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GET JROTC OUT OF OUR SCHOOLS!
SPEAK OUT AT THE BOARD MEETING TUESDAY, DECEMBER 11, 6:00 P.M.
555 Franklin Street, 1st Floor
San Francisco, CA 94102
415/241-6427 or (415) 241-6493
(To get on the speaker’s list call the Monday before the meeting from 8:30 AM - 4:00 PM or Tuesday, the day of the meeting from 8:30 AM - 3:30 PM. You will get at most, two minutes and most probably only one minute to speak.)
NEXT MEETING OF CITY-WIDE COMMITTEE TO GET RID OF JROTC:
Monday, January 7, 7:00 P.M., at 474 Valencia Street, First Floor, Room 145 (To the left as you come in, and all the way to the back of the long hallway, then, to the right.)
See "Articles in Full" #4 AND 5, full text below:
4) JROTC-Perpetrator of Jane Kim Death Threat Identified
November 29, 2007
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/
The original version of this article
was published in Beyond Chron
on November 29, 2006.
Copyright © 2006 Marc Norton
http://www.marcnorton.us/98827/99108.html
5) JROTC Supporters Threaten JROTC Opponents
by Marc Norton‚ Nov. 22‚ 2006
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=3940
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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,
In 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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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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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.
EXPLORATORY LETTER: UNIFIED NATIONAL ACTION DURING MARCH 2008:
The regional antiwar demonstrations on October 27th were a great success.. The Boston mobilization organized by New England United (NEU) drew about 10,000 people, including many new activists and young people. Nationally, tens of thousands demanded an end to war and occupation now.
The NEU-sponsored action on October 27 was endorsed by a broad range of over 200 organizations. At a follow-up meeting, many members of NEU believed that we should build on this momentum by bringing together the antiwar movement in unified national protest in the spring for the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war.
Reasons given included: 1) March will be the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and the antiwar movement must come together to demand an end to this war now; 2) The war plans against Iran are intensifying, and we have to fight now to stop a war on Iran before it's too late. At the same time, it was recognized that successful national action in the spring would require a broad base of support from antiwar organizations around the country. Therefore, NEU decided to create a working group to assess the level of support for such an action, and report back to our next general meeting in December with both an assessment of support, and a detailed proposal for a unified national mobilization in the spring. As an indication of growing interest in national action, Cindy Sheehan is convening a peace summit in San Francisco in January to help develop a unified strategy for the peace movement and to develop a plan for a unified national mobilization in DC during the March anniversary of the Iraq war.
A strong base of support from the grass-roots organizations around the country will be necessary to make unified national action a reality. If your organization is interested in planning for unified national action in March, please contact us as soon as possible at the following email address: spring2008@lists.riseup.net . Thank you. Spring Mobilization working group New England United http://www.newenglandunited.org/
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Spreading the Misery
Editorial
November 29, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/opinion/29thu1.html?hp
2) FEMA Sets Date for Closing Katrina Trailer Camps
By LESLIE EATON
November 29, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/us/29trailer.html?ref=us
3) "Save Darfur" —a PR Scam to Justify the Next U.S. Oil and Resource Wars in Africa
By Bruce Dixon
http://www.blackagendareport.com/
4) JROTC-Perpetrator of Jane Kim Death Threat Identified
November 29, 2007
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/
The original version of this article
was published in Beyond Chron
on November 29, 2006.
Copyright © 2006 Marc Norton
http://www.marcnorton.us/98827/99108.html
5) JROTC Supporters Threaten JROTC Opponents
by Marc Norton‚ Nov. 22‚ 2006
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=3940
6) Mothers Scrimp as States Take Child Support
By ERIK ECKHOLM
December 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/us/01child.html?ex=1197176400&en=ab143e798bd415e5&ei=5070&emc=eta1
7) U.S. Credit Crisis Adds to Gloom in Arctic Norway
By MARK LANDLER
December 2, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/world/europe/02norway.html?hp
8) We're Proposing a Constitution of Transition to Socialism
Interview with Roberto Hernandez, vice president of the Venezuelan
National Assembly.
JUAN ANTONIO BORREGO and CALIXTO N. LLANES (photo)
November 29, 2007
GRANMA
9) US War Vets to Speak Publicly About War Crimes
by Aaron Glantz
Published on Friday, November 30, 2007
One World.net
10) The Saturday Profile
A Pygmy Traveler Gives Voice to a Marginalized People
By MITCH KELLER
December 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/world/africa/01lonoa.html?ex=1197176400&en=f2c601bc8de22ef4&ei=5070&emc=eta1
11) Witness Names to Be Withheld From Detainee
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
December 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/us/nationalspecial3/01gitmo.html
12) Figures on H.I.V. Rate Expected to Rise
By BLOOMBERG NEWS
December 2, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/health/02aids.html?ref=us
13) A Rising Number of Birds at Risk
By ANTHONY DePALMA
December 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/nyregion/01birds.html?ref=nyregion
14) Wall St. Sees Silver Lining in Economy
By PETER S. GOODMAN
News Analysis
December 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/business/01econ.html?ref=business
15) Labor Pacts in Detroit Didn’t Ease Stocks’ Slide
By NICK BUNKLEY and MICHELINE MAYNARD
December 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/business/01place.html?ref=business
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1) Spreading the Misery
Editorial
November 29, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/opinion/29thu1.html?hp
The nation’s foreclosure crisis is metastasizing, and communities are in harm’s way as property values and tax bases decline and crime increases.
In the third quarter, there were 635,000 foreclosure filings, a 30 percent increase from the previous quarter and nearly double from a year ago, according to RealtyTrac, a national real estate information service. That works out to one for every 196 households. Michigan and Ohio, which were hit early and hard by a combination of economic weakness and reckless lending, continue to reel. Foreclosures rose last year in Colorado, Georgia and Texas and are now surging in California, Nevada, Arizona and Florida. In those states unsustainable mortgages are at the root of the problem.
The Bush administration has been far too slow to respond, with some officials apparently worried that helping today’s troubled borrowers might encourage future borrowers to take on too much debt. That misses a critical point: much of this crisis can be traced to lenders’ failure to vet borrowers and the government’s failure to regulate the industry. And it misses an even bigger point: unless something is done quickly, whole communities, not just people who lose their homes, will suffer.
Foreclosed properties damage the value of nearby homes and the tax bases of municipalities. There is also a strong correlation between foreclosures and crime. For every one percentage point increase in a neighborhood’s foreclosure rate, violent crime rises 2.3 percent, according to a recent study by Dan Immergluck of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Geoff Smith of Woodstock Institute, a research and advocacy organization in Chicago.
Reports from Cleveland, Atlanta and the sprawl around Los Angeles and Sacramento — from low-income city neighborhoods to middle-class suburbs — all tell a similar story: when vacancies appear, so do looters, vagrants, prostitutes and drug dealers. In Cleveland’s inner city, it takes 72 hours for a vacated house to be looted, a community activist told CNN recently, with lootings often followed by violent crime. In the suburbs, the descent may be slower, beginning with graffiti and vandalism and moving to gang activity and other crime.
Police departments may not be able to keep up, in part because foreclosures are projected to strain municipal budgets. Neighborhood watch groups are quickly overwhelmed. The United States Conference of Mayors met this week to discuss the impact of foreclosures. Based on the mayors’ experience, their estimates of the number of coming foreclosures, and the damage inflicted on community life, were grimmer than projections from the federal government and the housing industry. The question is whether their concerns will be heeded.
As more foreclosures take their toll, the need becomes ever more obvious for a comprehensive, national effort to avert evictions. Last week, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. wisely shifted his position on loan modifications, endorsing the idea that some at-risk loans should be modified en masse rather than on an inefficient one-by-one basis. If Mr. Paulson backs up his new stance with a plan of action, the socio-economic costs of foreclosures may yet be contained.
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2) FEMA Sets Date for Closing Katrina Trailer Camps
By LESLIE EATON
November 29, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/us/29trailer.html?ref=us
NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 28 — Almost 3,000 families here and across Louisiana will have to leave their government-supplied trailers over the next few months under a new schedule prepared by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
FEMA officials said Wednesday that the agency planned to close all the trailer camps it runs for victims of the 2005 hurricanes by the end of May, including its biggest camp for evacuees, outside of Baton Rouge. Here in New Orleans, 926 families are living in smaller FEMA camps, some of which are supposed to close within days. The agency says its action is intended to hasten the move of residents from trailers to permanent housing, and officials said FEMA is committed to helping them find new housing before the parks close. Counselors will work with residents to track down available apartments.
“We’re with them every step of the way,” said Diane L. W. Perry, a spokeswoman for the agency here, who added that no one will be forced out of a trailer without a home in which to live.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development will assume responsibility for paying to house poor families, as it is also doing for evacuees who are already in rental units around the country. Volunteer groups have been assisting with down payments and furniture in some cases, she said.
But advocates who work with trailer park residents are skeptical of the plan, noting anyone still living in a cramped, flimsy and possibly formaldehyde-tainted trailer probably has nowhere else to go.
Most of those still living in the FEMA parks — which occupy playgrounds, churchyards, parking lots and fields around southern Louisiana — had previously been renters, and little low-cost rental housing has been repaired or built since the storm. Many people in the trailer sites are elderly or disabled, and large numbers are living alone.
“I have talked with people who had no place to go and their location closed down,” said Davida Finger, a staff lawyer with Loyola University Law Clinic. “Booting people out of their one safe place is kicking people when they are down.”
The new schedule does not affect the largest number of trailer dwellers, those living in trailers on private property (usually their own driveways). The timetable for these 9,545 families depends in large part on their rebuilding progress and on local ordinances.
But by the end of next year, the agency will stop paying for about 3,700 families living in government trailers in private trailer parks, agency officials said. They plan to remove about 258 trailers requested by employers for their workers by the end of February.
Federal officials have always said that the trailer program was a stopgap, and that their goal was eventually to move hurricane victims into permanent housing. Publicizing the schedule — in many cases far in advance of the agency’s usual 60-day notice — is meant to help residents make plans, said Ms. Perry said.
“We want to make sure people are safe before the next hurricane season,” she said.
Earlier this year, concerns about formaldehyde contamination prompted the agency to end a plan to allow residents to buy their trailers.
The formaldehyde issue did play a role in the decision to move people out of the trailers, said Ronnie Simpson, a FEMA spokesman.
Because of chemical contamination, “it’s probably a good idea to get people out of trailers,” said Joseph Rich, a lawyer with the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Washington. “But not at the expense of making them homeless.”
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3) "Save Darfur" —a PR Scam to Justify the Next U.S. Oil and Resource Wars in Africa
By Bruce Dixon
http://www.blackagendareport.com/
The star-studded hue and cry to "Save Darfur" and "stop the genocide" has gained enormous traction in U.S. media along with bipartisan support in Congress and the White House. But the Congo, with ten to twenty times as many African dead over the same period is not called a "genocide" and passes almost unnoticed. Sudan sits atop lakes of oil. It has large supplies of uranium, and other minerals, significant water resources, and a strategic location near still more African oil and resources. The unasked question is whether the nation's Republican and Democratic foreign policy elite are using claims of genocide, and appeals for "humanitarian intervention" to grease the way for the next oil and resource wars on the African continent. The regular manufacture and the constant maintenance of false realities in the service of American empire is a core function of the public relations profession and the corporate news media. Whether it's fake news stories about wonder drugs and how toxic chemicals are good for you, bribed commentators and journalists discoursing on the benefits of No Child Left Behind, Hollywood stars advocating military intervention to save African orphans, or slick propaganda campaigns employing viral marketing techniques to reach out to college students, bloggers, churches and ordinary citizens, it pays to take a close look behind the facade.
Among the latest false realities being pushed upon the American people are the simplistic pictures of Black vs. Arab genocide in Darfur, and the proposed solution: a robust U.S.-backed or U.S.-led military intervention in Western Sudan. Increasing scrutiny is being focused upon the “Save Darfur” lobby and the Save Darfur Coalition—upon its founders, its finances, its methods and motivations and its truthfulness. In the spirit of furthering that examination we here present ten reasons to suspect that the "Save Darfur" campaign is a PR scam to justify U.S. intervention in Africa.
1. It wouldn't be the first Big Lie our government and media elite told us to justify a war.
Elders among us can recall the Tonkin Gulf Incident, which the U.S. government deliberately provoked to justify initiation of the war in Vietnam. This rationale was quickly succeeded by the need to help the struggling infant "democracy" in South Vietnam, and the still useful "fight 'em over there so we don't have to fight 'em over here" nonsense. More recently the bombings, invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq have been variously explained by people on the public payroll as necessary to "get Bin Laden" as revenge for 9-11, as measures to take "the world's most dangerous weapons" from the hands of "the world's most dangerous regimes," as measures to enable the struggling Iraqi "democracy" stand on its own two feet, and necessary because it's still better to "fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here."
2. It wouldn't even be the first time the U.S. government and media elite employed "genocide prevention" as a rationale for military intervention in an oil-rich region.
The 1995 U.S. and NATO military intervention in Kosovo was supposedly a "peacekeeping" operation to stop genocide. The lasting result of that campaign is Camp Bondsteel, one of the largest military bases on the planet. The U.S. is practically the only country in the world that maintains military bases outside its own borders. At just under a thousand acres, Camp Bondsteel offers the U.S. military the ability to pre-position large quantities of equipment and supplies within striking distance of Caspian oil fields, pipeline routes and relevant sea lanes. It is also widely believed to be the site of one of the U.S.'s secret prison and torture facilities.
3. If stopping genocide in Africa really was on the agenda, why the focus on Sudan with 200,000 to 400,000 dead rather than Congo with five million dead?
“The notion that a quarter million Darfuri dead are a genocide and five million dead Congolese are not is vicious and absurd," according to Congolese activist Nita Evele. "What's happened and what is still happening in Congo is not a tribal conflict and it's not a civil war. It is an invasion. It is a genocide with a death toll of five million, twenty times that of Darfur, conducted for the purpose of plundering Congolese mineral and natural resources."
More than anything else, the selective and cynical application of the term "genocide" to Sudan, rather than to the Congo where ten to twenty times as many Africans have been murdered reveals the depth of hypocrisy around the "Save Darfur" movement. In the Congo, where local gangsters, mercenaries and warlords along with invading armies from Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola engage in slaughter, mass rape and regional depopulation on a scale that dwarfs anything happening in Sudan, all the players eagerly compete to guarantee that the extraction of vital coltan (the ore for tantalum used in consumer electronics products such as cell phones, DVD players, computers, and games consoles) for Western computers and cell phones, the export of uranium for Western reactors and nukes, along with diamonds, gold, copper, timber and other Congolese resources continue undisturbed.
Former UN Ambassador Andrew Young and George H.W. Bush both serve on the board of Barrcik Gold, one of the largest and most active mining concerns in war-torn Congo. Evidently, with profits from the brutal extraction of Congolese wealth flowing to the West, there can be no Congolese "genocide" worth noting, much less interfering with. For their purposes, U.S. strategic planners may regard their Congolese model as the ideal means of capturing African wealth at minimal cost without the bother of official U.S. boots on the ground.
4. It's all about Sudanese oil.
Sudan, and the Darfur region in particular, sit atop a lake of oil. But Sudanese oil fields are not being developed and drilled by Exxon or Chevron or British Petroleum. Chinese banks, oil and construction firms are making the loans, drilling the wells, laying the pipelines to take Sudanese oil where they intend it to go, calling far too many shots for a twenty-first century in which the U.S. aspires to control the planet's energy supplies. A U.S. and NATO military intervention will solve that problem for U.S. planners.
5. It's all about Sudanese uranium, gum arabic and other natural resources.
Uranium is vital to the nuclear weapons industry and an essential fuel for nuclear reactors. Sudan possesses high quality deposits of uranium. Gum arabic is an essential ingredient in pharmaceuticals, candies and beverages like Coca-Cola and Pepsi, and Sudanese exports of this commodity are 80 percent of the world's supply. When comprehensive U.S. sanctions against the Sudanese regime were being considered in 1997, industry lobbyists stepped up and secured an exemption in the sanctions bill to guarantee their supplies of this valuable Sudanese commodity. But an in-country U.S. and NATO military presence is a more secure guarantee that the extraction of Sudanese resources, like those of the Congo, flow westward to the U.S. and the European Union.
6. It's all about Sudan's strategic location
Sudan sits opposite Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, where a large fraction of the world's easily extracted oil will be for a few more years. Darfur borders on Libya and Chad, with their own vast oil resources, is within striking distance of West and Central Africa, and is a likely pipeline route. The Nile River flows through Sudan before reaching Egypt, and Southern Sudan water resources of regional significance too. With the creation of AFRICOM, the new Pentagon command for the African continent, the U.S. has made open and explicit its intention to plant a strategic footprint on the African continent. From permanent Sudanese bases, the U.S. military could influence the politics and economies of Africa for a generation to come.
7. The backers and founders of the "Save Darfur" movement are the well-connected and well-funded U.S. foreign policy elite. According to a copyrighted Washington Post story this summer:
"The Save Darfur (Coalition) was created in 2005 by two groups concerned about genocide in the African country – the American Jewish World Service and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum...
“The coalition has a staff of 30 with expertise in policy and public relations. Its budget was about $15 million in the most recent fiscal year...
“Save Darfur will not say exactly how much it has spent on its ads, which this week have attempted to shame China, host of the 2008 Olympics, into easing its support for Sudan. But a coalition spokeswoman said the amount is in the millions of dollars.”
Though the "Save Darfur" PR campaign employs viral marketing techniques, reaching out to college students, even to black bloggers, it is not a grassroots affair, as were the movement against apartheid and in support of African liberation movements in South Africa, Namibia, Angola and Mozambique a generation ago. Top heavy with evangelical Christians who preach the coming war for the end of the world, and with elements known for their uncritical support of Israeli rejectionism in the Middle East, the Save Darfur movement is clearly an establishment affair, a propaganda campaign that spends millions of dollars each month to manufacture consent for U.S. military intervention in Africa under the cloak of stopping or preventing genocide.
8. None of the funds raised by the "Save Darfur Coalition", the flagship of the "Save Darfur Movement" go to help needy Africans on the ground in Darfur, according to stories in both the Washington Post and the New York Times.
“None of the money collected by Save Darfur goes to help the victims and their families. Instead, the coalition pours its proceeds into advocacy efforts that are primarily designed to persuade governments to act.”
9. "Save Darfur" partisans in the U.S. are not interested in political negotiations to end the conflict in Darfur. President Bush has openly and repeatedly attempted to throw monkey wrenches at peace negotiations to end the war in Darfur. Even pro-intervention scholars and humanitarian organizations active on the ground have criticized the U.S. for endangering humanitarian relief workers, and for effectively urging rebel parties in Darfur to refuse peace talks and hold out for U.S. and NATO intervention on their behalf.
The PR campaign, which depicts the conflict as strictly a racial affair, in which Arabs, who are generally despised in the U.S. media anyway, are exterminating the black population of Sudan, is slick, seamless and attractive, and seems to leave no room for negotiation. But in fact, many of Sudan's “Arabs", even the Janjiweed, are also black. In any case, they were armed and unleashed by a government which has the power to disarm them if it chooses, and refusing to talk to that government's negotiators is a sure way to avoid any settlement.
10. Blackwater and other U.S. mercenary contractors, the unofficial armed wings of the Republican Party and the Pentagon are eagerly pitching their services as part of the solution to the Darfur crisis.
"Chris Taylor, head of strategy for Blackwater, says his company has a database of thousands of former police and military officers for security assignments. He says Blackwater personnel could set up perimeters and guard Darfurian villages and refugee camp in support of the U.N. Blackwater officials say it would not take many men to fend off the Janjaweed, a militia that is supported by the Sudanese government and attacks villages on camelback."
Apparently Blackwater doesn't need to come to the Congo, where hunger and malnutrition, depopulation, mass rape and the disappearance of schools, hospitals and civil society into vast law free zones ruled by an ever-changing cast of African proxies (like the son of the late and unlamented Idi Amin), all under a veil of complicit media silence already constitute the perfect business-friendly environment for siphoning off the vast wealth of that country at minimal cost.
Look for the adoption of the Congolese model across the wide areas of Africa that U.S. strategic planners call "ungoverned spaces." Just don't expect to see details on the evening news, or hear about them from Oprah, George Clooney or Angelina Jolie.
Bruce Dixon is BAR managing editor.
Black Agenda Report (BAR), 27 November 27, 2007
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4) JROTC-Perpetrator of Jane Kim Death Threat Identified
November 29, 2007
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/
The original version of this article
was published in Beyond Chron
on November 29, 2006.
Copyright © 2006 Marc Norton
http://www.marcnorton.us/98827/99108.html
Beyond Chron has learned the identity of the person who sent out a Facebook message last year which said "Jane Kim needs to die." Kim is an elected member of the San Francisco School Board, and an ally of school board members who voted last November to phase out the JROTC program from San Francisco schools.
Kim has identified the person who made the death threat as Daniel Chin, a JROTC cadet who graduated from Lowell High School in 2006. Significantly, Chin has emerged as a leader of the pro-JROTC forces trying to overturn the School Board's decision to phase out JROTC. According to the board's mandate, there should be no more JROTC classes after the end of the current 2007-2008 school year.
Kim had previously refused to divulge Chin's name, but is now willing to identify him as the perpetrator. Beyond Chron has also received corroborating evidence of the Facebook message that contained the threat from Chin.
This new information also links Chin to a series of Myspace messages that threatened Mara Kubrin, a student leader of the anti-JROTC forces.
As I first reported last year, Mara presented a petition to the board opposing JROTC, signed by over 800 students. Subsequently, a previously-unidentified JROTC supporter drafted a bulletin with Mara's picture, calling her a "traitor," identifying her as a student at Lowell, and claiming that "by viewing this... [you agree] to release said author from all damages resulting from... any physical or mental damages resulting from violence" as a result of the bulletin.
This bulletin fostered a flood of threatening messages to Mara, such as the one that read "DAMN HOE U BETTER LISTEN UP... I FEEL SORRY 4 UR MOTHER 4 GIVEN BIRTH 2 YA UGLY ASS... U BETTER FUCKIN WATCH UR PIMPLE ASS BAK BEFORE PPL GO JUMPIN UR ASS UP SHIET HA..."
David Kubrin, Mara's father, has told Beyond Chron that Jane Kim previously related a conversation with the person who had threatened her -- now identified as Daniel Chin -- and asked him if he was responsible for the threats against Mara. Chin did not deny the accusation, according to the report from Mara's father.
Chin, currently a student at UC Berkeley, is in the thick of the fight to overturn the School Board's decision to remove JROTC from the city's schools. On Monday, November 19, Chin appeared on KPFA's popular Morning Show, along with Doug Bullard, a retired colonel and a Lowell JROTC instructor, to advocate for the preservation of JROTC. Mark Sanchez, one of the School Board members who introduced the resolution to phase out JROTC, also appeared on the Morning Show segment. It is unknown whether or not Sanchez knew at the time that Chin had threatened the life of his fellow school board member.
Beyond Chron has also learned that Chin attended the first meeting of the JROTC Task Force, as a "Guest Speaker" with a "presentation by JROTC." The task force was mandated by the school board to find "alternative" programs to JROTC. Although the school board directed the district administration to set up the task force in its November 2006 resolution phasing out JROTC, it appears that the task force was not convened until May 16, 2007. This is the meeting at which Chin appeared.
Beyond Chron has additionally learned that Chin was selected to be the note-taker at the most recent meeting of the JROTC Task Force. The task force meetings are not open to the public, and Chin is not a member of the task force. "Since opponents of JROTC are likely to be identified at these task force meetings, it seems wildly inappropriate that someone with a propensity for making threats against these same opponents of JROTC would be in the position of recording task force business," said one opponent of JROTC, who prefers to remain anonymous.
A Bay Area Reporter (BAR) article reported last year that Eric Mar, one of the school board members who voted to phase out JROTC, turned over incriminating information about the person who threatened Kim to the school board's legal counsel, and asked them to work "with the San Francisco Police Department to look into the matter." That was in December 2006. There is no evidence that either the school district or the police department has taken any official action against Chin.
David Kubrin, Mara's father, reports that he repeatedly asked the police department to investigate the threats against his daughter. Nothing has ever come of these requests.
For years, the debate about JROTC has taken place in an atmosphere of intimidation.
As far back as 1994, controversy erupted around JROTC when a School Board investigation revealed that JROTC cadets at Balboa High had sent three members of the drill team through "ranks" four times -- "a ritual form of punishment in which JROTC cadets are punched repeatedly on the upper arms and shoulders as they walk between a gauntlet of drill team members," according to a statement by the board. In this particular instance, one of the cadets was assaulted by the student commander after being sent through ranks. The board investigation further revealed that "for at least the last five years, ranks was a common means of student-to-student punishment in the JROTC program at Balboa."
Partly as a result of this revelation, a resolution to remove JROTC from the schools was introduced to the school board in 1995. This resolution failed by a 4-3 vote, during a tumultuous meeting attended by hundreds of rowdy JROTC students. The chief sponsor of the 1995 resolution was Dan Kelly. Kelly was also a sponsor of last year's successful resolution to remove JROTC. Kelly is no longer a member of the school board, having failed in his most recent re-election bid.
When Mara Kubrin presented the student petition opposing JROTC to the school board last year, she stated that many students opposed to JROTC were afraid to come to the meeting, fearing intimidation by JROTC students. Eric Blanc, another student leader, reported at a recent meeting of JROTC opponents that he had received death threats. There have been several other reports of teachers receiving threats from JROTC students, although none have yet been willing to come forward publicly.
Kim told Beyond Chron that, in addition to the death threat from Chin, she has received other emails "threatening in nature" from JROTC proponents. She told us that these threats "turn people away from dialogue" that could lead to a "working solution" around JROTC and alternative programs.
Daniel Chin -- who threatened Jane Kim's life, and who appears to have set off the threats against Mara Kubrin -- was quoted in a Front Page Magazine article earlier this year claiming that "everything JROTC does is encourage youth to give back to their communities."
"The first duty of our schools is to keep our children out of harm's way," says Riva Enteen, Mara Kubrin's mother, and an outspoken opponent of JROTC. "That means both preventing threats and violence, and keeping the military and military recruiters out of our schools."
____________________________________________________________________________
Please note:
The original version of this article incorrectly stated that Jane Kim had "voted with the majority last November to phase out the JROTC program."
In fact, Kim was not yet a member of the school board when the board voted, on November 14, 2006, to phase out JROTC. She had, however, been elected to the board just one week before, on November 7, running as a Green Party candidate. Kim joined fellow Green Party member, Mark Sanchez, on the board when she was sworn into office in January, 2007. Sanchez was one of the sponsor's, along with Dan Kelly, of the resolution to phase out JROTC.
Curiously, the death threat made by Daniel Chin took place before the November school board vote, and even before Kim was elected to the board. The Facebook message containing the death threat was sent on October 16, 2006. At this point, Kim's election to the board was widely expected, if not yet a sure thing. It appears that Chin's threat was pre-emptive in nature, not reactive.
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5) JROTC Supporters Threaten JROTC Opponents
by Marc Norton‚ Nov. 22‚ 2006
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=3940
"Hey you stupid hatin azz bitch!!! Better watch ur fkn bk ya dumbazz whore!"
This was just one of the threatening MySpace messages directed at Mara Kubrin, a senior at Lowell High School, following the vote by the San Francisco school board to phase JROTC out of the City's public schools. On Tuesday evening, November 14, Mara presented a petition to the board opposing JROTC, signed by over 800 students. The next morning her picture appeared in the online edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, and the flood of threats began.
"God you know how many people you have made cry & how many people hate you! & wanna Beat you up & Slap the Shit out of you!!!!" The Chronicle has editorialized that JROTC teaches "leadership skills and self-discipline." One of the program's supporters demonstrated that leadership, if not self-discipline, by drafting a bulletin with Mara's picture, calling her a "traitor," identifying her as a student at Lowell, and claiming that "by viewing this... [you agree] to release said author from all damages resulting from... any physical or mental damages resulting from violence" as a result of the bulletin.
"Man those pic bulletins of you are really funny. i mean HAHAH! funny. Like LOL funny. BITCH."
MySpace web pages are often private, which means that they can not be accessed without the permission of the individual involved. Mara's page is private. Yet, somehow, the person who drafted the inflammatory bulletin about Mara hacked into her page, got vital information about her and her family, and broadcast it with a link to her MySpace page -- resulting in the deluge of threatening MySpace messages.
"DAMN HOE U BETTER LISTEN UP... I FEEL SORRY 4 UR MOTHER 4 GIVEN BIRTH 2 YA UGLY ASS... U BETTER FUCKIN WATCH UR PIMPLE ASS BAK BEFORE PPL GO JUMPIN UR ASS UP SHIET HA..."
Ironically, when Mara presented the petition at the school board she claimed that many students opposed to JROTC were afraid to come to the meeting, fearing intimidation by JROTC students. The threats she has received since then have proven that point.
Others have experienced similar intimidation. Bonnie Weinstein has posted an open letter on the Bay Area United Against War web page -- http://bauaw.org -- stating that "several of them [JROTC supporters] physically threatened Cristina Guitierrez, myself and others as we left [the school board meeting] -- it was scary to see them filled with so much hate. Of course, that's why we want JROTC out of our schools. (You may not be aware that JROTC students were laughing when Cristina told of being tortured by U.S. Military-trained Columbian troops.) I was also very puzzled that their 'teachers' were not there with them to counsel them after the vote was taken..."
The message from JROTC supporters to JROTC opponents, as stated in one of the MySpace threats aimed at Mara, is coming through loud and clear: "u should stfu." Or else.
A police report has been filed about the threats against Mara. She believes that the student who sent out the threatening bulletin can be identified.
Copyright (c) 2006 by Marc Norton
Marc Norton is a bellman at a small hotel in downtown San Francisco. Norton's partner, Riva Enteen, is Mara's mother. The "Drill and Ceremonies" graphic is the cover of a JROTC textbook listed on the Lowell JROTC web page. Norton can be reached at nortonsf@ix.netcom.com, and through his website at http://www.MarcNorton.us.
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6) Mothers Scrimp as States Take Child Support
By ERIK ECKHOLM
December 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/us/01child.html?ex=1197176400&en=ab143e798bd415e5&ei=5070&emc=eta1
MILWAUKEE — The collection of child support from absent fathers is failing to help many of the poorest families, in part because the government uses fathers’ payments largely to recoup welfare costs rather than passing on the money to mothers and children.
Close to half the states pass along none of collected child support to families on welfare, while most others pay only $50 a month to a custodial parent, usually the mother, even though the father may be paying hundreds of dollars each month.
Critics say using child support to repay welfare costs harms children instead of helping them, contradicting the national goal of strengthening families, and is a flaw in the generally lauded national campaign to increase collections.
Karla Hart, a struggling mother of four here, held out her monthly statement from the county child-support office.
Paid by the father: $229.40.
Amount deducted to repay federal costs of welfare: $132.18.
Her share: $97.22. “That extra money was a bill I could pay,” said Ms. Hart, 56, who has lupus and other serious ailments but against her doctor’s advice has started working at a day care center, in a failing effort to achieve solvency.
Reflecting a growing, bipartisan sense that diverting child support money to government coffers is counterproductive, Congress, in the Deficit Reduction Act passed in early 2006, took a modest step toward change. Beginning in 2009, states will be permitted to pass along up to $100 for one child and $200 for two or more children, with the state and federal governments giving up a share of welfare repayments they have received in the past.
The Bush administration has set a goal of increasing the share of collections distributed to families and reducing the amount retained by the government. But the drive to reduce the budget deficit has gotten in the way. As part of last-minute budget crunching, the Republican-controlled Congress in that same act reduced by 20 percent the child-support enforcement money it gives to the states, starting this fall. Many states say the effort to force them to pay more of the enforcement costs will impede collections and prevent them from passing more money on to needy families.
“There was a real groundswell toward the idea of giving more of the money, or even all of it, to the families,” said Vicki Turetsky, an expert on child support at the Center for Law and Social Policy in Washington. But that momentum has been stopped short, she said, by the financing change.
Ms. Hart was luckier than most mothers in her position because for more than eight years, under a federally approved experiment, Wisconsin gave all money collected from noncustodial parents to the families. When the experiment ended last year, she lost most of the check.
“My daughter told me this morning that she needed $9 for something at school, and I was like, ‘But I have to pay the rent,’” Ms. Hart said. “I gave it to her, and now I have to find that money someplace else.”
Barry A. Miller, the chief of the North Carolina child support office, said North Carolina, like about half of all states, passed no support money on to families. “We were seriously considering a change, but it’s doubtful we could do that now,” said Mr. Miller, who is also the president of the National Council of Child Support Directors. In North Carolina and elsewhere, lost federal aid may instead force cuts in personnel and enforcement.
On Nov. 15, 24 governors from both parties sent a letter to Congress asking it to repeal the cuts, arguing that they would hurt one of the government’s most cost-effective programs, which raises more than $4 in child support for every $1 spent on enforcement.
The intensified national effort over the last decade to establish paternity for babies born out of wedlock and to collect more support money, mainly from fathers, is often described as a great success. And indeed, collections have increased significantly, to some $24 billion in 2006 from $12 billion in 1996, helping many families avoid penury.
But for the poorest men and women, the story is mixed. Young fathers with little education or job prospects find themselves in arrears and facing jail time or the loss of their driver’s licenses as a result, making it all the harder to start earning and paying, said David J. Pate Jr., an assistant professor of social work at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
One startling indicator of how pervasively the poor are affected is highlighted by Daniel L. Hatcher, a legal expert on welfare issues at the University of Baltimore School of Law, in a forthcoming law review article. Of the nation’s total uncollected child-support arrears of $105 billion in 2006, Professor Hatcher writes, fully half was owed to the federal and state governments to recover welfare costs, rather than to families.
When Congress set up the current child support system in the 1970s, recovering welfare costs was an explicit goal, with some experts arguing that it was only fair for fathers to repay the government for sustaining their offspring and that giving families the money was a form of “double dipping.” But experience and research have suggested to most experts and state and federal officials from both parties that the policy is counterproductive — driving fathers into the underground economy and leaving families more dependent on aid.
Today, said Ron Haskins, a Republican expert at the Brookings Institution, “I don’t think anyone thinks it’s double dipping, especially because one of the major goals is to get more money to the mother so she can stay off welfare.”
The major obstacle to change, Mr. Haskins said, “has usually been that it cost both the federal government and the states money.”
Studies of the Wisconsin experiment showed that when support payments were fully passed along to mothers, more fathers came forward and paid more of the support they owed, said Maria Cancian, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. As families receive more support money, they are less apt to require public assistance, she and other experts say, making up for any short-term loss of revenues. And fathers are more likely to establish lasting patterns of payment and connection with their children, Ms. Cancian said.
Using child support for revenue collection “is penny wise and pound foolish,” she added.
Tonya Wenk, 24, of Milwaukee is so angry at the reduction in payments for her daughter that she and the father have applied to withdraw from the child support system. Ms. Wenk said the father, Lashun Gray, had always paid his required sum to the state and more in private.
Mr. Gray, 26, a forklift driver at a large store, said of the disappearing money, “It bothers me a lot.”
The federal government refused to extend the waiver that allowed Wisconsin to pay all money to families, but the state, despite a $27 million cut in federal aid, continues to forgive its own share of welfare costs.
That is why Ms. Hart, like others in Wisconsin, is receiving more than she would in other states. But this is small comfort to the ailing mother, who had to move to Milwaukee’s outskirts when the building where she rented an apartment was lost to foreclosure, must share a bed with a daughter and worries that she cannot buy a computer for her children in high school.
“The school says go to a library to use one, but we don’t have any transport to the library,” said Ms. Hart, who cannot even think of owning a car.
Going to work, she said, may have been a wash financially because her federal disability check and food stamps were reduced, as is her energy.
“As soon as I catch up, I’ll slow down, but it just keeps going,” she said. “I’m tired and worn out.”
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7) U.S. Credit Crisis Adds to Gloom in Arctic Norway
By MARK LANDLER
December 2, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/world/europe/02norway.html?hp
NARVIK, Norway, Nov. 30 — At this time of year, the sun does not rise at all this far north of the Arctic Circle. But Karen Margrethe Kuvaas says she has not been able to sleep well for days.
What is keeping her awake are the far-reaching ripple effects of the troubled housing market in sunny Florida, California and other parts of the United States.
Ms. Kuvaas is the mayor of Narvik, a remote seaport where the season’s perpetual gloom deepened even further in recent days after news that the town — along with three other Norwegian municipalities — had lost about $64 million, and potentially much more, in complex securities investments that went sour.
“I think about it every minute,” Ms. Kuvaas, 60, said in an interview, her manner polite but harried. “Because of this, we can’t focus on things that matter, like schools or care for the elderly.”
Norway’s unlucky towns are the latest victims — and perhaps the least likely ones so far — of the credit crisis that began last summer in the American subprime mortgage market and has spread to the farthest reaches of the world, causing untold losses and sowing fears about the global economy.
Where all of the bad debt ended up remains something of a mystery, but to those hit by the collateral damage, it hardly matters. Tiny specks on the map, these Norwegian towns are links in a chain of misery that stretches from insolvent homeowners in California to the state treasury of Maine, and from regional banks in Germany to the mightiest names on Wall Street. Citigroup, among the hardest hit, created the investments bought by the towns through a Norwegian broker.
For Ms. Kuvaas, being in such company is no comfort. People here are angry and scared, fearing that the losses will hurt local services like kindergartens, nursing homes and cultural institutions. With Christmas only weeks away, Narvik has already missed a payroll for municipal workers.
Above all, the residents want to know how their close-knit community of 18,000 could have mortgaged its future — built on the revenue from a hydroelectric plant on a nearby fjord — by dabbling in what many view as the black arts of investment bankers in distant places.
“The people in City Hall were naïve and they were manipulated,” said Paal Droenen, who was buying fish at a market across the street from the mayor’s office. “The fund guys were telling them tales, like, ‘This could happen to you.’ It’s a catastrophe for a small town like this.”
Now, the towns are considering legal action against the Norwegian brokerage company, Terra Securities, that sold them the investments. They allege that they were duped by Terra’s brokers, who did not warn them that these types of securities were risky and subject to being cashed out, at a loss, if their market price fell below a certain level.
“When you sell something that is not what you say it is, that is a lie,” Ms. Kuvaas said. She disputed the suggestion that people here lacked the sophistication to understand what they were buying. “We’re not especially stupid because we live so far in the north,” she said.
Norway’s financial regulator agreed that the brokers had misled the towns, and it revoked the license of Terra Securities, prompting the company to file for bankruptcy. But the company’s parent, Terra Group, which is in turn owned by 78 savings banks and remains in business, rejected calls for it to compensate the towns. A spokesman for the group said it too had taken a hit from the episode.
Norway’s finance minister, Kristin Halvorsen, has ruled out the possibility of a state bailout, and Citigroup, which announced Thursday that it would shut down one of the money-losing investments Narvik bought, said it had no legal obligation to step in.
At City Hall, the stark reality of the situation is starting to set in. Narvik’s chief administrator, Trond L. Hermansen, figures he may recoup half of the town’s $9.4 million investment in the defunct Citigroup product — a package of securities linked to municipal bonds in the United States. Those securities declined in value after the market for bonds dried up.
But Narvik put $34.5 million into a second Citigroup-designed investment, known as a collateralized debt obligation, which has also lost value as a result of the broader market turmoil. The town stands to lose at least some of that money, too.
These investments represent a quarter of Narvik’s annual budget of $163 million, and covering the losses would necessitate taking out a long-term loan, which the town could only pay off by cutting back on services.
“You can calculate this in terms of places for schoolchildren or help for the elderly,” said Mr. Hermansen, a soft-spoken man who sat in his office in near-darkness, the lights switched off.
As the losses begin to bite, the political finger-pointing has begun. Down the hall from Ms. Kuvaas, the town’s opposition leader, Torgeir Traeldal, is calling for an investigation of how and why Narvik could have made such an ill-advised investment.
“Heads are going to roll,” Mr. Traeldal said, repeating the phrase a few times to drive home his point.
From Mr. Traeldal’s window, cargo ships are visible in Narvik’s harbor, waiting to be loaded with iron ore. They testify to the town’s strategic location, more than 120 miles north of the Arctic Circle, not far from rich ore fields in Sweden. This has long made Narvik a target of opportunity for foreigners.
Hitler viewed the port as an important conquest because it could provide Nazi Germany with an ice-free harbor from which to ship iron ore to build his war machine. The British had similar ideas, and the stage was set for one of the first great naval battles of World War II.
In April 1940, German warships sailed to Narvik. They were met by Norwegian and British ships, and the ensuing clashes left hundreds of sailors dead and the wrecks of more than a dozen destroyers scattered in the fjords.
Narvik’s war history is chronicled in a little museum next to the fish market that attracts visitors from around the world. But it, too, may be a victim of the crisis. Ulf Eirik Torgersen, the director, said the town told him his budget would be cut by 40 percent, which could mean closing.
“That would be a shame,” he said, “because this whole town is based on naval history and war history.”
Nowadays, scuba divers prospect the World War II shipwrecks, part of the town’s busy tourist trade. Like many other Norwegian towns, Narvik also gets hefty tax payments and other revenue from the nearby hydropower plant. This wealth is what got it into trouble.
In 2004, Narvik and a number of other towns took out a large loan, using future energy revenue as collateral. They invested the money, through Terra Securities, in the Citigroup debt vehicle, which offered a better return than traditional investments. In June 2007, as the subprime problems were brewing, Narvik shifted some money from that investment into an even more complex one, again through Terra Securities.
Within weeks, as the market deteriorated, this investment declined in value, and Narvik got a letter from Terra Securities, demanding an additional payment of $2.8 million. Mr. Hermansen said Terra’s brokers never told him that he would be liable for such payments.
The chief investigator of Norway’s financial regulator, Eystein Kleven, said Terra Securities’ Norwegian-language prospectus did not mention such payments, or other risk factors. Citigroup’s term sheet did provide information on risks, but Narvik only got a copy after it had signed the agreement.
“This is the most serious matter we have dealt with in the stock market in the last 10 years,” Mr. Kleven said.
Even if the Norwegian prospectus had been complete, it is not certain that Narvik would have shunned the investment. Ms. Kuvaas, for one, said she did not read the prospectus before voting to authorize it — a decision that was made when she was in the government but not yet mayor. She said the town trusted Terra Securities, with which it had worked since the late 1990s.
To local residents, the bigger question is why Narvik would gamble its future energy revenue on exotic investments.
“We’re upset with our politicians because they should have known better,” said Eileen Jacobsen, 34, a kindergarten teacher. “If this was a private person who did this, people would say, ‘Hello?’ ”
Ms. Jacobsen, who has a son in kindergarten, said she worried that the town would cut back on resources. Fourteen adults look after 54 children at the kindergarten. But, even without the crisis, Narvik has 40 children on a waiting list for kindergarten, something that is considered almost a right in Norway.
With candles burning in the windows and lights strung on the streets, Narvik and its residents seem determined not to let the losses spoil the season. But late at night, in the Narvik Guten pub, the sadness is palpable. “I really love this town,” said Per Ellingsen, 45, a carpenter who recently returned home after years away. “I’m afraid this is going to set us back 10 years.”
Walter Gibbs contributed reporting from Oslo.
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8) We're Proposing a Constitution of Transition to Socialism
Interview with Roberto Hernandez, vice president of the Venezuelan
National Assembly.
JUAN ANTONIO BORREGO and CALIXTO N. LLANES (photo)
GRANMA
November 29, 2007
CARACAS.- In the legislative history of Venezuela, which includes the
approval of 26 constitutions in the last two centuries, no reform has
been as consulted with the general population than the one proposed
by President Hugo Chavez to the 1999 Constitution, said Robert
Hernandez, the vice president of the Venezuelan legislature.
ROBERTO HERNANDEZ: "WE ARE NOT MAKING A NEW CONSTITUTION."
Hernandez, who joined the communist youth when he was 14 years old,
is an attorney and sociologist. He spoke with Granma on the
referendum to be voted on Sunday, December 2.
"We are transferring greater powers to the people and that's
precisely the first step towards socialism. It's not anything other
than giving society functions that until now have been privileges of
the State," said Hernandez.
However, you have insisted that what's being considered is not a
socialist constitution.
RH: We are not making a socialist constitution; we are making a
constitution that is a transition towards socialism. Within it, the
institutions of the old class society coexist with new ones that we
want to move towards a socialist future."
But the opposition talks about a legislative coup, a coup by the
executive against the constitution.
RH: Those are clever statements, but they know all too well that this
does not represent a coup. But don't forget that those who claim
today to be the defenders of the Constitution opposed its approval in
1999, and not only opposed it, but they are the same people who
carried out a short-lived coup (April 11-14, 2002) that did away with
the Constitution, dismissed all the freely elected State powers and
institutions including the Congress, Attorney General, governors and
mayors. As you can see they are acting like hypocrites, trying to
prevent the Venezuelan people from deciding their own destiny."
How do you see the issue of presidential reelection?
RH "The people are going to decide if they want to allow the
reelection of a president. Besides, from a middle class point of
view, they [the opposition] can't say it's a bad idea because they
have used reelection numerous times. From a democratic socialist
point of view I think what's correct is that the people can elect
among diverse options. If a leader has done well and is capable of
continuing, he could be reelected again.
What are the benefits that the reforms offer to the majority of the
population?
RH: In the proposal we are widening the rights of people who are
self-employed and presently don't have access to social security.
That's about five million people and also includes housewives.
Venezuela has been a country of incredible paradox. A country
immensely rich in natural resources and nonetheless 80 percent of its
population lived in poverty. We have been attacking that situation
over these years, but with big obstacles, because the privileged
sectors have always refused to share a part of the wealth with the
majority.
When President Chavez presented the reform package he proposed
changes in only 33 articles. The National Assembly and citizen
proposals raised the changes to 69. How were those suggestions
incorporated?
RH: We have held more than 5,000 little parliament meetings on the
street level and gathered many opinions and suggestions that were
integrated into the president's proposal. The additional reforms are
based on the idea to increase citizen empowerment. We also want
community councils and others of workers, small farmers, students,
women, professionals and technicians to take part in the daily
decisions regarding the problems they face.
So what's your prediction for Sunday's vote?
RH: The reforms will undoubtedly triumph. The problem for us, the
revolutionaries, is that we don't want to simply obtain more votes
than the opposition. We want this victory to be overwhelming and for
a large portion of the electorate to participate giving it greater
legitimacy.
Are we talking about a profoundly reformed constitution or
practically a new one?
RH: We are not making a new constitution.
We are developing principles that already exist in the current
constitution. I would also say that you can explain it in a
historical context. In a revolutionary process things move fast and
it's logical that the legal framework is also transformed alongside
the events. That's exactly what is happening in Venezuela.
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9) US War Vets to Speak Publicly About War Crimes
by Aaron Glantz
Published on Friday, November 30, 2007
One World.net
SAN FRANCISCO — U.S. war veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have
announced they’re planning to descend on Washington, DC this March to
testify about war crimes they committed or personally witnessed in
Iraq.1130 09
“The war in Iraq is not covered to its potential because of how
dangerous it is for reporters to cover it,” said Liam Madden, a
former Marine and member of the group Iraq Veterans Against the War.
“That’s left a lot of misconceptions in the minds of the American
public about what the true nature of military occupation looks like.”
Iraq Veterans Against the War argues that well-publicized incidents
of American brutality like the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the
massacre of an entire family of Iraqis in the town of Haditha are not
the isolated incidents perpetrated by “a few bad apples,” as many
politicians and military leaders have claimed. They are part of a
pattern, the group says, of “an increasingly bloody occupation.”
“This is our generation getting to tell history,” Madden told
OneWorld, “to ensure that the actual history gets told — that it’s
not a sugar-coated, diluted version of what actually happened.”
Iraq Veterans Against the War is calling the gathering a “Winter
Soldier,” named after a similar event organized by Vietnam veterans
in 1971.
In 1971, over 100 members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War
gathered in Detroit to share their stories with America. Atrocities
like the My Lai massacre had ignited popular opposition to the war,
but political and military leaders insisted that such crimes were
isolated exceptions.
“Initially even the My Lai massacre was denied,” notes Gerald
Nicosia, whose book Home to War provides the most exhaustive history
of the Vietnam veterans’ movement.
“The U.S. military has traditionally denied these accusations based
on the fact that ‘this is a crazy soldier’ or ‘this is a malcontent’
— that you can’t trust this person. And that is the reason that
Vietnam Veterans Against the War did this unified presentation in
Detriot in 1971.
“They brought together their bonafides and wore their medals and
showed it was more than one or two or three malcontents. It was medal-
winning, honored soldiers — veterans in a group verifying what each
other said to try to convince people that these charges cannot be
denied. That people are doing these things as a matter of policy.”
Nicosia says the 1971 “Winter Soldier” was roundly ignored by the
mainstream media, but that it made an indelible imprint on those who
were there.
Among those in attendance was 27-year-old Navy Lieutenant John Kerry,
who had served on a Swift Boat in Vietnam. Three months after the
hearings, Nicosia notes, Kerry took his case to Congress and spoke
before a jammed Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Television
cameras lined the walls, and veterans packed the seats.
“Many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes
committed in Southeast Asia,” Kerry told the Committee, describing
the events of the “Winter Soldier” gathering.
“It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in
Detroit — the emotions in the room, and the feelings of the men who
were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute
horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.”
In one of the most famous antiwar speeches of the era, Kerry
concluded: “Someone has to die so that President Nixon won’t be — and
these are his words — ‘the first President to lose a war’. We are
asking Americans to think about that, because how do you ask a man to
be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the
last man to die for a mistake?”
Nicosia says Americans and veterans find themselves in a similar
situation today.
“The majority of the American people are very dissatisfied with the
Iraq war now and would be happy to get out of it. But Americans are
bred deep into their psyches to think of America as a good country
and, I think, much harder than just the hurdle of getting troops out
of Iraq, is to get Americans to realize the terrible things we do in
the name of the United States.”
© 2007 One World.net
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10) The Saturday Profile
A Pygmy Traveler Gives Voice to a Marginalized People
By MITCH KELLER
December 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/world/africa/01lonoa.html?ex=1197176400&en=f2c601bc8de22ef4&ei=5070&emc=eta1
LYNCHBURG, Va.
THE first thing you notice about Antoine Lonoa, a Pygmy from Congo, is that contrary to the stereotype, he is not unusually small. Indeed, his size would not draw attention on any street in New York.
The second thing you notice is how easily Mr. Lonoa, the president of a group called the African Congress of the Pygmies, engages a roomful of curious Americans. With his quick smile, strong handshake and emphatic delivery, he passionately describes the plight of Congo’s Pygmies, whom he describes as “longtime victims of stigmatization, exclusion and contempt.”
He also knows how to tell a joke. In his opening remarks at a recent conference here, Mr. Lonoa said he had heard that Americans were getting shorter. He wondered if that meant that eventually “there could be 300 million Pygmies in the United States.”
The humor helps. As a rare spokesman for the hundreds of thousands of Pygmies in nations like Congo, Mr. Lonoa is only too familiar with what he calls the “repugnance” society feels toward his people and the “inferiority complex” it has engendered in them.
While most Pygmies still live in the forest, they are being displaced and driven out by the relentless encroachment of the modern world: huge logging enterprises, settlement, the development of national parks, and violence among militias and rebel groups. Forced to relinquish their traditional territory — “land which we have occupied forever,” Mr. Lonoa said — and lacking both civil documentation and a political voice, Pygmies often take up a precarious existence at the shabby margins of society.
But here in Lynchburg, a grimly symbolic place in Pygmy history, Mr. Lonoa and his wife, Thérèse Pambo, were treated as celebrity guests by scholars and students at a three-day conference in late October dedicated to their cause. Generations ago, Ota Benga, a Congolese Pygmy infamously displayed in a cage at the Bronx Zoo in September 1906, lived the last six years of his life here in Lynchburg. He committed suicide here in 1916, when he was in his early 30s, and was buried here.
So it was that Mr. Lonoa, Ms. Pambo and Grégoire Bokungu, a pro-Pygmy activist who traveled with the Pygmies from Kinshasa, Congo, found themselves in comfortable lodgings at idyllic Sweet Briar College in Sweet Briar, Va., riding in a shuttle van each morning past curiosities like Biscuitville, Food Lion, AutoZone and Dixie Outfitters.
Although he lives in Kinshasa now, Mr. Lonoa, 63, is from rural Bandundu Province, east of Kinshasa. He is among the small percentage of Pygmies who can read and write. Going to school, he said, is difficult or impossible for Congo’s Pygmies; most of them still live far from towns and all of them face discrimination from the majority Bantu.
“You have to be very, very strong,” he said. “You have to be willing to put up with being treated like a second-class citizen.”
AS a boy, Mr. Lonoa said, he had the good fortune of going to live in a town where the Bantu tribe was more tolerant of Pygmies, a move he made at the urging of a brother who was already there, and Bantu helped Mr. Lonoa get his schooling.
Eventually he became a teacher and school administrator in Bandundu, a considerable accomplishment. But in Kinshasa, where he has lived since the mid-1990s, he has had a couple of different jobs, including parking attendant, and has often been unemployed.
Scientists believe that Pygmies were the original inhabitants of central Africa’s vast rain forest, which has always provided for all their physical and spiritual needs. There are many different Pygmy societies in about a dozen African countries; Mr. Lonoa and Ms. Pambo are Batwa Pygmies. In Congo, a country of more than 60 million people, most estimates put the Pygmy population between 250,000 and 600,000.
Many Bantu refuse to eat or socialize with Pygmies, or to pay them what they would pay a Bantu for the same work. “Pygmies are abandoned to their own fate,” said Mr. Bokungu, a Bantu.
Despite its name’s suggestion of grand meeting halls and assembled legislators, the African Congress of the Pygmies is a small, struggling collaborative of people trying to promote and protect Congo’s Pygmies. It has very little money and no office.
Like many of the Pygmies in Kinshasa, Mr. Lonoa and Ms. Pambo, who is a vice president of the collaborative, did not even have a permanent place to live until their new friends in Lynchburg stepped up. Enough money was raised to make a $500 deposit on an apartment and to start paying the $50 monthly rent.
When Mr. Lonoa was asked how he would spread the news about his trip to America once he got home, he laughed. With no office and little money, communication is difficult.
“I don’t have the material possibilities to do this,” he said, speaking French through an interpreter. “If you give me money, I’d like you to give me some people, too, to guide me.”
Mr. Lonoa and Ms. Pambo were not the only Pygmies in the United States this fall. In October, two Pygmies from Congo met with officials of the World Bank in Washington. Pygmies recently scored a moral victory against the bank when a leaked report by the bank’s own watchdog panel said the bank had backed environmentally destructive logging projects without consulting the Pygmies, and without considering the effects of the logging on the Pygmies’ way of life. The report also found that logging companies had not delivered on pledges to invest in aid projects like schools and clinics.
One of the people most responsible for waking Lynchburg to its Pygmy legacy and bringing Mr. Lonoa here is Dibinga wa Said, a Congolese political activist who now lives in Boston and is a patron of the African Congress of the Pygmies. A few years ago, having learned the story of Ota Benga, Dr. Dibinga came to Lynchburg in search of the Pygmy’s burial site.
“They are animals, as far as the Congolese are concerned,” Dr. Dibinga, a Bantu, said of the Pygmies. He said Westerners displayed “a form of racism” when they showed more concern for Africa’s endangered gorillas than for the Pygmies and other trampled peoples. “Africa is not a zoo for your amusement,” he said. “It is a continent of people who are struggling.”
MR. LONOA’S trip to America included his first visit to a dentist, for an extraction, and a journey by bus to New York and the United Nations. Still, he did not seem overwhelmed by New York. “There were so many people, it was so crowded, it reminded me of Kinshasa,” he said.
He said he and his wife had been warmly welcomed by Americans, who struck him as so cheerful and positive that a visitor from Africa might wonder “if they even have troubles at all,” he said.
Coming from a country bigger than California and Alaska combined that has only several hundred miles of paved roads, Mr. Lonoa was particularly struck by one convenience that Westerners take for granted.
“The roads are very well maintained,” he said.
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11) Witness Names to Be Withheld From Detainee
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
December 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/us/nationalspecial3/01gitmo.html
Defense lawyers preparing for the war crimes trial of a 21-year-old Guantánamo detainee have been ordered by a military judge not to tell their client — or anyone else — the identity of witnesses against him, newly released documents show.
The case of the detainee, Omar Ahmed Khadr, is being closely watched because it may be the first Guantánamo prosecution to go to trial, perhaps as soon as May.
Defense lawyers say military prosecutors have sought similar orders to keep the names of witnesses secret in other military commission cases, which have been a centerpiece of the Bush administration’s policies for detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Some legal experts and defense lawyers said the judge’s order, issued on Oct. 15 without public disclosure, underscored the gap between military commission procedures and traditional American rules that the accused has a right to a public trial and to confront the witnesses against him.
Defense lawyers say the order would hamper their ability to build an adequate defense because they cannot ask their client or anyone else about prosecution witnesses, making it difficult to test the veracity of testimony.
The order, the documents show, followed a request by military prosecutors who said they feared terrorist retaliation against witnesses who appeared at Guantánamo proceedings.
“It is conceivable, if not likely, that Al Qaeda members or sympathizers could attempt to target witnesses,” a prosecutor, Maj. Jeffrey D. Groharing of the Marines, wrote to the judge, Col. Peter E. Brownback III of the Army.
The order says that three weeks before trial, prosecutors can abandon the secrecy protections or ask the judge to extend them. Prosecutors have also suggested that they may ask the judge to bar all information identifying witnesses from the trial. “Providing the witnesses’ true identities will add nothing to their testimony,” the prosecutors wrote in a legal filing.
Mr. Khadr’s military defense lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. William C. Kuebler of the Navy, said that while he has been given a list of prosecution witnesses, the judge’s decision requires him to keep secrets from his client and that he would ask Colonel Brownback to revoke the order. He said it treated Mr. Khadr as if he had already been convicted and deprived him of a trial at which the public could assess the evidence against him.
“Instead of a presumption of innocence and of a public trial,” Commander Kuebler said, “we start with a presumption of guilt and of a secret trial.”
Mr. Khadr, the only Canadian detainee at Guantánamo, is charged with killing an American soldier, giving material support for terrorism and other offenses. The documents released by the Pentagon, nearly 700 pages of previously unavailable records of arguments and rulings in the Khadr case in recent months, reflect a battle under way over how much information is to be revealed in public at the Guantánamo trials.
Some parts of trials are expected to be conducted in closed courtrooms for discussion of classified evidence, as permitted by law. Military officials say some witnesses might testify in open court behind a screen or, perhaps, in disguise.
The Bush administration’s effort to bring detainees to trial has been hampered for years by legal and logistical complications, but prosecutors have said they hope to try eventually as many as 80 of the 305 detainees at Guantánamo.
In an interview, Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, a senior official in the Pentagon’s Office of Military Commissions, said that the commission system was open to scrutiny from news organizations and human rights groups and that the order was necessary to protect the lives of witnesses.
“The system is designed to be open,” General Hartmann said. “But there are certain things that simply must be protected.”
Most witnesses in Mr. Khadr’s case are expected to be military personnel who took part in a 2002 firefight in Afghanistan when an American special forces soldier, Sgt. First Class Christopher James Speer, 28, was fatally wounded. Mr. Khadr, who was 15 at the time, was badly injured.
“It is so fundamental,” General Hartmann said, “that we’re in this global war on terror. We need to protect our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines and there’s nothing nefarious about it.”
He said requiring prosecutors to identify which witnesses they want to remain anonymous before the trial would assure that the military judge will evaluate assertions about why individual witnesses may need anonymity.
But Joshua L. Dratel, a lawyer in New York who represented another detainee prosecuted for war crimes, described such orders as an Orwellian effort to hamstring defense lawyers while making it appear that detainees are rigorously represented.
“It is ‘1984,’” Mr. Dratel said. “No system in the United States would operate this way.”
Some legal experts said while the identities of witnesses were shielded on rare occasions in American courts, an order applying to all witnesses in a case would be exceptional.
Such an order “would be very, very unusual” in a civilian court, said James A. Cohen, a Fordham University law professor, adding that he knew of no blanket order protecting the identities of all witnesses in a case.
Scott L. Silliman, a law professor and the director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke University, said people who had not heard the arguments could not fairly evaluate Judge Brownback’s order.
The military judge had the responsibility to protect witnesses while assuring a fair hearing, Mr. Silliman said. He added that Judge Brownback’s order appeared to balance those considerations appropriately.
But David D. Cole, a Georgetown University law professor who has been a critic of the commissions, said shielding the identities of witnesses “plays into the perception around the world that that United States is not willing to give detainees a fair shake.”
The materials released on Thursday, after numerous requests from news organizations, include extensive legal arguments and judicial orders on many central legal issues in Mr. Khadr’s case.
Many of the arguments, the documents show, occurred in e-mail exchanges between the lawyers and Judge Brownback. Only some of them have been referred to in two brief public hearings on the case at Guantánamo.
In an e-mail message on Oct. 9, Major Groharing, the prosecutor, described Mr. Khadr as a “trained Al Qaeda operative” who is “certainly capable of exacting revenge” on witnesses should he ever be free.
The major also indicated that military prosecutors had difficulties persuading people to testify at Guantánamo. “Potential witnesses have previously expressed reservations with participation in the military commission process because of fear of retaliation from Al Qaeda,” he wrote.
Commander Kuebler’s e-mail messages were filled with assertions that his client’s rights were being violated and with arguments that Mr. Khadr should be afforded the lenient treatment that has been accorded child fighters in some other wars. He ridiculed “the absurdity of characterizing an alleged former child soldier” as a dangerous terrorist and said the prosecution was ignoring rules assuring that detainees charged with war crimes are entitled to public trials.
In an e-mail message on Oct. 11 to the judge and the prosecutors, Commander Kuebler argued that it was notable that the entire discussion of whether witnesses would be permitted to shield their identities was being conducted without anyone in the public or the press able to observe the arguments.
“The manner in which this is being dealt with (i.e., off the record, via e-mail),” he wrote, “creates an added level of difficulty by making it appear that the government is trying to keep the secrecy of the proceedings a secret itself.”
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12) Figures on H.I.V. Rate Expected to Rise
By BLOOMBERG NEWS
December 2, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/health/02aids.html?ref=us
The United States government’s estimate of annual new H.I.V. infections is likely to rise as much as 50 percent, say patient advocates who are pressing officials to speed the release of the new figures.
Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have said new technologies and statistical analyses show that 50,000 to 60,000 people were infected with the virus in 2005, said Walt Senterfitt, an epidemiologist with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health and a former adviser for the centers. The agency has used an estimate of about 40,000 annual infections since 2001.
World health officials last month decreased their estimate of the number of people infected with H.I.V. by about 16 percent, to 33.2 million from 39.5 million. A higher estimate for the United States would not necessarily mean the country is moving in an opposite direction from the rest of the world, Dr. Senterfitt said.
“The old U.S. estimate was back of the envelope,” Dr. Senterfitt said in an interview. “We won’t know until the new system has been applied for at least three years in a row.”
Dr. Senterfitt and other patient advocates said officials at the centers had frequently referred to higher estimates of H.I.V. infection in meetings and conferences.
Jennifer Ruth, a spokeswoman for the centers, said the data on H.I.V. infections was going through a review process for publication in a medical journal. Until that process is complete, its estimate of annual infections will remain unchanged, she said.
“We really can’t speak to what the revised estimate will be, and it will be at least a few months until we’re ready to do so,” Ms. Ruth said in an interview.
Patient advocates have been looking for the new figure since 2005, believing that it shows the need for stronger H.I.V. prevention measures, said David Munar, the vice chairman of the National Association of People with AIDS, based in Silver Spring, Md.
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13) A Rising Number of Birds at Risk
By ANTHONY DePALMA
December 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/nyregion/01birds.html?ref=nyregion
Relentless sprawl, invasive species and global warming are threatening an increasing number of bird species in the United States, pushing a quarter of them — including dozens in New York and New Jersey — toward extinction, according to a new study by the National Audubon Society and the American Bird Conservancy.
The study, called WatchList 2007, categorized 178 species in the United States as being threatened, an increase of about 10 percent from 2002, when Audubon’s last study was conducted. Of the 178 species on the list, about 45 spend at least part of the year in this region.
Among the most threatened is the rare Bicknell’s thrush, a native of the Catskill and Adirondack highlands whose winter habitat in the Caribbean is disappearing. Although less at risk, the wood thrush — whose distinctive song was once emblematic of the Northeast’s rugged woodlands — is on the list because a combination of acid rain and sprawl has damaged its habitat and caused its numbers to decline precipitously over the last four decades.
The Audubon list, which was released Wednesday, overlaps the federal government’s official endangered species list in some cases. But it also includes a number of bird species that are not recognized as endangered by the federal government but that biologists fear are in danger of becoming extinct.
“We’re concerned that there’s been almost a moratorium on the listing of endangered birds over the last seven years under this administration,” Greg Butcher, Audubon’s bird conservation director and a co-author of the new study, said in a telephone interview. Placing a threatened bird on the new watch list can bring it the kind of attention it needs to survive even if the federal government does not act, he said.
“When we pay attention to these birds and do the things we know need to be done, these birds recover,” Mr. Butcher said. “All these birds have a chance to rebound if we put the right actions in motion.”
Those actions include channeling new development to established areas, being vigilant about new invasive species that can devastate habitats and limiting carbon dioxide emissions, which contribute to climate change.
The national watch list is divided into two categories: 59 species, including the whooping crane and the lesser prairie-chicken, are on the “red list” for species that are declining rapidly and facing major threats; 119 are on the “yellow list” for species that are declining or rare but are not yet endangered.
In New York, 10 birds — including the Henslow’s sparrow — are on the red list. The cerulean warbler, the short-eared owl and 35 other birds are on the yellow list. New Jersey’s list includes many of the same birds as New York’s. The count in Connecticut is similar, Mr. Butcher said.
The region’s coastal location raises issues of particular concern. Mr. Butcher said he was especially worried about beach birds like the piping plover, the least tern and the black skimmer, as well as birds whose habitat is the region’s disappearing salt marshes. They include the saltmarsh sharp-tailed sparrow and the clapper rail. And he noted that migratory shore birds, including the red knot and the semipalmated sandpiper, would face increasing difficulties in this region.
“As sea level rises, and the salt marshes disappear, these species don’t have anyplace to go,” Mr. Butcher said. “In New York and New Jersey, so many people live close to the coast that we do what we can to safeguard people but we don’t necessarily protect the natural habitat.”
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14) Wall St. Sees Silver Lining in Economy
By PETER S. GOODMAN
News Analysis
December 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/business/01econ.html?ref=business
As Wall Street rallied this week, it seemed that investors were taking comfort in the notion that the economy had become so imperiled by the crumbling housing market that it was forcing the government to finally mount an aggressive rescue effort.
Investors found reassurance yesterday in talk that the White House was brokering a deal with banks that could diminish a looming tidal wave of home foreclosures. Soothing words from the Federal Reserve earlier this week revived the hope that more interest rate cuts are on the way, drowning nervousness in a din of buying.
“The market now feels comfortable that the Fed has come to appreciate the severity of the situation,” said Robert Barbera, chief economist at the brokerage and advisory firm ITG. “The bad news gives you the blessing of lower interest rates.”
But even as investors took heart in palpable signs that the government was preparing to dole out more medicine for the ailing economy, a number of economists cautioned that the pain itself was still unfolding, with its ultimate magnitude far from known.
Signs point to a slowdown in the creation of jobs and investments by companies. Consumers are clutching their wallets more tightly. Banks are denying loans to many businesses, unwilling to bet scarce capital in a time of risk and uncertainty. A glut of unsold homes keeps prices falling and the construction industry in distress.
And even the sharp fall in the price of oil, which offered the comfort that higher energy costs might be easing, reflects a broader fear that global economic activity may slow as growth falters in the United States.
Looming large over the landscape is uncertainty about the size of losses still confronting banks and other financial institutions as they reckon with bad mortgages along with credit card debts, auto loans and the complex detritus of an era of loose money now over.
“It’s a sucker’s rally,” said Nouriel Roubini, a former Treasury official who runs an economic consultancy, RGE Monitor. “The market is essentially hoping the Fed can rescue the economy. But they are discounting the onslaught of really lousy economic news.”
The price of oil, which only last week threatened to break through $100 a barrel, closed yesterday at $88.71, completing its steepest weekly plunge in the last two years. Cheaper oil blunts the threat of inflation, adding to the sense that the Fed has room to take interest rates lower without worrying about setting off an upward price spiral.
But the lower price also reflects the view of investors who now expect a substantial American economic slowdown, which would ease the pressure of the rising demand for energy.
“The market is realizing how much of a train wreck the economy is right now," said John Kilduff, an energy analyst at MF Global in New York.
There are plenty of reasons, of course, to count on the economy’s inherent countervailing forces to ultimately help restore it to health. Lower interest rates should indeed spur more economic activity. A falling dollar has helped spur American exports and curb imports, contributing to a narrower trade deficit. And if the banks really do sign on to the deal the Bush administration is pushing to keep lower rates in place for subprime mortgages, that should keep a lot of people from losing their homes.
Yet many of the forces gnawing at the economy remain in place, and actually appear to be intensifying. The trajectory was reinforced by data released yesterday, which showed that Americans now have less money in their pockets and are less inclined to spend.
Personal income grew at a seasonally adjusted rate of 0.2 percent in October compared with September, the Commerce Department reported. That was only half the rate expected. Consumption grew a paltry 0.2 percent, dropping from the 0.3 percent increase registered in September. Construction spending plummeted at double the anticipated pace.
Perhaps more ominously, a government report released yesterday suggested that the number of jobs created in the spring was far smaller than previously assumed.
The economy generally needs about 125,000 new nonfarm jobs each month to absorb newcomers entering the labor force and employ those who have lost work, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. In 2006, the economy was still creating about 200,000 positions a month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But in the first 10 months of this year, the number slipped to 125,000.
On Friday, the government is to disclose how many nonfarm jobs were created in November. Mr. Zandi and many economists expect the number to fall to about 75,000. “That will erode confidence in the economy,” he said. “It becomes self-reinforcing, and the economy will slide into recession.”
If the economy does land in recession, “that would mean we’re going to lose a million jobs over a two-year period,” predicted Alan D. Levenson, chief economist at T. Rowe Price Associates in Baltimore. Whether the economy can avoid that fate, Mr. Levenson suggested, may ride on whether the words of comfort the market heard this week turn out to be sincere.
The Fed has to drop rates enough to break the financial logjam and encourage businesses and households to borrow and spend anew. The White House has to deliver a deal that really will prevent millions of families from losing their homes, he said.
“If the president puts his seal on it, that would tell me the grown-ups are in charge,” Mr. Levenson said.
Floyd Norris and Jad Mouawad contributed reporting.
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15) Labor Pacts in Detroit Didn’t Ease Stocks’ Slide
By NICK BUNKLEY and MICHELINE MAYNARD
December 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/business/01place.html?ref=business
DETROIT, Nov. 30 — Detroit auto companies have long expected a quid pro quo from Wall Street when it came to their dealings with the United Automobile Workers union.
Once the companies won labor contracts that improved their competitiveness, investors would bid up their share prices, or so they thought.
Instead, shares of General Motors and the Ford Motor Company have been sliding since this summer when talks began on new four-year contracts. While the shares rose Friday, along with the market, the outlook for auto sales in 2008 is increasingly pessimistic as the broader economy struggles and the housing crisis deepens.
That has gotten the 2008 model year off to a gloomy start for auto companies, which on Monday are expected to report lower sales for November. The carmakers are relying on new versions of vehicles like the Chevrolet Malibu and the Ford Focus to lure buyers into showrooms.
G.M. shares have fallen by a third since reaching a 52-week high of $43.20 in mid-October, shortly after members of the U.A.W. ratified a contract that was reached after a two-day strike.
Ford’s share price has fallen about 25 percent since starting talks with the union in July, even though it reached a deal without walkouts like the ones at G.M. and Chrysler.
“Structural issues are clearly getting better,” an analyst at Morgan Stanley, Jonathan Steinmetz, said Friday in a research report, “but cyclical factors are clearly getting worse.”
It is an especially abrupt reversal for G.M. Its share price rose 57.7 percent last year, making it the stock with the biggest increase among the Dow Jones industrial average.
G.M.’s chief financial officer, Frederick A. Henderson, helped heighten the gloom Thursday night at a dinner with analysts in Manhattan. According to analysts’ reports, Mr. Henderson predicted that automobile sales in the United States, which are expected to be slightly more than 16 million this year, would fall to about 15.7 million in 2008.
The news caused concern, analysts said, because G.M. based its reorganization plan two years ago on an annual selling rate of 17 million vehicles, the level in the early part of the decade.
Mr. Steinmetz at Morgan Stanley said G.M. clearly expects “a tough near-term environment.”
An analyst with Lehman Brothers, Brian Johnson, said the overall economy was simply too distressed for investors to feel upbeat about the Detroit companies. He said G.M.’s shares have fallen more than Ford’s because the company’s financing arm, the General Motors Acceptance Corporation, has been hit hard by the collapse of the subprime mortgage market. Ford has little exposure to subprime mortgages.
“The good news is Ford and G.M. are no longer basket-case restructuring plays,” Mr. Johnson said. “But having turned themselves into a cyclical stock, they’re coming in at a point when investors don’t want to touch those stocks.”
On Friday, shares of G.M. rose $1.09 to $29.87, and Ford rose 22 cents to $7.51.
The deteriorating economic environment has led both G.M. and Chrysler to make more cuts. G.M. said it was eliminating shifts at three plants, and Chrysler said it would cut 11,000 more jobs, on top of 13,000 announced earlier. The news came five days after workers narrowly approved a contract, following a six-hour strike.
The reductions might not end there. This week, Chrysler’s chief executive, Robert L. Nardelli, told employees that more layoffs could be needed if the market weakens more than expected.
Separately, Chrysler’s vice president for North American sales, Steven Landry, told business students at his alma mater in Nova Scotia that Chrysler anticipated losing about $1 billion in the 2008 fiscal year, on top of a $1.5 billion loss in 2007. That was an unexpected disclosure for an executive from Chrysler, which became a private company this year and no longer has to disclose financial data.
Mr. Landry, who was speaking at a ceremony to present a donation from Chrysler, said the company expected to break even in 2008 before becoming profitable in 2009, according to The Daily News in Halifax.
A Chrysler spokeswoman, Lori Pinter, declined to confirm the figures. Mr. Landry “was speaking off the cuff and using some general examples from the standpoint of mentoring the students,” she said.
Analysts are forecasting that all three Detroit carmakers will report sales declines on Monday, when they release November figures. Toyota, Honda and Nissan of Japan, which have fewer trucks in their lineups, are expected to post increases.
Chrysler is expected to report a double-digit decline, according to Edmunds.com, which predicts an 11.2 percent drop, while Mr. Johnson expects a 17 percent decline. The analysts said they expected smaller decreases for G.M. and for Ford, whose sales have fallen for 12 consecutive months.
Nick Bunkley reported from Detroit and Micheline Maynard from New York.
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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Senator Criticizes Genentech’s Limits on a Cheaper Drug
By BLOOMBERG NEWS
Genentech’s plan to restrict the availability of Avastin so doctors cannot use it instead of a more expensive medicine for eye disease will cost taxpayers $1 billion to $3 billion a year, according to Senator Herb Kohl.
Senator Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin, said in letters to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Food and Drug Administration that Genentech’s decision to limit access to the medicine by pharmacies that repackage drugs “is of great concern.”
He also sent the company a letter saying that his staff would investigate the restrictions.
The company, based in South San Francisco, wants specialists to buy its newer treatment, Lucentis, instead of Avastin.
November 29, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/business/29eye.html?ref=health
Weak Dollar Propels Sales at Tiffany
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Jewelry and luxury goods retailer Tiffany & Company’s third-quarter earnings more than tripled on strong sales growth and a gain on the sale and leaseback of its Tokyo flagship store, the company said yesterday.
It also raised its earnings outlook for the full year. However, the company’s stock fell $2.32, or 5 percent, to $46.43 a share, after a morning rally, as analysts expressed caution that its Manhattan flagship store has become a temporarily disproportionate driver of sales, helped by a flood of foreign tourists who are taking advantage of the declining dollar.
The company, based in New York, said net income climbed to $98.9 million, or 71 cents a share, from $29.1 million, or 21 cents per share, a year earlier.
Sales increased 18 percent to $627.3 million from $531.8 million a year earlier, helped by a 9 percent rise in global sales at stores open at least one year.
Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial expected profit of 25 cents a share.
December 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/business/01tiffany.html?ref=business
Israeli Court Upholds Gaza Fuel Cuts
By STEVEN ERLANGER
World Briefing | Middle East
Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the government could continue cutting fuel supplies to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, which it has done since Oct. 28. But it ordered a delay on plans to cut electricity until new details are offered by the groups challenging the plan.
December 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/world/middleeast/01briefs-gaza.html?ref=world
Canada: Man Dies After Shock From Taser
By IAN AUSTEN
World Briefing | Americas
November 23, 2007
A 45-year-old man who had been arrested on assault charges died, about a day after the police in Nova Scotia used a Taser to subdue him. The man was the third person to die in Canada in just over a month after being shocked by Tasers wielded by police officers. Justice Minister Cecil Clarke ordered a review of the use of the hand-held stun guns following the man’s death, the latest in a series of government inquiries into the use of Tasers by the police. Widespread outrage in Canada followed the broadcast of a video last month that showed another man being shocked at least twice with Tasers at a Vancouver airport by officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The man, a Polish immigrant who appeared extremely confused on the video, died. A Montreal man also died last month, three days after he was subdued by the police with a Taser while being arrested for drunken driving.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/23/world/americas/23briefs-taser.html?ref=world
California: Cards for Immigrants
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Lawmakers have given final approval to a law making San Francisco the nation’s largest city to issue identification cards to illegal immigrants. The Board of Supervisors voted 10 to 1 to create a municipal ID program to help residents without driver’s licenses obtain access to services and feel secure dealing with local law enforcement. The measure is modeled after a program that started last summer in New Haven, Conn. Supporters say that along with immigrants, elderly people who no longer drive and transgender individuals whose driver’s licenses no longer reflect their appearances also would benefit from having the cards. The measure goes into effect in August.
November 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/21/us/21brfs-CARDSFORIMMI_BRF.html?ref=us
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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We Didn't Start the Fire
http://yeli.us/Flash/Fire.html
I Can't Take it No More
http://lefti.blogspot.com/2007_11_01_archive.html#9214483115237950361
The Art of Mental Warfare
http://artofmentalwarfare.com/pog/artofmentalwarfarecom-the-warning/
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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"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.
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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">
