STOP THE WAR NOW! BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
MONEY FOR HUMAN NEEDS NOT WAR!
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Dear antiwar activist,
Can you help? Volunteers are needed for the October 27th End the War Now! demonstration.
Over 150 groups have already endorsed the protest. On Tuesday, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors will add its own endorsement and will declare October 27th „End the War in Iraq Day.‰ One YouTube video supporting the National Mobilization (at http://youtube.com/watch?v=76lZC_o95gE
While we expect a lot of protesters, we need more people to volunteer for Day of Event tasks. If you haven‚t done so already, please take a moment to complete the form at http://www.oct27sf.org/dotnetnuke/Volunteer/tabid/58/Default.aspx
If your group has endorsed the demonstration, please send an e-mail message to your members telling them about our volunteer needs and directing them to this web page. Finally, if you have friends or family members who may be willing to help out, please also encourage them to get in touch with us by filling out the volunteer form. Anyone who can volunteer should try to arrive at the Civic Center by 9am and come to the coalition table near the main stage.
Please let us know by e-mail to oct27sf@gmail.com
if you can help,or if you can help recruit some volunteers.
Thanks again. See you on the 27th!
Carole Seligman
On behalf of the October 27th Coalition ˆ San Francisco
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9/11, PERMANENT WAR AND THE REPRESSIVE APPARATUS OF THE STATE:
IS MARTIAL LAW ON THE AGENDA?
Frank Morales, Two-time winner of Sonoma State University¹s Project
Censored Award for Journalism
&
Ralph Schoenman & Mya Shone of Pacifica Radio¹s WBAI ³Taking Aim² radio
program
Tuesday, October 30, 7:00 to 10:00 p.m.
Frank Morales on Police State America & Pentagon Civil Disturbance Planning
Ralph Schoenman & Mya Shone on 9/11 & the Architecture of the Fascist State
Berkeley Unitarian Center, 1606 Bonita Ave. (Corner of Cedar and Bonita)
Berkeley, CA
Frank Morales is an Episcopal priest, writer, musician and activist born and
raised on New York City's Lower East Side. He is a central leader of New
York 9/11 Truth and the foremost investigator on the militarization of the
police and preparations for military rule in America.
Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone are co-producers of Taking Aim, now heard in
seventy-seven countries. Their broadcasts, lectures and writing on the
"treason at the top" that defines the role of U.S. governmental authority in
the events of 9/11 have offered a class analysis that reveals the nature of
capitalist rule today.
A $10.00 donation is requested. The hall is wheelchair accessible.
Contact: 707-552-9992 for more information.
six years.
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Bush asks for $46 billion more for wars
By ANDREW TAYLOR, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 48 minutes ago
October 22, 2007
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071022/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_war_spending_21
2) No Convictions in Trial Against Muslim Charity
By LESLIE EATON
October 22, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/us/22cnd-holyland.html?hp
3) Gone Baby Gone
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
October 22, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/opinion/22krugman.html?hp
4) Billionaires Up, America Down
by Holly Sklar
Published on Monday, October 22, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/22/4734/
5) The Long, Dark Night
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
October 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/opinion/23herbert.html?hp
6) Even Closer to the Brink
Editorial
October 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/opinion/23tue1.html?hp
7) U.S. Considering Missile Defense Delay
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:11 a.m. ET
October 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Gates.html?ref=world
8) Many Red Flags Preceded a Recall of Hamburger
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and ANDREW MARTIN
"While the government has long allowed meat plants to establish their own safety plans, Dr. Raymond added that “we haven’t shut the door” on setting mandatory standards for E. coli testing and prevention."
October 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/business/23meat.html?ref=us
9) College Costs Outpace Inflation Rate
By JONATHAN D. GLATER
"But even the net price, after taking into account grants and other forms of aid, is rising more quickly than prices of other goods and than family incomes. In recent years, consumer prices have risen less than 3 percent a year, while net tuition at public colleges has risen by 8.8 percent and at private ones, 6.7 percent."
October 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/education/23tuition.html?ref=us
10) Environmental Laws Waived to Press Work on Border Fence
By JULIA PRESTON
October 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/us/23fence.html?ref=us
11) Companies Seeking Immunity Donate to Senator [John D. Rockefeller IV]
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and SCOTT SHANE
October 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/washington/23nsa.html?ref=us
12) Chrysler Contract Receiving Narrow Approval
By MICHELINE MAYNARD and NICK BUNKLEY
October 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/business/23auto.html?ref=business
13) Blackwater and Haditha
A Tale of Two Atrocities
By RAHUL MAHAJAN
October 19, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/mahajan10182007.html
14) Reflections by the Commander in Chief
BUSH, HUNGER AND DEATH
Fidel Castro Ruz
October 22, 2007
5:48 p.m.
Walter Lippmann
15) Crack Users Do More Time Than People Convicted of Manslaughter
By Jessica Pupovac, AlterNet
Posted on October 17, 2007, Printed on October 22, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/65406/
16) Living paycheck to paycheck gets harder
By ANNE D'INNOCENZIO,
AP Business Writer
Fri Oct 19, 7:51 PM ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071019/ap_on_bi_ge/stretching_paychecks
17) Bush to Warn Cuba on Plan for Transition
By GINGER THOMPSON
October 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/washington/24cuba.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
18) State Department Use of Contractors Leaps in 4 Years
By JOHN M. BRODER and DAVID ROHDE
October 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/washington/24contractor.html?hp
19) To Be a Journalist in Iraq
Editorial
October 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/opinion/24wed2.html
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1) Bush asks for $46 billion more for wars
By ANDREW TAYLOR, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 48 minutes ago
October 22, 2007
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071022/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_war_spending_21
WASHINGTON - President Bush asked Congress on Monday for another $46 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and finance other national security needs. "We must provide our troops with the help and support they need to get the job done," Bush said.
The figure brings to $196.4 billion the total requested by the administration for operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere for the budget year that started Oct. 1. It includes $189.3 billion for the Defense Department, $6.9 billion for the State Department and $200 million for other agencies.
To date, Congress has already provided more than $455 billion for the Iraq war, with stepped-up military operations running about $10 billion a month. The war has claimed the lives of more than 3,830 members of the U.S. military and more than 73,000 Iraqi civilians.
Bush made his request in the Roosevelt Room after meeting in the Oval Office with leaders of veterans service organizations, a fallen Marine's family and military personnel who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The White House originally asked for $141.7 billion for the Pentagon to prosecute the Iraq and Afghanistan missions and asked for $5.3 billion more in July. The latest request includes $42.3 billion more for the Pentagon — already revealed in summary last month — and is accompanied by a modified State Department request bringing that agency's total for the 2008 budget year to almost $7 billion.
Bush said any member of Congress who wants to see success in Iraq, and see U.S. troops return home, should strongly support the request.
"I know some in Congress are against the war and are seeking ways to demonstrate that opposition," Bush said. "I recognize their position and they should make their views heard. But they ought to make sure our troops have what it takes to succeed. Our men and women on the front lines should not be caught the middle of partisan disagreements in Washington, D.C."
Democrats were not swayed.
"We've been fighting for America's priorities while the president continues investing only in his failed war strategy — and wants us to come up with another $200 billion and just sign off on it?" said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. "President Bush should not expect Congress to rubber stamp his latest supplemental request. We're not going to do that."
The State Department is requesting $550 million to combat drug trafficking in Mexico and Central America, $375 million for the West Bank and Gaza and $239 million for diplomatic costs in Iraq.
Top House lawmakers have already announced that they do not plan to act on Bush's request until next year, though they anticipate providing interim funds when completing a separate defense funding bill this fall. Bush asked lawmakers to approve the request before the holidays.
"We must provide our troops with the help and support they need to get the job done," Bush said. "Parts of this war are complicated, but one part is not, and that is America should do what it takes to support our troops and protect our people."
Congress already has approved more than $5 billion for new vehicles whose V-shaped undercarriages provide much better protection against mines and roadside bombs. It's likely that Congress will quickly grant $11 billion more to deliver more than 7,000 of the vehicles.
The delays in submitting the remaining war funding request were in part due to unease among congressional Republicans about receiving it during the veto override battle involving a popular bill reauthorizing a children's health insurance program.
The request also includes $724 million for U.N. peacekeeping efforts in the war-torn Darfur region in Sudan, $106 million in fuel oil or comparable assistance to North Korea as a reward for the rogue nation's promises to cease its efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Another $350 million would go to fight famine in Africa.
For the Pentagon, the latest request includes:
- $1 billion for military construction projects, including improvements at airfields and other U.S. bases in Iraq.
- $1 billion to expand the Iraqi security forces.
- $1 billion to train National Guard units.
All told, the $189.3 billion Pentagon request for 2008 includes:
- $77 billion for military operations and maintenance.
- $30.5 billion for to protect U.S. forces from roadside bombs, snipers, and other threats.
- $46.5 billion to repair and replace equipment that has been damaged or destroyed in combat or worn out in harsh conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Associated Press writer Deb Riechmann contributed to this report in Washington.
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2) No Convictions in Trial Against Muslim Charity
By LESLIE EATON
October 22, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/us/22cnd-holyland.html?hp
DALLAS, Oct. 22 —A federal jury today failed to convict any of the former leaders of a Muslim charity who were charged with financing Middle Eastern terrorists, and the judge declared a mistrial on almost all of the charges.
The case, involving the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, is the government’s largest and most complex legal effort to shut down what it contends is American financing for terrorist organizations in the Middle East. Even though the investigation began more than a decade ago, the trial was being closely watched by legal experts who saw it as test of anti-terrorism laws and tactics adopted by the government after the Sept. 11 attacks, including laws that allow it to freeze assets of groups it says are aiding terrorist organizations.
David D. Cole, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University, said the jury’s verdict called into question the government’s tactics of using secret evidence to freeze a charity’s assets. When, at trial, “they have to put their evidence on the table, they can’t convict anyone of anything,” he said. “It suggests the government is really pushing beyond where the law justifies them going.” Prosecutors were trying to show that the charity, based in a Dallas suburb, was not simply trying to help poor Palestinians, as Holy Land officials said, but was in fact an arm of the radical Islamic group Hamas; the 36 charges included conspiracy, money laundering and providing financial support to a foreign terrorist organization.
The case involved more than a decade of investigation, almost two months of testimony — including some from Israeli intelligence agents using pseudonyms — and mounds of documents, wiretap transcripts and even videotapes dug up in a backyard in Virginia.
But after more than 19 days of deliberations, the jury acquitted one of the five individual defendants of all but one charge, on which it deadlocked. Most jury members also appeared ready to acquit two other defendants of most charges, and failed to reach a verdict on the two principal organizers and on the foundation itself, which had been the largest Muslim charity in the United States until the government froze its assets in late 2001.
The decision today is “a stunning setback for the government, there’s no other way of looking at it,” said Matthew D. Orwig, a partner at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal here who was, until recently, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Texas.
“This is a message, a two-by-four in the middle of the forehead,” Mr. Orwig said. “If this doesn’t get their attention, they are just in complete denial,” he said of Justice Department officials.
The outcome of the trial emerged during a morning of confusion for jurors and those on both sides of the case, after Chief Judge A. Joe Fish read the verdict, which the jury had reached on Oct. 18 but which had been sealed because the judge was out of town.
In it, the jury said it failed to reach a decision on any of the charges against the charity and two of its main organizers, but acquitted three defendants on almost all counts.
But in an unusual development, when the judge polled the jurors, three members said that verdict did not represent their views. He sent them off deliberate again; after about 40 minutes, they returned and said they could not continue.
In the end, one defendant, Mohammed el-Mezain, was acquitted all on charges but one involving conspiracy, on which the jury failed to reach a verdict.
The five individual defendants in the case, all former officials of or volunteers for the foundation, faced as many as 36 counts apiece. Between the lengthy jury instructions and the verdict form, the packet given to the jurors “looks like the phone book for a small city,” the judge had said.
In the course of the trial, prosecutors said that the Holy Land Foundation functioned as an arm of Hamas, the radical Palestinian group that has sponsored suicide bombings in Israel. The government did not allege that the foundation’s money paid directly for attacks, but rather that the money — more than $12 million — which had been sent to charities controlled by Hamas, had increased public support for Hamas and had helped it recruit terrorists and spread its ideology.
Lawyers for the defendants told the jury that their clients did not support terrorism; rather, the defense said, they were humanitarians trying to lessen suffering among impoverished Palestinians. Though their clients might have expressed support for Hamas, the defense argued, they did so before the United States government designated Hamas as a terrorist organization in 1995.
One defendant, Mufid Abdulqader, is the half-brother of Khalid Mishal, a Hamas leader who has been designated as a terrorist by the United States government. Another Hamas official and designated terrorist, Mousa abu Marzook, is married to a cousin of the former chairman of Holy Land, Ghassan Elashi, a defendant in the case; last year, Mr. Elashi was sentenced to almost seven years in prison for having financial dealings with Mr. Marzook and for violating export laws.
The jury has been out since Sept. 19, although their deliberations were slowed by the replacement of one juror on Sept. 26. Judge Fish did not reveal why he replaced the juror with an alternate, nor did he disclose the contents of several early notes the jury sent him.
On Oct. 3, the jury sent the judge another note indicating that one panel member was refusing to vote; Judge Fish read them what is known as an Allen charge, stressing their responsibility to try to reach a verdict.
The case has been highly controversial among many Muslim Americans, who believe that their charitable efforts, required by their religion, are being unfairly singled out. During the trial, protesters gathered across the street from the federal courthouse here, holding signs with slogans like, “Prosecuting Islamic Charities is a Homeland Insecurity.”
“It’s an extremely expansive statute to begin with, and the prosecution’s interpretation in this case is the most expansive I’ve seen yet,” David D. Cole, an expert on constitutional law at Georgetown University in Washington, said before the mistrial was declared.
Maria Newman contributed reporting from New York.
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3) Gone Baby Gone
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
October 22, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/opinion/22krugman.html?hp
It pains me to say this, but this time Alan Greenspan is right about housing.
Mr. Greenspan was wrong in 2004, when he sang the praises of adjustable-rate mortgages. He was wrong in 2005, when he dismissed the idea that there was a national housing bubble, suggesting that at most there was some “froth” in the market. He was wrong last fall, when he suggested that the worst of the housing slump was behind us. (Housing starts have fallen 30 percent since then.)
But his latest pronouncement — that the market rescue plan being pushed by Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, is likely to make things worse rather than better — looks all too accurate.
To understand why, we need to talk about the nature of the mess.
First of all, as I could have told you — actually, I did — there was indeed a huge national housing bubble.
What even those of us who realized that there was a bubble didn’t appreciate, however, was how much of a threat the bursting of that bubble would pose to financial markets.
Today, when a bank makes a home loan, it doesn’t hold on to it. Instead, it quickly sells the mortgage off to financial engineers, who chop up, repackage and resell home loans pretty much the way supermarkets chop up, repackage and resell meat.
It’s a business model that depends on trust. You don’t know anything about the cows that contributed body parts to your package of ground beef, so you have to trust the supermarket when it assures you that the beef is U.S.D.A. prime. You don’t know anything about the subprime mortgage loans that were sliced, diced and pureed to produce that mortgage-backed security, so you have to trust the seller — and the rating agency — when it assures you that it’s a AAA investment.
But in the case of housing-related investments, investors’ trust was betrayed. Supposedly safe investments suddenly turned into junk bonds when the housing bubble burst. High profits reported by hedge funds — profits that were reflected in huge payments to the fund managers — turn out to have been based on wishful thinking.
Thus, when two hedge funds run by Ralph Cioffi of Bear Stearns imploded last summer, it came as a huge shock to many investors, and helped trigger a market panic. But a recent BusinessWeek report shows that the funds were a disaster waiting to happen. The funds borrowed huge amounts, and invested the proceeds in questionable mortgage-backed securities.
Even worse, “more than 60 percent of their net worth was tied up in exotic securities whose reported value was estimated by Cioffi’s own team.” We’re profitable because we say we are — just trust us. That hasn’t ever caused problems, has it?
Stories like this have led to a crisis of confidence. The current yield on one-month U.S. government bills is only 3.41 percent, an amazingly low number, and a sign that people are parking their money in government debt because they don’t trust private borrowers. And the result is a shortage of liquidity — the ability to raise cash — that is greatly damaging the economy.
Which brings us to the rescue plan proposed by a group of large banks, with Mr. Paulson’s backing.
Right now the bleeding edge of the crisis in confidence involves worries that there may be large losses hidden inside so-called “structured investment vehicles” — basically hedge funds that borrow from the public and invest the proceeds in mortgage-backed securities. The new plan would create a “super-fund,” the Master Liquidity Enhancement Conduit, which would seek to restore confidence by, um, borrowing from the public and investing the proceeds in mortgage-backed securities.
The plan, in other words, looks like an attempt to solve the problem with smoke and mirrors.
That might work if there were no good reason for investors to be worried. But in this case, investors have very good reasons to worry: the bursting of the housing bubble means that someone, somewhere, has to accept several trillion dollars in losses. A significant part of these losses will fall on mortgage-backed securities. And given this reality, the “conduit” looks like a really bad idea.
I’d put it like this: Investors aren’t putting their money to work because they don’t know where the bad debts are. And when investors need clarity, the last thing you want to be doing is pumping out more smoke.
Mr. Greenspan’s take, expressed in an interview with the magazine Emerging Markets, seems broadly similar. “If you believe some form of artificial non-market force is propping up the market,” he said, “you don’t believe the market price has exhausted itself.”
Translated: this rescue scheme could be seen as an attempt to hide the bad debts everyone knows are out there, and as a result could delay any return of trust to the markets.
Alan Greenspan is making sense.
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4) Billionaires Up, America Down
by Holly Sklar
Published on Monday, October 22, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/22/4734/
When it comes to producing billionaires, America is doing great.
Until 2005, multimillionaires could still make the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans. In 2006, the Forbes 400 went billionaires only.
This year, you’d need a Forbes 482 to fit all the billionaires.
A billion dollars is a lot of dough. Queen Elizabeth II, British monarch for five decades, would have to add $400 million to her $600 million fortune to reach $1 billion. And she’d need another $300 million to reach the Forbes 400 minimum of $1.3 billion. The average Forbes 400 member has $3.8 billion.
When the Forbes 400 began in 1982, it was dominated by oil and manufacturing fortunes. Today, says Forbes, “Wall Street is king.”
Nearly half the 45 new members, says Forbes, “made their fortunes in hedge funds and private equity. Money manager John Paulson joins the list after pocketing more than $1 billion short-selling subprime credit this summer.”
The 25th anniversary of the Forbes 400 isn’t party time for America.
We have a record 482 billionaires — and record foreclosures.
We have a record 482 billionaires — and a record 47 million people without any health insurance.
Since 2000, we have added 184 billionaires — and 5 million more people living below the poverty line.
The official poverty threshold for one person was a ridiculously low $10,294 in 2006. That won’t get you two pounds of caviar ($9,800) and 25 cigars ($730) on the Forbes Cost of Living Extremely Well Index. The $20,614 family-of-four poverty threshold is lower than the cost of three months of home flower arrangements ($24,525).
Wealth is being redistributed from poorer to richer.
Between 1983 and 2004, the average wealth of the top 1 percent of households grew by 78 percent, reports Edward Wolff, professor of economics at New York University. The bottom 40 percent lost 59 percent.
In 2004, one out of six households had zero or negative net worth. Nearly one out of three households had less than $10,000 in net worth, including home equity. That’s before the mortgage crisis hit.
In 1982, when the Forbes 400 had just 13 billionaires, the highest paid CEO made $108 million and the average full-time worker made $34,199, adjusted for inflation in $2006. Last year, the highest paid hedge fund manager hauled in $1.7 billion, the highest paid CEO made $647 million, and the average worker made $34,861, with vanishing health and pension coverage.
The Forbes 400 is even more of a rich men’s club than when it began. The number of women has dropped from 75 in 1982 to 39 today.
The 400 richest Americans have a conservatively estimated $1.54 trillion in combined wealth. That amount is more than 11 percent of our $13.8 trillion Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — the total annual value of goods and services produced by our nation of 303 million people. In 1982, Forbes 400 wealth measured less than 3 percent of U.S. GDP.
And the rich, notes Fortune magazine, “give away a smaller share of their income than the rest of us.”
Thanks to mega-tax cuts, the rich can afford more mega-yachts, accessorized with helicopters and mini-submarines. Meanwhile, the infrastructure of bridges, levees, mass transit, parks and other public assets inherited from earlier generations of taxpayers crumbles from neglect, and the holes in the safety net are growing.
The top 1 percent of households — average income $1.5 million — will save a collective $79.5 billion on their 2008 taxes, reports Citizens for Tax Justice. That’s more than the combined budgets of the Transportation Department, Small Business Administration, Environmental Protection Agency and Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Tax cuts will save the top 1 percent a projected $715 billion between 2001 and 2010. And cost us $715 billion in mounting national debt plus interest.
The children and grandchildren of today’s underpaid workers will pay for the partying of today’s plutocrats and their retinue of lobbyists.
It’s time for Congress to roll back tax cuts for the wealthy and close the loophole letting billionaire hedge fund speculators pay taxes at a lower rate than their secretaries.
Inequality has roared back to 1920s levels. It was bad for our nation then. It’s bad for our nation now.
Holly Sklar is co-author of “Raise the Floor: Wages and Policies That Work for All of Us” and “A Just Minimum Wage: Good for Workers, Business and Our Future.” She can be reached at hsklar@aol.com.
This essay was distributed by McClatchy-Tribune News Service.
Copyright © 2007 Holly Sklar
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5) The Long, Dark Night
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
October 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/opinion/23herbert.html?hp
Nashville
I was making small talk with Dan and Sharon Brodrick in a waiting area filled with anxious-looking patients on the first floor of St. Thomas Hospital. Mrs. Brodrick seemed tired, but she managed a smile. Her husband, a former truck driver who is now an ordained minister, was the talkative one.
“We found out five days after her 56th birthday,” he said. “How’s that for a happy birthday?”
While maintaining a pleasant facade for the outside world, the Brodricks, married 37 years and still deeply in love, are spinning toward the abyss.
“We’re in big trouble,” said Mr. Brodrick.
Mrs. Brodrick learned last May that she had cancer of the duodenum and it had already spread to her liver and pancreas. Not only is the prognosis grim, but the medical expenses will soon leave the couple destitute. Mrs. Brodrick has no health insurance.
The emotional toll has been nearly as devastating as the physical. Mrs. Brodrick told her husband that she wasn’t ready to leave him. “I don’t want to die,” she said. When he told her they had to cling to their faith in God, she replied, “I know that God can take care of this. But how’s he going to do it?”
The American Cancer Society has been campaigning to raise awareness of the desperate plight of people trying to deal with cancer without health insurance. I offer Dan and Sharon Brodrick as Exhibit A.
The Brodricks never had much money, but they raised two boys and managed to buy a modest home in Gainesboro, a rural town about 90 miles east of here. Dan Brodrick severely damaged his back in an accident at work several years ago and is disabled. His wife has suffered from a variety of illnesses.
But by carefully managing their meager income, they have lived in reasonable comfort. “With a little bit of savings,” said Mr. Brodrick, “and with what I’ve been drawing in disability, we figured we’d be all right.”
But the absence of health insurance for Mrs. Brodrick left a gaping hole in their financial plan, and they knew it. She had been covered by her husband’s health insurance while he was driving a truck. But that coverage ended when he was forced to retire.
“We tried to buy insurance for her,” said Mr. Brodrick. “We applied to dozens of companies. But they wouldn’t touch her because she already had health problems.”
Without insurance, Mrs. Brodrick received treatment for her various ailments under a special program for uninsured patients at St. Thomas. But the cancer diagnosis was an entirely different story, a step for the Brodricks into a realm of dizzying, unrelieved horror.
First came the biopsy, accompanied by reassuring comments from doctors. Then came word that the tumor was indeed malignant. That was followed by surgery.
“They opened her up, and then they closed her right up again,” said Mr. Brodrick.
Not only had the cancer metastasized, it was moving very aggressively. Various estimates were given, each one shorter than the last, about how long Mrs. Brodrick might live.
While his wife was being prepped for chemo, Mr. Brodrick sat in the corner of another room and spoke about what it was like to have one’s life all but literally blown apart.
“It tears you down,” he said. “You’d like to fight this with your bare hands, but you can’t. We’ve been married 37 years September 2nd, and when I think about it, it was the quickest 37 years I’ve ever seen go by in my life. It went by in a flash. And we have leaned on each other that whole time.”
The hospital is not billing the Brodricks for its costs. “But,” said Mr. Brodrick, “I’ve still got to pay the doctors’ bills and pay for the drugs. And the drugs are very expensive.”
He reeled off a long list of charges that are coming at him like machine-gun fire, bills that he cannot afford to pay.
“So we’re selling the house,” he said. He sat quiet for a moment, then added in a soft voice, “You shouldn’t have to go live in a tent somewhere just because you don’t have insurance.”
He said he wanted to tell his story publicly because he knew there were millions of others without health insurance, and that there are many families, like his own, facing the long, dark night of devastating illness.
“Something has to be done,” he said.
Mr. Brodrick was able to get his wife into a renowned cancer center in the Midwest to get another opinion on the course of treatment she was receiving.
“They said it was the perfect treatment for her and they wouldn’t change a thing,” he said. “They said the success rate with that treatment was 5 percent or less.”
He looked at me. “We’ve got faith in God,” he said. “Without that you might as well throw yourself off a cliff, because there’s nothing else left.”
David Brooks is off today.
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6) Even Closer to the Brink
Editorial
October 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/opinion/23tue1.html?hp
The news out of Iraq just keeps getting worse. Now Turkey is threatening to send troops across the border to wipe out Kurdish rebel bases, after guerrillas killed at least a dozen Turkish soldiers. This latest crisis should have come as no surprise. But it is one more widely predicted problem the Bush administration failed to plan for before its misguided invasion — and one more problem it urgently needs to deal with as part of a swift and orderly exit from Iraq.
Turkey’s anger is understandable. Guerrillas from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as the P.K.K., have been striking from bases in Iraqi Kurdistan with growing impunity and effect, using plastic explosives, mines and arms that are far too readily accessible in Iraq. The death toll for Turkish military forces is mounting.
Turkey’s civilian leaders are feeling strong popular pressure to lash back. The leadership should realize that the conflict is providing a dangerous opening for Turkey’s generals. The military is determined to regain the upper hand over Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom they detest for his party’s roots in Islamic politics.
Ankara needs to know that an invasion would not only add to Iraq’s chaos and raise the specter of a regional war, it would also do major damage to Turkey’s international standing and finish off its prospects for joining the European Union.
Following a personal appeal from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Erdogan’s government delayed retaliating and announced that all political means would be tried before launching a military operation into Iraq. But there is not a lot of time.
Washington should also explain the dangerous facts of life to the leaders of Iraqi Kurdistan, who have done nothing to rein in the guerrillas or drive them out of their territory. Iraq’s president, Jalal Talabani, who is a Kurd, did no good Sunday when he first said he wanted “to solve problems peacefully,” but then declared that Iraq would not even turn over “a Kurdish cat” to Turkey.
The Kurds will find it much easier to prosper if they can live in peace with Turkey, whose businessmen already invest heavily in their region. And Mr. Talabani and other Iraqi Kurds need to understand that their enclave of comparative peace and prosperity will not survive a regional war.
Washington must now try to walk both sides back from this brink. It then should make a serious and sustained effort to broker a long-overdue political agreement between Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan. There is much distrust on both sides. But there is also a lot to talk about. Iraqi Kurds want access routes to sell goods to Europe. Turkey needs a secure border with Iraq.
With so many other problems in Iraq, the Bush administration apparently thought it could ignore this one. It can’t. If it doesn’t now move quickly, Iraq’s disastrous civil war could spiral into an even bigger disaster — a regional war.
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7) U.S. Considering Missile Defense Delay
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:11 a.m. ET
October 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Gates.html?ref=world
PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) -- The United States might delay activating its proposed missile defense sites in Europe until it has ''definitive proof'' of a missile threat from Iran, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday.
At a news conference after meeting Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek, Gates said the United States would proceed with current plans to build the sites in Europe but possibly wait before putting them in working order.
The proposal has already been presented to the Russians, who strongly oppose having U.S. missile defense bases in Europe but have expressed interest in the proposal Gates mentioned Tuesday, which Gates said has yet to be worked out in detail.
''We would consider tying together activation of the sites in Poland and the Czech Republic with definitive proof of the threat -- in other words, Iranian missile testing and so on,'' Gates said with Topolanek at his side.
The United States wants to build a missile interceptor base in Poland and a radar site in the Czech Republic, but details have yet to be negotiated.
''We have not fully developed this proposal, but the idea was we would go forward with the negotiations, we would complete the negotiations, we would develop the sites, build the sites, but perhaps delay activating them until there was concrete proof of the threat from Iran,'' the defense chief said.
In Washington, President Bush said extending the U.S. missile defense system to Europe is needed urgently because it is possible that Iran will acquire the capability of striking Europe in the not-distant future.
''We need to take it seriously -- now,'' Bush said.
U.S. officials have said that the proposal tying activation of the European sites to proof of an Iranian threat was presented to the Russians by Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice earlier this month. But Gates' remarks in Prague were the most specific and clear that such a proposition raises the prospect of delay.
Much of the disagreement between Washington and Moscow over missile defense in Europe has centered on the question of when Iran's missile program would reach the stage where it could threaten all of Europe and the United States. The Russians say that is a far-distant prospect; the Americans say it is coming soon.
Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell, who attended Gates's talks with Topolanek, said later that Washington wants to address Moscow's concerns and come to an agreement on how imminent the Iranian threat is.
''As much as we wish to help the Russians better appreciate the threat as we do, this proposal does not mean they will have a veto'' over U.S. missile defense plans, Morrell said. If at the point where the European system is ready for use, as early as 2011, the American government sees a clear and present threat from Iranian missiles and the Russians do not, then the U.S. will be prepared to activate the system, he said.
Gates described a related proposal to the Russians that might mean permitting a Russian presence at U.S. missile defense bases, including at the Polish and Czech sites. He said this was presented to the Russians in the interest of making as transparent as possible to Moscow how the missile defense sites operate.
Asked whether having Russians on his territory would be acceptable to the Czech government, Topolanek pointedly declined to say. ''No comment,'' he said through an interpreter. Prior to the breakup of the Soviet empire, Czechoslovakia was part of the Warsaw Pact that opposed the U.S.-led NATO alliance.
Gates stressed that any proposal that involved allowing a Russian presence on Czech soil as monitors or inspectors of the radar site would be presented first to the Czech government and would not be negotiated with the Russians unless the Czechs agreed. As he said this, Topolanek nodded his head affirmatively.
Earlier Tuesday, Tomas Pojar, deputy minister of foreign affairs, told U.S. reporters traveling with Gates that his government's support for the defense plan is based not only on a shared worry about future missile threats but also a ''moral, historical'' sense of appreciation for American support for Czech democracy.
He also stressed that Prague does not intend to rush a deal, and he predicted that it will be difficult to win approval in parliament.
''I think it's going to take a few more months'' than the U.S. timetable, which calls for completing negotiations by the end of the year and winning parliamentary approval next spring, Pojar said in an interview over breakfast at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs while Gates was meeting with President Vaclav Klaus.
Pojar said he takes little stock in public opinion polls that show a majority of Czechs oppose having a U.S. missile defense site on their territory.
The Pentagon wants to install 10 interceptor rockets in Poland which, when linked to a proposed tracking radar in the Czech Republic and to other elements of the existing U.S. missile defense system based in the United States, could defend all of Europe against a long-range missile fired from the Middle East.
Poland's opposition party ousted ruling conservatives in parliamentary elections on Sunday, which is expected to mean some delay in missile defense negotiations with Washington. Nonetheless, Gates said Monday he still believes Warsaw will cooperate.
Critics say no such system is needed in the foreseeable future because no country in the Middle East, including Iran, now possesses a ballistic missile with sufficient range to threaten all of Europe or the United States.
The U.S. aim is to have both missile defense sites ready for limited operation by 2011 and fully operational by 2013. Russia strongly opposes the U.S. system, including the planned expansion into Europe. Earlier this month, President Vladimir Putin urged Washington to freeze negotiations with Warsaw and Prague.
Many in Congress also oppose adding the two European sites.
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8) Many Red Flags Preceded a Recall of Hamburger
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and ANDREW MARTIN
"While the government has long allowed meat plants to establish their own safety plans, Dr. Raymond added that “we haven’t shut the door” on setting mandatory standards for E. coli testing and prevention."
October 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/business/23meat.html?ref=us
ELIZABETH, N.J. — Over the summer, as Americans fired up their grills, the Topps Meat factory here scrambled to produce thousands of frozen hamburger patties for Wal-Mart and other customers, putting intense pressure on workers.
As output rose, federal regulators said in interviews, the company was neglecting critical safeguards meant to protect consumers. Three big batches of hamburger contaminated with a potentially deadly germ emerged from the plant, making at least 40 people sick and prompting the second-largest beef recall in history.
Topps is now out of business, but the case points up broader problems in the nation’s system for protecting consumers from food-borne illness.
Five years ago, the government demanded more stringent safeguards against contamination because of a deadly form of the germ E. coli. But federal regulators now acknowledge that the controls are not working in some meat plants. They are trying to figure out what went wrong and how to overcome the dangers.
In the case of Topps, the government has determined that the company reduced its testing of ground beef and neglected other safety measures in the months before the recall.
The Topps case is the most serious of 16 recalls this year involving E. coli contamination of beef. That is a sharp increase from 2005 and 2006, and the resurgence of the pathogen raises questions about whether the Agriculture Department has given the meat industry too much leeway to police itself.
“We’re beginning to feel that the 2002 guidelines have not been enacted to the maximum,” Dr. Richard A. Raymond, the Agriculture Department’s under secretary for food safety, said in an interview in Washington.
While noting that the amount of harmful E. coli in beef may be increasing as part of a natural cycle or for other reasons outside the control of the meat industry, Dr. Raymond said that “some of the plants that may have had less-than-stellar systems in place are getting caught.”
Two years ago, after an 8-year-old girl in Albany County, N.Y., was sickened by Topps ground beef, the Agriculture Department scrutinized the Elizabeth plant and found relatively few problems. But since then, the department said, Topps cut its microbial testing on finished ground beef from once a month to three times a year, a level the department considers inadequate.
Federal investigators said they had recently learned that the company failed to require adequate testing on the raw beef it bought from its domestic suppliers, and it sometimes mixed tested and untested meat in its grinding machines.
The Agriculture Department acknowledged that its safety inspectors, who were in the Topps plant for an hour or two each day, never cited the company for these problems.
Additionally, Topps, like many other beef processors, had bought an increasing amount of meat from overseas. Some types of meat from foreign countries — where E. coli has not been prevalent — are not required to be tested for contamination. But the Agriculture Department said the Topps case had prompted it to consider requiring such checks.
In response to the problems, the Agriculture Department directed its inspectors on Oct. 12 to conduct a nationwide survey of what meat plants are doing to fight E. coli., and it plans to send special assessment teams into any plants that seem to be lagging to urge them to adopt more stringent measures.
“When someone says we are a toothless tiger and we are not doing anything, this is an example of something we are doing that I believe is making the food supply safer,” Dr. Raymond said.
While the government has long allowed meat plants to establish their own safety plans, Dr. Raymond added that “we haven’t shut the door” on setting mandatory standards for E. coli testing and prevention.
Consumer groups and other critics say it is startling that the agency does not have a better handle on the problems, which they see as emblematic of a cozy relationship between the Agriculture Department and the meat industry. Representative Rosa L. DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, said the Agriculture Department’s approach to enforcement was “haphazard, catch as catch can.” She added, “They just lay it out and make recommendations” that are “summarily ignored.”
The owner of Topps, Strategic Investments & Holdings of Buffalo, declined to be interviewed for this report, nor would the firm respond in detail to written questions.
“Topps Meat Company prided itself on providing quality and safety, which is one reason the company was in business for 67 years,” the company said in a statement. “The health and safety of consumers was a top priority at Topps.”
James Hodges, president of the American Meat Institute Foundation, the research arm for a meat trade organization, said the industry had “climbed a very high mountain” in reducing E. coli contamination and was working hard to stop the increase in recalls.
“We’re concerned because we’ve had a very good track record here both in the prevalence of E. coli in meat and in the reduction of illnesses,” Mr. Hodges said.
Escherichia coli is a normally harmless bacterium. But the strain E. coli 0157:H7 produces a lethal toxin and can cause severe diarrhea, kidney failure and even death. Ground beef is vulnerable to contamination, and health experts advise consumers to cook burgers thoroughly to kill germs. The government has estimated that up to 73,000 Americans a year are sickened by E. coli 0157:H7.
Many of the nation’s largest meat plants have taken substantial measures to try to minimize the problem, from sterilizing carcasses with steam to testing ground beef once an hour. But the industry still has many small and mid-size plants that have not adopted the most expensive measures.
Topps began in Manhattan as a small operation in 1940. The original owners, the Sachs family, sometimes donned hair nets and joined their workers on the floor.
After Strategic Investments & Holdings, a diversified private equity firm, bought Topps in 2003, it brought in outside managers, invested $2.5 million in new machines and began ramping up production, ex-workers said in interviews.
“The whole time, the whole year, there was a lot more pressure,” Alberto Narvaelzi, a supervisor who worked at Topps for 23 years, said referring to this year.
The first worries about E. coli surfaced in July 2005, when a supplier mistakenly delivered raw beef trimmings that had tested positive for the pathogen. Later that summer the illness in Albany also prompted scrutiny from the government, and Topps agreed to adopt better safeguards, including increased testing.
During the next two years, the company received citations for persistent cleanliness problems. Some experts say that could have alerted inspectors to probe more deeply, but the Agriculture Department described the citations as routine.
The department did not learn of a problem it considered significant until late August, as illnesses around the country started coming to light. Eventually, 40 E. coli cases were linked to Topps ground beef.
Agriculture Department investigators found that “something had changed,” Dr. Raymond said. “A lot of the policies they had had in place were not being followed.”
Federal investigators found that three different lots of hamburger meat were tainted with E. coli. Moreover, they said, the company’s record keeping was so poor they could not rule out contamination of other lots.
Batches that had been tested by suppliers were mixed with those that were not, officials said. Untested boxes from the freezer were tossed in with the daily grind, as were untested scraps from the plant’s steak line.
To be safe, the regulators finally urged the company to recall a full year’s worth of production, or 21.7 million pounds. “They couldn’t say, ‘This started two months ago,’” said Kenneth E. Petersen, assistant administrator of field operations for the Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. “Because they couldn’t prove it, we went back a whole year.”
Daniel L. Engeljohn, another top food safety official, said a more sophisticated test for E. coli became available in 2004, and most of the largest meat companies now use it. He said the agency plans to use the current review to prod other companies to use that test as well.
Former Topps workers say the company had rarely used the often-cheaper imported beef before Strategic Investments & Holdings bought Topps in 2003. But after the buyout, it began using a significant amount of beef trimmings from countries like Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Uruguay.
Department officials said that on the three days when contaminated batches were known to have been produced at the Topps plant last summer, the company was grinding both domestic and foreign trimmings.
As more questions arise about the safety of imported products, Mr. Petersen said department officials are asking themselves, “Should we be looking for better support from the country, or should we require lot-by-lot testing?”
Perhaps the biggest question is why government inspectors did not catch the Topps problems as they were occurring, and whether inspectors in other plants around the country have missed similar problems.
Not only is the government beginning special assessments of meat plants to try to figure that out, but it plans additional training for meat inspectors to be sure they understand the safety plans — and how to hold companies to them.
Dr. Raymond said, “We are going to do this survey to find out if we just had a couple of plants that had fallen apart or if we’ve got a bigger problem.”
Contributing reporting were Ken Belson and Michael Barbaro in New York, Nate Schweber in Elizabeth and David Staba in Buffalo.
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9) College Costs Outpace Inflation Rate
By JONATHAN D. GLATER
"But even the net price, after taking into account grants and other forms of aid, is rising more quickly than prices of other goods and than family incomes. In recent years, consumer prices have risen less than 3 percent a year, while net tuition at public colleges has risen by 8.8 percent and at private ones, 6.7 percent."
October 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/education/23tuition.html?ref=us
Tuition and fees at public and private universities have risen this year at more than double the rate of inflation, with prices increasing faster at public institutions, the College Board said in reports released yesterday.
These increases in the cost of higher education continue to drive up the amount that students and families borrow, with the fastest growth in private loans, the reports found.
Tuition and other costs, not including room and board, rose on average to $6,185 at public four-year colleges this year, up 6.6 percent from last year, while tuition at private colleges hit $23,712, an increase of 6.3 percent. At public two-year institutions, average tuition and fees rose 4.2 percent to $2,361.
Last year, tuition and fees at public institutions rose 5.7 percent; at private ones, 6.3 percent and at public two-year institutions, 3.8 percent.
“The average price of college is continuing to rise more rapidly than the consumer price index, more rapidly than prices in the economy,” Sandy Baum, a co-author of the report who is a senior policy analyst for the College Board and a professor at Skidmore College, told reporters at a news conference yesterday.
Ms. Baum added that the prices “are probably higher than most of us want.”
Those price increases reflect increases in the sticker price that colleges advertise, though, Ms. Baum said, the average student does not pay that full amount. At public universities, the average student gets about $3,600 in grants and tax benefits, lowering the actual cost to around $2,600. At private institutions, aid totals about $9,300, bringing the cost to $14,400.
But even the net price, after taking into account grants and other forms of aid, is rising more quickly than prices of other goods and than family incomes. In recent years, consumer prices have risen less than 3 percent a year, while net tuition at public colleges has risen by 8.8 percent and at private ones, 6.7 percent.
The changes in tuition at public institutions closely track changes in financing they receive from state governments and other public sources, the report found. When state and local support for public colleges declined over the last seven years, tuition and fees rose more quickly, and as state support has grown of late, the pace of increases fell, it said.
“We hope that state governments — which really set tuition prices at most public colleges and universities — will do their part to reinvest in higher education,” David Ward, president of the American Council on Education, said in a statement released by the College Board.
Private loans, those not guaranteed by the federal government, continued to be the fastest-growing form of borrowing, totaling more than $17 billion in the 2006-7 academic year. In the same period, students and their families borrowed $59.6 billion in federally guaranteed loans.
The report also included data on loans by full-time students at for-profit institutions, finding that in 2003-4, they took out an average of $6,750 in loans, approaching the $7,320 borrowed by students at private colleges and exceeding the $5,390 borrowed by those at public four-year institutions and $3,180 at public two-year ones.
“College officials tell us not to worry because there’s plenty of financial aid,” said Robert Shireman, executive director of the Project on Student Debt, a nonprofit organization financed largely by the Pew Charitable Trusts. “But that aid is clearly not going where it’s needed, because student debt is up by an even greater margin than tuition — an 8 percent increase from 2005 to 2006, by our accounting.”
The report prompted Representative George Miller, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, to pledge to try to “rein in” tuition increases. Mr. Miller added, “Making college more affordable and accessible for all qualified students is a top priority.”
Last year the average Pell grant, the federal government’s grant to the neediest students, declined for the second year in a row, after taking into account the effects of inflation. Ms. Baum, the economist, said she expected that decline to stop because Congress recently enacted increases in the maximum amount of the grant, which held constant at $4,050 for four years but will rise to $5,400 over the next five years.
The College Board’s study drew on responses from 2,976 institutions to questionnaires sent out last October, as well as government agencies and organizations like the National Association of College and University Business Officers.
According to the study, the cost of room and board has also continued to rise and at many public colleges dwarfs actual tuition. At four-year public institutions, tuition, room and board on average now total $13,589; at private colleges, $32,307.
Ms. Baum emphasized that while the College Board reports provided information on the general cost of higher education, costs varied around the country as well as at different kinds of colleges.
“The average numbers don’t tell the story for any individual student,” Ms. Baum said.
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10) Environmental Laws Waived to Press Work on Border Fence
By JULIA PRESTON
October 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/us/23fence.html?ref=us
Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, waived several environmental laws yesterday to continue building a border fence through a national conservation area in Arizona, bypassing a federal court ruling that had suspended the fence construction.
Citing “unacceptable risks to our nation’s security” if the fence along the border with Mexico was further delayed, Mr. Chertoff invoked waiver authority granted him under a 2005 bill that mandated construction of the fence.
He ordered work to continue on 6.9 miles of fence along the border through the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area in Cochise County in southeastern Arizona.
In a ruling on Oct. 10, Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle of the federal court for the District of Columbia held up construction of the fence, finding that the government had failed to carry out the required environmental assessment. The decision came in a suit brought by the Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife.
In a statement yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security said it “disagrees with the court’s ruling” and was confident of eventually winning the case. It noted that two federal land management agencies had authorized the department to proceed with the fence.
In addition, department officials said that some 19,000 illegal immigrants were detained passing through the conservation area in the 2007 fiscal year and that the immigrants’ trash, human waste and illegal roads had caused more damage to plant and animal life than the fence would.
Sean Sullivan, a spokesman for the Sierra Club in Arizona, said that “we can secure our borders while we protect our public lands” and that “bulldozing” the conservation area was not necessary to manage the border.
The plaintiffs described the area near the San Pedro River as “one of America’s most unique and biologically diverse areas.”
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11) Companies Seeking Immunity Donate to Senator [John D. Rockefeller IV]
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and SCOTT SHANE
October 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/washington/23nsa.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON, Oct. 22 — Executives at the two biggest phone companies contributed more than $42,000 in political donations to Senator John D. Rockefeller IV this year while seeking his support for legal immunity for businesses participating in National Security Agency eavesdropping.
The surge in contributions came from a Who’s Who of executives at the companies, AT&T and Verizon, starting with the chief executives and including at least 50 executives and lawyers at the two utilities, according to campaign finance reports.
The money came primarily from a fund-raiser that Verizon held for Mr. Rockefeller in March in New York and another that AT&T sponsored for him in May in San Antonio.
Mr. Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, emerged last week as the most important supporter of immunity in devising a compromise plan with Senate Republicans and the Bush administration.
A measure approved by the intelligence panel on Thursday would add restrictions on the eavesdropping and extend retroactive immunity to carriers that participated in it. President Bush secretly approved the program after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mr. Rockefeller’s office said Monday that the sharp increases in contributions from the telecommunications executives had no influence on his support for the immunity provision.
“Any suggestion that Senator Rockefeller would make policy decisions based on campaign contributions is patently false,” Wendy Morigi, a spokeswoman for him, said. “He made his decision to support limited immunity based on the Intelligence Committee’s careful review of the situation and our national security interests.”
AT&T and Verizon have been lobbying hard to insulate themselves from suits over their reported roles in the security agency program by gaining legal immunity from Congress. The effort included meetings with Mr. Rockefeller and other members of the intelligence panels, officials said.
The companies face suits from customers who say their privacy was violated. Administration officials say they worry that the suits, pending before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, could bankrupt the utilities.
House Democrats have balked at the immunity, refusing to include it in a bill they drew up and saying they would not even consider it unless the administration produced long-sought documents on the origins of the program.
Mr. Rockefeller received little in the way of contributions from AT&T or Verizon executives before this year, reporting $4,050 from 2002 through 2006. From last March to June, he collected a total of $42,850 from executives at the two companies. The increase was first reported by the online journal Wired, using data compiled by the Web site OpenSecrets.org.
Neither Mr. Rockefeller’s predecessor as committee chairman or his House counterpart received increases in contributions from the phone companies, records show. But industry executives have given significant contributions to a number of other Washington politicians, including two presidential contenders, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain.
A spokeswoman for AT&T, Claudia B. Jones, said contributions from its executives related to Mr. Rockefeller’s role on the Senate Commerce Committee, not immunity or other questions before the Intelligence Committee.
“Many AT&T executives work with the leaders of both the House and Senate Commerce Committees on a daily basis and have come to know them over the years,” Ms. Jones said.
She added that although industry executives and politicians might not always agree, it is “commonplace for AT&T employees to regularly and voluntarily participate in the political process with their own funds.”
Ms. Morigi, in Mr. Rockefeller’s office, said the senator had had numerous meetings with his aides about immunity for a year and came to believe that the carriers needed legal protection to ensure cooperation on national security operations.
On other questions, she said, he has disagreed with the industry. Ms. Morigi pointed to his sponsorship of a separate bill to give cellphone subscribers more protections in their contracts. That bill, unlike the immunity provision, has been vigorously opposed by the industry.
She also said that the increased contributions from industry executives reflected a record fund-raising year for Mr. Rockefeller and that his contributions from many sectors had “skyrocketed.”
Mr. Rockefeller is up for re-election next year. No opponents have declared their intention to try and unseat him.
The senator has raised $3.1 million this year, in part through 107 campaign events, according to his office. He has promised not to use any of his personal fortune to finance his campaign.
“The idea that John Rockefeller could be bought is kind of ridiculous,” said Matt Bennett, vice president for Third Way, a moderate Democratic policy group that has supported immunity for the phone carriers.
“That these companies are going to focus their lobbying efforts where their business interests are is no revelation,” Mr. Bennett said. “That’s the standard Washington way of doing business. But you’re not going to buy a Rockefeller.”
Meredith McGehee, policy director for the Campaign Legal Center, a group promoting stricter campaign finance laws, said contributions like those to Mr. Rockefeller created an appearance problem that “corrode public confidence” in the political system.
“We have so many examples like this of people on relevant committees receiving these contributions from people who are under their jurisdictions,” Ms. McGehee said. “It’s sad to say, but it is pretty much business as usual in Washington. And it shows why so many Americans just shake their heads over the way Washington works.”
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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12) Chrysler Contract Receiving Narrow Approval
By MICHELINE MAYNARD and NICK BUNKLEY
October 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/business/23auto.html?ref=business
DETROIT, Oct. 22 — The fate of the tentative agreement between the United Automobile Workers union and Chrysler is still hanging in the balance amid concerns over job security.
A tally of available results by The New York Times on Monday indicated that roughly 53 percent had voted in favor of the deal and 47 percent against. The data covered 41 percent of Chrysler’s 45,000 workers.
A person with direct knowledge of the figures confirmed the estimate, which measured results through Sunday. The tally was based on figures made public by individual union locals, and in some cases, on estimates from percentages provided by the locals.
The margin of victory at smaller locals that have approved the contract is greater, on average, than the margin of defeat at the big locals that are voting against it, calculations by The Times showed.
At factories where workers have approved the deal, about 80 percent voted yes and 20 percent no, according to a rough tally. At the plants that have rejected it, about 65 percent voted no and 35 percent voted yes, the calculations showed.
“It’s still looking good,” the person with knowledge of the vote totals said. The U.A.W. has not released any official results. But the contract may be in jeopardy if there is a groundswell against the agreement in the next few days. Four union locals in Kokomo, Ind., are voting Tuesday, while Chrysler assembly plants in Warren and Sterling Heights, Mich., and its factory in Belvidere, Ill., vote later this week.
The U.A.W. and Chrysler reached the tentative agreement on Oct. 16, after a six-hour strike.
The contract’s path since then has been bumpy. The chairman of the union’s bargaining committee, Bill Parker, argued against the contract at a meeting of local leaders and wrote a minority report outlining why it should be rejected. The local leaders approved the contract on a voice vote, but participants in the meeting said a number opposed it.
Top union officials are lobbying hard for approval because a rejection would send them back to the bargaining table. Even the union’s president, Ron Gettelfinger, has attended informational meetings at Chrysler plants.
At the Jefferson Avenue North plant in Detroit, he was joined by the U.A.W.’s vice president for Chrysler, General Holiefield, who gave a spirited talk in favor of the contract. The union has sent international representatives onto shop floors at some factories to argue for the agreement.
Despite the lobbying effort, the Jefferson North plant voted the contract down on Sunday, joining assembly plants in St. Louis and Newark, Del., that also rejected the pact.
Sharon Goram, 35, a worker at Jefferson North, said she was unmoved by Mr. Holiefield’s remarks. “I still voted no because it’s too tough out here for them to have made the concessions that they made,” Ms. Goram said. “I’m not surprised at all that people are voting no.”
Those defeats could give other workers who ordinarily support union leaders the political cover to vote against the contract, said Gary N. Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.
“Once they see it’s been voted down at one local, then they feel they can do it at another and another and another,” Professor Chaison said. “Normally, everyone wants to show solidarity, but in this case, it’s safe to vote no.”
A rejection of the contract could cloud discussions at the Ford Motor Company, which have been moving slowly during the contract vote at Chrysler. Even if the contract is approved, the opposition from big locals shows that Mr. Gettelfinger does not have his members’ complete support, Professor Chaison said.
“His credibility as a technician is good, but his credibility as a leader of the troops is very much questioned right now,” he said.
The no votes came amid fears by some workers that the contract did not give them as much protection as a similar one at General Motors, which won approval this month.
Those workers see the lack of job guarantees as violating the union’s long-held principle of pattern bargaining — winning the same terms at each Detroit automaker.
Job protection is a critical point, because Chrysler, which was sold in August to the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, is in the midst of a revamping that will eliminate 13,000 jobs in North America over the next few years.
G.M. to End Plant’s 3rd Shift
General Motors will end a third shift by the close of the year at its assembly plant near Lansing, Mich., and lay off about 1,000 workers, the company said yesterday.
The plant, which makes the Buick Enclave, Saturn Outlook and GMC Acadia crossover vehicles, has been operating on three shifts to meet initial demand for the new products.
“Demand is not slackening,” a company spokesman, Tom Wickham, said, but he added that the plant had the flexibility in two shifts to produce enough vehicles to satisfy demand.
Mary M. Chapman contributed reporting.
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13) Blackwater and Haditha
A Tale of Two Atrocities
By RAHUL MAHAJAN
October 19, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/mahajan10182007.html
The recent public outrage over the conduct of Blackwater Security mercenaries in Iraq, after an unprovoked massacre of at least 17 Iraqi civilians in western Baghdad has been heartening; unfortunately, there has been virtually no attention a far more important concurrent development -- the ongoing collapse of the military prosecution in the Haditha massacre.
Paul Bremer's decision at the eleventh hour before his departure in June 2004 to set all private contractors in Iraq above the law (they are not subject to Iraqi law, U.S. military law, or U.S. civilian law) stands out as one of the more cynical decisions of a war that has redefined cynicism, and attention to that fact is a positive development.
At the same time, however, all the attention is being focused on an extremely minor issue. The U.S. military has possibly killed more civilians in a single incident than all the mercenary companies operating in Iraq in the last several years. According to Iraq Body Count, the first U.S. Marine assault on Fallujah in April 2004, claimed the lives of at least 600 Iraqi civilians, out of a total of at least 800 people.
That number is actually cited in a report by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform regarding Blackwater, but its implications are hardly appreciated.
According to the same report, since January 1, 2005, Blackwater has been involved in 195 shooting incidents -- other mercenary companies all together account for a similar number.
This is the equivalent of a couple of days' worth of shooting incidents for the U.S. military in Iraq. Not only are there more of them than there are of private mercenaries (roughly three times the number), mercenaries do not go on offensive operations or do routine patrolling. Those are the activities most likely to lead to shooting.
Even if U.S. soldiers are for the most part genuinely more careful about rules of engagement, the far greater volume of violent incidents means that it is actually the conduct of the U.S. military, not of mercenaries, that is the problem.
In that regard, consider the evolution of the prosecution for the Haditha massacre, one of the most iconic incidents of atrocity by the U.S. military.
The facts that are not in dispute are these: On November 19, 2005, after an IED attack that killed one of them, Marines from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Regiment killed 24 people. The first killed were five men in a car who stopped, got out, and then were mown down. Afterwards, Marines entered a house and killed 15 civilians, including three women and seven children, ranging in age from 2 to 13.
In another house, four brothers, all adults, were killed, three of them with handgun shots to the head. Lance Corporal Justin Sharratt, the killer, said that they were armed and preparing to attack.
The Marines lied about what happened, indicating at first that there had been a firefight with insurgents and the others had been caught in the crossfire.
A series of higher-ranking officers didn't bother to investigate.
Court-martial hearings did not begin until this summer, almost two years after the incident.
Initially, 8 men were charged: Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, Sgt. Sanick Dela Cruz, Lance Cpl. Justin Sharratt, and Lance Cpl. Stephen Tatum, for unpremeditated murder, and Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, Capt. Lucas McConnell, Capt. Randy Stone, and 1st Lt. Andrew Grayson, for dereliction of duty and a series of more minor charges relating to not investigating or to covering up.
The hearings have been a circus. First of all, they were held in Camp Pendleton, California, rather than in Iraq, so the Iraqis who witnessed the events couldn't testify. Second, the families of the victims refused requests by military interrogators to exhume the bodies for forensic evidence. Third, Lt. Col. Paul Ware, who presided over the hearings, has been both excessively sympathetic to the defendants and excessively concerned with the effect that the verdicts will have on future Marine operations. Fourth, some rather odd plea bargains have been made.
Most recently, Ware recommended that all charges of murder (originally 13 counts) against Wuterich be dropped and replaced with charges of negligent homicide only for seven of the murdered women and children (many of them shot in their beds) -- and has added that he doesn't think Wuterich would be convicted on those charges either.
According to the testimony of fellow Marines, a week before the incident, Wuterich said that if something like that happened, they should kill everyone in the vicinity. Wuterich himself admitted to ordering his men breaking into the houses to "shoot first and ask questions later." And, contrary to Wuterich's claim that the first five men were running away after they got out of the car, Dela Cruz testified that the men "were just standing, looking around, had hands up."
Dela Cruz was given immunity for his testimony, but he may have deliberately made a hash of it, contradicting himself and at one time admitting that he was lying; events conspired nicely to get him and Wuterich both off.
Earlier, Ware recommended dropping all charges against Sharratt, accepting his claim that the execution-style killings of the three men shot in the head occurred in self-defense in the heat of combat. He also wanted charges dropped on Tatum, even though fellow Marine Lance Cpl. Humberto Mendoza testified that Tatum had ordered him to shoot the seven women and children, even after being informed of their identity and that they posed no threat.
Charges were dropped against the two captains, Grayson is still under investigation, and Ware recommended that Chessani be charged with dereliction of duty, although with none of the actual murderers on trial, apparently, he was derelict in investigating nothing.
Major General Eldon Bargewell's scathing outside report on the incident, which, though unclassified, has not been publicly released because of the ongoing hearings, found that "All levels of command tended to view civilian casualties, even in significant numbers, as routine and as the natural and intended result of insurgent tactics," adding, "Statements made by the chain of command during interviews for this investigation, taken as a whole, suggest that Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives, their deaths are just the cost of doing business, and that the Marines need to get 'the job done' no matter what it takes." He also found that found that "virtually no inquiry at any level of command was conducted," that officers looked at reports of civilian casualties as pro-insurgent propaganda to suppress and spin, and that reports filed by senior officers were "forgotten once transmitted."
Even so, no higher officers faced criminal charges; three were reprimanded.
Of course, not every court-martial in the Iraq war has been such a farce. The men who raped 14-year-old Abeer Hamza in Mahmudiyah, killed her family, then killed her and set her corpse on fire got severe sentences. In the Hamdaniyah case, where a squad of Marines murdered an innocent man and then planted a shovel on him to suggest that he was placing an IED, Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins was actually sentenced to 15 years, although it remains to be seen if he will serve his time; most of his accomplices got slaps on the wrist and are already out of jail.
The Haditha case is different from the others. It is not essential to U.S. military strategy in Iraq to leave soldiers free to rape and murder little girls or even to murder the wrong man when you're looking for insurgents; in fact, the military has an interest in discouraging such behavior. Aggressive house raids in which soldiers feel free to "shoot first and ask questions later," have been, however, fundamental to U.S. practice in Iraq; even Lt. Col. Ware, departing from his ostensible role as prosecutor, expressed concern about the chilling effect convictions would have on Marines operating in Iraq.
Overall, the record of accountability for atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers is pathetic. Soldiers who kill prisoners in custody routinely get administrative punishment; missing a troop movement gets a court-martial, but murdering a helpless man rarely does. In the particularly brutal killing of two young men in Bagram prison, in which soldiers testified that they used to assault one of them, Dilawar, a 22-year-old taxi driver, just because they liked to hear him scream "Allah!" in pain, nobody was charged with murder, on the incredibly specious reasoning that, since 27 different people used to enjoy torturing him, there was no way to determine which "unlawful knee strike" caused him to die. Try using that defense if you're a young black kid holding up a 7-11 when one of your accomplices shoots the clerk. Contractors may be subject to no law, but the law soldiers are subject to is rarely much better than nothing.
During the course of this trial, we learned that Marine rules of engagement allowed them to shoot in the back unarmed people running away from the scene of a car bomb explosion, even if there was no reason to connect them with the attack. We learned that in the second assault on Fallujah (in November 2004), approved procedure was to "clear" rooms by tossing in fragmentation grenades blind -- even though initial estimates were that perhaps as many as 50,000 civilians remained in the town -- and that many Marines used the same technique afterward in other areas. We learned about the routine practice of dead-checking -- if a man is wounded, instead of offering him medical aid, shoot him again, on the principle that "If somebody is worth shooting once, they're worth shooting twice." One of the Marines testified in the hearings that they were taught this practice in boot camp.
A sleepwalking nation paid little attention to these revelations. When future histories of the war are written, it will probably accept statements that the hearings proved the Haditha massacre was a hoax.
But we will all remain united in righteous indignation against peripheral targets.
Rahul Mahajan is publisher of the weblog Empire Notes
http://www.counterpunch.org/mahajan10182007.html
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14) Reflections by the Commander in Chief
BUSH, HUNGER AND DEATH
Fidel Castro Ruz
October 22, 2007
5:48 p.m.
Walter Lippmann
For the first time, just before the UN discusses, as it does every
year, the project of the Cuban resolution condemning the blockade,
the President of the United States announces that he will adopt new
measures to accelerate the "transition period" in our country,
equivalent to a new conquest of Cuba by force.
On the other hand, the danger of a massive world famine is aggravated
by Mr. Bush‚s recent initiative to transform foods into fuel while,
calling on strategic security principles, he threatens humanity with
World War III, this time using atomic weapons.
Such crucially important issues are the ones attracting the attention
of the representatives of the countries that will be meeting on
Tuesday, October 30, to discuss the Cuban project condemning the
blockade.
In elections where voting is not mandatory, our people have just
given their verdict, with more than 95 percent of the electorate
casting their vote at 37,749 polling stations, in ballot boxes
guarded by school children. That is the example provided by Cuba.
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15) Crack Users Do More Time Than People Convicted of Manslaughter
By Jessica Pupovac, AlterNet
Posted on October 17, 2007, Printed on October 22, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/65406/
The death of Alva Mae Groves on Aug. 9 of this year went largely unnoticed
outside of her family and fellow inmates at the Tallahassee Federal
Corrections Institution, where she lived out the last 13 years of her life.
She never went to high school, lived her entire life dirt-poor and raised
her nine children for the most part without the help of her abusive husband.
In 1994 Alva Mae "Granny" Groves was locked up for conspiring to trade crack
cocaine for food stamps. It was largely her son, whose trailer home she
lived in, who ran an operation that her family and neighbors contested, but
some customers testified that Alva Mae would sell them small bags when he
wasn't around.
"The only money I received came from SSI (Supplementary Security Income) and
what money I could earn selling eggs from my laying hens (I had about 100
chickens)," Alva Mae wrote shortly before her death in a letter asking for a
pardon so that she could die near her family. "I also cleaned houses when I
was able, and sold candy bars and soft drinks to the kids coming from school
in the afternoons."
Because she refused to testify against her son, and because of the money she
had saved in the bank, which was weighed against her for its value in crack,
and most of all because of the current sentencing system for crack cocaine
offenders, Groves was condemned to 24 years in jail at the age of 72.
In 1986, Congress passed a law that established an unprecedented five-year
mandatory minimum sentence for anyone found in possession of two sugar
packets worth of crack, regardless of whether or not that person had a
criminal record. Beyond the minimum, additional "sentencing guidelines" tack
on extra months or even years for obstruction of justice (which, in some
cases, means refusing to admit guilt), whether or not there was a weapon on
the premises and prior convictions.
Crack cocaine is treated more harshly than any other drug on the streets
right now, mostly because of the "tough on crime" response that was en vogue
at the time of its introduction. Marc Mauer, executive director of the
Sentencing Project, a D.C.-based advocacy group that works for fairness in
sentencing, explained that Congress attributed the sentencing tiers at the
time to a desire to "protect the black community."
Ron Hampton, a retired D.C. police officer and executive director of the
National Black Police Association, takes issue with that rationale. "It's
hard for me to believe that you are going to have legislation that severely
cripples and victimizes members of our community in order to do something
good for us," he said.
Nonetheless, 20 years later, the sentencing structure still stands, and it
is precisely the black community that is suffering the most.
According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC), a division of the
judicial branch that monitors and advises Congress on sentencing policy, in
2006, more than four-fifths of crack cocaine offenders in federal courts
were black.
The 1986 drug laws have had a devastating effect on the U.S. criminal
justice system. Drug offenders in prisons and jails have increased 1100
percent since 1980, from 41,000 people to nearly 500,000.
Nearly 6 out of 10 people in state prison for a drug offense have no history
of violence or high-level drug-selling activity but are often receiving
harsher sentences than people who do. People caught with the drug in 2004,
the last year for which data is available, served an average of ten years in
federal penitentiaries, while the average convict served 2.9 years for
manslaughter, 3.1 years for assault and 5.4 years for sexual abuse.
Many legislators, police officers and even federal judges have been vocal
critics of the sentences being handed to crack cocaine offenders.
In 2002, Roger Williams University Law Professor David Zlotnick conducted a
series of interviews with Republican-appointed federal judges to survey
their views of various sentencing tiers. He found the majority of them saw
crack cocaine sentencing as "completely unacceptable," "a grave injustice"
and a "discrepancy that has no basis in fact."
However, says Monica Pratt, spokesperson for Families Against Mandatory
Minimums, "Because crack cocaine mandatory minimums have applied mostly to
people of color and poor people, there has been a lack of political will to
do something about it."
Until now. The massive mobilizations in Jena, La., last month shined a
much-needed spotlight on continuing disparity in the U.S. justice system.
With a Supreme Court case addressing the issue starting on Oct. 2, a
promising reform bill currently in the Senate and proposed USSC amendments
just weeks away from taking effect (pending congressional opposition), a
confluence of forces just might create the perfect storm that advocates for
sentencing reform have been hoping for.
Said Mauer, "We have more momentum now than we have seen at any time since
the laws were passed in 1986."
The main rallying point for many critics is the sentencing disparity between
crack cocaine and powder cocaine, two drugs that are pharmacologically
identical. The main difference, they contend, is who does them and in what
neighborhoods.
A drug abuser whose drug of choice is powder cocaine would have to be found
with more than two cups of it (500 grams) before receiving the same sentence
as a person caught with two sugar packets worth (5 grams) of crack. All
along the sentencing tier, 100 times more powder cocaine is required to
trigger the same mandatory minimum penalty as crack. It is a system referred
to as the "100-to-1" drug quantity ratio.
Since crack is made by cooking powder cocaine with baking soda or another
base when it reaches the street retail level, the 100-to-1 ratio has served
to exact harsher punishments on low-level dealers than the kingpins
supplying the raw material. According to USSC data, low-level crack sellers
are punished 300 times more severely than high-level, international cocaine
traffickers on an imprisonment-per-gram basis.
There are two different types of sentences given to drug offenders: the
mandatory minimums established by Congress and the sentencing guidelines
tacked onto those minimums by federal prosecutors and accepted or denied by
federal judges.
"The congressional wheel in many ways is the most important right now,
because without congressional action, the mandatory sentences are still
going to stand, whether the USSC changes the guidelines or the Supreme Court
changes the way the judges administer them," says Pratt.
There are three bills currently introduced in Congress that attempt to
address the 100:1 disparity, but only one that would eliminate it. The Drug
Sentencing Reform and Cocaine Kingpin Trafficking Act of 2007 ( S.1711),
introduced by Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Del., would bring the penalties
for possessing crack cocaine in line with those for cocaine in its powder
form. It offers, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, a
"long-awaited fix to discriminatory federal drug sentencing" that will take
place only with increased pressure.
The sentencing guidelines are also slated to change, unless Congress moves
to block them. The USSC sets the guidelines, barring congressional
objections, and has proposed amendments to crack penalties in the past,
which have been shot down. They forged ahead this year, however, bringing
crack cocaine guidelines in line with powder guidelines in a list of
amendments introduced last spring. They will go into effect on Nov. 1 unless
somebody notices and tries to stop them. If implemented, the commission
predicts the change would shorten 69.7 percent of incoming crack cocaine
sentences, resulting in an average reduction of nearly 13 months.
In a highly unusual move, the USSC is also considering making the amendments
retroactive and are seeking public comment on the issue. FAMM has been
mobilizing its base, consisting predominantly of people incarcerated on drug
charges and their families, to get involved in the political process and
voice their opinions. "The public information officer for the USSC told our
president, Mary Price, that they have received 10,000 letters on this issue
already," Pratt said. The USSC predicts that retroactivity would reduce the
sentences of approximately 19,500 current inmates.
Then there is Kimbrough v. United States, a crack-related case that just got
under way in the Supreme Court. The case challenges a judge's discretion in
sentencing a crack cocaine convict below federal sentencing guidelines and
centers around the sentencing hearing for Derrick Kimbrough, a Desert Storm
veteran in Norfolk, Va., who pled guilty in 2005 to possession with intent
to distribute 56 grams of crack. Although he had no previous felony
convictions, his mandatory minimum and federal sentencing formula
recommended he be sentenced to 19 to 22 years. However, Federal District
Judge Raymond A. Jackson called the guideline "ridiculous" and instead
handed Kimbrough a 15-year sentence, a move that an appeals court later
challenged his authority to make.
However, according to retired D.C. Officer Hampton, the crack problem that
plagues many low-income communities across America won't go anywhere without
a more "holistic" approach that considers responses that are more than
punitive. "If they wanted to help, one of the best things they could do is
treat people who use crack cocaine much like they do for powder cocaine,"
Hampton suggested. "They need to look it as a disease. That's another
problem embedded in the disparity, not just the sentences, but the amount of
treatment that is available to them."
Indeed, a "significant number" of dealers are also addicts, who might not
find themselves in the courthouse without their addictions, according to
Zlotnick's research.
"But more than that," says Howard, "we need to develop some strategy that
focuses on the systemic issues that cause people to look for it in the first
place. I think a lot of the problem is the despair in our community, because
of lack of housing, lack of jobs, a poor educational system -- they all have
a lot to do with why people do it. If we were to address those problems in
our society, we'd probably see a lot less people doing crack."
But, for the meantime, he says, the laws are as good a place as any to
start.
Jessica Pupovac is an adult educator and independent journalist living in
Chicago.
C 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/65406/
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16) Living paycheck to paycheck gets harder
By ANNE D'INNOCENZIO,
AP Business Writer
Fri Oct 19, 7:51 PM ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071019/ap_on_bi_ge/stretching_paychecks
The calculus of living paycheck to paycheck in America is getting harder. What used to last four days might last half that long now. Pay the gas bill, but skip breakfast. Eat less for lunch so the kids can have a healthy dinner.
Across the nation, Americans are increasingly unable to stretch their dollars to the next payday as they juggle higher rent, food and energy bills. It's starting to affect middle-income working families as well as the poor, and has reached the point of affecting day-to-day calculations of merchants like Wal-Mart Stores Inc., 7-Eleven Inc. and Family Dollar Stores Inc.
Food pantries, which distribute foodstuffs to the needy, are reporting severe shortages and reduced government funding at the very time that they are seeing a surge of new people seeking their help.
While economists debate whether the country is headed for a recession, some say the financial stress is already the worst since the last downturn at the start of this decade.
From Family Dollar to Wal-Mart, merchants have adjusted their product mix and pricing accordingly. Sales data show a marked and more prolonged drop in spending in the days before shoppers get their paychecks, when they buy only the barest essentials before splurging around payday.
"It's pretty pronounced," said Kiley Rawlins, a spokeswoman at Family Dollar. "It seems like to us, customers are running out of food products, paper towels sooner in the month."
Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, said the imbalance in spending before and after payday in July was the biggest it has ever seen, though the drop-off wasn't as steep in August.
And 7-Eleven says its grocery sales have jumped 12-13 percent over the past year, compared with only slight increases for non-necessities like gloves and toys. Shoppers can't afford to load up at the supermarket and are going to the most convenient places to buy emergency food items like milk and eggs.
"It even costs more to get the basics like soap and laundry detergent," said Michelle Grassia, who lives with her husband and three teenage children in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, N.Y.
Her husband's check from his job at a grocery store used to last four days. "Now, it lasts only two," she said.
To make up the difference, Grassia buys one gallon of milk a week instead of three. She sometimes skips breakfast and lunch to make sure there's enough food for her children. She cooks with a hot plate because gas is too expensive. And she depends more than ever on the bags of free vegetables and powdered milk from a local food pantry.
Grassia's story is neither new nor unique. With the fastest-rising food and energy prices since the 1980s, low-income consumers are stretching their budgets by eating cheap foods like peanut butter and pasta.
Industry analysts and some economists fear the strain will get worse as people are hit with higher home heating bills this winter and mortgage rates go up.
It's bad enough already for 85-year-old Dominica Hoffman.
She gets $1,400 a month in pension and Social Security from her days in the garment industry. After paying $500 in rent on an apartment in Pennsauken, N.J., and shelling out money for food, gas and other expenses, she's broke by the end of the month. She's had to cut fruits and vegetables from her grocery order — and that's even with financial help from her children.
"Everything is up," she said.
Many consumers, particularly those making less than $30,000 a year, are cutting spending on nutritious food like milk and vegetables, and analysts fear they're further skimping on basic medical care and other critical services.
Coupon-clipping just isn't enough.
"The reality of hunger is right here," said the Rev. Melony Samuels, director of The BedStuy Campaign against Hunger, a church-affiliated food pantry in Brooklyn.
The pantry scrambled to feed 5,000 new families over the past 12 months, up almost 70 percent from 3,000 the year before.
"I am shocked to see such numbers," Samuels said, "and I am really concerned that this is just the beginning of what we are going to see."
In the past three months, Samuels has seen more clients in higher-paying jobs — the $35,000 range — line up for food.
The Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York, which covers 23 counties in New York State, cited a 30 percent rise in visitors in the first nine months of this year, compared with 2006.
Maureen Schnellmann, senior director of food and nutrition programs at the American Red Cross Food Pantry in Boston, reported a 30 percent increase from January through August over last year.
Until a few months ago, Dellria Seales, a home care assistant, was just getting by living with her daughter, a hairdresser, and two grandchildren in a one-bedroom apartment for $750 a month. But a knee injury in January forced her to quit her job, leaving her at the mercy of Samuels' pantry because most of her daughter's $1,200 a month income goes to rent, energy and food costs.
"I need it. Without it, we wouldn't survive," Seales said as she picked up carrots and bananas.
John Vogel, a professor at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business, worries that the squeeze will lead to a less nutritious diet and inadequate medical or child care.
In the meantime, rising costs show no signs of abating.
Gas prices hit a record nationwide average of $3.23 per gallon in late May before receding a little, though prices are expected to soar again later this year. Food costs have increased 4.5 percent over the past 12 months, partly because of higher fuel costs. Egg prices were 44 percent higher, while milk was up 21.3 percent over the past 12 months to nearly $4 a gallon, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The average family of four is spending anywhere from $7 to $10 extra a week — $40 more a month — on groceries alone, compared to a year ago, according to retail consultant Burt Flickinger III.
And while overall wage growth is a solid 4.1 percent over the past 12 months, economists say the increases are mostly for the top earners.
Retailers started noticing the strain in late spring and early summer as they were monitoring the spending around the paycheck cycle.
Wal-Mart and Family Dollar key on the first week of the month, when government checks like Social Security and public assistance generally hit consumers' mailboxes.
7-Eleven, whose customers are more diverse, looks at paycheck cycles in specific markets dominated by a major employer, such as General Motors in Detroit, to discern trends in shopping.
To economize, shoppers are going for less expensive food.
"They're buying more peanut butter and pasta. And they're going for hamburger meat," Flickinger, the retail consultant, said. "They're trying to outsmart the store by looking for deep discounts at the end of the month."
He said the last time he saw this was 2000-2001, when the dot-com bubble burst and the economy went into a recession after massive layoffs.
For now, low-price retailers are readjusting their merchandising and pricing.
Wal-Mart is becoming more aggressive on discounting. It announced Thursday it is expanding price cuts to 15,000 items, ranging from Motts apple juice and Progresso soups to women's fleece tops, heading into the holidays.
Family Dollar, whose food offerings were limited to candy and snacks until two years ago, has expanded its mix of groceries like fruit cups, cereal and such refrigerated items as milk and ice cream while cutting back on shoes. This summer the chain began accepting food stamps.
Food pantries are also getting creative. Samuels said her church, Full Gospel Tabernacle of Faith, just started offering free cooking classes to teach clients who are diabetic or have other health conditions how to prepare vegetables like squash. It's also offering free exercise classes.
"We are trying to make them health conscious," Samuels said. "It's not right to give them just anything. Our mantra is eat well and live well."
Associated Press Writers Geoff Mulvihill in Mount Laurel, N.J., and Terry Tang in Phoenix, Ariz., contributed to this report.
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17) Bush to Warn Cuba on Plan for Transition
By GINGER THOMPSON
October 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/washington/24cuba.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 — President Bush is planning to issue a stern warning Wednesday that the United States will not accept a political transition in Cuba in which power changes from one Castro brother to another, rather than to the Cuban people.
As described by an official in a background briefing to reporters on Tuesday evening, Mr. Bush’s remarks will amount to the most detailed response — mainly an unbending one — to the political changes that began in Cuba more than a year ago, when Fidel Castro fell ill and handed power to his brother Raúl.
The speech, scheduled to be given at the State Department before invited Cuban dissidents, will introduce the relatives of four Cuban prisoners being held for political crimes. A senior administration official said the president wanted to “put a human face,” on Cuba’s “assault on freedom.”
In effect, the speech will be a call for Cubans to continue to resist, a particularly strong line coming from an American president. He is expected to say to the Cuban military and police, “There is a place for you in a new Cuba.”
The official said Mr. Bush would make the case that for dissidents and others pursuing democracy in Cuba, little has changed at all, and that the country has suffered economically as well as in other ways as a result of the Castro rule.
He will say that while much of the rest of Latin America has moved from dictatorship to democracy, Cuba continues to use repression and terror to control its people. And, the administration official said, Mr. Bush will direct another part of his speech to the Cuban people, telling them they “have the power to shape their destiny and bring about change.”
The administration official said Mr. Bush was expected to tell Cuban viewers that “soon they will have to make a choice between freedom and the force used by a dying regime.”
Some of the sharpest parts of the speech, however, will be aimed directly at Raúl Castro. Mr. Bush is expected to make clear that the United States will oppose an old system controlled by new faces. The senior administration official said that nothing in Raúl Castro’s past gives Washington reason to expect democratic reforms soon. And he said the United States would uphold its tough economic policies against the island.
Mr. Bush would hold out the possibility of incentives for change, if Cuba demonstrated an openness to such exchanges, the official said. Those steps might include expanding cultural and information exchanges with Cuba and allowing religious organizations and other nonprofits to send computers to Cuba and to award scholarships.
However, he is expected to reiterate the administration’s long-standing demands for free and transparent elections, and the release of political prisoners.
John Kavulich, senior policy adviser at the U.S.-Cuba Trade andEconomic Council, said those demands would likely be non-starters for Cuba. He said the technology and educational opportunities Mr. Bush intends to offer are being provided to Cuba by Venezuela and China.
He suggested that the real constituency for Mr. Bush’s speech was the politically-powerful exile community in Miami.
Phil Peters, an expert on Cuba at the non-partisan Lexington Institute, said he saw Mr. Bush’s speech as an attempt to reorient a policy that had fallen behind the times. American policy, he said, had been centered around the idea that the Communist government would fall once Mr. Castro left power, and that Mr. Castro, 81, would be forced out of power only by death. Instead, Mr. Peters said, Raúl Castro’s rise caught the administration off guard.
President Bush has remained largely silent, Mr. Peters said, while Raúl Castro consolidated his control over Cuban institutions by establishing his own relationships with world leaders, and opening unprecedented dialogue with the Cuban people about their visions for their own country. Meanwhile, all the doomsday scenarios predicted for Cuba once Fidel Castro left power — a violent uprising by dissidents and a huge exodus of Cuban refugees — never materialized.
“The administration realized they had missed the boat,” Mr. Peters said. “Succession has already happened. They can no longer have a policy that keeps them waiting for Castro to die when the rest of the world has moved on.”
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18) State Department Use of Contractors Leaps in 4 Years
By JOHN M. BRODER and DAVID ROHDE
October 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/washington/24contractor.html?hp
WASHINGTON, Oct. 19 — Over the past four years, the amount of money the State Department pays to private security and law enforcement contractors has soared to nearly $4 billion a year from $1 billion, administration officials said Tuesday, but they said that the department had added few new officials to oversee the contracts.
It was the first time that the administration had outlined the ballooning scope of the contracts, and it provided a new indication of how the State Department’s efforts to monitor private companies had not kept pace. Auditors and outside exerts say the results have been vast cost overruns, poor contract performance and, in some cases, violence that has so far gone unpunished.
A vast majority of the money goes to companies like DynCorp International and Blackwater USA to protect diplomats overseas, train foreign police forces and assist in drug eradication programs. There are only 17 contract compliance officers at the State Department’s management bureau overseeing spending of the billions of dollars on these programs, officials said.
Two new reports have delivered harsh judgments about the State Department’s handling of the contracts, including the protective services contract that employs Blackwater guards whose involvement in a Sept. 16 shooting in Baghdad has raised questions about their role in guarding American diplomats in Iraq.
In a report made public on Tuesday, a review panel found that there were too few American officials in Iraq to enforce the rules that apply to Blackwater and other security contractors. It also found that the conduct of the contractors had undermined the broader mission of ending the insurgency and establishing a democratic government in Iraq.
Ms. Rice approved a number of the review panel’s recommendations intended to strengthen oversight of the security contractors, including a revision of the rules for the use of deadly force to bring them more in line with the military’s rules of engagement, and creation of review panels to investigate every incident involving the injury or killing of a civilian. The panels could refer possible instances of wrongdoing to the Justice Department. The contractors would also undergo more rigorous training in Iraqi culture and language.
The other report was an audit of the State Department’s oversight of DynCorp, released Tuesday, which found that records tracking hundreds of millions of dollars paid to the company were in “disarray.”
Interviews with administration officials, auditors and outside experts show that the use of contractors has grown far beyond what department officials imagined when they first outsourced critical security functions in 1994 and hired private security guards to protect American diplomats in Haiti, which was thrown into turmoil by civil strife.
Today, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, the small State Department office that oversees the private security contractors in Iraq and elsewhere, is overwhelmed by its responsibilities to supervise the contractors, according to former employees, members of Congress and outside experts. They say the office has grown too reliant on, and too close to, the 1,200 private soldiers who now guard American officials overseas.
“They simply didn’t have enough eyes and ears watching what was going on,” said Peter W. Singer, an expert on security contactors at the Brookings Institution. “Secondly, they seemed to show no interest in using the sanctions they had.”
Another State Department office, the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, has issued more than $2.2 billion in contracts for police training and drug eradication in Iraq, Afghanistan, Latin America and elsewhere, according to State Department records. Ninety-four percent of that money has gone to DynCorp.
State Department officials say they have tried to increase competition, but few companies are able to operate in war zones. “The lack of competition does concern us a great deal,” said a senior State Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We want as many companies as possible.”
State Department contracting officials complain that they do not have nearly enough people to properly oversee the more than 2,500 contractors now under their informal command around the world. And a proposal to charge contractors a fee to pay for additional government compliance officers has stalled in the State Department bureaucracy.
The ballooning budget for outside contracts at the State Department is emblematic of a broader trend, contracting experts say.
The Bush administration has doubled the amount of government money going to all types of contractors to $400 billion, creating a new and thriving class of post-9/11 corporations carrying out delicate work for the government. But the number of government employees issuing, managing and auditing contracts has barely grown.
“That’s a criticism that’s true of not just State but of almost every agency,” said Jody Freeman, an expert on administrative law at Harvard Law School.
On the eve of the 1994 American invasion of Haiti, the State Department’s law enforcement bureau received an urgent request. The department needed 45 American police officers to help secure the nation.
Officials in the small bureau contacted DynCorp, a Texas aviation services company with a $30 million bureau contract to operate counternarcotics flights in Latin America. Impressed with its aviation work, a selection committee awarded DynCorp a small contract.
State Department officials viewed it as an interim measure. DynCorp viewed it as an opportunity. “We always saw it as a growth area because of the conflicts in the world,” said Steve Cannon, a former DynCorp executive.
Later that year, DynCorp won a contract from the diplomatic security office to guard American diplomats in Haiti. Over the next several years, the two small State Department offices issued more than $250 million in police training and diplomatic security contracts to DynCorp for work in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo.
After the 2001 American invasion of Afghanistan, contracts grew again, eventually bringing the company $400 million a year. The law enforcement office had DynCorp dispatch dozens, then hundreds, of police trainers to Afghanistan. The diplomatic security office had DynCorp send employees to guard the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai.
Former State Department officials and Afghan officials said the DynCorp guards were far too aggressive in their tactics, and their conduct alienated Afghan and European officials, as well as Afghan citizens. Gregory Lagana, a DynCorp spokesman, said the company agreed there was a problem and replaced the guards. “The demeanor, the swagger, was wrong,” he said. “We put a stop to that.”
State Department officials said DynCorp had performed well over all, and won most contracts through competitive bidding.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq opened new opportunities in the burgeoning world of government security. Blackwater got a toehold with a $27 million no-bid contract to guard L. Paul Bremer III, the administrator of the American occupation in Baghdad. A year later, the State Department expanded that contract to $100 million. Blackwater now employs 845 of the more than 1,100 private security contractors at work in Iraq and holds a contract worth $1.2 billion.
Assistant Secretary of State Richard J. Griffin, who oversees the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, told Congress this month that his office had 36 agents overseeing the guards.
Congressional investigators say the security bureau has sought to minimize episodes like the shootings of civilians.
“We are all better off getting this case — and any similar cases — behind us quickly,” one State Department security official in Iraq wrote to another, after Blackwater guards killed a father of six in Hilla in 2005, according to an internal State Department memo turned over to Congress. He recommended paying the man’s family $5,000.
The State Department took no action against Blackwater for the killing. Blackwater declined to comment for this article. The company has denied any wrongdoing and said that its techniques have resulted in no diplomats, visiting members of Congress or other American dignitaries being killed or seriously hurt in thousands of escort missions since 2005. Twenty-seven Blackwater employees have died in Iraq.
DynCorp’s work and the department’s oversight of the company have been questioned also. In interviews in Iraq and Afghanistan, local police officials said DynCorp’s trainers were costly and in some cases poorly qualified. The trainers are mostly retired civilian police officers from the United States who are paid up to $134,000 in Iraq and $118,000 in Afghanistan for a year of service.
State Department and DynCorp officials said all of the trainers were carefully screened and well qualified. Department officials also said they had added some two dozen staffers to oversee DynCorp over the past year.
American military officials in Iraq and Afghanistan said the quality of trainers was mixed as well. Jonathan Shiroma, a captain in the California National Guard who worked with DynCorp trainers in Iraq from 2005 to 2006, said some were “outstanding,” while others preferred to remain on base.
DynCorp and Blackwater, meanwhile, continue to win contracts.
The State Department has said it will continue to rely on contractors because, for now at least, it has no choice. It cannot quickly hire the bodyguards and trainers it would need to replace the contractors, and the military does not have the trained personnel to take over the job.
John M. Broder reported from Washington, and David Rohde from Washington, Baghdad and Kabul, Afghanistan. Paul von Zielbauer contributed reporting from Baghdad.
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19) To Be a Journalist in Iraq
Editorial
October 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/opinion/24wed2.html
The International Women’s Media Foundation awarded its “courage in journalism awards” yesterday to women who risk their lives covering the news. One award was given to six Iraqi women who work in the McClatchy Newspapers bureau in Baghdad, a job so dangerous that they cannot take the chance of being photographed, not even in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue.
Speaking for the six, Sahar Issa had a powerful message that we wanted to share with our readers:
“To be a journalist in violence-ridden Iraq today, ladies and gentlemen, is not a matter lightly undertaken. Every path is strewn with danger, every checkpoint, every question a direct threat.
“Every interview we conduct may be our last. So much is happening in Iraq. So much that is questionable. So much that we, as journalists, try to fathom and portray to the people who care to know.
“In every society there is good and bad. Laws regulate the conduct of the society. My country is now lawless. Innocent blood is shed every day, seemingly without purpose. Hundreds of thousands have been killed for seemingly no reason. It is our responsibility to do our utmost to acquire the answers, to dig them up with our bare hands if we must.
“But that knowledge comes at a dear price, for since the war started, four and half years ago, an average of about one reporter and media assistant killed every week is something we have to live with.
“We live double lives. None of our friends or relatives know what we do. My children must lie about my profession. They cannot under any circumstance boast of my accomplishments, and neither can I. Every morning, as I leave my home, I look back with a heavy heart, for I may not see it again — today may be the day that the eyes of an enemy will see me for what I am, a journalist, rather than the appropriately bewildered elderly lady who goes to look after ailing parents, across the river every day. Not for a moment can I let down my guard.
“I smile as I give my children hugs and send them off to school; it’s only after they turn their backs to me that my eyes fill to overflowing with the knowledge that they are just as much at risk as I am.
“So why continue? Why not put down my proverbial pen and sit back? It’s because I’m tired of being branded a terrorist: tired that a human life lost in my county is no loss at all. This is not the future I envision for my children. They are not terrorists, and their lives are not valueless. I have pledged my life — and much, much more, in an effort to open a window through which the good people in the international community may look in and see us for what we are, ordinary human beings with ordinary aspirations, and not what we have been portrayed to be.
“Allow me, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to reach out. Help us to build bridges of understanding and acceptance. Even though the war has cast a dark shadow upon your nation and mine — it is never too late.”
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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Britain: New Claim for Sovereignty in Antarctica
By REUTERS
World Briefing | Europe
Britain plans to submit a claim to the United Nations to extend its Antarctic territory by 386,000 square miles, the Foreign Office said. Argentina wants some of it, and its foreign minister said his country was working on its own presentation. May 13, 2009, is the deadline for countries to stake their claims in what some experts are describing as the last big carve-up of maritime territory in history.
October 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/world/europe/18briefs-claim.html?ref=world
California: Veto of 3 Criminal Justice Bills
By SOLOMON MOORE
Bucking a national trend toward stronger safeguards against wrongful convictions, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed bills that would have explored new eyewitness identification guidelines, required electronic recordings of police interrogations and mandated corroboration of jailhouse informant testimony. Mr. Schwarzenegger cited his concern that the three bills would hamper local law enforcement authorities, a contention shared by several state police and prosecutor associations. The proposals had been recommended by the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, a bipartisan body of police officials, prosecutors and defense lawyers charged by the State Senate to address the most common causes of wrongful convictions and recommend changes in criminal justice procedures.
October 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/16/us/16brfs-VETOOF3CRIMI_BRF.html?ref=us
Illinois: Chicagoans May Have to Dig Deeper
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Chicagoans would have to spend 10 cents more on a bottle of water, pay higher property taxes and spend more for liquor under Mayor Richard M. Daley’s proposed budget for next year. Also financing Mr. Daley’s $5.4 billion budget are higher water and sewer fees and more expensive vehicle stickers for people driving large vehicles, $120 a vehicle sticker, up from $90. Mr. Daley announced his budget to aldermen, calling it a last resort to ask taxpayers for more money. His budget closes a $196 million deficit and avoids service cuts and layoffs. Budget hearings will be held, and a city spending plan will require a vote by aldermen.
Midwest
October 11, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/us/11brfs-CHICAGO.html?ref=us
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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