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The Art of Mental Warfare
http://artofmentalwarfare.com/pog/artofmentalwarfarecom-the-warning/
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GET JROTC OUT OF OUR SCHOOLS—AGAIN!
Attend a meeting:
Monday, November 26
7:00 P.M.
474 Valencia Street
(Near 16th Street, San Francisco)
For more info, call: 415-824-8730
Remember when SF made history a year ago when the Board of Education voted to phase out JROTC from our public schools? Well it seems like the military forces have succeeded in delaying, if not stopping, the phase out. Even previously anti-JROTC school board members are wavering.
In 2004, 63 percent of San Franciscans voted to withdraw all troops from Iraq. In 2005, 59 percent of San Franciscans voted to end military recruiting in our public schools. In 2006 the school board, the first in the country, voted to phase out JROTC. San Franciscans clearly do not support the military taking our children. We MUST muster enough support to hold the school board to its courageous vote last year.
In solidarity,
Medea Benjamin
Eric Blanc
Riva Enteen
Bob Forsberg
Vickie Leidner
Cristina Gutierrez
Tommi Avicoli Mecca
Millie Phillips
Carole Seligman
Bonnie Weinstein
Please sign this letter and pass it along to all those opposed to JROTC in our schools.
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SUPPORT THE DAY AFTER DEMONSTRATIONS TO FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL
From: LACFreeMumia@aol.com
A ruling by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals on Mumia's case, based on the hearing in Philadelphia on May 17th 2007, is expected momentarily. Freeing Mumia immediately is what is needed, but that is not an option before this court. The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal calls on everyone who supports Mumia‚s case for freedom, to rally the day after a decision comes down. Here are Bay Area day-after details:
OAKLAND:
14th and Broadway, near the Federal Building
4:30 to 6:30 PM the day after a ruling is announced,
or on Monday if the ruling comes down on a Friday.
Oakland demonstration called by the Partisan Defense Committee and Labor Black Leagues, to be held if the Court upholds the death sentence, or denies Mumia's appeals for a new trial or a new hearing. info at (510) 839-0852 or pdcbayarea@sbcglobal.org
SAN FRANCISCO:
Federal Courthouse, 7th & Mission
5 PM the day after a ruling is announced,
or Monday if the decision comes down on a Friday
San Francisco demo called by the Mobilization To Free Mumia,
info at (415) 255-1085 or www.freemumia.org
Day-after demonstrations are also planned in:
Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Toronto, Vancouver
and other cities internationally.
A National Demonstration is to be held in Philadelphia, 3rd Saturday after the decision
For more information, contact: International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal, www.mumia.org;
Partisan Defense Committee, www.partisandefense.org;
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC), www.freemumia.com;
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL IS INNOCENT!
World-renowned journalist, death-row inmate and political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal is completely innocent of the crime for which he was convicted. Mountains of evidence--unheard or ignored by the courts--shows this. He is a victim, like thousands of others, of the racist, corrupt criminal justice system in the US; only in his case, there is an added measure of political persecution. Jamal is a former member of the Black Panther Party, and is still an outspoken and active critic of the on-going racism and imperialism of the US. They want to silence him more than they want to kill him.
Anyone who has ever been victimized by, protested or been concerned about the racist travesties of justice meted out to blacks in the US, as well as attacks on immigrants, workers and revolutionary critics of the system, needs to take a close look at the frame-up of Mumia. He is innocent, and he needs to be free.
FREE MUMIA NOW!
END THE RACIST DEATH PENALTY!
FOR MASS PROTESTS AND LABOR ACTION TO FREE MUMIA!
In 1995, mass mobilizations helped save Mumia from death.
In 1999, longshore workers shut West Coast ports to free Mumia, and teachers in Oakland and Rio de Janeiro held teach-ins and stop-works.
Mumia needs powerful support again now. Come out to free Mumia!
- The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222, Oakland CA 94610
510.763.2347
LACFreeMumia@aol.com
November 2007
ACTION ALERT: Ensure Fairness For Mumia Abu-Jamal on NBC’s The Today Show!
On Dec. 6, NBC’s The Today Show intends to air a show about Michael Smerconish and Maureen Faulkner’s new book “Murdered By Mumia.” According to the announcement on Michael Smerconish’s website, the show is planning to feature both Smerconish and Faulkner as guests.
The International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal (FreeMumia.com), Journalists for Mumia (Abu-Jamal-News.com), and Educators for Mumia (EmajOnline.com) have initiated a media-activist campaign urging people to write The Today Show at today@msnbc.com asking them to fairly present both sides of the Mumia Abu-Jamal / Daniel Faulkner case, by also featuring as guests, Linn Washington, Jr. (Philadelphia Tribune columnist and Associate Professor of Journalism at Temple University ) and Dr. Suzanne Ross (Clinical Psychologist and Co-Chair of the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition, NYC).
A sample letter (http://www.abu-jamal-news.com/pr/TodayShow.doc), accompanied by an extensive informational press pack (http://www.abu-jamal-news.com/pr/PressPackNov07.pdf) has been created to use for contacting The Today Show. Please take a minute and contact them to ensure fair media coverage of this controversial and important case.
Sincerely,
The International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal (FreeMumia.com)
Journalists for Mumia Abu-Jamal (Abu-Jamal-News.com)
Educators for Mumia Abu-Jamal (EmajOnline.com)
SAMPLE LETTER:
Dear Today Show,
On December, 2007, the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal will be entering the 27th year. In the course of those years, much of the media coverage has contained pure speculation and falsehoods. Media watchdogs like FAIR.ORG have sharply criticized this coverage as being biased against Abu-Jamal.
We understand that on Dec. 6, the Today Show intends to air a show about Michael Smerconish and Maureen Faulkner’s book “Murdered By Mumia.” Interestingly, the scheduled interview regarding the new book focusing on Mrs. Faulkner comes at a time of many startling new developments in this historic case, generating international attention.
Reflecting the international interest in this case, in 2003, Abu-Jamal was named an honorary citizen of Paris , and in 2006, the city of St. Denis named a street after him. While this was largely motivated by opposition to the death penalty, they also cited strong evidence of both an unfair trial and Abu-Jamal’s innocence.
One of these developments centers on extraordinary photos of the 1981 crime scene taken by Philadelphia-based press photographer Pedro Polakoff (viewable at Abu-Jamal-News.com) that reveal manipulation of evidence, and completely contradict the prosecution’s case, including Officer James Forbes’ testimony that he properly handled both Abu-Jamal’s and Faulkner’s guns (the photos show Forbes holding both guns in his bare hand). Also the photos reveal that there were no large bullet divots or destroyed chunks of cement where Faulkner was found, which should be visible in the pavement if the prosecution’s scenario was accurate, according to which Abu-Jamal shot down at Faulkner and allegedly missed several times while Faulkner was on his back. Of particular note, this photographer twice attempted to provide these photos to the District Attorney for both the 1982 trial and the 1995 PCRA hearings, and was ignored both times.
Since his incarceration, Abu-Jamal has published six books and countless articles, and has delivered hundreds of speeches, including keynote addresses for college graduations. As a prolific writer and tenacious journalist, he has earned the respect (and support) of such notable prize-winning authors as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman, and Salman Rushdie. Just recently, he was accepted into the PEN American Center , one of the highest honors a writer can achieve. Additionally, at the time of his arrest, he was president of the Philadelphia chapter of the Association of Black Journalists, and was awarded the PEN Oakland award for outstanding journalism after the publication of his first book, Live from Death Row. Since Live, he has garnered a following of dedicated readers around the world, including scholars, college educators, and journalists. His work is, in part, testament to the dignity he has demonstrated for the past 25 years he has been on death row.
The ethical interests in balance and fairness in presenting “news” regarding the Abu-Jamal case, arguably requires providing Today Show viewers with information evidencing Mr. Abu-Jamal’s innocence and unfair trial. To represent this other side, and to provide perspectives addressing the informational needs of your viewers, I ask that you also feature experts Linn Washington, Jr. (Philadelphia Tribune columnist and Associate Professor of Journalism at Temple University ) and Dr. Suzanne Ross (Clinical Psychologist and Co-Chair of the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition, NYC) as guests on your Dec. 6 show (they can be contacted via Journalists for Mumia: hbjournalist@gmail.com).
While Mrs. Faulkner certainly has a “story” and is entitled to her opinions, your viewers should be privy to other facts, such as the prosecution withholding key evidence, witness coercion, racist jury selection, and evidence that Judge Albert Sabo boasted about his desire to help the prosecution “fry the nigger,” as enclosed in the press packet provided here for you: http://www.abu-jamal-news.com/pr/PressPackNov07.pdf
I also write to provide you with information (inclusive of material from Abu-Jamal’s lawyer) in the interests of journalistic balance, fairness and integrity. The press packet includes 1) A recent Black Commentator article by Philadelphia lawyer/journalist David A. Love describing the significance of the Polakoff photos, 2) An Educators for Mumia Abu-Jamal press release about the Polakoff photos, written by Princeton University Professor Mark L. Taylor, 3) Criticism of the 1998 ABC 20/20 program about Abu-Jamal, 4) Background on the case, focusing on both the 1982 trial and 1995-97 PCRA hearings, with a focus on Abu-Jamal’s alleged “hospital confession,” ballistics evidence, and the testimony of Veronica Jones, 5) Recent police intimidation of Abu-Jamal’s supporters, including reported death threats against Sgt. DeLacy Davis, of Black Cops Against Police Brutality, and more.
Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Your Name
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Next Antiwar Coalition meeting Sunday, January 6, 1:00 P.M.
474 Valencia St.
The OCT. 27 COALITION met Saturday, November 18. After a long discussion and evaluation of the Oct. 27 action, the group decided to meet again, Sunday, January 6, at 1:00 P.M. at CENTRO DEL PUEBLO, 474 Valencia Street, SF (Near 16th Street) to assess further action.
Everyone felt the demonstration was very successful and, in fact, that the San Francisco demonstration was the largest in the country and, got the most press coverage. Everyone felt the "die in" was extremely effective and the convergence added to the scope of the demonstration.
Please keep a note of the date of the next coalition meeting:
Sunday, January 6, 1:00 P.M.
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MONEY AS DEBT
http://video. google.com/ videoplay? docid=-905047436 2583451279
http://www.moneyasd ebt.net/
UNCONSTITUTIONAL
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6582099850410121223&pr=goog-sl
IRAQ FOR SALE
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6621486727392146155
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Port of Olympia Anti-Militarization Action Nov. 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOkn2Fg7R8w
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Help end the war by supporting the troops who have refused to fight it.
Please sign the appeal online
"DEAR CANADA: LET U.S. WAR RESISTERS STAY!"
"I am writing from the United States to ask you to make a provision for
sanctuary for the scores of U.S. military servicemembers currently in
Canada, most of whom have traveled to your country in order to resist
fighting in the Iraq War. Please let them stay in Canada..."
To sign the appeal or for more information:
http://www.couragetoresist.org/canada
Courage to Resist volunteers will send this letter on your behalf to three
key Canadian officials--Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Minister of
Citizenship and Immigration Diane Finley, and Stéphane Dion, Liberal
Party--via international first class mail.
In collaboration with War Resisters Support Campaign (Canada), this effort
comes at a critical juncture in the international campaign for asylum for
U.S. war resisters in Canada.
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Handcuffing the Wounded: Tactic Hits a Nerve
By AL BAKER
November 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/nyregion/18cuffs.html
2) Sergeant Fled Army, but Not the War in His Head
By FERNANDA SANTOS
November 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/nyregion/18awol.html
3) Blowing the Whistle, Many Times
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
November 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/business/18whistle.html?hp
4) A Short Primer on Money
by Richard Greaves
Prosperity, April 2002
http://www.prosperityuk.com/articles_and_reviews/articles/primer.php
5) Keeping Americans in Their Homes
Editorial
November 19, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/opinion/19mon1.html?hp
6) Goldman Sachs Rakes in Profit in Credit Crisis
By JENNY ANDERSON and LANDON THOMAS Jr.
November 19, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/business/19goldman.html?hp
7) A Deeply Green City Confronts Its Energy Needs and Nuclear Worries
By KIRK JOHNSON
November 19, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/us/19collins.html?ref=us
8) Patients Without Borders
By SARA CORBETT
November 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18healthcare-t.html?ref=health
9) A Swarm of Swindlers
BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
November 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/opinion/20herbert.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
10) A Health System’s ‘Miracles’ Come With Hidden Costs
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
November 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/world/americas/20havana.html?ref=world
11) Civil Servants Join Strikes in France
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:16 p.m. ET
November 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-France-Strikes.html?ref=world
12) Decline of the Tenure Track Raises Concerns
By ALAN FINDER
November 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/education/20adjunct.html?ref=us
13) Whites Take a Majority on New Orleans’s Council
By ADAM NOSSITER
November 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/us/nationalspecial/20orleans.html?ref=us
14) Report Finds Racial Disparities in Police Searches
By Al Baker
November 20, 2007, 12:09 pm
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/report-finds-racial-disparities-in-police-searches/
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1) Handcuffing the Wounded: Tactic Hits a Nerve
By AL BAKER
November 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/nyregion/18cuffs.html
It was done after three men were shot in Queens a year ago in a hail of 50 police bullets. It occurred again on Monday, after five officers fired 20 shots at Khiel Coppin outside his Brooklyn home, killing him.
A man is down, on the ground, bleeding, and the police are handcuffing him.
Relatives, friends, neighbors and curious onlookers often see one thing: a wounded man, who is already incapacitated, being further restrained.
While the deadly force itself is always Topic A, the handcuffing that follows can become a flash point for angry outbursts, seen as one final indignity. It may sound backward: The cuffs go on after the shooting.
Others may see it as a kind of street justice, an extension of the authority that comes with a badge, though most officers would argue with such reasoning.
People in and out of law enforcement, including some critics of the Police Department, say there are many reasons for the use of handcuffs in shooting situations, even after the bullets stop flying. It is meant to keep everyone — officers, civilians and the shot person himself — from further harm, in the same way a doctor might have to restrain a patient before administering medicine.
“It is standard procedure,” said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman. “It is standard procedure to handcuff somebody, even after he’s shot.”
Indeed, the use of handcuffs is mandated by the Patrol Guide, the department’s policy manual.
“Handcuff prisoners with hands behind back,” the guide instructs in a section outlining the procedures for an arresting officer.
In another section, titled “Prisoners Requiring Medical/Psychiatric Treatment,” the guide states that an arresting officer should “rear cuff and place leg restraints on prisoner before transporting to hospital.”
Critics of the policy concede that handcuffing is acceptable to keep a shot person from doing further violence to himself or others, particularly if he may still be armed or in psychiatric distress. But several people said that police officials ought to re-examine the one-size-fits-all nature of the policy, particularly if the shot person is clearly incapacitated or dead from the bullets.
Ronald L. Kuby, a civil rights lawyer who has represented clients shot and handcuffed by the police, said the practice could leave an impression of harsh treatment, even when a shooting was justified.
“Cuffing people after they’ve been shot, or when they’re dead, or when they’re dying,” Mr. Kuby said, “is one of the ugliest, most barbaric, unnecessarily horrifying things that the police do, and they do it as a matter of course.”
He said the shooting of Mr. Coppin, who the officers believed had a gun, appeared to be legally justified.
But he questioned whether handcuffing the young man was appropriate, considering that Mr. Coppin was so gravely wounded.
“I think what you lose in public support and approval is far greater than any marginal, negligible fraction of safety that they may gain,” Mr. Kuby said. “All of that support is thrown away when they handcuff a helpless, bleeding, dying person, because when it looks brutal and unnecessary, it casts a pall on the entire incident.”
Active and retired officers generally say that assessing someone’s propensity for lethal behavior is impossible to do in a short time, particularly after a shooting, when emotions are pumping.
A dark street or bad weather can make things worse.
One law enforcement official recalled several instances in which officers had found a second gun hidden on a suspect after he had been shot and handcuffed.
Thomas D. Nerney, who retired in 2002 as a detective in the Police Department’s Major Case Squad, said officers relied on rules to survive in shooting situations.
Mr. Nerney, who was in four gunfights in his career, said that the rigor of the handcuffing rule “removes the discretion from a police officer saying, ‘Should I or shouldn’t I?’ because either way you can be damned.”
“If it is just a standard procedure,” he said, “the objective is not only to protect the lives of the officers but to prevent someone who might be psychologically damaged or emotionally disturbed from further injuring themselves, particularly with a gunshot wound that might be superficial and then made fatal by someone who is exercising ‘suicide by cop.’”
In the case of Mr. Coppin, the police are investigating whether the 18-year-old provoked the shooting as a means toward his own death. Paul Wooten, a lawyer for Mr. Coppin’s family, rejected that notion.
When the gunfire stopped, it was the image of Mr. Coppin lying on the ground as police officers hovered over him that was particularly difficult to watch, several people who witnessed it said.
They described how, on Gates Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant about 7:20 p.m., the officers handcuffed Mr. Coppin, who had been hit by 10 bullets.
“Then they put him on a stretcher and just took him out of here,” said Beverly Holloman, 50, who watched from her fourth-floor window.
In an interview on NY1 News on Friday, Mr. Coppin’s stepfather, Reginald Owens, said that when witnesses told him about the handcuffs, it only deepened his rage:
“I come on the scene and one of the officers told me, a commander or somebody, told me: ‘I feel for you. I don’t know all of what happened, but it appears that your son is dead.’
“‘O.K. Where’s he at?’
“‘They took him in the hospital.’
“Then,” Mr. Owens continued, “you hear people on the street telling you that he was shot and they still handcuffed him to the back, still had his hands behind his back and handcuffed him and threw him in the back of the car.”
A similar scene played out last November, after the police fatally shot Sean Bell and wounded two of his friends as they sat in Mr. Bell’s car outside a strip club in Jamaica, Queens, after Mr. Bell’s bachelor party.
Officers say they fired because Mr. Bell was driving his car into them; at least one detective involved in the shooting said he thought one of Mr. Bell’s companions was about to fire a gun, according to someone familiar with that detective’s account. Two detectives have been charged with manslaughter and one with reckless endangerment.
When the shots ended, a sergeant called for an ambulance and then directed a colleague to put cuffs on the outstretched hands of Joseph Guzman, one of Mr. Bell’s passengers.
The other wounded friend, Trent Benefield, who was in a rear seat, scrambled out of the car and collapsed half a block away, where he was handcuffed. The sergeant at the scene also ordered Mr. Bell handcuffed, according to the preliminary police report of the shooting.
Michael Hardy, a lawyer for Mr. Benefield and Mr. Guzman, said he believed that Mr. Bell ultimately was not handcuffed.
“I think they realized he was dead,” Mr. Hardy said.
Mr. Hardy and Sanford A. Rubenstein, another lawyer representing the wounded men, said they believed the Police Department should consider altering its policy.
Officers should be trained to exercise “discretion” in the way they restrain people, said Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. She said the use of handcuffs, even under the best of circumstances, could put physical stress on people.
“In certain circumstances, particularly where someone is injured and it stands to exacerbate the injury, it may well be tantamount to cruel and unusual punishment,” Ms. Lieberman said of the policy. “I think the Police Department has to rethink it.”
But in police encounters, there is often a wide gulf between perception and reality, said a Police Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the agency.
As jarring as it is to see a shot person being handcuffed or frisked, the official said, the measures are necessary.
And the public attention to such scenes comes only after the police have acted, he said, drawing an analogy to a sports referee who sees only the second half of some action on the field; what the suspect did to prompt the police response is often missed.
“Just because it might not look pretty,” the police official said, “doesn’t mean what the police are doing is not a good thing.”
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2) Sergeant Fled Army, but Not the War in His Head
By FERNANDA SANTOS
November 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/nyregion/18awol.html
EAST ORANGE, N.J., Nov. 15 — The psychotherapist remembers the strapping young soldier, slouched in a chair in her office one morning last month, asking if God could be punishing him because he had once thought it would be exciting to fight in a war.
By then, the soldier, Sgt. Brad Gaskins, had been absent without leave for 14 months from his post at Fort Drum in northern New York State, waging a lonely battle against an enemy inside his head — memories of death and destruction that he said had besieged him since February 2006, when he returned from a second tour of combat in Iraq.
“I asked Sergeant Gaskins whether he thought about death,” the psychotherapist, Rosemary Masters, said in an interview on Thursday. “He said that death seemed like a good alternative to the way he was existing.”
On Tuesday, Sergeant Gaskins, 25, traveled almost 300 miles from his home here to the Different Drummer Internet Cafe near Fort Drum. He planned to surrender to military authorities, and his lawyer had notified commanders at the base. But before he could turn himself in, two officials from Fort Drum, accompanied by a pair of police officers from Watertown, showed up at the cafe and placed him under arrest.
Sergeant Gaskins has been hospitalized for his psychiatric problems and could be discharged from the Army for medical reasons. He could be court-martialed, which could land him in prison and prevent him from receiving veterans’ benefits.
“I just put faith in God that everything is going to work out according to his plan,” he said during a telephone interview on Thursday from a veterans’ hospital in Syracuse, where he was taken after his arrest. (On Friday, he was transferred to Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, said Benjamin Abel, a civilian spokesman at Fort Drum.)
“I just want it all to go away, and I want to get my life back,” Sergeant Gaskins said.
He had always spoken with pride about his military service, his relatives said. He enlisted in the Army at 17, while still a senior at Orange High School, where he was starting quarterback for the Orange Tornadoes. He used to wear his olive-green dress uniform, lock arms with his paternal grandmother, Bernice Murray, and strut inside New Hope Baptist Church in Newark for Sunday services.
“He joined the military because he wanted to improve his life, to have a career,” said Mrs. Murray. “He wanted to help his family and to serve his country, and we were all supportive.”
No one knows for sure when Sergeant Gaskins’s troubles started. He is, by all accounts, tough and reserved, and he said that he was reluctant to share his emotional distress because he feared his superiors would label him as weak — or, worse, as crazy. But after he returned home on leave in August 2006 and decided he would not go back to Fort Drum, his relatives began to notice signs that something was seriously wrong.
He started biting his nails compulsively, a new habit, one of his aunts said. He slept little, and often woke up screaming and drenched in sweat. He became reclusive, locking himself in a darkened room at his grandmother’s apartment in Newark whenever her friends stopped by. His legs trembled as he watched images from Iraq on television. He yelled at his 2-year-old son for no apparent reason, his wife, Amber Gaskins, said. And once, she said, he placed a knife at her throat, as if he did not know who she was.
Even before Sergeant Gaskins came home, there were hints of distress. In a letter from Iraq in September 2005 to Sonia Murray, an aunt who helped raise him, Sergeant Gaskins asked, “Will God forgive me for the people I’ve killed?”
Sergeant Gaskins, who first went to Iraq in 2003, transferred to Fort Drum, home of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, after his second deployment, and he said he sought help at the base for his problems. He stayed for two weeks at a psychiatric ward at Samaritan Medical Center in Watertown, and was prescribed a cocktail of drugs — Zoloft and trazodone for depression, and Ambien to help him sleep. But he said he received no psychotherapy or follow-up care.
He was discharged from Samaritan and returned to the base, but he said the nightmares and flashbacks about Iraq would not go away. At Fort Drum, the tanks, marching soldiers and gunfire became too much to bear. So when he came home on a two-week leave in August 2006, he decided not to go back.
Ms. Masters, the Manhattan psychotherapist who evaluated Sergeant Gaskins on Oct. 18, said his symptoms were consistent with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and severe depression. The sergeant said he did not receive a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder at the Watertown hospital, and the Army would not discuss his medical history.
An Army report released on Tuesday found that soldiers suffer more mental distress in the transition to life at home than they show upon leaving Iraq. The report also estimated that one in five active duty soldiers and as many as 40 percent of reservists are in need of treatment.
The Army has said that it employs about 200 mental health workers in the field. There are 31 mental health workers at Fort Drum, and there are plans to add 17 more, Mr. Abel said. The base is home to 17,000 troops.
For years, researchers have debated the definition and extent of post-traumatic stress. Many of the experts believe that the frequency of the disorder reported among Vietnam veterans has been inflated.
“I don’t know what Brad had when he came home,” Mrs. Gaskins said. “All I know is that he had changed. I didn’t recognize it; nobody recognized it as post-traumatic stress disorder. He just needed help.”
Sergeant Gaskins and his wife had been classmates since the seventh grade, she said, but it was not until their senior year in high school, after she asked him to be her date at a Sadie Hawkins dance, that they started dating.
After graduation, she went to college and he joined the military. They married at Fort Stewart, Ga., on May 9, 2002.
Sergeant Gaskins went to Iraq as a member of the Third Infantry Division. At the end of his first tour, he re-enlisted and transferred to Fort Irwin, Calif., where he was deployed again to Iraq, this time with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. His son, Brandon, was just a month old when Sergeant Gaskins left.
“The first time, he was excited,” said Mrs. Gaskins, 25. “He’d say, ‘I swear, baby, I’m going to fight hard and get a medal.’ But when he came back after the second time, I asked him how it was, and he told me he didn’t want to ever talk about it, so I didn’t ask anymore.”
Last year, after Sergeant Gaskins decided not to return to duty, he sought work in construction and at a warehouse, but could not hold jobs for long, Mrs. Gaskins said. One night, she said, she woke up to find her husband holding a kitchen knife against her throat. She soothed him, and eventually he let go of the knife, but she was scared. She said that she called Fort Drum, and that a victim’s advocate at the base advised her to contact the police and get a restraining order against her husband. She acted on the advice that same day.
Sergeant Gaskins was arrested and spent almost two weeks in the Essex County jail, until his grandmother cobbled together $3,000 for his bail. He went to live with a cousin and then disappeared for several months.
“He went into hiding,” said Sonia Murray, his aunt. “No one really knows where he was or what he did.”
In September, Sergeant Gaskins called his aunt and asked her for help. “He reached a breaking point,” she said.
Sergeant Gaskins started going to church again, and he also approached Tod Ensign, director of Citizen Soldier, a veterans’ advocacy group, for advice. Mr. Ensign persuaded him to see Ms. Masters for a psychological evaluation and encouraged him to turn himself in.
“I’m not a deserter. I’ve served my country, but now I need help,” Sergeant Gaskins said on Thursday. “I don’t know what the Army is going to do to me. I’m just hoping to get treated, to get better, to be back to who I was before the war.”
Benedict Carey contributed reporting.
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3) Blowing the Whistle, Many Times
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
November 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/business/18whistle.html?hp
WHEN Cynthia Fitzgerald started out in pharmaceutical sales 20 years ago, she received ample training on the right and wrong ways to sell medical products. Right was selling on the merits. Wrong was luring customers with perks and freebies. It was O.K. to buy doctors lunch or dinner, for example, but tempting them with lavish gifts was taboo.
“There were pretty stringent rules back then,” recalls Ms. Fitzgerald, now 50 and a grandmother living in Dallas. “It was really clinically driven.”
But she says those early lessons didn’t serve her so well when she went to work on the other side of the table in 1998, in health care purchasing. Going by the book, and expecting her colleagues and employer to do the same, cost her a job, most of her friendships and several years of her life, she says.
Eventually, Ms. Fitzgerald decided to file what could become one of the largest whistle-blower lawsuits on record. And her case, which names more than a dozen companies as defendants — some with well-known names like Johnson & Johnson, Becton Dickinson and Merck — offers a window onto a little-known world, where billions of dollars’ worth of medical products are sold each year to institutional buyers like hospitals.
The suit, filed in 2003 in federal court in Dallas, and unsealed this year, argues that improper sales practices, together with erroneous accounting, are invisibly draining millions of dollars out of vital public programs like Medicare through overcharges or unauthorized uses. While whistle-blower cases typically involve, at most, a handful of companies, Ms. Fitzgerald’s alleges systemic fraud across a whole network of companies and more than 7,000 health care institutions.
Her contentions are set against a complex backdrop: spiraling health care costs and debates about Medicare. State and federal authorities in Texas are investigating Ms. Fitzgerald’s allegations, and any decision by them to join her case may give the suit momentum in the courts. But her corporate adversaries dispute her accusations.
“Cynthia Fitzgerald is rehashing old rumors and suspicions,” said Jody Hatcher, senior vice president of Novation, the company in Irving, Tex., at the heart of her lawsuit. ”These allegations have been examined in depth by a variety of different authorities, and no one has proven any of them to be true. The simple fact is that Ms. Fitzgerald’s allegations are false.”
For her part, Ms. Fitzgerald bristles at the idea that her lawsuit is without merit or, in response to common critiques of whistle-blower cases, about easy money. “I thought they were really nice people,” she says. “I was so grateful and thankful to have a steady income again. I wouldn’t have rocked the boat for any small thing to save my life.”
So why did she rock the boat?
“It was wrong,” she says of the behavior she asserts she has witnessed. “And I knew it was wrong.”
NINE years ago, while still recovering from a financially ruinous divorce, Ms. Fitzgerald decided to move to Dallas from her native Omaha. She knew almost no one in her new city. She graduated from the University of Nebraska 13 years earlier with a communications degree, then worked in sales and marketing in the food, pharmaceutical and insurance industries.
When she moved to Texas, she says, “It was pretty bleak.” She adds, “I went from having Thanksgiving dinners in a house with my family to living in an apartment that was so small that every time I turned around I ran into myself.”
More than anything, she said, she wanted stability — a steady job at a company where she could climb the ladder and work until she retired. After months of looking, she joined Novation. The company helped thousands of hospitals, rehabilitation centers, home health agencies and doctors’ offices nationwide negotiate prices for medical supplies — a wide range of items as diverse as saline solution and huge imaging machines.
Novation assigned her a portfolio of medical and surgical products for which its member hospitals were spending an estimated $240 million a year: rubber gloves, surgical tools and so forth. The company sent her to a training class where, among other things, she says she learned once again about ethical purchasing procedures.
“I cannot overemphasize in the beginning how excited I was and really feeling blessed,” she says. “I felt like I got a second chance. Even though it was on the other side of sales, it was still sales.”
But as she settled in, she says, not everything in her new workplace squared with what she had been told in training, a situation that came to a head one day in 1998, when she was still just a few months into the job. According to her complaint, she and her boss met with a Johnson & Johnson sales team that was vying for an exclusive, three-year contract to sell $130 million worth of IV equipment to Novation’s clients. It was a valuable contract, and Ms. Fitzgerald had the power to decide who would get it.
The bids were already in. Ms. Fitzgerald understood this to be a mandatory “silent period,” when she was not supposed to meet privately with any of the bidding companies. All communications with vendors were supposed to be in writing, and if Ms. Fitzgerald disclosed any information to any bidder, she was required to tell them all.
In a deposition in a separate lawsuit filed against Novation by a medical supplier, a former Novation executive, John M. Burks, did not dispute that the Johnson & Johnson meeting took place. But he said that Ms. Fitzgerald misunderstood the rules, and that Novation permitted such meetings at that point. (When reached for comment, Mr. Burks said his views haven’t changed since his deposition.)
Ms. Fitzgerald says she had a very different understanding of the meeting. Discussions behind closed doors, tipping off a company on how to structure a winning bid, naming her price — this could be a felony, she recalls thinking :bid-rigging.
“How much will it take to get the contract?” she says one of the salesmen asked her, according to her complaint. “Others before you have done it.”
She says she chose not to do so. “Oh, no!” she recalls blurting out, bringing the meeting to a halt. “This is illegal, and I don’t look good in orange.”
A spokesman for Johnson & Johnson, Marc Monseau, said, “We vigorously deny the allegations and will defend ourselves against them in court.”
Ms. Fitzgerald did not stop there. After the salesmen left, she says, she confronted her boss in the women’s room. Shouldn’t they report the incident to the legal department? Hadn’t they just been told that someone at Novation had taken a bribe?
Her boss offered no satisfaction, Ms. Fitzgerald says in her complaint. Concerned about the integrity of a bidding process she was responsible for, she began pursuing the matter herself.
OVER the following weeks, she says, she scoured her portfolio for contracting anomalies. She told colleagues about what had happened; some confided that similar things had happened to them. Others left anonymous notes on her desk. She began to think that Johnson & Johnson should be excluded from the bidding as a penalty for what she considered a serious ethical breach.
She says she took her concerns to Novation’s legal department, human resources and even the company’s president. In his deposition, Mr. Burks confirmed her activities, but called her “an employee who doesn’t simply understand that when a supplier asks an inappropriate question, you simply say no and move on.”
Ms. Fitzgerald says she passed over Johnson & Johnson for the IV contract, awarding it instead to Becton Dickinson. She said Becton had a superior bid, which provided a number of opportunities for Novation and member hospitals to be rewarded with rebates and other payments.
Becton said it believes that Ms. Fitzgerald’s accusations of improprieties in how contracts were awarded are baseless and that her complaint is “without merit.”
She turned to the next contract, for trash bags — and the same thing started to happen, according to her complaint. When Ms. Fitzgerald told representatives of one vendor, Heritage Bag, that she was planning to put that contract up for bid, she says, one representative told her at dinner with several people that he would “take care of” her. Heritage Bag did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.
Ms. Fitzgerald asked her supervisor if she could be taken off the trash-bag contract. Her supervisor agreed, but then gave her a negative performance review. It said that among other things, she was rude, unable to meet deadlines and kept trying to “overhaul” parts of Novation that were outside her job description, according to a copy of the review. Ms. Fitzgerald refused to sign it. Relations deteriorated, and 15 days later, she was fired for “nonperformance of duties that were clearly identified as part of her job description,” according to Mr. Burks’s deposition.
Ms. Fitzgerald says she believes she was shown the door because she had stumbled onto illegal behavior involving hundreds of millions of dollars and had refused to look the other way.
“It’s hilarious how stupid I was,” she says. “I knew that it was wrong, but I thought that if I just went to the right people, they would correct it. I was very naïve. I didn’t realize that it was systemic.”
The False Claims Act is a federal law that allows private individuals to sue on behalf of the United States if they believe that they have inside knowledge of a fraud. Their lawsuits stay under court seal at first, to give federal and state investigators time to look into the accusations quietly and to decide whether to join the case. If the government recovers money, the whistle-blower gets 15 to 30 percent of the amount.
Though enacted to fight war profiteering, the False Claims Act has become a potent weapon in the battle against escalating health care costs. Of the 20 largest False Claims Act recoveries listed on the Web site of Taxpayers Against Fraud, a group that supports whistle-blowers and their lawyers, 19 involved health care companies. (The other involved municipal bonds.)
The size of recoveries has soared in recent years. All told, the government has recovered more than $20 billion since 1986, when the False Claims Act was last amended, with $5 billion of it in the last two years.
The biggest single whistle-blower settlement to date was the $900 million that Tenet Healthcare, a hospital company, paid last year to settle accusations of overbilling the Medicare program. That settlement is dwarfed by the $1.7 billion that HCA, another big hospital chain, paid between 2000 and 2003 to settle a number of fraud suits.
Companies and their lawyers say the growing caseload is a sign that the False Claims Act, with its promise of a payout for whistle-blowers, is motivating disgruntled employees to file nuisance suits that can tie up law-abiding companies for years.
Proponents of the law say that $20 billion of recoveries is proof that contracting fraud is real, and that offering whistle-blowers a percentage is a good way to compensate them for the near-certainty that they will be fired.
“Protection for people who are willing to risk their lives and livelihoods, their careers and reputations, is critical,” said Richard Blumenthal, the attorney general of Connecticut, in Senate hearings last year.
As Ms. Fitzgerald sees it, Medicare’s losses grow out of the way that Novation and the vendor companies negotiate contracts.
When companies submitted bids to Novation, she recalled, they did not typically quote a simple price. Rather, they proposed package deals with opportunities for rebates, frequent-buyer discounts, “loyalty” rewards and baskets of products tied together. They might throw in free training for hospital staff, chances to participate in clinical trials, shares of stock, project sponsorships, sometimes even cash. The vendors also paid Novation for administering their contracts and for other services.
Ms. Fitzgerald says her compensation rewarded her for closing deals that maximized these payments — not for simply finding the lowest bid. Vendors preferred to combine higher upfront prices with rebates or other cash-back rewards, she says, because that obscured the net unit price of their products, making it harder for hospitals to comparison-shop.
But this also allowed millions of dollars to become “lost” in the system, she says. Novation passed on many of the payments to hospitals, she says, but not in a way that hospitals could accurately report them to the government. Thus they ended up overstating their supply costs, she says, and getting larger Medicare reimbursements than they were entitled to. The lawsuit does not contend that the hospitals did this deliberately, but that Novation knew it was happening.
A 2005 audit by Daniel R. Levinson, the inspector general of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, appears to bear her out. After studying the finances of three unnamed purchasing consortiums in response to repeated questions from Congress, federal agencies and the news media about their business practices, Mr. Levinson reported that their member hospitals “did not fully account” for such flows of money. In just five years, the discrepancies ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Novation said that there was no evidence that any underreporting was intentional. It cited the complexity of how hospitals are required to report costs and said it believed that hospitals met all legal requirements in how they reported Novation’s distributions to them.
In the past, a prosecutor’s decision whether or not to join a whistle-blower lawsuit could be a make-or-break moment. If the government became involved, defendants often settled right away. The announcement usually coincided with the unsealing of the whistle-blower’s complaint.
But now that the lawsuits have become so complex, and investigations so slow, judges have become impatient with sealed lawsuits moldering in their courts. Some are ordering the complaints unsealed before investigators finish examining the claims.
That is what happened in Ms. Fitzgerald’s case. Last May, a federal judge in Dallas unsealed her suit, which had languished for four years. The assistant United States attorney for the Northern District of Texas , Sean R. McKenna, and the Texas attorney general, Greg Abbott, notified the court that they were still investigating and would decide later whether to join the case.
THAT leaves Ms. Fitzgerald on her own for now. After Novation fired her, she was contractually forbidden from disclosing information about the company or filing lawsuits against it for three years, she says. Once that period lapsed, she gradually became aware she was eligible to file a suit under the False Claims Act. That led her to Phillips & Cohen, a law firm involved in whistle-blower cases.
Her firing, meanwhile, left her unable to get another job in her field; word of her demise at Novation seemed to precede her wherever she went. Former colleagues stopped speaking to her. “I was probably at one of the lowest points in my life,” she says.
She eventually founded her own business, Dimension Medical Supply. But she regrets the contentious departure from Novation, a company that made her feel as if she “was coming home” when it hired her. Deciding to speak out about the company’s dealings was difficult, she says.
“I warred with myself,” she says. “There weren’t any blacks in upper management. I knew that there were opportunities there, and I could rise to those opportunities.”
She was tempted, she says, to follow the status quo at Novation. And a little voice in her head kept saying, “Why can’t you just take the money and run? Buck up, girl, this is the system. You can take it and go places.”
In the end, the place she decided to go was court.
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4) A Short Primer on Money
by Richard Greaves
Prosperity, April 2002
http://www.prosperityuk.com/articles_and_reviews/articles/primer.php
Money is simply the medium we use to exchange goods and services. Without it, buying and selling would be impossible except by direct exchange.
Notes and coins are virtually worthless in their own right. They take on value as money because we all accept them when we buy and sell.
To keep trade and economic activity going, there has to be enough of this medium of exchange called money in existence to allow it all to take place.
When there is plenty, the economy booms. When there is a shortage, there is a slump.
In the Great Depression, people wanted to work, they wanted goods and services, all the raw materials for industry were available, yet national economies collapsed because there was far too little money in existence.
The only difference between boom and bust, growth and recession, is money supply.
Someone has to be responsible for making sure that there is enough money in existence to cover all the buying and selling that people want to engage in.
Each nation has a Central Bank to do this -- in Britain, it is the Bank of England, in the United States, the Federal Reserve.
Central Banks act as banker for commercial banks and the government -- just as individuals and businesses in Britain keep accounts at commercial banks, so commercial banks and government keep accounts at the Bank of England.
In Britain today, notes and coins now account for only 3% of our total money supply, down from 50% in 1948. The remaining 97% is supplied as a debt by the Bank of England, commercial banks, and financial institutions -- on which interest is payable.
This pattern is repeated across the globe.
Banks are businesses out to make profits from the interest on the loans they make. Since they alone decide to whom they will lend, they effectively decide what is produced, where it is produced and who produces it, all on the basis of profitability to the bank, rather than what is beneficial to the community.
With bank-created credit now at 97% of money supply, entire economies are run for the profit of financial institutions. This is the real power, rarely recognised or acknowledged, to which all of us including governments the world over are subject.
Our money, instead of being supplied debt-free as a means of exchange, now comes as a debt owed to bankers providing them with vast profits, power and control, as the rest of us struggle with an increasing burden of debt.
By supplying credit to those of whom they approve and denying it to those of whom they disapprove, international bankers can create boom or bust, and support or undermine governments.
How much could prices fall and wages increase if businesses did not have to pay huge sums in interest payments which have to be added to the cost of goods and services they supply?
How much could taxes be reduced and spending on public services such as health and education be increased if governments created money themselves instead of borrowing it at interest from private banks?
On this, at least, the IMF had it right.
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5) Keeping Americans in Their Homes
Editorial
November 19, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/opinion/19mon1.html?hp
The nation’s housing market is in a deep recession, and further declines in new construction, sales and prices are imminent. By the end of next year, falling home values, combined with rising payments on adjustable mortgages, tighter lending conditions and, in all probability, a faltering job market, will have unleashed mass foreclosures — estimated at several hundred thousand to two million — unless something is done to help keep Americans in their homes.
The Bush administration has no relief plan that is up to the frightening scale of this problem. And no one in the administration seems to feel much urgency. Administration officials often lowball the number of imminent foreclosures and question the significance of statistics on the housing downturn.
In a speech last week extolling the economy’s strength, President Bush made just one reference to the battered housing market, calling it “challenged,” and asserted that we can “deal with it” and other economic uncertainties, “particularly if we keep the taxes low.”
Fortunately, some members of Congress do have a plan to help.
Senator Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, recently introduced a bill that would allow bankruptcy courts to modify repayment terms on mortgages for primary homes. That could keep an estimated 600,000 troubled borrowers in their homes, paying off their mortgages, albeit over longer terms, at lower interest rates or on lower principal balances.
The bill also undoes a longstanding injustice. Under current law, mortgages on primary homes are the only type of secured debt that is ineligible for bankruptcy protection. Owners of vacation homes, farms and commercial property can modify those debts in bankruptcy court. But not your everyday homeowner. Under any circumstances, that double standard should not be allowed. With a foreclosure debacle unfolding, it must be rectified.
There are worrying signs that the White House will oppose the reform. Opponents will likely argue that modifying troubled mortgages in bankruptcy may pose a threat to the legal sanctity of other contracts. That makes no sense. Contracts are modified every day in bankruptcy court. A mortgage on a primary home is not significantly different from other secured debt.
The mortgage industry is already warning that granting bankruptcy protection to most mortgages would raise borrowers’ costs. That doesn’t make much sense either. The total economic costs of foreclosure are much greater than bankruptcy-associated costs. The cost of making sound loans could drop if the Durbin bill became law.
Senator Durbin’s reform bill must move through the Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over bankruptcy issues. The committee’s chairman, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, should schedule a full committee hearing as soon as Congress returns from the Thanksgiving break. There is no time to lose.
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6) Goldman Sachs Rakes in Profit in Credit Crisis
By JENNY ANDERSON and LANDON THOMAS Jr.
November 19, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/business/19goldman.html?hp
For more than three months, as turmoil in the credit market has swept wildly through Wall Street, one mighty investment bank after another has been brought to its knees, leveled by multibillion-dollar blows to their bottom lines.
And then there is Goldman Sachs.
Rarely on Wall Street, where money travels in herds, has one firm gotten it so right when nearly everyone else was getting it so wrong. So far, three banking chief executives have been forced to resign after the debacle, and the pay for nearly all the survivors is expected to be cut deeply.
But for Goldman’s chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, this is turning out to be a very good year. He will surely earn more than the $54.3 million he made last year. If he gets a 20 percent raise — in line with the growth of Goldman’s compensation pool — he will take home at least $65 million. Some expect his pay, which is directly tied to the firm’s performance, to climb as high as $75 million.
Goldman’s good fortune cannot be explained by luck alone. Late last year, as the markets roared along, David A. Viniar, Goldman’s chief financial officer, called a “mortgage risk” meeting in his meticulous 30th-floor office in Lower Manhattan.
At that point, the holdings of Goldman’s mortgage desk were down somewhat, but the notoriously nervous Mr. Viniar was worried about bigger problems. After reviewing the full portfolio with other executives, his message was clear: the bank should reduce its stockpile of mortgages and mortgage-related securities and buy expensive insurance as protection against further losses, a person briefed on the meeting said.
With its mix of swagger and contrary thinking, it was just the kind of bet that has long defined Goldman’s hard-nosed, go-it-alone style.
Most of the firm’s competitors, meanwhile, with the exception of the more specialized Lehman Brothers, appeared to barrel headlong into the mortgage markets. They kept packaging and trading complex securities for high fees without protecting themselves against the positions they were buying.
Even Goldman, which saw the problems coming, continued to package risky mortgages to sell to investors. Some of those investors took losses on those securities, while Goldman’s hedges were profitable.
When the credit markets seized up in late July, Goldman was in the enviable position of having offloaded the toxic products that Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, UBS, Bear Stearns and Morgan Stanley, among others, had kept buying.
“If you look at their profitability through a period of intense credit and mortgage market turmoil,” said Guy Moszkowski, an analyst at Merrill Lynch who covers the investment banks, “you’d have to give them an A-plus.”
This contrast in performance has been hard for competitors to swallow. The bank that seems to have a hand in so many deals and products and regions made more money in the boom and, at least so far, has managed to keep making money through the bust.
In turn, Goldman’s stock has significantly outperformed its peers. At the end of last week it was up about 13 percent for the year, compared with a drop of almost 14 percent for the XBD, the broker-dealer index that includes the leading Wall Street banks. Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns and Citigroup are down almost 40 percent this year.
Goldman’s secret sauce, say executives, analysts and historians, is high-octane business acumen, tempered with paranoia and institutionally encouraged — though not always observed — humility.
“There is no mystery, or secret handshake,” said Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman and now a Goldman director. “We did a lot of work to build a culture here in the 1980s, and now people are playing on the balls of their feet. We just have a damn good talent pool.”
That pool has allowed Goldman to extend its reach across Wall Street and beyond.
Last week, John A. Thain, a former Goldman co-president, accepted the top position at Merrill Lynch, while a fellow Goldman alumnus, Duncan L. Niederauer, took Mr. Thain’s job running the New York Stock Exchange. Another fellow veteran trader, Daniel Och, took his $30 billion hedge fund public.
Meanwhile, two Goldman managing directors helped bring Alex Rodriguez back to the Yankees, a deal that could enhance the value of Goldman’s 40 percent stake in the YES cable network — which it is trying to sell — while also pleasing Yankee fans. The symmetry was perfect: like the Yankees, Goldman, more than any other bank on Wall Street, is both hated and revered.
Robert E. Rubin, a former Goldman head, is the new chairman of Citigroup. In Washington, another former chief, Henry M. Paulson Jr., is the Treasury secretary, having been recruited by Joshua B. Bolten, the White House chief of staff and yet another former Goldman executive.
The heads of the Canadian and Italian central banks are Goldman alumni. The World Bank president, Robert B. Zoellick, is another. Jon S. Corzine, once a co-chairman, is the governor of New Jersey. And in academia, Robert S. Kaplan, a former vice chairman, has just been picked as the interim head of Harvard University’s $35 billion endowment.
Since going public in 1999, Goldman has been the No. 1 mergers and acquisitions adviser, globally and in the United States, with two exceptions: in 2005 it came in second in the United States rankings, and in 2000 it lost the top spot globally. In both instances, Morgan Stanley took the lead, according to Dealogic.
Goldman, of course, has made its share of mistakes. It took among the most serious write-downs in the third quarter on loans that were made to private equity firms, totaling $1.5 billion. The firm runs one of the largest hedge fund operations in the world, but its flagship funds — funds whose investors include marquee Goldman clients and employees — have had two years of abysmal performance. Clients are expected to redeem billions of dollars of capital at the end 2007.
But Goldman’s absence from the mortgage debacle and the strong performance of its other businesses made up for the write-down associated with the loans. The firm reported $2.85 billion in profit in the third quarter, up 79 percent. Mr. Moszkowski estimates that investment and commercial banks in the United States have taken $50 billion in write-downs related to mortgages, with more coming; Mr. Blankfein said at a conference last week that he expected to take none.
Goldman’s business is built on taking risks, both for itself and its clients. In recent years, Goldman has established the largest private equity and real estate fund complexes in the world. That has led to natural tensions with private equity clients who sometimes complain, but never publicly, about Goldman’s common insistence to team up with them for a piece of the deal.
“Goldman has done the best job of any firm in the U.S. or world competing with their clients but doing business with them,” said one client who asked not to be named because he does business with the firm. “They’ve managed to get their clients to live with it.”
Still, this bottom-line approach has turned off some Goldman veterans and clients. They see the firm’s desire to advise, finance and invest — a so-called triple play — as antithetical to Goldman’s stated No. 1 business principle of putting clients first.
And there is little question that its success in trading, investment banking and servicing hedge funds — many of the traders come right from Goldman — allows the firm a bird’s-eye view on trends and capital flows in the market.
Numerous Goldman investment bankers, former and current, voice the view that Mr. Blankfein’s approach — using Goldman’s investment banking business to develop principal investment opportunities for the firm — creates a brand intended to feed Goldman’s profits rather than relationships. But this harking back to the firm’s golden days as a pure advisory firm does not find much sympathy at Goldman these days.
“I have little patience for these people who talk of the last days of Camelot,” Mr. Friedman said. “Principal investing has been an important and useful business. If you want to be relevant you have to anticipate where the world is going.”
Mr. Blankfein, at the conference last week, echoed that sentiment. “While the integration of our investment banking operations with our merchant bank was somewhat controversial at the time, we felt these businesses were mutually reinforcing,” he said.
Money soothes a lot of concerns, of course, and Goldman has had plenty to spread around. Through the third quarter, Goldman’s $16.9 billion compensation pool — the money it sets aside to pay its employees — was significantly bigger than the entire $11.4 billion market capitalization of Bear Stearns.
Goldman executives and analysts assign much of their success to smart people and a relatively flat hierarchy that encourages executives to challenge one another. As a result, good ideas can get to the top.
But the differentiator that has become clearest recently is the firm’s ability to manage its risks, a tricky task for any bank. Checks and balances must be in place to turn off a business spigot even as it is still making a lot of money for a lot of people. In a world where power gravitates to the rainmakers, that means only management can empower the party crashers.
At Goldman, the controller’s office — the group responsible for valuing the firm’s huge positions — has 1,100 people, including 20 Ph.D.’s. If there is a dispute, the controller is always deemed right unless the trading desk can make a convincing case for an alternate valuation. The bank says risk managers swap jobs with traders and bankers over a career and can be paid the same multimillion-dollar salaries as investment bankers.
“The risk controllers are taken very seriously,” Mr. Moszkowski said. “They have a level of authority and power that is, on balance, equivalent to the people running the cash registers. It’s not as clear that that happens everywhere.”
For all its success on Wall Street, it is Goldman’s global reach and political heft that inspire a mix of envy and admiration. In the race for president, Goldman Sachs executives are the top contributors to Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, and the second highest contributor to Hillary Rodham Clinton. Mr. Blankfein has held a fund-raiser for Mrs. Clinton in his apartment and has come out publicly in her favor.
Another member of Goldman’s influential diaspora is Philip D. Murphy, a retired executive who is the chief fund-raiser for the Democratic National Committee.
All of which has made Goldman a favorite of conspiracy theorists, columnists and bloggers who see the firm as a Wall Street version of the Trilateral Commission.
One particular obsession is President Bush’s working group on the markets, an informal committee led by Mr. Paulson that includes Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve; Christopher Cox, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission; and Walter Lukken, the acting chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
The group meets about once a quarter — privately, with no minutes taken — to ensure that government agencies are briefed on market conditions and issues. The group is currently examining the extent to which the packaging and distribution of mortgage loans contributed to the crisis. It also recently completed a study recommending that hedge funds not be subject to further regulation; the group’s fund committee was led by Eric Mindich, a former Goldman trader who now runs a successful hedge fund.
There is no evidence that the conduct of the group is anything but above board. But to some, the group’s existence adds more color to the view that Goldman is indeed everywhere — much as J. P. Morgan was in the early years of the 20th century.
“Goldman Sachs has as much influence now that the old J. P. Morgan had between 1895 and 1930,” said Charles R. Geisst, a Wall Street historian at Manhattan College. “But, like Morgan, they could be victimized by their own success.”
Mr. Blankfein of Goldman seems aware of all this. When asked at a conference how he hoped to take advantage of his competitors’ weakened position, he said Goldman was focused on making fewer mistakes. But he wryly observed that the firm would surely take it on the chin at some point, too.
“Everybody,” he said, “gets their turn.”
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7) A Deeply Green City Confronts Its Energy Needs and Nuclear Worries
By KIRK JOHNSON
November 19, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/us/19collins.html?ref=us
FORT COLLINS, Colo. — This city takes pride in being green, from its official motto, “Where renewal is a way of life,” to its Climate Wise energy program, which helps local businesses reduce the carbon emissions that scientists say can contribute to global warming.
But now two proposed energy projects are exposing the hard place that communities like this across the country are likely to confront in years to come as the tangled nuances of thinking globally come back to bite.
Both projects would do exactly what the city proclaims it wants, helping to produce zero-carbon energy. But one involves crowd-pleasing, feel-good solar power, and the other is a uranium mine, which has a base of support here about as big as a pinkie. Environmentalism and local politics have collided with a broader ethical and moral debate about the good of the planet, and whether some places could or should be called upon to sacrifice for their high-minded goals.
The solar project, called AVA Solar, plans to use a new manufacturing process developed at Colorado State University here to make panels for electricity generation, and will use cadmium — a hazardous metal linked to cancer — as part of the industrial process.
The company that would run the proposed uranium mine, Powertech Uranium, would like to drill down through part of an aquifer about 10 miles northeast of town using what the company says would be state-of-the-art drilling technology to extract fuel for nuclear-generated electricity.
Some politicians who agree on almost nothing else have united in expressing concerns about the mine — especially its possible effect on water quality — including Representative Marilyn Musgrave, a Republican who represents the area, and Senator Ken Salazar, a Democrat.
Local environmentalists like Dan Bihn, an electrical engineer and environmental consultant who sits on the Fort Collins Electric Utilities Board, are caught in the middle.
“I think nuclear needs to be on the table, and we need to work through this thing and we can’t just emotionally react to it,” Mr. Bihn said in an interview at Mugs Coffee Lounge, an environmentally correct cafe near the university, where the take-out forks are biodegradable. Asked about his own emotional reaction to the mining plan, Mr. Bihn paused. “Deep down inside, my emotional reaction is that we should never do this,” he said.
The central thorn in Fort Collins’s dilemma, some land-use and energy experts say, is that local and global simply do not mean what they once did.
“Politically it’s going to become more complicated,” said Bill Klein, the director of research at the American Planning Association, a nonprofit group that works with local governments. “There’s always been this weighing of our individual desires against the greater good, but now we’re becoming much more attuned to a global responsibility,” Mr. Klein said. “We’ve got to question some of the knee-jerk responses that we’ve had in the past.”
What green energy even means these days is probably the next question to ask.
Gov. Bill Ritter Jr., a Democrat who was elected last year and who has made what he calls “the new energy economy” a centerpiece of his administration, does not include uranium mining in the green portfolio, said Tom Plant, the director of the governor’s energy office. Mine regulators still handle questions about uranium, Mr. Plant said.
Ron Cattany, the director of the division of reclamation, mining and safety at the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, said that Powertech had not yet filed a formal application, but that the hurdles to opening any kind of new mine in Colorado, regardless of the location, were high.
There is no doubt that new money is chasing new energy. Company officials at Powertech, which is based in Denver, said they had spent more than $2 million so far buying land, or the option to buy, in the area where their proposed drilling would take place. They bought the minerals beneath the surface last year for an undisclosed price, and under what is called “split estate,” that gives them title to the uranium, no matter who owns the land on top of it.
Test drilling in the 1970s confirmed the existence of about 9.7 million pounds of uranium in deposits under 5,700 acres, according to the company’s Web site. At the current market price, which has risen about 30 percent in the last year, the ore would be worth about $860 million.
Mr. Cattany said that 10 other uranium projects — all involving the possible reopening of mothballed mines that use traditional open cut or underground methods, and all on the state’s less-populated western side — had come into a formal review or staff consideration over the last year as uranium prices shot up.
Powertech has proposed using what is called in-situ mining — chemicals are injected into the ground, releasing the uranium, which is then pumped to the surface. The process was developed in the 1950s and 1960s, but has never been used in Colorado for commercial mining, state officials said.
At least $250 million, meanwhile, has flowed into solar, wind and ethanol projects in Colorado over the last few years as well, according to state figures, and officials at the new solar company said they were seeing their share of the tide.
“We’re not hurting,” said Russ Kanjorski, the director of strategic planning for AVA Solar. Mr. Kanjorski declined to say how much the start-up costs might be for a factory, but said the company intended to build up to a production level of 4.5 million solar panels a year beginning in 2009, employing up to 500 people, mostly engineers. “Funding is not an issue for us,” he said.
Mr. Kanjorski said that the environmental protections in using cadmium would be tight and that he expected the state would take a very close look at the water discharge and monitoring practices in particular, which he said were still being developed.
Jeff Lebesch, another member of the city’s utility board, said he worried that the popularity of some energy projects could make for bad public policy.
“I think there is a risk that the popular ones have some things overlooked,” said Mr. Lebesch, who is also a co-founder and president of New Belgium Brewing, a 16-year-old company that has been a leader in pushing energy conservation and renewable sources like wind power. As for nuclear power, Mr. Lebesch said he was not opposed, if the energy was really needed.
“The big issue of power plants is carbon emissions,” he said, “and nuclear plants don’t have them.” The fuel is the bigger issue for him. Extracting uranium, processing it and disposing of it, he said, all have long-term, unresolved questions.
A spokesman for Powertech, Lane Douglas, said the company’s proposal should be judged on facts, not beliefs or prejudices or what he conceded was a spotty environmental record for uranium mining.
“The science will either be good science or it won’t,” said Mr. Douglas, the company’s Colorado land and project manager. “We’re just saying give us a fair hearing.”
Ariana Friedlander, an advertising sales representative, who was having lunch at Mugs on a recent afternoon, said she was trying to be consistent. Ms. Friedlander said she opposed the mine but thought the solar factory should be closely regulated, too.
“I don’t know of anyone who’s really for it,” she said of the mine. “But we shouldn’t be giving the other guys a pass because they’re sexy right now.”
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8) Patients Without Borders
By SARA CORBETT
November 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18healthcare-t.html?ref=health
Long before the dentists and the doctors got there, before the nurses, the hygienists and X-ray techs came, before anyone had flicked on the portable mammography unit or sterilized the day’s first set of surgical instruments, the people who needed them showed up to wait. It was 3 a.m. at the Wise County Fairgrounds in Virginia — Friday, July 20, 2007 — the start of a rainy Appalachian morning. Outside the gates, people lay in their trucks or in tents pitched along the grassy parking lot, waiting for their chance to have their medical needs treated at no charge — part of an annual three-day “expedition” led by a volunteer medical relief corps called Remote Area Medical.
The group, most often referred to as RAM, has sent health expeditions to countries like Guyana, India, Tanzania and Haiti, but increasingly its work is in the United States, where 47 million people — more than 15 percent of the population — live without health insurance. Residents of remote rural areas are less likely than their urban and suburban counterparts to have health insurance and more likely to be in fair or poor health. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, nearly half of all adults in rural America are living with at least one chronic condition. Other research has found that in these areas, where hospitals and primary-care providers are in short supply, rates of arthritis, hypertension, heart ailments, diabetes and major depression are higher than in urban areas.
And so each summer, shortly after the Virginia-Kentucky District Fair and Horse Show wraps up at the fairgrounds, members of Virginia Lions Clubs start bleaching the premises, readying them for RAM’s volunteers, who, working in animal stalls and beneath makeshift tents, provide everything from teeth cleaning and free eyeglasses to radiology and minor surgery. The problem, says RAM’s founder, Stan Brock, is always in the numbers, with the patients’ needs far outstripping what his team can supply. In Wise County, when the sun rose and the fairground gates opened at 5:30 on Friday morning, more than 800 people already were waiting in line. Over the next three days, some 2,500 patients would receive care, but at least several hundred, Brock estimates, would be turned away. He adds: “There comes a point where the doctors say: ‘Hey, I gotta go. It’s Sunday evening, and I have to go to work tomorrow.’ ”
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9) A Swarm of Swindlers
BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
November 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/opinion/20herbert.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Chicago
Like vultures, the mortgage lenders began circling the single-family house with the tiny front lawn on Merrill Avenue.
They knew that the woman who owned the house was old and sick and that her two aging daughters were struggling with illness and poverty as well. That was all to the good as far as the lenders were concerned. The predator’s mission is to home in on the vulnerable.
“The people that wanted to put through the loan called me about a hundred times,” said Rosa Dailey, who is 65 and going blind and needs an oxygen tank at times to help her breathe. “I kept telling them no, because I didn’t think we could afford it. But they kept saying how it was to our advantage. So I finally said: ‘All right, let’s see what we can do.’ ”
That was the beginning of a tragic spiral, with one unaffordable loan following another. As Ms. Dailey put it: “I feel like they led me down a dark alley.”
Ms. Dailey told me her story in the freezing living room of the house on Merrill Avenue, which no longer has a working furnace and is growing shabbier by the day. It’s all she has left. Her mother and her older sister are dead now. Her only income is about $1,300 a month from Social Security — less than the monthly note on the house, which is in foreclosure proceedings.
One aspect of the so-called mortgage crisis that hasn’t been adequately explored is the extent to which predatory lenders have committed fraud against vulnerable homeowners. They have pushed overpriced loans and outlandish fees on hapless victims who didn’t understand — and could not possibly have met — the terms of the contracts they signed.
In some cases, corporate con artists have deliberately targeted and seized the equity of financially strapped and unsophisticated owners. In some cases, homes have been stolen outright.
This is an issue crying out for a thorough federal investigation.
Ms. Dailey and her sister, Betty Jones, agreed to refinance the mortgage on their ailing mother’s home in 2000. Neither understood how deeply into debt they were slipping. They struggled to make the payments and hang on to the house after their mother died, although neither was working and their only income was from Social Security. Then Ms. Jones was hospitalized with a heart condition.
As illogical as it may sound, the two women were pressed to refinance yet again in 2005. There was no way they could legitimately qualify for such a loan, and the lenders had to know it. But they persisted.
On Aug. 8, 2005, a representative of the Argent Mortgage Company took Ms. Dailey from the Merrill Avenue house to her sister’s bedside at Kindred Hospital. There the women signed papers for a loan that they were told would bring their monthly payments down to a manageable level.
Betty Jones was dying. Ms. Dailey’s eyesight was too poor to read the papers shoved in front of her. Both women were frightened and confused.
“I was told that was the only way I could save the house,” Ms. Dailey said.
Thousands of dollars in additional fees were heaped upon them. And the required monthly payment was more than they could possibly have afforded.
Betty Jones died the following December. Rosa Dailey was left with the sick realization that she had been had, that in her confusion and desperation she had agreed to terms that were impossible.
“I’m terrified,” Ms. Dailey told me as she wrapped a sweater tightly around her to ward off the cold. “I can’t sleep anymore. They’re trying to take the house away from me, and I wanted to stay here until I died. That was what I was really trying to do.”
A lawyer, William Spielberger, has taken up Ms. Dailey’s case. He said she and her sister were clear victims of fraud, that the companies pushing loans on them had deliberately inflated their meager incomes on the loan applications, had inflated the value of their property, had imposed unconscionable terms and fees and were fully aware that the two women did not know what they were getting into.
He has filed a federal lawsuit on Ms. Dailey’s behalf against a number of companies, including Citi Residential Lending, a subsidiary of Citigroup that acquired Argent Mortgage this past summer.
A spokeswoman for Citi Residential said she could not comment on the case because of the pending litigation.
I asked Rosa Dailey yesterday how she’d be spending her Thanksgiving. She said her money for the month had run out, so she wouldn’t be doing anything special.
“I’ll be right here,” she said. “I’ve got some corn flakes and canned vegetables. That’ll be my Thanksgiving.”
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10) A Health System’s ‘Miracles’ Come With Hidden Costs
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
November 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/world/americas/20havana.html?ref=world
HAVANA, Nov. 16 — A shiny new tour bus pulled up to the top eye hospital in Cuba on a sunny day this month and disgorged 47 working-class people from El Salvador, many of whom could barely see because they had thick cataracts in their eyes.
Among them were Francisca Antonia Guevara, 74, a homemaker from Ciudad Delgado whose world was a blur. She said she had visited an eye doctor in her home country but could not pay the $200 needed for artificial lens implants, much less pay for the surgery.
“As someone of few resources, I couldn’t afford it,” she said. “With the bad economic situation we have there, how are we going to afford this?”
Cuba’s economy is not exactly booming either, yet within two hours Ms. Guevara’s cataracts were excised and the lenses implanted, with the Cuban government paying for everything — including air transportation, housing, food and even the follow-up care.
The government has dubbed the program Operation Miracle, and for the hundreds of thousands of people from Venezuela, Central America and the Caribbean who have benefited from it since it was started in July 2004, it is aptly named.
Yet the program is no simple humanitarian effort, and it has not come without a cost. The campaign against vision loss serves as a poignant advertisement for the benefits of Cuban socialism, as well as an ingenious way to export one of the few things the Cuban state-run economy produces in abundance — doctors.
Cuban doctors abroad receive much better pay than in Cuba, along with other benefits from the state, like the right to buy a car and get a relatively luxurious house when they return. As a result, many of the finest physicians have taken posts abroad.
The doctors and nurses left in Cuba are stretched thin and overworked, resulting in a decline in the quality of care for Cubans, some doctors and patients said.
The Cuban authorities say they have treated more than 750,000 people for eye conditions like cataracts and glaucoma since the program started.
At the same time, Cuban doctors have set up 37 small eye hospitals in Latin America, the Caribbean and Mali. Twenty-five of the centers are in Venezuela and Bolivia, whose leaders have close ties to the Castros. The hospitals are staffed with more than 70 top-notch eye surgeons from Cuba and hundreds of other nurses and ophthalmologists.
Dr. Sergio M. Vidal Casali, 84, has worked at the Ramón Pando Ferrer Cuban Institute of Ophthalmology for more than 50 years, specializing in diseases of the retina. He said the heavy flow of foreign patients through the hospital, combined with the exodus of several physicians to other countries, had hurt his department. “I don’t like it, really,” he said. “It’s wonderful for the people, but not for us. It disturbs our work.”
Dr. Reynaldo Rios Casas, the director of the institute, said the first days of the program were hectic. Eye surgeons worked in three shifts, keeping the hospital’s operating rooms going all day and all night. It was not uncommon for a single surgeon to perform 40 operations in a shift.
“It was really heroic,” he said. “We were operating day, afternoon and night.”
Since then, Dr. Rios says his hospital has been training new eye doctors at an astounding rate of 2,100 this year, half of them surgeons. The hospital’s budget has been increased tenfold and its equipment upgraded. It now has 34 operating theaters with state-of-the-art equipment, including two outfitted for advanced laser surgery techniques.
One advantage of the program is that it has given young surgeons a steady flow of patients on whom to hone their skills. Just this year, they have performed 394 cornea transplants at the hospital, he noted. “Our specialists have an incredible amount of experience,” he said. “What specialist in the world can do dozens of cornea transplants a year?”
In recent years, the program has allowed Cuba to use its doctors as barter for subsidized Venezuelan oil and to forge closer relations with other countries in the region, including those, like El Salvador, that have not been historically close to the Communist regime here.
Of course, the people who have their sight restored could not care less about the political and economic repercussions of the program. For them, the offer of free surgery was a dream come true.
Mrs. Guevara, whose husband is a retired construction worker from San Salvador, said she had given up hope of seeing again. She heard about the Cuban project on a Mayan radio station. “I never imagined anyone would help me the way they have helped me,” she said as she waited for surgery. “I thought I was going to end up blind.”
Near her in the waiting room was Reina López, 58, of San Vicente, El Salvador, who has not been able to see for 13 years because of cataracts. Her daughter, Adilia Reyes, 33, said she had cared for her mother since she lost her sight. The family, including four children, survives on her father’s salary of $3 a day, plus whatever fruit can be sold at a market on Saturdays.
“For the poor, this is a tremendous benefit,” she said, as she guided her mother to a presurgery test. “If it works, we’ll be so grateful.”
Downstairs in the cafeteria, Manuel Agustín Isasi, 33, a professional fencing coach from Islas Margaritas in Venezuela, was eating a lunch of pork, rice and beans, able for the first time in years to see his food with both eyes. Three years ago, he had been whitewashing his home when he accidentally burned both corneas with a bucket of quicklime. The accident ended his fencing career.
He had been one of the first to receive a cornea transplant in his left eye when the program started, he said. Then, in early November, doctors in Havana replaced the cornea in his right eye. He was unabashed in his praise for the Cuban government and for President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.
“I would have remained completely blind,” he said, fixing a reporter with a swordsman’s gaze. “Vision is half of one’s life.”
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11) Civil Servants Join Strikes in France
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:16 p.m. ET
November 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-France-Strikes.html?ref=world
PARIS (AP) -- Schools closed, flights were delayed, trains again weren't running, and newspapers weren't printed as civil servants joined transport workers in strikes Tuesday to challenge President Nicolas Sarkozy's program of sweeping reform for France.
A defiant Sarkozy said voters gave him a mandate for reform when they elected him in May, adding: ''We will not surrender and we will not retreat.''
''France needs reforms to meet the challenges imposed on it by the world,'' he told a meeting of mayors.
Sarkozy previously had remained uncharacteristically silent about the transit strikes that have hobbled the national rail network and transport in and around the capital for a week.
He said the walkout must stop before it brings ''the economy to its knees.''
''You have to know how to stop a strike,'' said the conservative. ''You have to think of all of those who have to go to work.''
He reiterated his determination to press ahead with the pension reform that prompted labor leaders to call the open-ended strike. But he also suggested that he is not looking to crush unions in the reform process.
''I do not want a winner and loser,'' Sarkozy said.
The walkouts looked increasingly like the last gasp of a protest movement that started with train drivers but seems to be losing some punch after a week of major travel disruptions.
Talks with transport unions are to start Wednesday and the government said it would take part.
Tuesday marked the seventh full day of the transit strikes against pension reforms.
Hundreds of thousands of civil servants -- teachers, customs agents and tax inspectors -- also stayed off the job to press for pay raises and job security. Sarkozy has promised a slimmed-down and reformed civil service, France's largest employer with more than 5 million workers.
Although civil servants and transport workers have different demands, together their protests stood as the biggest test since Sarkozy took office with a determination to revamp France through reforms and cost-cutting.
More than 300,000 teachers -- about 40 percent -- were on strike Tuesday, the Education Ministry said, and some schools were forced to close. Flights also were delayed and postal services were affected.
National newspapers were absent from kiosks as printers and distributors joined the walkout. Strike-hit France-Inter radio broadcast music and a message of apology instead of its regular programming.
National weather service Meteo France, which has 3,700 employees, said a third of the staff members were on strike.
Thousands joined protest marches in Paris and other cities. The Paris demonstration had a picnic atmosphere, with music, roasted sausages and balloons marked ''Public Service is a Public Good.'' The demonstrators marched across the Left Bank to the gold-domed monument at Les Invalides, site of Napoleon's tomb.
About one in seven employees at France's main energy utilities, Electricite de France and Gaz de France, were on strike, the companies said.
Striking air traffic controllers caused delays averaging 45 minutes at Paris' two airports, Charles de Gaulle and Orly, affecting both short domestic routes and long-haul flights.
Despite the pressure on Sarkozy, the government has stood firm. Prime Minister Francois Fillon said Monday that reforms must move forward.
The transit strike has caused massive disruption on the national rail network and in Paris' Metro and commuter lines.
The government says the transit walkout is costing France's economy between $440 million and $513 million a day and could dent economic growth if it lasts.
Train drivers are protesting Sarkozy's plans to extend their retirement age. The government has insisted that for talks to start, unions must move toward a return to work. It also says the core of the reform -- that all workers must work for 40 years to qualify for full pensions -- is nonnegotiable.
Sarkozy was elected on promises to reform France -- from its courts to its creaking university system, its army of civil servants to rail workers whose special retirement privileges he vowed to eliminate.
Campuses are also bubbling with discontent. Knots of students have been blocking classes at dozens of France's 85 state-run universities to protest a law allowing them to seek nongovernment funding. Critics fear the change will mean schools closing their doors to the poor and scrapping classes that can't attract private funding.
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Associated Press Writers Jean-Marie Godard, John Leicester and Elizabeth Ryan contributed to this story.
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12) Decline of the Tenure Track Raises Concerns
By ALAN FINDER
November 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/education/20adjunct.html?ref=us
DEARBORN, Mich. — Professors with tenure or who are on a tenure track are now a distinct minority on the country’s campuses, as the ranks of part-time instructors and professors hired on a contract have swelled, according to federal figures analyzed by the American Association of University Professors.
Elaine Zendlovitz, a former retail store manager who began teaching college courses six years ago, is representative of the change. Technically, Ms. Zendlovitz is a part-time Spanish professor, although, in fact, she teaches nearly all the time.
Her days begin at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, with introductory classes. Some days end at 10 p.m. at Oakland Community College, in the suburbs north of Detroit, as she teaches six courses at four institutions.
“I think we part-timers can be everything a full-timer can be,” Ms. Zendlovitz said during a break in a 10-hour teaching day. But she acknowledged: “It’s harder to spend time with students. I don’t have the prep time, and I know how to prepare a fabulous class.”
The shift from a tenured faculty results from financial pressures, administrators’ desire for more flexibility in hiring, firing and changing course offerings, and the growth of community colleges and regional public universities focused on teaching basics and preparing students for jobs.
It has become so extreme, however, that some universities are pulling back, concerned about the effect on educational quality. Rutgers University agreed in a labor settlement in August to add 100 tenure or tenure-track positions. Across the country, faculty unions are organizing part-timers. And the American Federation of Teachers is pushing legislation in 11 states to mandate that 75 percent of classes be taught by tenured or tenure-track teachers.
Three decades ago, adjuncts — both part-timers and full-timers not on a tenure track — represented only 43 percent of professors, according to the professors association, which has studied data reported to the federal Education Department. Currently, the association says, they account for nearly 70 percent of professors at colleges and universities, both public and private.
John W. Curtis, the union’s director of research and public policy, said that while the number of tenured and tenure-track professors has increased by about 25 percent over the past 30 years, they have been swamped by the growth in adjunct faculty. Over all, the number of people teaching at colleges and universities has doubled since 1975.
University officials agree that the use of nontraditional faculty is soaring. But some contest the professors association’s calculation, saying that definitions of part-time and full-time professors vary, and that it is not possible to determine how many courses, on average, each category of professor actually teaches.
Many state university presidents say tight budgets have made it inevitable that they turn to adjuncts to save money.
“We have to contend with increasing public demands for accountability, increased financial scrutiny and declining state support,” said Charles F. Harrington, provost of the University of North Carolina, Pembroke. “One of the easiest, most convenient ways of dealing with these pressures is using part-time faculty,” he said, though he cautioned that colleges that rely too heavily on such faculty “are playing a really dangerous game.”
Mark B. Rosenberg, chancellor of the State University System of Florida, said that part-timers can provide real-world experience to students and fill gaps in nursing, math, accounting and other disciplines with a shortage of qualified faculty. He also said the shift could come with costs.
Adjuncts are less likely to have doctoral degrees, educators say. They also have less time to meet with students, and research suggests that students who take many courses with them are somewhat less likely to graduate.
“Really, we are offering less educational quality to the students who need it most,” said Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, noting that the soaring number of adjunct faculty is most pronounced in community colleges and the less select public universities. The elite universities, both public and private, have the fewest adjuncts.
“It’s not that some of these adjuncts aren’t great teachers,” Dr. Ehrenberg said. “Many don’t have the support that the tenure-track faculty have, in terms of offices, secretarial help and time. Their teaching loads are higher, and they have less time to focus on students.”
Dr. Ehrenberg and a colleague analyzed 15 years of national data and found that graduation rates declined when public universities hired large numbers of contingent faculty.
Several studies of individual universities have determined that freshmen taught by many part-timers were more likely to drop out.
“Having an adjunct in a course is not necessarily bad for you, but having too many adjuncts might be,” said Eric P. Bettinger, an economics professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
Students say they can often tell when a professor is part-time. Mike Brennan, a sophomore at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, said the courses taught by adjuncts tend to be more basic and the exams less challenging. “They have so many classes that they give tests that are easier to grade,” Mr. Brennan said.
Carly Matkovich, a senior at the university, said she had bonded more with her part-time teachers, in part because they have more practical experience. But it is usually hard to find time to talk with them outside class. “They’re never around,” Ms. Matkovich said. “It does make me feel kind of cheated.”
At some departments the proportion of faculty who are tenured is startlingly low. The psychology department at Florida International University in Miami has 2,400 undergraduate majors but only 19 tenured or tenure-track professors who teach, according to a department self-assessment. It is possible for a psychology major to graduate without taking a course with a full-time faculty member.
“We’re at a point where it is extreme,” said Suzanna Rose, a psychology professor who said she stepped down as department head in August, primarily because she could not hire as many tenure-track professors as she thought the department needed. “I’m just very concerned about the quality.”
Ronald Berkman, the provost at Florida International, disputed her numbers, saying the psychology department has 23 professors who are tenured or tenure track and 5 full-time teachers on contracts. The department is conducting a search for three more tenure-track professors, Dr. Berkman said.
“Which is not to say that they don’t need more, which they do,” he said.
Tenure, a practice carried from Germany to the United States, was designed to guarantee academic freedom to professors by protecting them against dismissal. Some argue that it also protects incompetent or lazy teachers and sometimes leaves universities saddled with professors in disciplines that have lost currency.
The lack of tenure can leave adjuncts vulnerable. In a number of cases, professors outside the tenure track have been dropped after run-ins with administrators over everything from grading to opinion articles in newspapers.
Several unions have been organizing adjunct faculty in recent years. In Michigan, the American Federation of Teachers has successfully organized full-time, nontenure-track professors at Eastern Michigan University, as well as part-time and full-time adjuncts at the University of Michigan campuses in Ann Arbor, Dearborn and Flint.
“They are so exploited, the only difficulty in organizing adjuncts is finding them,” said David Hecker, president of the teachers federation.
Keith Hoeller, who has been teaching philosophy for 17 years as a part-timer in Seattle, described it this way: “It’s a caste system, and we are the untouchables of academia.”
Aletia Droba taught for 10 years as a part-time philosophy professor in the Detroit area. She said she was paid as little as $1,400 a course at community colleges and as much as $2,400 a class at universities.
Some semesters, Ms. Droba said, she taught as many as seven courses at four colleges, including across the border in Canada. This fall, she landed a full-time, non-tenure track job. She will teach five courses in the fall and spring combined — less than the number she often taught in a single semester as a part-timer.
Ms. Droba will not miss the constant driving that a part-timer does, shuttling among universities. “My students used to ask me how come I knew so much about current affairs,” she said. “And I’d say, ‘I listen to NPR all day.’ ”
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13) Whites Take a Majority on New Orleans’s Council
By ADAM NOSSITER
November 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/us/nationalspecial/20orleans.html?ref=us
NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 19 — In one of the clearest signs yet of Hurricane Katrina’s lasting demographic impact, the City Council is about to have a white majority for the first time in over two decades, pointing up again the storm’s displacement of thousands of residents, mostly black.
In local elections on Saturday, a veteran white politician, Jacquelyn B. Clarkson, defeated an African-American candidate, Cynthia Willard-Lewis, by 53 percent to 47 percent, in a contest for an at-large Council seat decided largely along racial lines. In addition, substantially more whites than blacks appear to have voted. Ms. Clarkson will become the fourth white member on the seven-member Council.
The total number of votes cast in the election — 52,614 — was sharply down from 113,000 in the election for mayor in May 2006. The low number called into question recent optimistic estimates that the city’s population had attained as much as two-thirds of its prestorm level, which was about 450,000.
In the 2006 election, many of those displaced by the hurricane voted absentee or drove into New Orleans to cast ballots. That vote from elsewhere appears to have been largely absent on Saturday, over two years after the storm.
“I think many people have moved on,” said Gregory C. Rigamer, a local demographic analyst whose work has been widely cited here. “When you look at this, you have to think the lower voter turnout would indicate that some people who previously cast votes from afar have lost interest.”
Since the mid-1980s, black politicians have held virtually all of the reins of power in a city where interest groups are sharply factionalized along racial lines and blacks were once two-thirds of the population. Saturday’s vote indicated a transition is in the making, perhaps similar to the one that occurred at the end of the segregation era here.
White candidates made other gains on Saturday, taking two New Orleans seats in the Louisiana Legislature long held by blacks, and a state court judgeship that had also been occupied by a black judge.
Voting was largely along racial lines. The apparently greater number of votes cast by whites — 29,700, compared with 22,900 black votes, according to an analysis by Mr. Rigamer — makes uncertain widely quoted estimates that blacks, despite a disproportionate population loss, are still substantially in the majority here.
The weekend election appeared to confirm what many had predicted immediately after the storm in 2005: New Orleans became almost overnight a smaller, whiter city with a much reduced black majority. And the results suggested that the election for mayor last year, where voting percentages were closer to pre- Katrina norms, might have been something of a fluke.
“Either blacks have really decided not to come back, in numbers, or they just voted by not voting,” said Cheron Brylski, a veteran political consultant here. “I’m really amazed at the number who just didn’t show up, knowing what was at stake.”
“I think this is the new normal,” she added. “We have to accept the fact that this is who is here, and this is who is back.”
The results on Saturday were greeted with gloom in black political circles.
“It is somewhat disheartening,” said Bill Rouselle, a veteran African-American consultant here. “It’s an indication that a lot of people have given up hope. A lot of people feel abandoned.”
Though not as highly publicized as the mayor’s race last year, the race for one of two at-large seats on the seven-member Council was nonetheless closely watched in New Orleans. The event that prompted the contest — the resignation of a popular black councilman who pleaded guilty to a federal bribery charge — shocked the city as few events in public life here have, appearing as confirmation that a miasma of corruption still held sway in New Orleans.
Virtually none of the post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction projects planned by the city have gotten off the ground. Racial divisions on the Council have been sharp, and confrontations with Mayor C. Ray Nagin are frequent, though usually fruitless.
Ms. Brylski, the consultant, suggested that this might change under the newly constituted Council. “I do think the power shifts to the City Council,” she said, “and it’s incumbent on them to do something.”
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14) Report Finds Racial Disparities in Police Searches
By Al Baker
November 20, 2007, 12:09 pm
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/report-finds-racial-disparities-in-police-searches/
A study by the private nonprofit Rand Corporation found that blacks and Hispanics were more likely than whites to be stopped by police officers, but the study does not accuse the department of racial profiling, according to Warren Robak, a spokesman for Rand.
The study, which is being unveiled this morning at police headquarters in Lower Manhattan, was requested by Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly in March after the department released statistics showing that 508,540 people were stopped on the streets in the five boroughs in 2006.
Mr. Robak of Rand said that researchers made some recommendations for policy changes based on the racial disparities they found. “The report finds different patterns in different parts of the city, a couple parts of the city where the patterns are different than in the entire city, patterns of some concern,” he said.
But, he also said, the report did not simply examine the issue of who was stopped, but what happened after the stop.
“Were blacks more likely to be frisked?” he said, adding that the analysis tried to explain and account for the raw numbers of stops.
On Nov. 9, the Police Department released statistics showing that 111,103 people were stopped on the streets during the third quarter of this year. The police stopped 134,029 people in the first quarter of this year and 113,945 people in the second quarter, said Christopher Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, a group that has been tracking the numbers.
The Police Department has still not released statistics on street stops from all of 2004 and 2005, or for the last three months of 2003, so it had been more than three years since it released data when it submitted the statistics to the City Council — as is mandated by law — in March.
The issue of stopping people on the streets — known in the department parlance as “stop and frisks” — has been a source of occasional tension between the police and residents. It became an emotional flashpoint after the 1999 fatal police shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed black street peddler, and the department’s lat in releasing numbers came to light after the fatal shooting November 2006 of another unarmed black man, Sean Bell.
The civil liberties group filed suit last week to have the police make public a database of information that officers have recorded on the more than 800,000 stops of civilians since the beginning of 2006 –- the same information the department turned over to Rand, which has also studied the issue in other cities, including Oakland, Calif., and Cincinnati.
Mr. Dunn said the civil liberties group expected the data to confirm its contention that stop-and-frisk operations have been improperly used and that they employ racial profiling.
Rand is also studying several aspects of firearm use in the department after the fatal police shooting of Mr. Bell, who died in a hail of 50 police bullets. But that study is still under way, officials said.
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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Manhattan: Teachers Criticize Review Unit
By ELISSA GOOTMAN
Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, called for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his schools chancellor to apologize to the city’s 80,000 teachers yesterday, a day after the chancellor sent principals an e-mail message announcing the formation of teams of lawyers and consultants meant to help principals remove poorly performing tenured teachers. Ms. Weingarten said that the message seemed timed to the release yesterday of national reading and math test scores showing little progress among New York City students. “The first speck of bad news, all of the sudden they go after teachers,” Ms. Weingarten said. The mayor said yesterday that removing tenured teachers was “a last alternative.”
November 16, 2007
New York
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/16/nyregion/16mbrfs-TEACHERS.html?ref=nyregion
Waterboarding and U.S. History
by William Loren Katz
"U.S. officers in the Philippines routinely resorted to what they called ‘the water cure.'"
November 14, 2007
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=435&Itemid=1
Writers Set to Strike, Threatening Hollywood
By MICHAEL CIEPLY and BROOKS BARNES
November 2, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/02/business/media/02cnd-hollywood.html?ref=us
Raids Traumatized Children, Report Says
By JULIA PRESTON
Hundreds of young American children suffered hardship and psychological trauma after immigration raids in the last year in which their parents were detained or deported, according to a report by the National Council of La Raza and the Urban Institute. Of 500 children directly affected in three factory raids examined in the report in which 900 adult immigrants were arrested, a large majority were United States citizens younger than 10. With one or both parents deported, the children had reduced economic support, and many remained in the care of relatives who feared contact with the authorities, the study said. Although the children were citizens, few families sought public assistance for them, the study found.
November 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/us/01brfs-raids.html?ref=us
Newark: Recalled Meat Found in Store
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
New Jersey consumer safety officials said yesterday that state inspectors bought recalled frozen hamburgers at a store weeks after the meat was recalled because of fears of E. coli contamination. The 19 boxes were bought in Union City on Wednesday, nearly four weeks after the manufacturer, the Topps Meat Company, issued a nationwide recall of 21.7 million pounds of frozen patties. Officials would not name the store yesterday because of the investigation, and investigators have not determined when the store received the meat, said Jeff Lamm, a spokesman for the state’s Division of Consumer Affairs.
New Jersey
October 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/nyregion/26mbrfs-meat.html?ref=nyregion
Florida: Sentence for Lionel Tate Is Upheld
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
An appeals court has upheld a 30-year probation violation sentence for Lionel Tate, who for a time was the youngest person to be sentenced to life in an American prison. The ruling Wednesday by the Fourth District Court of Appeal in West Palm Beach sets the stage for Mr. Tate’s trial on robbery charges that could carry another life term. Mr. Tate, 20, had sought to have the sentence thrown out based on procedural mistakes. Mr. Tate was 12 at the time of the 1999 beating death of 6-year-old Tiffany Eunick. An appeals court overturned his murder conviction in 2004, and he was released but was on probation. In May 2005, the police said, Mr. Tate robbed a pizza delivery man, and he was found to be in possession of a gun even before that, a violation of his probation.
October 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/us/26brfs-lionel.html?ref=us
Submarine’s Commanding Officer Is Relieved of His Duties
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The commanding officer of the nuclear-powered submarine Hampton was relieved of his duty because of a loss of confidence in his leadership, the Navy said. The officer, Cmdr. Michael B. Portland, was relieved of duty after an investigation found the ship had failed to do daily safety checks on its nuclear reactor for a month and falsified records to cover up the omission. Commander Portland will be reassigned, said Lt. Alli Myrick, a public affairs officer. [Aren't you glad they are out there making the world safe for democracy?...bw]
October 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/us/26brfs-sub.html?ref=us
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/
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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS AND INFORMATION
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Russell Means Speaking at the Transform Columbus Day Rally
"If voting could do anything it would be illegal!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8Lri1-6aoY
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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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"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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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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"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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[For some levity...Hans Groiner plays Monk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51bsCRv6kI0
...bw]
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Which country should we invade next?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3g_zqz3VjY
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My Favorite Mutiny, The Coup
http://www.myspace.com/thecoupmusic
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Michael Moore- The Awful Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeOaTpYl8mE
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Morse v. Frederick Supreme Court arguments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_LsGoDWC0o
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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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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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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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