverage will be those who are very old or very young, and other poor souls, doled out medical services on Medicare.
"There is no free lunch!"
The battle cry of the entire capitalist class in their assault on the right to medical care is summarized in Clinton's slogan: "There is no free lunch!"
What outrageous hypocrisy! The only ones gorging on "free lunches" are the corporations; banks and insurance companies who claim the sacred right to a "reasonable profit"--that is, the right to systematically expropriate the surplus value produced by every working man, woman and child.
Overstuffed and indolent capitalists have the gall to denounce the "free lunch" they claim too many workers have come to believe is their right. It's as if no one knows that what working people get for the sweat and blood they give free to the bosses is barely enough for the average worker's subsistence.
But their "free lunch" includes everything provided by the part of our labor that is not paid for. The arrogant exploiters feast on the mountains of wealth they take from us. They enjoy the best of everything we make while we can never ~ certain that there will be food on the table, a roof over our heads, or medicine to treat a sick child.
The ruling class and its political servants in both parties have been exercising their monopoly over politics to steadily shift the tax burden from them to us. They have no intention to stop ripping us off. They intend to keep it up --especially by piling payroll and other taxes on working people and the least privileged sections of the middle class. That's the real message in Clinton's vaunted health plan.
Unfortunately, the so-called leaders of working people heading our unions have virtually given Clinton a blank check on this and other matters vital to working people. The best they are willing to do is wheedle a few "concessions" they can point to to justify going along with the needs of American capitalism. And that, we can be sure, amounts to accepting whatever finally comes out of Congress.
Some labor people have spoken longingly for health care modeled on the Canadian or British health care system. But this amounts to putting one's foot on the downside of a slippery slope to ever-higher taxes and increased payments for each visit to a medical group, or for each prescription. This inexorably leads to an ever-worsening quality of medical care.
Workers in countries like Britain and Germany are presently suffering such a deterioration of the system of universal health care won by workers in Western Europe in the massive labor upsurge following the end of World War ll. This is precisely because they accepted the principle of taxing workers to pay for health care-without clear and meaningful protest.
Such a protest would have been registered if representatives of workers' organizations had unambiguously fought for vital services to be financed from the surplus value systematically expropriated by the capitalist class from workers at the point of production-as this newspaper (Socialist Action) advocates today.
Only Cuba, a small nation suffering under a 35- year-long embargo enforced by the richest and most heavily armed imperialist power, provides full free medical coverage to every resident. This is despite U.S. imperialism's attempt to starve Cuba into submission.
Ironically, poor, tiny Cuba affords far superior medical coverage to all its people than is provided the citizens of each and every country in the capitalist world.
What is the "single payer" plan?
Other labor people, some with the best intentions, have boiled the Canadian system down to the ambiguous call for a "single-payer health plan." By this they mean to put the focus on eliminating the parasitical insurance company middlemen. This is certainly an important criticism of all plans being floated in Congress, to which we give wholehearted support.
But that's hardly the way to organize labors' forces for most effectively gaining as much as the given relationship of forces will allow. Even soft-headed union negotiators know better than to go into bargaining with the most minimal demands.
But worse yet, all those calling for "single payer" don't agree on what it means. And, medical experts warn that even if insurance companies were to be removed as middlemen the Health Maintenance Organizations will soon come under the control of the insurance companies.
Many HMOs have already been taken over by these parasitical capitalist institutions whose reason for existence is to subordinate insurance of; any kind to profits-even at the cost of denying its customers the promised benefits they had already paid for. The best way to negotiate with an adversary is to layout on the table what workers understand to be their vital needs on questions such as this one. Clearly, the current situation calls for mobilizing workers around a health program that would provide universal, comprehensive health care for every U.S. resident and to finance it by taxing profits.
Such a mobilization would include mass rallies and demonstrations designed to both educate woIking people on their rights and to show the ruling class that labor means business.
Then, as in every conflict between capital and labor, the relationship of forces will determine how much of our demands can be won now. But every small victory won through a well-conceived and organized struggle becomes a stepping stone to a higher living standard and ultimately to a decisive and final victory by working people over the capitalist adversary.
The SOCIALIST PROGRAM for QUALITY HEALTH CARE FOR ALL!
For a comprehensive, national health care system based on human needs - not profits!
Free, universal quality health care for all! Health care is a right, not a privilege!
Free, legal, safe, accessible abortion! Repeal the Hyde Amendment! .
Free pre-natal and post-natal care for all! . Establish a "Manhattan Project" program to find a cure for AIDS!
HOW DO WE PAY FOR THIS?
Tax the rich-not working people!
Eliminate the military war budget!
100% tax on all corporate polluters!
No tax on incomes under $75,000 per year and a steeply graduated tax on higher incomes, rising to 100% on all incomes over $500,000 a uear!
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16) Auto Union Workers Walk Out at Chrysler
By MICHELINE MAYNARD and NICK BUNKLEY
October 10, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/business/10cnd-auto.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
DETROIT, Oct. 10 — The United Automobile Workers union walked off the job at Chrysler LLC plants nationwide this morning after the two sides failed to reach agreement on a new four-year contract by a union-set deadline.
Chrysler has about 48,000 workers in the United States. About 12,000 workers are exempt from the strike, however, while their plants are temporarily closed by Chrysler.
The strike is the second in two weeks by the union against a Detroit automaker. Workers at General Motors struck for two days before the union reached a tentative deal with G.M. on Sept. 26.
G.M. workers are set to finish voting on their agreement today. Although some local unions have rejected the contract, it is expected to be approved.
Workers at Chrysler began leaving plants shortly before 11 a.m. Eastern time, a deadline set by the union over the weekend when talks moved slowly.
The union had told workers to begin walking off the job unless they were instructed otherwise. The strike did not include five plants that already had been temporarily shut down. Those plants are in Newark, Del.; Belvidere, Ill.; Warren, Mich., and two plants in Detroit.
They receive most of their pay and benefits from the company when they are temporarily laid off. Otherwise, workers receive strike pay of $200 a week, about one-fourth their normal take-home pay.
Even after the two-day G.M. strike, the union’s strike fund stands well above $800 million, and could finance a walkout at Chrysler for months.
“We were hoping we could have gotten a last minute deal but we have to do what we have to do,” said James Benton, 50, a die setter at a Chrysler plant in Warren, Mich.
Rick Smith, 49, a maintenance worker at the plant, said: “Nobody wants a strike. We don’t even know what the sticking points are.”
Indeed, the union was silent after the walkout began. By contrast, car horns blared in support of the striking workers, who lifted their signs as motorists passed.
Talks continued at Chrysler’s headquarters in Auburn Hills, Mich., despite the strike.
One of the biggest demonstrations took place outside the headquarters, where hundreds of workers marched in a circle lifting their picket signs. The demonstration caused a highway exit leading to the headquarters to be closed.
There has not been a major strike at Chrysler since 1985, when 80,000 workers in the United States and Canada walked off the job for a total of 12 days.
But Chrysler, bought by a private equity firm two months ago, apparently balked at the union’s demand that it agree to similar contract terms, a concept known as pattern bargaining.
In particular, Chrysler was reluctant to make a commitment to the number of new products would be built in American plants, and to guarantee how many jobs would remain at the company, which is in the midst of a restructuring program.
Chrysler officials are said to be seeking flexibility to import vehicles from outside the United States, so they can take advantage of cheaper labor costs. Chrysler is set to begin selling Chinese built small cars at the end of the decade, making it the first American company to use China as an export source for the United States.
The walkout is a test of Chrysler’s new owners, Cerberus Capital Management, which bought Chrysler on Aug. 3 from its former German parent, DaimlerChrysler. Cerberus paid $7.4 billion for 80.1 percent of Chrysler.
“This is not good at all,” said Bruce Fuson, 55, a welder who has spent 32 years at Chrysler. “With the new company this is scary. This could be absolutely serious.”
The strike may not have much immediate impact on supplies of cars at dealer lots. Chrysler has at least three months’ worth of most vehicles in stock and has shut half of its United States assembly plants this week to let those inventories thin out.
But production of a new version of its minivans, built in Windsor, Ontario, could be halted by tomorrow, said Ed Saenz, a spokesman for Chrysler Canada. Mr. Saenz said the plant would probably run out of parts.
An assembly plant in Brampton, Ontario, that produces three large rear-wheel-drive automobiles, including the Chrysler 300 sedan, has enough parts to keep operating for about two days, he said.
The strike could actually help dealers clear out oversupplies of vehicles from their lots. Chrysler, which had stockpiled as many as 100,000 cars last year for which it had no dealer orders, has begun to see its inventories climb again as its sales slow.
“Chrysler’s got plenty of inventory,” said John A. Casesa, an automotive analyst who is managing partner of Casesa Strategic Advisers in New York. “Any work stoppage short of a couple of weeks will have no lasting effect on the company.”
Indeed, since Chrysler no longer reports quarterly results, the impact of a strike would be known primarily to Cerberus, which is taking a long-term view as it fixes the money-losing automaker.
For workers walking picket lines, Mr. Casesa said, “every hour seems like an eternity.”
Yet workers said they understood things had changed in discussions between the U.A.W. and the auto companies.
“This is a whole different ballgame now,” Greg Boudreau, 54, an electrician at Chrysler’s Sterling Stamping plant north of Detroit., said Tuesday. “We’re not dealing with DaimlerChrysler anymore. This is an investment bank. If they’re fair-minded, we’ll certainly find out in the next couple of days.”
Christopher Lambert, 36, who has worked at three Chrysler plants in his nine years with the carmaker, said he had started saving money this year, in anticipation of tough negotiations.
“We might be out for a while,” said Mr. Lambert, who works in the stamping plant’s press room. But he added, “I can’t see Cerberus buying us out and then closing the doors.”
Mr. Casesa, the analyst, said: “The G.M. agreement was a genuine breakthrough because it sent a clear signal that the union and the industry are willing to compromise — that this would not be a battle to the death.”
As workers awaited a new contract, they learned Tuesday that Chrysler planned to cut as many as 1,500 salaried and contract positions. The cuts, first reported by The Detroit Free Press, would be in addition to 2,000 salaried positions being eliminated as part of Chrysler’s revamping plan, announced in February before the sale to Cerberus.
A person with direct knowledge of the plans confirmed the figures but spoke on condition of anonymity because they had not been formally announced.
As many as 5 percent, or 415, of the company’s 8,300 salaried jobs would be cut, as would up to 37 percent, or 1,110, of the 3,000 contractors that Chrysler uses.
Ian Austen contributed reporting from Ottawa.
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17)2 Women Killed in Security Shooting Are Buried in Iraq
By ANDREW E. KRAMER and JAMES GLANZ
October 11, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/world/middleeast/11iraq.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Oct. 10 — The two women killed Tuesday by a barrage of gunfire from private security guards in central Baghdad were buried here today, and relatives insisted that the guards be brought to justice.
“The killers must be punished,” said Albert Mamook, the brother of one of the victims, Marany Awanees, 59. "We have a right for justice," he said.
Ms. Awanees was driving the white Oldsmobile that was riddled by automatic gunfire in the Karada neighborhood of Baghdad Tuesday afternoon. Her front-seat passenger, Jeniva Jalal, 30, was also killed; a woman and a boy in the back seat survived, according to witnesses and local police officials.
The incident came just weeks after a shooting by another company strained relations between the United States and Iraq. An Iraqi government spokesman today condemned the shooting as the latest sign of recklessness by security contractors in Iraq.
The victims were Armenian Christians, and the memorial service today was held in an Armenian cultural club in eastern Baghdad. Family members and clergy sat quietly on sofas and sipped black coffee, men in one row and women in another. Those who attended the service expressed condolences to the three orphaned daughters of Ms. Awanees and discussed her life.
Relatives described a quiet woman who had taken to working as a taxi driver two years ago, after her husband died, to support her daughters through college.
The guards involved in the Tuesday shooting were working for an Australian-run security company. But the people they were assigned to protect work under the same United States government agency whose security guards sprayed bullets across a crowded Baghdad square on Sept. 16, an episode that caused an uproar among Iraqi officials and is still being investigated by the United States.
In the Tuesday shooting, which took place on a boulevard lined with appliance stores, tea shops and money changers, as many as 40 bullets struck the car. American government officials said the guards had been hired to protect financial and policy experts working for an organization under contract with the United States Agency for International Development, a quasi-independent State Department agency that does extensive aid work in Iraq.
The organization, RTI International, is in Iraq to carry out what is ultimately a State Department effort to improve local government and democratic institutions. But a Bush administration official said the State Department bore no responsibility for overseeing RTI’s security operations.
“A.I.D. does not direct the security arrangements of its contractors,” the official said. “These groups are contractually responsible for the safety and security of their employees. That responsibility falls entirely on the contractor.”
The Oldsmobile was shot once in the radiator, witnesses said, in front of a plumbing supply store as it approached a convoy of white sport utility vehicles 50 yards away.
As the car kept rolling, a hail of gunfire suddenly tore through its hood, roof and windshield, as well as the passenger side.
The guards who were in the convoy work for Unity Resources Group, an Australian-run company that has its headquarters in Dubai and is registered in Singapore, according to a statement by the company. Unity Resources was hired by RTI to provide security in Iraq.
In its statement, Unity Resources said that according to its initial information, the car had approached the convoy “at speed” and failed to stop in response to hand signals and a warning flare.
“Finally shots were fired at the vehicle and it stopped,” the company said.
The episode’s connection with the United States Agency for International Development is one of several parallels to the Sept. 16 shootings, in which the Iraqi government says 17 Iraqis died and 27 were wounded.
The Sept. 16 episode began when a convoy operated by Blackwater USA, an American private security company hired to protect the aid agency’s officials, entered Nisour Square in central Baghdad and fired several bullets toward a car the guards apparently considered a threat.
In the Tuesday shooting, like the one on Sept. 16, the car drifted forward after the initial burst, prompting guards to unleash a barrage of gunfire. And there were no government officials or policy experts in either of the convoys: the Nisour Square convoy was controlling traffic as part of a larger operation, and the convoy in Karada was on a routine movement that involved only security guards, according to American officials.
Although the United States Embassy in Baghdad has said almost nothing about the Nisour Square episode while an American investigation grinds on, the Iraqi government has said its own investigation concluded that the shootings were an act of “deliberate murder” and called on the Blackwater guards to be prosecuted.
Ali Jafar, a traffic policeman posted near the Karada shooting, said he thought the similarities between the cases were undeniable.
“They are killing the people just like what happened in Nisour Square,” Mr. Jafar said. “They are butchering the Iraqis.”
The new shootings happened at an extremely difficult time for the State Department, which relies heavily on Blackwater to protect its diplomats whenever they work outside the fortified Green Zone. As a result of new restrictions placed on Blackwater after the Nisour Square shootings, the State Department’s numerous programs for rebuilding Iraqi government and technical institutions have been seriously hampered.
Embassy officials have vowed to continue their operations even as they increase oversight of Blackwater operations. But Tuesday’s episode appears to show that the new oversight comes with many loopholes: Unity Resources is not working directly for the State Department, but for RTI International, which has been contracted by the aid agency to provide experts on local governing.
In fact, an American Embassy spokesman said, the State Department has no say in the operations of security companies employed by government contractors. “Their contract might be with A.I.D., but that doesn’t shed any light on their choice of security contractor,” he said.
A spokesman for Unity Resources, Martin Simich, said Tuesday that he was unsure whether the guards involved in the shooting had been interviewed by American authorities.
On Tuesday, the convoy of white S.U.V.’s was stopped in the eastbound lane of Karada Street at an intersection with an alley lined with low concrete homes, witnesses said. A man who works at the plumbing shop, who gave his name only as Muhammad, said the Oldsmobile was approaching the convoy from behind.
He said he heard no warnings. “They shot from the back door,” he said. “The door opened and they fired.”
Two witnesses said they heard a single shot first, which apparently punctured the Oldsmobile’s radiator, spilling coolant onto the street about 50 yards from where the convoy was parked. As the car continued rolling, the guards opened up with a barrage of sustained automatic fire. The car finally came to a stop about 10 yards from the convoy at a point that, three hours later, was marked by blood stains, broken glass and tufts of brown hair.
The plumbing shop employee said the convoy moved out right away, without checking to see what damage had been done or to offer medical help.
The Oldsmobile was towed to a nearby police station.
As twilight set in on Tuesday, family members gathered beside the car in a dirt alley outside the police station, staring at the blood and hair on the inside of the windshield.
A brother-in-law of the driver, Hrair Vartanian, said she was the mother of three grown daughters. As he spoke, one daughter arrived and looked at the blood stains, crying softly.
Reporting was contributed by Richard A. Oppel Jr., Qais Mizher and Ahmad Fadam from Baghdad, John M. Broder from Washington, and Graham Bowley from New York.
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18) Hate-Crime Investigation at Columbia
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR
October 10, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/nyregion/10cnd-columbia.html?hp
A hangman’s noose was found hanging on the door of a black professor’s office at Columbia University Teacher’s College on Tuesday morning, prompting the police to start a hate-crime investigation.
Detectives with the New York Police Department’s hate-crime task force were investigating whether the noose, which was discovered on the fourth floor of the college at about 9:45 a.m., was put there by a rival professor or by a student who was angry over a dispute. Colleagues of the professor identified her as Madonna Constantine, 44, a prominent author, educator and psychologist.
Ms. Constantine is a professor of psychology and education at Columbia and has published several books on race relations, including “Addressing Racism” in 2006 and “Strategies for Building Multicultural Competence in Mental Health and Educational Settings” in 2007. Derald Wing Sue, one of her co-authors and a fellow professor at Columbia, said Ms. Constantine was devastated by the incident.
“She’s all right at this point with the support of colleagues, friends, students and family,” said Mr. Wing Sue, an adjunct professor at the school of social work. “But you can imagine the terrible impact that this has had on her.”
Ms. Constantine could not be reached at her office on Columbia’s campus this morning.
The discovery of the noose — a widely reviled symbol of black lynchings in the South and elsewhere — sparked outrage across the campus. Last night, about 150 students held a protest outside the Teachers College building at 525 West 120th Street, and organizers of the rally called for another protest and student walkout at 2 p.m. today. The news also ignited a chain of e-mail messages between students that described the incident as “Jena at Columbia,” referring to an incident in Jena, La., last year that prompted violence after three white high school students hung nooses under a tree where six black students had been sitting the day before.
In an e-mail message to students and faculty at the school, the president of Teachers College, Susan Furhman, said the incident was a “hateful act, which violates every Teachers College and societal norm.”
The president of Columbia, Lee C. Bollinger, also released a statement condemning what happened.
“This is an assault on African Americans and therefore it is an assault on every one of us,” he said. “I know I speak on behalf of every member of our communities in condemning this horrible action.”
The discovery of the noose comes in the wake of several incidents that have incited racial and political tensions at Columbia in recent months, including a visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in September and the discovery of racist and threatening graffiti in a bathroom at the School of International and Public Affairs. Last fall, the campus drew media attention after a group of students stormed a stage to protest a speech by the head of a group that opposes illegal immigration.
Mr. Wing Sue, Ms. Constantine’s colleague, said students and faculty were at a loss to figure out who pinned the noose to the door.
“You speculate about all the possible reasons that could have instigated such a cruel and hateful act,” he said. “Is it a disgruntled student, is it a conflict with a colleague or staff, is it her work on racism that has pushed buttons on this matter?”
“This is something the police are investigating,” he added, “but to me it represents a major opportunity for Columbia to begin the process of dealing directly and honestly with race and racism. It’s a hot button issue that is representative of the larger community and society.”
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19) Palestinians Return to Lebanese Camp
By THANASSIS CAMBANIS
October 11, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/world/middleeast/11lebanon.html?ref=world
NAHR EL BARED REFUGEE CAMP, Lebanon, Oct. 10 — The first 500 Palestinian refugees to return to this camp arrived today to find their homes shattered by bombs, a month after the Lebanese Army ousted a jihadist splinter group from the camp.
Angry refugees inspected the wreckage under heavy guard from the Lebanese Army, which began battling Islamist insurgents in the camp in late May. More than a hundred soldiers were killed, prompting widespread anger toward Palestinians living in the country.
Journalists were allowed, accompanied by guards, just inside the main gate of the camp. But eyewitnesses said that many of the buildings in the camp had been completely burnt and stripped bare from the inside.
“We saw houses burnt from the inside, the appliances gone, and even a stolen refrigerator blocking a stairwell,” said Greg Ross, a Scottish volunteer from the nonprofit group Nabaa, who accompanied refugees into the camp today. Some of the refugees have been seeing their furniture and televisions for sale in local markets, Mr. Ross said. The military denies that it allowed soldiers or outsiders to loot the camp, but the accusations have further heightened tensions between the military and the Palestinians.
It is unclear whether the refugees — a tiny fraction of the 32,000 displaced from the camp by the fighting — will be able to remain in their homes, which suffered widespread damage from bullets, shells, shrapnel, and looting.
But the Lebanese government wants to refashion from the ruins of Nahr El Bared a “new model” for the 400,000 Palestinian refugees living in the country, descendants of people who fled the Israeli military in 1948.
“This is going to be a model, so the Palestinians see they are better off under the authority of the Lebanese government,” Khalil Makkawi, head of a government committee charged with negotiating between the government and the Palestinians, who have largely been a force unto themselves in Lebanon for more than three decades.
The face-off in Nahr El Bared between the Lebanese Army and Fatah al-Islam, a militant jihadist group whose following included Palestinians and hundreds of foreign Arabs, underscored the long-simmering tensions between Lebanese and the Palestinian refugees here, who live under strict restrictions.
Palestinians are not allowed to hold skilled jobs and can only leave their camps with the permission of the Lebanese military. But inside, Palestinian factions have free rein — including the right to bear arms unregulated by the Lebanese State.
Most of the 32,000 people displaced from Nahr El Bared have been living in schools and tents in another refugee camp in northern Lebanon called Beddawi, on the outskirts of Tripoli.
With the immediate crisis in the camp resolved, Lebanon appears ready to impose a new level of control over Palestinian refugees there. Today, soldiers searched the bags of clothes and food that returning refugees lugged through the razor-wire cordon into the camp.
“From the beginning, they didn’t like having Palestinians here,” said Dalal Kohder, 23, a refugee whose family home in the old section of Nahr El Bared has been completely reduced to rubble. She studies psychology, even though under Lebanese law she cannot work as a psychologist; that is one of many professions barred to Palestinians.
She said she believed that now, her family would have to live under far greater scrutiny.
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20)Faster Army Expansion Plan Approved
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
October 10, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/washington/10army.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON, Oct. 9 — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has approved a plan to ease the strain of two wars on the military by increasing the size of the active-duty Army to 547,000 by 2010, two years sooner than planned, officials said Tuesday.
Mr. Gates approved the accelerated timetable in a Sept. 26 memo that also barred the Army from reaching the goal by lowering its recruiting standards or employing “stop loss,” a practice of prohibiting soldiers from retiring. The memo put the plan’s cost at $2.6 billion over the next five years.
Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, announced the 2010 goal in a speech on Tuesday at the Association of the United States Army convention here. Army officials had previously said the timeline would be reduced by one year, to 2011.
Army officials said they could achieve the increase through retention and recruiting, but conceded that achieving the goal in three years, rather than five, was ambitious. “Meeting this target will not be easy,” General Casey said.
The planned increase would be from an authorized level of 512,000 last year.
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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Wisconsin Iraq vet returns medals to Rumsfeld
By David Solnit, Courage to Resist / Army of None Project.
"I swore an oath to protect the constitution ... not to become a pawn in your New American Century."
September 26, 2007
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/
Madison, Wisconsin--Joshua Gaines, who served a year long tour in Iraq in 2004 to 2005 with the Army Reserve, returned his Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal and National Defense Service Medal to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld today by mail as dozens of supporters look on.
Verizon Reverses Itself on Abortion Messages
By ADAM LIPTAK
September 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/business/27cnd-verizon.html?ref=us
Manhattan: Slain Soldier to Receive Citizenship
A soldier from Washington Heights who was killed while serving with the Army’s Second Infantry Division in Iraq is to receive citizenship posthumously on Monday, immigration officials said in a statement yesterday. The soldier, Cpl. Juan Alcántara, 22, left, was one of four soldiers killed in an explosion as they searched a house in Baquba on Aug. 6. Representative Charles B. Rangel, a Harlem Democrat, will speak at a ceremony at the City University Great Hall in Manhattan and present a certificate to Corporal Alcántara’s family. The corporal was born in the Dominican Republic and grew up in Washington Heights, Mr. Rangel’s office said.
September 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/14/nyregion/14mbrfs-SOLDIER.html?ref=nyregion
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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS AND INFORMATION
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Stop the Termination or the Cherokee Nation
http://groups.msn.com/BayAreaIndianCalendar/activismissues.msnw?action=get_message&mview=1&ID_Message=5580
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USLAW Endorses September 15 Antiwar Demonstration in Washington, DC
USLAW Leadership Urges Labor Turnout
to Demand End to Occupation in Iraq, Hands Off Iraqi Oil
By a referendum ballot of members of the Steering Committee of U.S. Labor Against the War, USLAW is now officially on record endorsing and encouraging participation in the antiwar demonstration called by the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition in Washington, DC on September 15. The demonstration is timed to coincide with a Congressional vote scheduled in late September on a new Defense Department appropriation that will fund the Iraq War through the end of Bush's term in office.
U.S. Labor Against the War
http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/
Stop the Iraq Oil Law
http://www.petitiononline.com/iraqoil/petition.html
2007 Iraq Labor Solidarity Tour
http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?list=type&type=103
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FREE THE JENA SIX
http://www.mmmhouston.net/loc/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=114&Itemid=66
This is a modern day lynching"--Marcus Jones, father of Mychal Bell
WRITE LETTERS TO:
JUDGE J.P. MAUFFRAY
P.O. BOX 1890
JENA, LOUISIANA 71342
FAX: (318) 992-8701
WE NEED 400 LETTERS SENT BEFORE MYCHAL BELL'S SENTENCING DATE ON JULY 31ST. THEY ARE ALL INNOCENT!
Sign the NAACP's Online Petition to the Governor of Louisiana and Attorney General
http://www.naacp.org/get-involved/activism/petitions/jena-6/index.php
JOIN THE MASS PROTEST IN SUPPORT OF
MYCHAL BELL & THE JENA 6
WHERE: JENA COURTHOUSE in Louisiana
WHEN: TUESDAY, JULY 31ST
TIME: 9:00AM
THE HOUSTON MMM MINISTRY OF JUSTICE IS ORGANIZING A CARAVAN TO JOIN FORCES WITH THE JENA 6 FAMILIES, THE COLOR OF CHANGE, LOCs, AND OTHER ORGANIZATIONS ON THE STEPS OF THE COURTHOUSE THAT DAY TO DEMAND JUSTICE!
ALL INTERESTED IN GOING TO THE RALLY CALL:
HOUSTON RESIDENTS: 832.258.2480
ministryofjustice@mmmhouston.net
BATON ROUGE RESIDENTS: 225.806.3326
MONROE RESIDENTS: 318.801.0513
JENA RESIDENTS: 318.419.6441
Send Donations to the Jena 6 Defense Fund:
Jena 6 Defense Committee
P.O. Box 2798
Jena, Louisiana 71342
BACKGROUND TO THE JENA SIX:
Young Black males the target of small-town racism
By Jesse Muhammad
Staff Writer
"JENA, La. (FinalCall.com) - Marcus Jones, the father of 16-year-old Jena High School football star Mychal Bell, pulls out a box full of letters from countless major colleges and universities in America who are trying to recruit his son. Mr. Jones, with hurt in his voice, says, “He had so much going for him. My son is innocent and they have done him wrong.”
An all-White jury convicted Mr. Bell of two felonies—aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated battery—and faces up to 22 years in prison when he is sentenced on July 31. Five other young Black males are also awaiting their day in court for alleged attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit second-degree murder charges evolving from a school fight: Robert Bailey, 17; Theo Shaw, 17; Carwin Jones, 18; Bryant Purvis, 17; and Jesse Beard, 15. Together, this group has come to be known as the “Jena 6.”
Updated Jul 22, 2007
FOR FULL ARTICLE:
http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_3753.shtml
My Letter to Judge Mauffray:
JUDGE J.P. MAUFFRAY
P.O. BOX 1890
JENA, LOUISIANA 71342
RE: THE JENA SIX
Dear Judge Mauffray,
I am appalled to learn of the conviction of 16-year-old Jena High School football star Mychal Bell and the arrest of five other young Black men who are awaiting their day in court for alleged attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit second-degree murder charges evolving from a school fight. These young men, Mychal Bell, 16; Robert Bailey, 17; Theo Shaw, 17; Carwin Jones, 18; Bryant Purvis, 17; and Jesse Beard, 15, who have come to be known as the “Jena 6” have the support of thousands of people around the country who want to see them free and back in school.
Clearly, two different standards are in place in Jena—one standard for white students who go free even though they did, indeed, make a death threat against Black students—the hanging of nooses from a tree that only white students are allowed to sit under—and another set of rules for those that defended themselves against these threats. The nooses were hung after Black students dared to sit in the shade of that “white only” tree!
If the court is sincerely interested in justice, it will drop the charges against all of these six students, reinstate them back into school and insist that the school teach the white students how wrong they were and still are for their racist attitudes and violent threats! It is the duty of the schools to uphold the constitution and the bill of rights. A hanging noose or burning cross is just like a punch in the face or worse so says the Supreme Court! Further, it is an act of vigilantism and has no place in a “democracy”.
The criminal here is white racism, not a few young men involved in a fistfight!
I am a 62-year-old white woman who grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Fistfights among teenagers—as you certainly must know yourself—are a right of passage. Please don’t tell me you have never gotten into one. Even I picked a few fights with a few girls outside of school for no good reason. (We soon, in fact, became fast friends.) Children are not just smaller sized adults. They are children and go through this. The fistfight is normal and expected behavior that adults can use to educate children about the negative effect of the use of violence to solve disputes. That is what adults are supposed to do.
Hanging nooses in a tree because you hate Black people is not normal at all! It is a deep sickness that our schools and courts are responsible for unless they educate and act against it. This means you must overturn the conviction of Mychal Bell and drop the cases against Robert Bailey, Theo Shaw, Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis, and Jesse Beard.
It also means you must take responsibility to educate white teachers, administrators, students and their families against racism and order them to refrain from their racist behavior from here on out—and make sure it is carried out!
You are supposed to defend the students who want to share the shade of a leafy green tree not persecute them—that is the real crime that has been committed here!
Sincerely,
Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War
www.bauaw.org
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"They have a new gimmick every year. They're going to take one of their boys, black boys, and put him in the cabinet so he can walk around Washington with a cigar. Fire on one end and fool on the other end. And because his immediate personal problem will have been solved he will be the one to tell our people: 'Look how much progress we're making. I'm in Washington, D.C., I can have tea in the White House. I'm your spokesman, I'm your leader.' While our people are still living in Harlem in the slums. Still receiving the worst form of education.
"But how many sitting here right now feel that they could [laughs] truly identify with a struggle that was designed to eliminate the basic causes that create the conditions that exist? Not very many. They can jive, but when it comes to identifying yourself with a struggle that is not endorsed by the power structure, that is not acceptable, that the ground rules are not laid down by the society in which you live, in which you are struggling against, you can't identify with that, you step back.
"It's easy to become a satellite today without even realizing it. This country can seduce God. Yes, it has that seductive power of economic dollarism. You can cut out colonialism, imperialism and all other kind of ism, but it's hard for you to cut that dollarism. When they drop those dollars on you, you'll fold though."
—MALCOLM X, 1965
http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=987
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Youtube interview with the DuPage County Activists Who Were Arrested for Bannering
You can watch an interview with the two DuPage County antiwar activists
who arrested after bannering over the expressway online at:
http://www.youtube.com/user/DuPageFight4Freedom
Please help spread the word about this interview, and if you haven't
already done so, please contact the DuPage County State's attorney, Joe
Birkett, to demand that the charges against Jeff Zurawski and Sarah
Heartfield be dropped. The contact information for Birkett is:
Joseph E. Birkett, State's Attorney
503 N. County Farm Road
Wheaton, IL 60187
Phone: (630) 407-8000
Fax: (630) 407-8151
Email: stsattn@dupageco.org
Please forward this information far and wide.
My Letter:
Joseph E. Birkett, State's Attorney
503 N. County Farm Road
Wheaton, IL 60187
Phone: (630) 407-8000
Fax: (630) 407-8151
Email: stsattn@dupageco.org
Dear State's Attorney Birkett,
The news of the arrest of Jeff Zurawski and Sarah Heartfield is getting out far and wide. Their arrest is outrageous! Not only should all charges be dropped against Jeff and Sarah, but a clear directive should be given to Police Departments everywhere that this kind of harassment of those who wish to practice free speech will not be tolerated.
The arrest of Jeff and Sarah was the crime. The display of their message was an act of heroism!
We demand you drop all charges against Jeff Zurawski and Sarah Heartfield NOW!
Sincerely,
Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War, www.bauaw.org, San Francisco, California
415-824-8730
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A little gem:
Michael Moore Faces Off With Stephen Colbert [VIDEO]
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/57492/
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LAPD vs. Immigrants (Video)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/qws/ff/qr?term=lapd&Submit=S&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Search&st=s
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Dr. Julia Hare at the SOBA 2007
http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeo9ewi/proudtobeblack2/
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"We are far from that stage today in our era of the absolute
lie; the complete and totalitarian lie, spread by the
monopolies of press and radio to imprison social
consciousness." December 1936, "In 'Socialist' Norway,"
by Leon Trotsky: “Leon Trotsky in Norway” was transcribed
for the Internet by Per I. Matheson [References from
original translation removed]
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/12/nor.htm
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Wealth Inequality Charts
http://www.faireconomy.org/research/wealth_charts.html
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MALCOLM X: Oxford University Debate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmzaaf-9aHQ
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ADDICTED TO WAR
Animated Video Preview
Narrated by Peter Coyote
Is now on YouTube and Google Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZwyuHEN5h8
We are planning on making the ADDICTED To WAR movie.
Can you let me know what you think about this animated preview?
Do you think it would work as a full length film?
Please send your response to:
Fdorrel@sbcglobal. net or Fdorrel@Addictedtow ar.com
In Peace,
Frank Dorrel
Publisher
Addicted To War
P.O. Box 3261
Culver City, CA 90231-3261
310-838-8131
fdorrel@addictedtow ar.com
fdorrel@sbcglobal. net
www.addictedtowar. com
For copies of the book:
http://www.addictedtowar.com/book.html
OR SEND CHECK OR MONEY ORDER TO:
Frank Dorrel
P.O. BOX 3261
CULVER CITY, CALIF. 90231-3261
fdorrel@addictedtowar.com
$10.00 per copy (Spanish or English); special bulk rates
can be found at: http://www.addictedtowar.com/bookbulk.html
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"There comes a times when silence is betrayal."
--Martin Luther King
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YouTube clip of Che before the UN in 1964
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtATT8GXkWg&mode=related&search
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The Wealthiest Americans Ever
NYT Interactive chart
JULY 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/business/20070715_GILDED_GRAPHIC.html
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New Orleans After the Flood -- A Photo Gallery
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=795
This email was sent to you as a service, by Roland Sheppard.
Visit my website at: http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret
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DEMAND THE RELEASE OF SAMI AL-ARIAN
The National Council of Arab Americans (NCA) demands the immediate
release of political prisoner, Dr. Sami Al-Arian. Although
Dr. Al-Arian is no longer on a hunger strike we must still demand
he be released by the US Department of Justice (DOJ). After an earlier
plea agreement that absolved Dr. Al-Arian from any further questioning,
he was sentenced up to 18 months in jail for refusing to testify before
a grand jury in Virginia. He has long sense served his time yet
Dr. Al-Arian is still being held. Release him now!
See:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/16/1410255
ACTION:
We ask all people of conscience to demand the immediate
release and end to Dr. Al- Arian's suffering.
Call, Email and Write:
1- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
Department of Justice
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Fax Number: (202) 307-6777
Email: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
2- The Honorable John Conyers, Jr
2426 Rayburn Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-5126
(202) 225-0072 Fax
John.Conyers@mail.house.gov
3- Senator Patrick Leahy
433 Russell Senate Office Building
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
(202)224-4242
senator_leahy@leahy.senate.gov
4- Honorable Judge Gerald Lee
U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia
401 Courthouse Square, Alexandria, VA 22314
March 22, 2007
[No email given...bw]
National Council of Arab Americans (NCA)
http://www.arab-american.net/
Criminalizing Solidarity: Sami Al-Arian and the War of
Terror
By Charlotte Kates, The Electronic Intifada, 4 April 2007
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6767.shtml
Related:
Robert Fisk: The true story of free speech in America
This systematic censorship of Middle East reality
continues even in schools
Published: 07 April 2007
http://news. independent. co.uk/world/ fisk/article2430 125.ece
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[For some levity...Hans Groiner plays Monk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51bsCRv6kI0
...bw]
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Excerpt of interview between Barbara Walters and Hugo Chavez
http://www.borev.net/2007/03/what_you_had_something_better.html
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Which country should we invade next?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3g_zqz3VjY
My Favorite Mutiny, The Coup
http://www.myspace.com/thecoupmusic
Michael Moore- The Awful Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeOaTpYl8mE
Morse v. Frederick Supreme Court arguments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_LsGoDWC0o
Free Speech 4 Students Rally - Media Montage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfCjfod8yuw
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'My son lived a worthwhile life'
In April 2003, 21-year old Tom Hurndall was shot in the head
in Gaza by an Israeli soldier as he tried to save the lives of three
small children. Nine months later, he died, having never
recovered consciousness. Emine Saner talks to his mother
Jocelyn about her grief, her fight to make the Israeli army
accountable for his death and the book she has written
in his memory.
Monday March 26, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2042968,00.html
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Introducing...................the Apple iRack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-KWYYIY4jQ
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"A War Budget Leaves Every Child Behind."
[A T-shirt worn by some teachers at Roosevelt High School
in L.A. as part of their campaign to rid the school of military
recruiters and JROTC--see Article in Full item number 4, below...bw]
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THIS IS AN EXCELLENT VIDEO DESTRIBUTED BY U.S. LABOR AGAINST
THE WAR (USLAW) FEATURING SPEAKERS AT THE JANUARY 27TH
MARCH ON WASHINGTON FOCUSING ON THE DEMAND - BRING
THE TROOPS HOME NOW.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6935451906479097836&hl=en
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Defend the Los Angeles Eight!
http://www.committee4justice.com/
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George Takai responds to Tim Hardaway's homophobic remarks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcJoJZIcQW4&eurl_
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Iran
http://www.lucasgray.com/video/peacetrain.html
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Another view of the war. A link from Amer Jubran
http://d3130.servadmin.com/~leeflash/
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Petition: Halt the Blue Angels
http://action.globalexchange.org/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=458
http://www.care2.com/c2c/share/detail/289327
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A Girl Like Me
7:08 min
Youth Documentary
Kiri Davis, Director, Reel Works Teen Filmmaking, Producer
Winner of the Diversity Award
Sponsored by Third Millennium Foundation
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1091431409617440489
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Film/Song about Angola
http://www.prisonactivist.org/angola/
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"200 million children in the world sleep in the streets today.
Not one of them is Cuban."
(A sign in Havana)
Venceremos
View sign at bottom of page at:
http://www.cubasolidarity.net/index.html
[Thanks to Norma Harrison for sending this...bw]
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"Cheyenne and Arapaho oral histories hammer history's account of the
Sand Creek Massacre"
CENTENNIAL, CO -- A new documentary film based on an award-winning
documentary short film, "The Sand Creek Massacre", and driven by
Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho people who tell their version about
what happened during the Sand Creek Massacre via their oral
histories, has been released by Olympus Films+, LLC, a Centennial,
Colorado film company.
"You have done an extraordinary job" said Margie Small, Tobient
Entertainment, " on the Colorado PBS episode, the library videos for
public schools and libraries, the trailer, etc...and getting the
story told and giving honor to those ancestors who had to witness
this tragic and brutal attack...film is one of the best ways."
"The images shown in the film were selected for native awareness
value" said Donald L. Vasicek, award-winning writer/filmmaker, "we
also focused on preserving American history on film because tribal
elders are dying and taking their oral histories with them. The film
shows a non-violent solution to problem-solving and 19th century
Colorado history, so it's multi-dimensional in that sense. "
Chief Eugene Blackbear, Sr., Cheyenne, who starred as Chief Black
Kettle in "The Last of the Dogmen" also starring Tom Berenger and
Barbara Hershey and "Dr. Colorado", Tom Noel, University of Colorado
history professor, are featured.
The trailer can be viewed and the film can be ordered for $24.95 plus
$4.95 for shipping and handling at http://www.fullduck.com/node/53.
Vasicek's web site, http://www.donvasicek.com, provides detailed
information about the Sand Creek Massacre including various still
images particularly on the Sand Creek Massacre home page and on the
proposal page.
Olympus Films+, LLC is dedicated to writing and producing quality
products that serve to educate others about the human condition.
Contact:
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
7078 South Fairfax Street
Centennial, CO 80122
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Vasicek,+Don
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
303-903-2103
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A NEW LOOK AT U.S. RADIOACTIVE WEAPONS
Join us in a campaign to expose and stop the use
of these illegal weapons
http://poisondust.org/
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You may enjoy watching these.
In struggle
Che:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqcezl9dD2c
Leon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukkFVV5X0p4
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FIGHTBACK! A Collection of Socialist Essays
By Sylvia Weinstein
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-fightback-intro.html
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[The Scab
"After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad,
and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with
which he made a scab."
"A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul,
a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue.
Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten
principles." "When a scab comes down the street,
men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and
the devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out."
"No man (or woman) has a right to scab so long as there
is a pool of water to drown his carcass in,
or a rope long enough to hang his body with.
Judas was a gentleman compared with a scab.
For betraying his master, he had character enough
to hang himself." A scab has not.
"Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.
Judas sold his Savior for thirty pieces of silver.
Benedict Arnold sold his country for a promise of
a commision in the british army."
The scab sells his birthright, country, his wife,
his children and his fellowmen for an unfulfilled
promise from his employer.
Esau was a traitor to himself; Judas was a traitor
to his God; Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country;
a scab is a traitor to his God, his country,
his family and his class."
Author --- Jack London (1876-1916)...Roland Sheppard
http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret]
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END ALL U.S. AID TO ISRAEL!
Stop funding Israel's war against Palestine
Complete the form at the website listed below with your information.
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Advocacy?
JServSessionIdr003=cga2p2o6x1.app2a&cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=177
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Sand Creek Massacre
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FEATURED AT NATIVE AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL:
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/local/16035305.htm
(scroll down when you get there])
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING
WRITER/FILMMAKER DONALD L. VASICEK REPORT:
http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/sandcreekmassacre.html
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FINALIST IN DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL COMPETITION (VIEW HERE):
http://www.docupyx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=41
VIEW "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FILM MOVIE OF THE WEEK FOR FREE HERE:
http://twymancreative.com/twymanc.html
On November 29, 1864, 700 Colorado troops savagely slaughtered
over 450 Cheyenne children, disabled, elders, and women in the
southeastern Colorado Territory under its protection. This act
became known as the Sand Creek Massacre. This film project
("The Sand Creek Massacre" documentary film project) is an
examination of an open wound in the souls of the Cheyenne
people as told from their perspective. This project chronicles
that horrific 19th century event and its affect on the 21st century
struggle for respectful coexistence between white and native
plains cultures in the United States of America.
Listed below are links on which you can click to get the latest news,
products, and view, free, "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" award-
winning documentary short. In order to create more native
awareness, particularly to save the roots of America's history,
please read the following:
Some people in America are trying to save the world. Bless
them. In the meantime, the roots of America are dying.
What happens to a plant when the roots die? The plant dies
according to my biology teacher in high school. American's
roots are its native people. Many of America's native people
are dying from drug and alcohol abuse, poverty, hunger,
and disease, which was introduced to them by the Caucasian
male. Tribal elders are dying. When they die, their oral
histories go with them. Our native's oral histories are the
essence of the roots of America, what took place before
our ancestors came over to America, what is taking place,
and what will be taking place. It is time we replenish
America's roots with native awareness, else America
continues its decaying, and ultimately, its death.
You can help. The 22-MINUTE SAND CREEK MASSACRE
DOCUMENTARY PRESENTATION/EDUCATIONAL DVD IS
READY FOR PURCHASE! (pass the word about this powerful
educational tool to friends, family, schools, parents, teachers,
and other related people and organizations to contact
me (dvasicek@earthlink.net, 303-903-2103) for information
about how they can purchase the DVD and have me come
to their children's school to show the film and to interact
in a questions and answers discussion about the Sand
Creek Massacre.
Happy Holidays!
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Vasicek,+Don
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
303-903-2103
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FEATURED AT NATIVE AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL:
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/local/16035305.htm
(scroll down when you get there])
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING
WRITER/FILMMAKER DONALD L. VASICEK REPORT:
http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/sandcreekmassacre.html
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FINALIST IN DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL COMPETITION (VIEW HERE):
http://www.docupyx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=41
VIEW "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FILM MOVIE OF THE WEEK FOR FREE HERE:
http://twymancreative.com/twymanc.html
SHOP:
http://www.manataka.org/page633.html
BuyIndies.com
donvasicek.com.Peace Articles at Libraryofpeace.org">
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