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Stop the ICE Raids!
Tuesday, May 27, 10 AM
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Headquarters
630 Sansome St (at Washington St.) San Francisco
THE ENFORCEMENT OF CURRENT IMMIGRATION LAW BY ICE IS UNWARRANTED AND
NEGATIVELY IMPACTS THE COMMUNITY FOR EVERYONE
aldi responds to ICE Press Release and Tuesday, May 27th Press Conference-Demonstration
To: ALDI llamado urgente
News Release
Contact: ALDI at (415)368-8481 or at
(831)261.2493
May 23, 2008
THE ENFORCEMENT OF CURRENT IMMIGRATION LAW BY ICE IS UNWARRANTED AND
NEGATIVELY IMPACTS THE COMMUNITY FOR EVERYONE
According to ICE officials, they have just completed a three week
enforcement surge that has netted them with the arrest of 905
individuals in California. Out of these 905, 441 of them were made
here in Northern California.
Many in our Northern California community probably did not even know
that ICE was up to such activities. However there were many who were
despondently waiting for these surges in enforcement. Undocumented or
with documents we understood that no matter what reason, fairness or
justice seemed to call for, that a legalization program for the
millions of our undocumented residents was not currently attainable.
But that did not mean that we idly waited for these actions to come.
On the contrary these actions seemed to bring out the justice seeker
in us, motivated us to become more informed and to work together and
be more connected with our undocumented immigrant community. As a
result we were well aware that ICE was targeting our communities.
Before ICE issued this press release we knew that ICE had arrested a
father of two in Watsonville, had deported another two who had been
detained by the Hayward Police for traffic violations and that early
yesterday morning, seventeen of our San Rafael community members had
been arrested.
Although these ICE officials are said to be enforcing the law, the
enforcement of current immigration law is unwarranted and overall
negatively impacts the community for everyone Instead of extracting
workers, consumers, students and ultimately human beings from our
communities, our federal government should work to create better
economic, social and educational opportunities for us.
Please join us
Press Conference - Demonstration:
Stop the ICE Raids!
Tuesday, May 27, 10 AM
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Headquarters
630 Sansome St (at Washington St.) San Francisco
An outrageous wave of anti-immigrant ICE raids is sweeping the nations
homes, schools, and workplaces, as business and government tries to
deflect anger over a failing economy, layoffs, rising prices, cuts in
social services, and continuing war.
In San Francisco, the first of the the first of the 63 Balazo Taqueria
workers seized in the May 2nd raids have their hearing on Tuesday, May
27. There will be a demonstration-press conference at 10 AM at ICE
headquarters, 630 Sansome St, demanding:
* Stop the raids on our homes, schools, and workplaces!
* Stop the deportations and the breaking up of our families!
* Immediate, unconditional legalization of immigrant families!
* Victims of deportations be allowed to return to their families!
People are also urged to be at ICE headquarters at 8:30 AM the same
day, to attend the siezed Balazo workers' hearings in support, if possible.
More information: 415-933-2023
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Call for an Open U.S. National Antiwar Conference
Stop the War in Iraq! Bring the Troops Home Now!
Join us in Cleveland on June 28-29 for the conference.
Sponsored by the National Assembly to End the Iraq War and Occupation
P.O. Box 21008; Cleveland, OH 44121; Voice Mail: 216-736-4704; Email: NatAssembly@aol.com
FOR REGISTRATION AND MORE INFORMATION:
http://natassembly.org/
TO READ THE CALL:
http://natassembly.org/thecall/
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
AN OPEN NATIONAL CONFERENCE TO SUPPORT THE DEMANDS:
Stop the War in Iraq! Bring the Troops Home NOW!
We invite everyone who opposes the war and occupation to attend an open democratic
national antiwar conference to place on the agenda of the entire US antiwar movement
a proposal for the largest possible united mass mobilization to stop the war and end
the occupation.
Saturday, June 28 & Sunday, June 29, 2008
Cleveland, Ohio
Speakers include:
Donna Dewitt, President, South Carolina AFL-CIO
Fred Mason, President of the Maryland AFL-CIO and President of the
Metro Washington D.C. Central Labor Council, one of the National
Co-Convenors of U.S. Labor Against the War
Greg Coleridge, Program Director, Northeast Ohio American Friends
Service Committee; Coordinator, Northeast Ohio Anti-War Coalition
Jonathan Hutto, Navy Petty Officer, author, Anti-War Soldier and
co-founder of Appeal for Redress
Jeremy Scahill, Author, of "Blackwater: The Rise of the World‚s Most Powerful Mercenary Army"
Jesse Diaz, Organizer of the May 1, 2006 immigrant rights boycott
Cindy Sheehan, by video
To register and for more information, log on to: www.natassembly.org.
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The Girl Who Silenced the World at the UN!
Born and raised in Vancouver, Severn Suzuki has been working on environmental and social justice issues since kindergarten. At age 9, she and some friends started the Environmental Children's Organization (ECO), a small group of children committed to learning and teaching other kids about environmental issues. They traveled to 1992's UN Earth Summit, where 12 year-old Severn gave this powerful speech that deeply affected (and silenced) some of the most prominent world leaders. The speech had such an impact that she has become a frequent invitee to many U.N. conferences.
[Note: the text of her speech is also available at this site...bw]
http://www.karmatube.org/videos.php?id=433
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MINIATURE EARTH
http://www.miniature-earth.com/me_english.htm
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"Dear Canada: Let U.S. war resisters stay!"
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/499/89/
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JROTC MUST GO!
Check out the new website:
http://www.jrotcmustgo.blogspot.com/
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NO on state Prop. 98!
San Francisco Tenants Union (415) 282-5525 www.sftu.org
Wealthy landlords and other right-wing operatives placed Prop. 98 on the state ballot. This is a dangerous and deceptive measure. Disguised as an effort to reform eminent domain laws and protect homeowners, Prop. 98 would abolish tenant protections such as rent control and just-cause eviction laws, and would end a number of other environmental protection and land use laws. [The catch is, that while it's true that the landlord can increase rents to whatever he or she wants once a property becomes vacant, the current rent-control law now ensures that the new tenants are still under rent-control for their, albeit higher, rent. Under the new law, there simply will be no rent control when the new tenant moves in so their much higher rent-rate can increase as much as the landlord chooses each year from then on!!! So, no more rent-control at all!!! Tricky, huh?...BW]
SAVE RENT CONTROL! NO ON PROP. 98!
http://leftinsf.com/blog/index.php/archives/2492
We All Hate that 98!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Phrt5zVGn0
READ ALL OF PROP. 98 at: http://yesprop98.com/read/?_adctlid=v%7Cwynx8c5jjesxsb%7Cwziq39twoqov52
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Stop fumigation of citizens without their consent in California
Target: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Senator Joe Simitian, Assemblymember Loni Hancock, Assemblymember John Laird, Senator Abel Maldonado
Sponsored by: John Russo
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/stop-fumigation-of-citizens-without-their-consent-in-california
Additional information is available at http://www.stopthespray.org
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Toughest Summer Job This Year Is Finding One
By PETER S. GOODMAN
May 25, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/business/25teen.html?hp
2) The Sergeant Lost Within
By DANIEL BERGNER
May 25, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/magazine/25injuries-t.html?ref=world
3) Immigration Officials Arrest 905 in California Sweep
By REBECCA CATHCART
May 24, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/us/24deport.html?ref=us
4) "Folksinger, Storyteller, Railroad Tramp Utah Phillips Dead at 73"
Nevada City, California
The offical Obituary as provided by the family. May 24, 2008
http://www.utahphillips.org/
5) CPR for the Anti-War Movement
By Ron Jacobs
Monthly Review
May 21, 2008
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/jacobs210508.html
6) Joe Lieberman, Would-Be Censor
Editorial
May 25, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/opinion/25sun1.html?hp
7) Colombia Rebels Confirm Leader’s Death
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:53 p.m. ET
May 25, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Colombia-FARC-Leader.html?hp
8) Brazil Rainforest Analysis Sets Off Political Debate
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
May 25, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/world/americas/25amazon.html?ref=world
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1) Toughest Summer Job This Year Is Finding One
By PETER S. GOODMAN
May 25, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/business/25teen.html?hp
TULSA, Okla. — School is out, and Aaron Stallings, his junior year of high school behind him, wanders the air-conditioned cocoon of the Woodland Hills Mall in search of a job.
Mr. Stallings, 18, says he has been looking for three months, burning gasoline to get to the mall, then filling out applications at stores selling skateboard T-shirts, beach sandals and baseball caps. He likes the idea of working amid the goods he covets. But so far, no offers.
“I’m going to go to Iraq and get a job,” he says acidly. “I hear they’ve got cheap gas.” He grins. “I’m just playing. But I’ve been all over, and nobody’s hiring. They just say, ‘We’ll call you tomorrow.’ And no one ever calls back.”
As the forces of economic downturn ripple widely across the United States, the job market of 2008 is shaping up as the weakest in more than half a century for teenagers looking for summer work, according to labor economists, government data and companies that hire young people.
This deterioration is jeopardizing what many experts consider a crucial beginning stage of working life, one that gives young people experience and confidence along with pocket money.
Little more than one-third of the 16- to 19-year-olds in the United States are likely to be employed this summer, the smallest share since the government began tracking teenage work in 1948, according to a research paper published by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. That is a sharp drop from the 45 percent level of teenage employment reached in 2000.
The rates among minority young people have been particularly low, with only 21 percent of African-Americans and 31 percent of Hispanics from the ages of 16 to 19 employed last summer, according to the Labor Department.
Retailers, a major source of summer jobs, are grappling with a loss of American spending power, causing some to pull back in hiring. Restaurants, also big employers of teenagers, are adding jobs at a slower pace than in previous summers, said Hudson Riehle, senior vice president for research at the National Restaurant Association in Washington.
As older people stay in the work force longer and as experienced workers lose jobs at factories and offices, settling for lower-paying work in restaurants and retail, some teenagers are being squeezed out.
“When you go into a recession, kids always get hit the hardest,” said Andrew Sum, an economist at the Center for Labor Market Studies who led the study on the summer job market. “Kids always go to the back of the hiring queue. Now, they find themselves with a lot of other people in line ahead of them.”
At the lower end of the market, adult Mexican immigrants, in particular, pose competition for jobs traditionally filled by younger Americans, like those at fast food chains.
“Spanish-speaking team members in our stores have increased the age a little bit,” said Andy Lorenzen, senior manager for human resources at Chick-fil-A, a national chain of chicken restaurants based in Atlanta, where 70 percent of the work force is 14 to 19 years old. Adult workers “have lost jobs in this economic downturn and begun to seek employment in our stores.”
Employment among American teenagers has been sliding continuously for the last decade and, with a few ups and downs, dropping steadily since the late 1970s, when nearly half of all 16- to 19-year-olds had summer jobs.
Economists debate the cause of this precipitous decline in teenage employment. Many contend that the drop is largely a favorable trend, reflecting a rising percentage of teenagers completing high school and going on to college, with some enrolling in summer academic programs, leaving less time for work.
“The key factor is the attraction of attending college and enjoying the increasing wage premium that accompanies this,” said John H. Pencavel, a labor economist at Stanford University.
In wealthier households, many have come to see summer work as a waste of time that could be spent gaining an edge in the competition for entry to elite colleges.
“Kids from higher-income households just aren’t going into the labor market,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “They’re looking for things to put on résumés, and working at Dairy Queen or Wal-Mart just isn’t going to help you get into Wake Forest or Stanford. And they just don’t need the cash.”
But others, like Professor Sum, contend that plenty of teenagers want to work but face increasing difficulties landing jobs. From early 2001 to the middle of 2007, the number of Americans employed outside the military grew more than 8.3 million, according to the Labor Department, yet employment among teenagers fell more than 1.2 million.
In the New York metropolitan area, an index by Economy.com shows a modest increase in the sorts of jobs typically filled by teenagers in the summer.
Still, with the economy gripped by what many experts believe is a recession, opportunities are growing leaner for teenagers in most of the country.
Even in parts of the country where there are jobs, some teenagers are having trouble finding them.
Tulsa, a town on the banks of the Arkansas River that swelled into a city amid an oil boom early last century, seems at first an easy place to find work. This metropolitan area of 900,000 people never saw the increase in housing prices and subsequent collapse that leveled economies elsewhere. While energy prices are reaching records and the oil patch is buzzing with activity, Tulsa’s unemployment rate was a mere 3.3 percent in March, compared with the national rate of 5.1 percent that month.
Here, the force of Hispanic immigration is being reversed: A bill aimed at cracking down on illegal immigrants passed by the state legislature late last year has prompted thousands of them to leave town.
So along the broad suburban avenues in the southern part of town — ribbons of black pavement lined with ice cream shops, burger stands and barbecue joints — managers are having a hard time finding workers.
“Pretty much everybody is hiring,” said Andy Irick, director of operations for Sonic, a restaurant chain based in Oklahoma, complete with blaring music and servers on roller skates. “If you walk in and you’re clean cut and presentable, you’re going to get a job.”
While summer jobs may be abundant in some industries, opportunities tend to divide along traditional fault lines like race, the connections offered by one’s parents and — not least — whether one has a car in this sprawling city of scant public transportation.
More than 15 percent of the city’s population is African-American, according to the 2000 census. Black people are largely clustered in the older, northern part of town, on weather-beaten roads largely devoid of shopping and places to work. The suburban strip malls to the south are miles away.
At a state-financed program that helps lower-income young people find jobs, Arbor Education and Training, some have quit coming to the center because gas prices are too high, and some have lost jobs because they could not get to work, said the program’s director of operations, Jacky Noden.
Meanwhile, at a job skills class at Booker T. Washington High School, considered Tulsa’s most prestigious public campus, six graduating seniors, all bound for college and all possessing cars, already had jobs for the summer.
Greg Robinson, 18, cast his job as an instructor at a golf course as a perfect chance to network. “Golf is the sport of business.”
Shakhura Henderson, 18, saw her job as an assistant in an optometrist’s office as a beachhead in a growing area of the American economy. She and the other students stammered in veritable horror when asked if they would consider working in fast food.
“I don’t see myself saying, ‘Hey, sir, may I take your order,’ ” Ms. Henderson said. “I don’t see any growth in it.”
Claire Tolson, 17, a student at another selective school, Thomas A. Edison Preparatory, said she planned to spend the summer as a hostess at the Local Table, a restaurant specializing in produce from around the area, earning $8 an hour, plus tips.
Tall, blond and poised, and looking ahead to a career in engineering, Ms. Tolson has two friends working at the restaurant already. One of their parents knows the owner, she said.
“I don’t think it’s too hard to find a job,” she said.
But Ms. Tolson’s classmate, Wesley Childers, has no such connections, relying instead on newspaper classified advertisements for his job search. He wants a job so he can save money to buy a car next year, but his lack of a vehicle presents something of a Catch-22.
“Employers want you to have reliable transportation,” he said.
Mr. Childers wears a pressed blue suit and shiny black loafers to job interviews. He has applied to McDonald’s and to Target, the discount department store, among other places.
“I haven’t heard anything back,” he said. “There’s so many other kids, and there’s also so many other people who are unemployed. It’s getting frustrating.”
At Will Rogers High School in a heavily Hispanic part of town, a 15-year-old sophomore named José, who has lived here since he was 2 years old but lacks legal immigration papers, worried that he would not find a job. He would happily work in fast food, he said, but word is that more places are checking papers.
“It limits your choices,” he said. “A lot of people are afraid.”
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2) The Sergeant Lost Within
By DANIEL BERGNER
May 25, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/magazine/25injuries-t.html?ref=world
“You want to wear this or this for therapy tomorrow?” Sgt. Shurvon Phillip’s mother asked, holding two shirts in front of him. On one wall of his bedroom hung a poster of a marine staring fiercely, assault rifle in hand and black paint beneath his narrow eyes. Shurvon’s eyes, meanwhile, are wide and soft brown. He sat upright, supported by the tilt of a hospital bed. He cannot speak and can barely emit sound or move any part of his body, and sometimes it’s as if the striking size of his eyes is a desperate attempt to let others understand who he is, to let them see inside his mind, because his brain can carry out so little in the way of communication.
He gazed at the two shirts and, with excruciating effort and several seconds’ delay, managed to jab his gnarled right hand a few inches toward his choice, a black pullover with writing on the front. White letters declared the man, and a white arrow pointed upward to his head; red letters proclaimed the legend, and a red arrow pointed downward to his groin.
Gail Ulerie, Shurvon’s mother, had already received his O.K. — a painstaking raising of his eyebrows — on a pair of jeans. Mostly, Shurvon can answer only yes-or-no questions. The slightly lifted brows, a gesture that stretches his eyes yet wider, signify yes. A slow lowering of his lids indicates no. Now, with tomorrow’s clothes decided, Gail, a Trinidadian-American, reclined Shurvon’s bed for the night. He wore a hospital gown and tube socks pulled up tightly on the twigs of his caramel-colored shins. The socks were immaculately white, as if Gail believed that if everything were properly and precisely attended to, right down to the cotton that sheathed his toes, her son’s brain could recover.
In Iraq’s Anbar Province, in May 2005, Shurvon, who joined the Marine reserves seven years earlier at 17, partly as a way to pay his community-college tuition, was riding back to his base after a patrol when an anti-tank mine exploded under his Humvee. The Humvee’s other soldiers were tossed in different directions and dealt an assortment of injuries: concussions, broken bones, herniated discs. Along with a broken jaw and a broken leg, Shurvon suffered one of the war’s signature wounds on the American side: though no shrapnel entered his head, the blast rattled his brain profoundly.
Far more effectively than in previous American wars, helmets and body armor are protecting the skulls and saving the lives of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. But according to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, a joint Defense Department and V.A. organization, about 900 soldiers have come home with serious traumatic brain injury, or T.B.I., which essentially means dire harm to their brains; it can be caused by explosions that deliver blunt injury to the helmeted skull or that send waves of compressed air to slam and snap the head ruinously even at a distance of hundreds of yards from the blast. (The 900 also include injuries caused by shrapnel or bullets that have managed to penetrate.) Some of these veterans have been left — for protracted periods and often permanently — unable to think or remember or plan clearly enough to cope with everyday life on their own; others, like Shurvon, have been left incapable of doing much at all for themselves. (A recent Rand Corporation report estimates that, additionally, 300,000 soldiers have suffered milder T.B.I., frequently including brief loss of consciousness, disorientation or cognitive lapses.)
In the explosion’s aftermath, Shurvon was airlifted to the American military’s hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, and then to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., where Gail saw him for the first time since he was sent to war a few months before. By that point a portion of the left side of his skull had been cut away to relieve the pressure of the casing of bone against his swelling brain. “His head,” she told me, “looked like a ball with the air half out of it.” She was confronted, too, with a CT scan taken by the hospital. “I didn’t do much biology, but I’m thinking, That’s not a brain I’m looking at,” she said, describing her reaction. “Everyone has a right hemisphere and a left hemisphere, but this didn’t look like that. Do you remember Play-Doh? When children play with Play-Doh” — she slammed her palms together to demonstrate — “it’s just a gray blob. That was Shurvon’s brain.”
Before his injury, Shurvon was, as his younger sister, Candace, recalled, “a big kid” who liked to come home from his job at Wal-Mart, stocking shelves and counting cash, and curl up with his older sister’s son to watch Spider-Man cartoons. Short and slender, he squirmed through every tunnel his nephew slithered into at Chuck E. Cheese. But he was “the brains of the family,” Candace said, and Gail added that, besides being something of a ladies’ man, he had a 3.4 G.P.A. at college and was on his way to an associate’s degree in computer science when he was called up.
Her round face framed by overlapping brown, cream and white headbands, Gail remembered the military doctors at the National Naval Medical Center stopping by her son’s bed in the weeks after his injury and commanding: “ ‘Sergeant Phillip! Sergeant Phillip! Give me a thumbs up!’ ” His hands remained still. “When I called his name,” she said, “sometimes he fluttered his eyelids a little bit.” And his eyes seemed to focus on her, at moments. Those were about the only signs of awareness. And even those may have been her imagination. Col. William O’Brien, then the director of the Severely Injured Marines and Sailors program in the Department of the Navy, visited Shurvon in the hospital during that time. “She was a true believer,” he said of Shurvon’s mother. O’Brien saw no purposeful fluttering of eyelids, no responsiveness whatsoever. He saw a man with a misshapen head, his mouth open, staring vacantly into space. But as Gail recounted to me, she would plead with her son, in a voice infinitely closer and quieter than those of the staff, “Shurvon, give me a thumbs up, please give me a thumbs up.” One day she saw the tiniest shift of his right thumb.
There have been, since then, three years of tiny shifts, tiny increments of progress, tiny indications that Shurvon’s brain could somehow — to some unknown degree — heal. “They say your brain cells cannot regrow,” Gail said to me in February after putting her 27-year-old son to bed. “But God has been smiling on him.”
Gail credited, in addition to God, Dr. Felise Zollman, a neurologist who runs the brain-injury unit at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, or R.I.C., a pristine private hospital where Shurvon was treated between August and December of last year. Zollman’s patients tend to be survivors of car accidents, falls, assaults. But starting in early 2007, with a soldier whose brain was ravaged by a roadside bomb in Iraq and whose family learned that R.I.C. was rated the top rehabilitative hospital in the country by U.S. News & World Report, 15 soldiers wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan have made their way — often with the relentless advocacy of their families helping to pry payment from the military for private treatment — to Zollman’s ward. Shurvon, more than two years after the explosion of his Humvee, became one of them, through the persistence not only of his mother but also of Cmdr. William Bailey, a Navy reservist lawyer in Shurvon’s home city, Cleveland, who took up his cause. The military paid $310,000 for Shurvon’s months at R.I.C.
Some of Shurvon’s infinitesimal advances were made at the military’s own facilities — the naval hospital in Bethesda, a Veterans’ Administration polytrauma center in Minneapolis that specializes in T.B.I., the V.A. hospital in Cleveland — where he was treated before his stay at R.I.C., but Gail said that Zollman and her staff had transformed his life, had fostered miracles, a process Zollman described, less metaphysically, as aiding the adaptive capacities of the brain. Gail was right: the prevailing scientific understanding is that, for the most part, the adult brain cannot grow new cells, new neurons — though there is evidence that the implantation of stem cells into the brain may someday alter this basic neurological truth. But the brain can adjust, rerouting or reinvigorating its wiring. And in what Zollman called “a perverse positive consequence of the war,” attention recently focused on brain-injured troops will likely quicken future discoveries about the brain’s adaptive potential, about ways to prod that potential and about why even a case like Shurvon’s isn’t quite what Colonel O’Brien once thought it was: hopeless.
“The day I met him,” Zollman told me, remembering Shurvon’s arrival at R.I.C., “I realized he was so in there.” With sharp features accentuating brown eyes that appear almost as large as his, she said she felt a connection — “he was really present” — with something behind his still and silent carapace. She asked him about the tattoo on his left forearm, a panther with the words “Trini Boy” near its paws. Fondly she recalled his voiceless reply: the intense brightening of his eyes and the slight, scarcely perceptible shifting of his lips, an attempt to smile with a mouth distorted by the way the blast broke his jaw and, too, by the way it wrecked his brain, causing a muscle spasticity that pulls his lower jaw behind his upper, so that he sometimes seems to have no chin at all. He couldn’t relate whatever story or explanation was behind the tattoo, but it seemed clear that there was one and that it amused him. He has humor, she remembered thinking. He has abstraction. His mind, behind the frozen exterior, was alive.
For more than a year before his arrival at R.I.C., Shurvon was treated by the V.A. hospital in Cleveland, sometimes as an inpatient, when infections and a crisis with his feeding tube imperiled his very survival. And Zollman is careful not to critique the work of the Cleveland staff. But she suggests, as many doctors and advocates for wounded soldiers have argued, that the military medical system just wasn’t prepared for the prevalence of brain injuries among its troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and that T.B.I. units like hers have gained a complex understanding of the brain’s capacity for healing through long concentration on civilian injuries. Traci Piero, a nurse practitioner at the Cleveland hospital and the coordinator of Shurvon’s care there, both before and after his time at R.I.C., told me that in the spring of last year, the Cleveland staff considered reducing Shurvon’s physical therapy to a maintenance level. This would have meant abandoning the attempt to help him toward some degree of autonomous movement and focusing simply on preventing bedsores and keeping the muscles in his inert limbs from tightening more than they already had. It was a consideration born of futility. Piero and Dr. Clay Kelly, the hospital’s chief of physical medicine and rehabilitation, explained that Shurvon had hardly progressed from when he first arrived at the Cleveland facility after five months at the V.A.’s Minneapolis polytrauma center; he remained in a nearly vegetative state and was seen as having, in the words of an evaluating neurologist at the Cleveland hospital, “little hope for improvement.”
But by a system of nostril-flaring mastered with his speech therapist at the Cleveland facility, Piero recounted, Shurvon became able, last spring, to respond reliably to yes-or-no questions; Piero said that this breakthrough dissuaded the team from diminishing his physical work. Commander Bailey, Shurvon’s advocate, told things differently. The decision against cutting back Shurvon’s physical therapy was made, he said, in response to desperate pleading from Gail and some urgent lobbying of Bailey’s own.
When Shurvon came under Zollman’s care, he was taking a narcotic painkiller, Fentanyl, prescribed for him by the Minneapolis center and by the Cleveland team. Fentanyl suppresses the function of the brain, Zollman said, and may stunt recovery in T.B.I. patients. Kelly, the Cleveland chief of rehabilitation, who is closely involved with Shurvon’s treatment now but didn’t work with him before his months at R.I.C., referred to case notes and told me that Shurvon’s grimacing (or what grimacing his frozen features allowed) had indicated pain and that the narcotic had been necessary to address it. He compared caring for someone as noncommunicative as Shurvon to a veterinarian’s guesswork. But Zollman managed to communicate with Shurvon well enough to determine that he could do without the Fentanyl and weaned him from it. She weaned him, as well, from the Valium he’d been given, partly for anxiety, by the teams in Minneapolis and Cleveland — Valium, too, dulls the workings of the brain. She prescribed a drug to enhance alertness and cognition. And she started to direct a program of therapy that, she hoped, would give him some fraction of a full life.
In both hemispheres of Shurvon’s brain, the frontal lobes, which are involved in motor control, facial movement, language, judgment and the restraint of impulse, problem-solving and planning, were, Zollman said, “extensively atrophied.” Harm to this region is typical in the nonpenetrating brain injuries so commonly inflicted by explosives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The inside of the bone plate that guards part of this region is full of ridges. Rattled against the rough surface, the frontal lobes are left bruised and hemorrhaging.
Zollman characterized a blast’s initial jarring of the brain as a kind of earthquake, which is followed by a storm that is just as devastating. Neurons communicate with one another through a series of electrical and chemical reactions that define the brain’s pathways. The mechanical energy of the earthquake in Shurvon’s frontal lobes had almost surely, Zollman explained, upset the electrical balance of his neurons, causing a deluge of neurotransmitters, chemicals like glutamate and dopamine, in toxic excess. “It’s like a conquering army has passed through,” she said of the aftermath, “and left a wasteland of swelling and bursting cells and burnt out pathways.”
When Shurvon arrived at R.I.C. more than two years after these calamities, it was too late, in all likelihood, for Zollman and her staff to help his brain generate new pathways and find new locations to take over the roles of the areas that were ravaged, a potential known as neuroplasticity and an essential part of Zollman’s practice. Once, the dominant neurological notion was that the realms of the brain are fixed in their responsibilities and that if an area is destroyed, no other domain can substitute for it. This has given way, over the past several decades, to the idea that one domain can, to varying degrees, stand in for another. Rudimentary and repetitive exercise — the moving of an arm or the making of sounds with the help of a physical or speech therapist — is the primary means for stirring such substitution. Three floors up from Zollman’s ward, R.I.C.’s researchers are hunting for ways to enhance this dogged and sometimes unsuccessful process. In one lab, a scientist experiments with a crude-looking conductive device that zaps the skull and sends precisely aimed magnetic charges coursing through stand-in domains; the hope is that by stimulating the brain while, say, a physical therapist simultaneously forces a patient’s leg to move in a walking stride, a healthy area of the brain will be jolted into assuming responsibility for that motion. But for reasons that remain unclear, like so much that involves the brain’s hundred billion cells and hundred trillion intercellular connections, the best chance to spur neuroplasticity comes within three or four months of the initial damage. With Shurvon, Zollman was instead reduced to “priming the connections” along the pathways that had survived. To evoke this she conjured another metaphor. “Let’s say you’ve got a railroad station in a small town in the Old West. The switchman is dozing. Trains rarely come, and when one finally does he might be sound asleep. Everything gets slowed down. But if his station is busy he’s more primed to do his job.” Keeping the connections active — and in this way maintaining a ready supply of neurotransmitters to deliver messages — could make the remaining pathways work more effectively and give Shurvon some measure of movement.
Priming connections, like generating neuroplasticity, can seem less a matter of ingenious science than of basic and relentless physical therapy. To address the paralysis of Shurvon’s arms, Botox was injected into his muscles to loosen them and permit a therapist gently to bend and unbend his elbows, over and over. The idea was that the neural pathways governing the extensor muscles would be invigorated by this motion and that eventually Shurvon would be able to straighten his arms whenever his mind decided to. By the time I met him, a few months after his stay at R.I.C., he could, when his mother asked, give her a hug, raising his stiff arms inch by inch and reaching outward, not enwrapping her but at least touching her rigidly on either side of her thick body.
A campaign of physical therapy was waged, as well, to give him minimal influence over his right hand. “You have to remember,” Zollman said, “that tiny changes can lead to big changes in life.” The gains he achieved with his right hand, along with a bit of mobility attained with his right leg, led her to expect that he would soon be operating a power wheelchair with a specially formulated set of controls. She told me that R.I.C. designed such a chair for him, that he had driven a mock-up version on the 10th-floor ward and that the Cleveland V.A. was currently having the chair made. Kelly, at the Cleveland V.A., told me otherwise. No chair was on order. The Cleveland staff didn’t think Shurvon could turn his head readily enough to see and steer around obstacles; Kelly said he didn’t envision Shurvon driving a wheelchair anytime in the near future. When I told Zollman this, she said that she was stunned, that her team was confident of what Shurvon could handle. And listening to Zollman’s dismay and passion, I thought, not for the first time, that without the kind of investment and ingenuity that a place like R.I.C. can offer, patients like Shurvon might be cut off, forever, from any aspect of independence.
When it came to the most fundamental capability, breathing, for more than two years, before arriving at R.I.C., Shurvon had been sucking air through a surgical hole in his Adam’s apple. Zollman and her team resolved to cap the tracheostomy. Part of the difficulty in doing this was that the wreckage of Shurvon’s brain left him unable to swallow at will; mucus and saliva welled at the back of his throat, clogging his airway. But capping the hole stirred panic. So Zollman prescribed an anti-anxiety drug that wouldn’t hinder the function of Shurvon’s brain, and her staff combined a gradual process of conditioning, beginning with the cap in place for just five minutes at a time, along with an effort to awaken his brain’s authority over the back of his throat. The awakening involved crude methods, like jabbing a chilled dental mirror repeatedly behind the tongue of a helpless, paralyzed man until he gagged, that might have qualified as torture in a different context. But the cap stays in 24 hours a day now, and with the occasional assistance of having fluid suctioned from his throat, Shurvon breathes through his mouth.
Zollman said that she has never wondered what she and her staff might have accomplished for Shurvon had he reached R.I.C. much earlier, during the period of possible neuroplasticity. For one thing, his condition was so dire, his survival so precarious, during the first months after his injury that rigorous efforts at rehabilitation might have been unfeasible. For another, Zollman says she thinks in terms not only of neuroscience but of Eastern religions. She spoke often about “accepting what is.” This view seemed to pose a paradox in a doctor devoted to the most hard-won kinds of amelioration. Yet it seemed, as well, part of what enabled her to engage fully with Shurvon, part of what kept her from being horrified and repelled by the facts of his existence: fully conscious, nearly motionless and, when he first came to R.I.C., completely mute.
“Do you hear the sound he’s making?” Gail asked me as we sat in her kitchen, late one evening, with Shurvon put to bed in his room close by. I barely did, but she heard it keenly: a gurgling, strangulated cry, the best his brain could wrest from his throat and mouth. She seemed to love the progress that cry represented; without the capping of his tracheostomy, no sound was possible.
She went in to see what he needed. She wore blue track pants and a blue sweatshirt and three gold hoops in each ear. With the help of a health aide, who is paid for by the V.A. and who comes in every day, Gail is her son’s all-hours caregiver. Before his wounding, she worked as a nurse’s assistant in hospice care and nursing homes.
The only light in Shurvon’s room beamed from the wall-mounted television that played cartoons silently. Under the beam, and at the foot of Shurvon’s bed, Candace’s 3-year-old son, Malik, in a red-and-blue Spider-Man pajama suit, and her 2-year-old daughter, Kyla, her hair in yellow and white beads, slept on the floor on a blanket and couch pillows Gail had spread out for them. This was where they curled up on the nights when Candace, a single mother who lived with Gail and Shurvon, worked as a stocker at Wal-Mart. With their uncle, Malik and Kyla seemed both comfortable and comforted. Malik had earlier scrambled up onto Shurvon’s bed and onto his inert body to show him photographs from the program of a car show. The children can’t pronounce the word “uncle” and instead call him “Ya-Ya.” They slept soundly below him.
And later, when Gail herself was ready to try to close her eyes, she, too, would spend the night, as she always does, in Shurvon’s room, in a lounge chair right beside his bed. Money from the V.A., along with donations raised privately by Commander Bailey and Marine organizations, allowed Shurvon and his family to move to this house in suburban Cleveland from a downtown apartment where the rooms were so tight that Gail could hardly maneuver his wheelchair. Beyond the benefits that helped with the down payment on the house, the V.A.’s disability program pays Shurvon about $86,000 a year. The house has plenty of bedrooms, but three generations spend their nights in the room with the hospital bed, with a suctioning machine and a respirator ready in case they are needed, and with a feeding tube supplying sustenance to the man who was now, with the cry he could manufacture, asking for some unspecified form of attention.
“Are you wet?” Gail asked quietly, leaning over his face in the gray light from the television. He raised his eyebrows a 16th of an inch. She began to unfasten his diaper. During the days, if he’s taken outside the house, he usually wears a catheter that she rolls onto his penis like a condom; in the house he mostly wears diapers. “Oh, that’s why you’re fussing,” she said. “You did more than one.” She turned his body so she could wipe him, then filled a plastic tub with warm water and a bit of gentle soap.
He was silent now, turned onto his back again. In the near-darkness, she dipped a washcloth and squeezed it from above his thighs so that a tiny waterfall dripped down over him. “Don’t worry, big guy,” she said. “Mama’s got you.” She swabbed him with the cloth.
“The first time I gave my son a bath,” Gail told me about life after Shurvon’s injury, as we sat again at the kitchen table, “I cried. It took me a good while to get used to cleaning him up. In the morning if we have to go somewhere, everything that a mom with a baby has to walk with — wipes and everything in a bag — I have to walk with.” She talked about the A&D ointment that kept him from getting rashes, and she talked about how she imagined he thought about this aspect of his life. “Nobody wants anybody else to clean them. He wouldn’t look at it like he’s a child again. He’s this grown man, but he just can’t do it.” Then she remembered that before his deployment, when she would get upset about this or that difficulty in her life, he would say: “ ‘Mom, what are you crying for? If Plan A don’t work, Plan B will work.’ ”
At last Gail went to her lounge chair to sleep, and the next morning a special van picked up Shurvon and his mother to take them for one of the twice-weekly, three-hour stints of therapy that, since his stay at R.I.C., the V.A. hospital provides him. There a physical therapist guided him into a sitting position on the edge of a low bed and had him sit briefly on his own, another of the things his brain learned to compel his body to do in Chicago. And at the V.A. hospital a speech therapist with straight blond hair requested a “kissy face,” by way of motivating him to struggle to close his lips. She asked next for a wink; he couldn’t do that, but immediately he shut and opened both his eyes together. “In Trinidad,” Gail said, thrilled by his quick responsiveness, “we call that the sweet eye.”
“He’s learning how to flirt!” the therapist exclaimed. “You’ve got the kissy face and the wink and,” she added, referring to his arm movements in physical therapy, “the weight room. You’re all set!”
Listening to this, I wondered whether Shurvon, alive to touch and alive in his mind, but imprisoned, was flattered or tormented. He was beaming, eyes glittering. I wondered, too, what he might have said or done had he been capable of speech or any extensive movement. Damage to the frontal lobes — “the area of the superego,” Zollman said — can bring extreme disinhibition. Male patients on her ward sometimes proposition and grope their nurses or therapists; sometimes they masturbate in the halls; not long ago a man masturbated in front of his mother. Sometimes women expose their breasts.
The therapist worked with Shurvon to produce an “ah” sound — he opened his mouth wide and, seconds later, a faint, agonized approximation came out. And she made him practice on his DynaVox, a computer that can speak for him, its screen fixed to his wheelchair or bed. The various icons can generate phrases, like “I am 27,” delivered in a robotic voice that sounds straight out of an old sci-fi movie.
One problem with the device, which Shurvon began trying to use at the V.A. hospital before going to R.I.C., has been how to best click on the icons. At the hospital in Cleveland he tried a nose piece that communicated with the computer whenever he flared a nostril, and at R.I.C. he tried a camera that directed the cursor by tracking his pupils. But the nostril-flaring proved too awkward, and the slight back-tilt of his head, another symptom of his injury, made it difficult to position the camera. As the mobility in Shurvon’s right hand improved, technicians at R.I.C. settled on using a thin cord attached to his right wrist; his tugs can activate an icon. His tugs are deliberate, delayed.
And the icons on his screen are limited. In Chicago, he graduated from an 8- to a 12-choice system; clicking on the “feelings” icon, with its childish renditions of smiley and frowning faces, will lead him to 12 choices including “frustrated” and “mad” and “O.K.” and “proud,” and the computer will then give robotic voice to his selection. The R.I.C. technicians programmed his DynaVox so that Shurvon can tell people that he wants the TV channel changed or so that he can name one of his favorite reggae songs, “Girls,” by Beenie Man, but his system can’t provide much in the way of nuanced personal expression, and he’s a long, long way from being able to navigate programs that would let him construct speech by picking from a wide array of words. For now, except when he’s practicing with his therapist, his DynaVox doesn’t get much use.
In the van, on the ride home, I asked Shurvon if he ever thought about going back to college. He gave the minimal lift of his eyebrows. His mother added that he wants to get a master’s degree.
Later, I talked with his R.I.C. speech therapist, who had tested his cognitive powers. After she’d put him through weeks of drills to improve his battered capacity for concentration, he was able to listen to passages several paragraphs long — she showed me an example, and it certainly wasn’t simple — and could readily indicate the correct answers in sets of multiple-choice comprehension questions. (Eye fatigue seemed the only impediment to his reading extended passages on his own.) Hearing this, I thought that there seemed little reason that Shurvon couldn’t someday earn a master’s degree. But at other moments the reasons appeared too immense ever to be overcome; the notion of college, let alone graduate school, seemed merely a soothing fantasy. And sometimes impossible to overcome, too, was the idea that Shurvon’s life might not be worth living; that I, in his place, would rather stop breathing, cease thinking, that I would prefer to die.
Whenever this idea took hold, I recalled a medical ethicist at R.I.C. telling me about studies showing that doctors and nurses tend to rate the quality of life of severely impaired patients to be far lower than the patients do themselves. The ethicist had spoken, then, about the ways that a life acquires meaning. And I thought about Malik scrambling onto Shurvon’s bed to show him pictures, and about Malik and Kyla curled and comforted on the floor below him. I thought, too, about a kind of exercise that Shurvon’s family discovered recently by chance and that Gail described: with Shurvon sitting in a wheelchair in the driveway, his nieces and nephews tossed inflatable beach balls, one pink and another blue, softly toward him, and he tried to move his arms to bat them back. “They were cheering like at a baseball game,” Gail said, remembering the first time the children did this. “ ‘Yeah! Go on Ya-Ya!’ ” Beach balls and high voices of excitement floated in the air around him.
Daniel Bergner is a contributing writer for the magazine. His latest book, “A Map of Desire,” will be published in January.
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3) Immigration Officials Arrest 905 in California Sweep
By REBECCA CATHCART
May 24, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/us/24deport.html?ref=us
LOS ANGELES — Federal immigration agents have arrested 905 people in California in the past three weeks after a statewide search for those who had violated orders to leave the country. The operation was the latest in a series of national sweeps by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
The arrests were the result of collaboration among teams in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco that began on May 5.
“The focal point of this operation were people who had exhausted all of their due process in the courts,” said Lauren Mack, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in San Diego. “They have a final order of removal issued by a U.S. immigration judge, and they’ve failed to depart.”
In the process of seeking each person on the list, Ms. Mack said, agents often encountered friends, family members and others who had violated immigration laws.
“Agents may come to a house looking for a target, and someone answers the door, or there are other people in the house who have also violated immigration laws,” she said.
Brian DeMore, acting director of the federal Office of Detention and Removal Operations in Los Angeles, said agents took into custody any person they encountered during an arrest who had violated immigration laws. Agents set out with a target list of just over 1,500 “fugitive aliens,” Mr. DeMore said, referring to people who have ignored orders to leave the country.
In addition to the 495 of those found, 410 people were taken into custody on charges of violating immigration laws, he said. Other violations included returning after being deported, overstaying a visa, or living in the country without any legal documentation, Ms. Mack said. Over half of all arrested this month have been deported.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 25.7 percent of those caught in the sweeps had been convicted of crimes while in the country.
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4) "Folksinger, Storyteller, Railroad Tramp Utah Phillips Dead at 73"
Nevada City, California
The offical Obituary as provided by the family. May 24, 2008
http://www.utahphillips.org/
Utah Phillips, a seminal figure in American folk music who performed extensively and tirelessly for audiences on two continents for 38 years, died Friday of congestive heart failure in Nevada City, California a small town in the Sierra Nevada mountains where he lived for the last 21 years with his wife, Joanna Robinson, a freelance editor.
Born Bruce Duncan Phillips on May 15, 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio, he was the son of labor organizers. Whether through this early influence or an early life that was not always tranquil or easy, by his twenties Phillips demonstrated a lifelong concern with the living conditions of working people. He was a proud member of the Industrial Workers of the World, popularly known as "the Wobblies," an organizational artifact of early twentieth-century labor struggles that has seen renewed interest and growth in membership in the last decade, not in small part due to his efforts to popularize it.
Phillips served as an Army private during the Korean War, an experience he would later refer to as the turning point of his life. Deeply affected by the devastation and human misery he had witnessed, upon his return to the United States he began drifting, riding freight trains around the country. His struggle would be familiar today, when the difficulties of returning combat veterans are more widely understood, but in the late fifties Phillips was left to work them out for himself. Destitute and drinking, Phillips got off a freight train in Salt Lake City and wound up at the Joe Hill House, a homeless shelter operated by the anarchist Ammon Hennacy, a member of the Catholic Worker movement and associate of Dorothy Day.
Phillips credited Hennacy and other social reformers he referred to as his "elders" with having provided a philosophical framework around which he later constructed songs and stories he intended as a template his audiences could employ to understand their own political and working lives. They were often hilarious, sometimes sad, but never shallow.
"He made me understand that music must be more than cotton candy for the ears," said John McCutcheon, a nationally-known folksinger and close friend.
In the creation of his performing persona and work, Phillips drew from influences as diverse as Borscht Belt comedian Myron Cohen, folksingers Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and Country stars Hank Williams and T. Texas Tyler.
A stint as an archivist for the State of Utah in the 1960s taught Phillips the discipline of historical research; beneath the simplest and most folksy of his songs was a rigorous attention to detail and a strong and carefully-crafted narrative structure. He was a voracious reader in a surprising variety of fields.
Meanwhile, Phillips was working at Hennacy's Joe Hill house. In 1968 he ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. The race was won by a Republican candidate, and Phillips was seen by some Democrats as having split the vote. He subsequently lost his job with the State of Utah, a process he described as "blacklisting."
Phillips left Utah for Saratoga Springs, New York, where he was welcomed into a lively community of folk performers centered at the Caffé Lena, operated by Lena Spencer.
"It was the coffeehouse, the place to perform. Everybody went there. She fed everybody," said John "Che" Greenwood, a fellow performer and friend.
Over the span of the nearly four decades that followed, Phillips worked in what he referred to as "the Trade," developing an audience of hundreds of thousands and performing in large and small cities throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. His performing partners included Rosalie Sorrels, Kate Wolf, John McCutcheon and Ani DiFranco.
"He was like an alchemist," said Sorrels, "He took the stories of working people and railroad bums and he built them into work that was influenced by writers like Thomas Wolfe, but then he gave it back, he put it in language so the people whom the songs and stories were about still had them, still owned them. He didn't believe in stealing culture from the people it was about."
A single from Phillips's first record, "Moose Turd Pie," a rollicking story about working on a railroad track gang, saw extensive airplay in 1973. From then on, Phillips had work on the road. His extensive writing and recording career included two albums with Ani DiFranco which earned a Grammy nomination. Phillips's songs were performed and recorded by Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Joan Baez, Tom Waits, Joe Ely and others. He was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Folk Alliance in 1997.
Phillips, something of a perfectionist, claimed that he never lost his stage fright before performances. He didn't want to lose it, he said; it kept him improving.
Phillips began suffering from the effects of chronic heart disease in 2004, and as his illness kept him off the road at times, he started a nationally syndicated folk-music radio show, "Loafer's Glory," produced at KVMR-FM and started a homeless shelter in his rural home county, where down-on-their-luck men and women were sleeping under the manzanita brush at the edge of town. Hospitality House opened in 2005 and continues to house 25 to 30 guests a night. In this way, Phillips returned to the work of his mentor Hennacy in the last four years of his life.
Phillips died at home, in bed, in his sleep, next to his wife. He is survived by his son Duncan and daughter-in-law Bobette of Salt Lake City, son Brendan of Olympia, Washington; daughter Morrigan Belle of Washington, D.C.; stepson Nicholas Tomb of Monterrey, California; stepson and daughter-in-law Ian Durfee and Mary Creasey of Davis, California; brothers David Phillips of Fairfield, California, Ed Phillips of Cleveland, Ohio and Stuart Cohen of Los Angeles; sister Deborah Cohen of Lisbon, Portugal; and a grandchild, Brendan. He was preceded in death by his father Edwin Phillips and mother Kathleen, and his stepfather, Syd Cohen.
The family requests memorial donations to Hospitality House, P.O. Box 3223, Grass Valley, California 95945 (530) 271-7144 www.hospitalityhouseshelter.org
Jordan Fisher Smith and Molly Fisk
Molly Fisk, 530.277.4686 molly@mollyfisk.com
Jordan Fisher Smith 530.277.3087 jordanfs@gv.net
Word document here: http://www.utahphillips.org/utahphillipsdeadat73.doc
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5) CPR for the Anti-War Movement
By Ron Jacobs
Monthly Review
May 21, 2008
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/jacobs210508.html
It is fair to say that the anti-war movement in the U.S. is moribund. A movement that put a million people in the streets a month before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and has drawn as many as half-a-million protesters to protests as recently as January 2007 has failed to mobilize anything even near those numbers since then. Part of this is because of differences among the leadership of the two primary anti-war organizations, part of it is because many people opposed to the war have put their energies—however misplaced—into working for Barack Obama, and part of it is attributable to the belief that there is nothing one can do to stop the bloody occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. The most recent example of this occurred during the week of March 15, 2008. Despite the announced intentions of both anti-war organizations to organize some kind of national march marking the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, there was no such protest. Instead, hundreds of cities and towns around the country held smaller observances.
In the wake of the failure to organize a national protest, some folks from the U.S. who had formed a coalition following a 2007 international anti-war conference in London decided to step outside the existing organizational stasis. They formed a steering committee with the intention of reigniting the national movement against the war in the United States. The primary movers behind this effort include members of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), U.S. Labor Against the War (U.S.LAW), military veterans and individuals with decades of experience organizing against imperial war, and representatives of numerous local anti-war committees.
Characterizing themselves as the mass action wing of the anti-war movement, the steering committee in early spring 2008 put out a call for a national meeting of anti-war activists and citizens in late June of this year—a call which has been answered by hundreds of organizations and individuals from across the U.S. Organizing under the name The National Assembly to End the Iraq War and Occupation, the steering committee has garnered the endorsement of several labor organizations and individuals like Cindy Sheehan, Howard Zinn, and Mumia Abu Jamal. In addition, a multitude of local peace and justice organizations, church groups, and student organizations have signed on.
When I asked AFSC organizer and coordinator of the Northeast Ohio Anti-War Coalition, Greg Coleridge, who along with Marilyn Levin of Greater Boston United for Justice with Peace, is one of the national spokespeople for the National Assembly, why this conference should be held now, he responded this way.
“The ever-increasing human carnage, economic costs, and desire for U.S. military conquest connected to the Iraq war and occupation demand effective resistance. There is an urgent need for greater coordination, collaboration and cohesion among U.S. anti-war organizations without giving up their own missions and identities. The upcoming elections provide ample opportunities to distract attention from the current permanent nature of the war and occupation. Now is the time for anti-war activists and concerned citizens to come together and call on the anti-war movement to organize mass actions which communicate to the public and pressure elected officials that U.S. troops, bases and contractors must leave Iraq immediately.”
It is important to note that there is not a call for a withdrawal timetable here. As Coordinating Committee member Jerry Gordon told me in a conversation, the only correct demand for the U.S. anti-war movement is for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq. Furthermore, it is assumed that the best way to make this demand is through mass action and a unified anti-war movement that utilizes democratic decision-making and remains independent of any and all political parties and organizations. It is not the intention of those on the steering committee to supersede UFPJ or ANSWER. Indeed, they have the utmost respect for the two organizations and the work they have done to this point. This respect is evident in the fact that both organizations have members from their coordinating committees on the speakers list for the Assembly.
The Assembly, which will take place on June 28th and 29th 2008 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Northeast Cleveland, is open to all. A five-point action plan will be discussed and voted on during the weekend. Although there are several speakers slated for the podium and a number of workshops scheduled, there will be ample time for anyone to speak and it is hoped that those who have serious ideas on how to organize a movement that will stop this war will attend and speak up. As Greg Coleridge put it in an email to me, “I see the Assembly as a collective facilitator—enabling the many different voices against the war to coalesce and create a massive roar to force an immediate end to the war and occupation.” He continued, hoping that a “greater trust” can be developed among those working to end the war. As for concrete outcomes, he said the organizers “hope that Assembly attendees will agree to urge that the broad anti-war movement unite in calling for mass actions this year and next.”
Reminding me that the vast majority of people in the U.S. oppose the war and occupation, Coleridge explained why he believes mass action is not only important but essential. “Unfortunately,” he wrote in an email. “the U.S. Constitution doesn’t permit national initiatives or referendums.” If it did, he “believe(s) most people today would vote for a federal initiative calling to end the Iraq war, bring U.S. troops home, close military bases, and end funding beyond required to transport the troops back.” Coleridge continued, explaining that “Organized mass street actions have played a historically important role in producing social change in this country. A government that ignores public opinion and mass mobilizations loses credibility, authenticity, and legitimacy. No government can effectively govern without support from the majority of its citizens. A vast majority of people opposes the war and occupation. The anti-war movement has a responsibility to provide forums where those feelings can be expressed. National and coordinated mass action is certainly not the only strategy required to end the Iraq war and occupation. Over the last couple of years, however, it is a strategy that has not been utilized for maximum effect. That must change.”
Conference speakers include Jonathan Hutto, Navy Petty Officer, author of Anti-War Soldier and Co-Founder of Appeal for Redress; Donna Dewitt, president of the South Carolina AFL-CIO; Cindy Sheehan (by satellite); Colia Clark, long time civil rights activist; Fred Mason, President of the Maryland AFL-CIO and National Co-Convener of U.S.LAW; Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army; and Clarence Thomas, Executive Board member, ILWU Local 10, the trade union that initiated the May 1 one-day strike that closed all U.S. West Coast ports from Canada to Mexico.
For information and to register for the National Assembly, please go to their website at www.natassembly.org or call 216-736-4704.
Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground (republished by Verso). His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. He can be reached at: rjacobs3625@charter.net
—Monthly Review, May 21, 2008
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/jacobs210508.html
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6) Joe Lieberman, Would-Be Censor
Editorial
May 25, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/opinion/25sun1.html?hp
The Internet is simply a means of communication, like the telephone, but that has not prevented attempts to demonize it — the latest being the ludicrous claim that the Internet promotes terrorism.
Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut is trying to pressure YouTube to pull down videos he does not like, and a recent Senate report and a bill pending in Congress also raise the specter of censorship. It is important for online speech to be protected against these assaults.
Mr. Lieberman recently demanded that YouTube take down hundreds of videos produced by Islamist terrorist organizations or their supporters. YouTube reviewed the videos to determine whether they violated its guidelines, which prohibit hate speech and graphic or gratuitous violence. It took down 80 videos, but left others up. Mr. Lieberman said that was “not enough,” and demanded that more come down.
Earlier this month, the Senate homeland security committee, which is led by Mr. Lieberman, issued a report titled “Violent Islamist Extremism, the Internet, and the Homegrown Terrorist Threat.” The report identified the Internet as “one of the primary drivers” of the terrorist threat to the United States.
All of this comes against the backdrop of a troubling Congressional antiterrorism bill that also focuses on the Internet. The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, which passed the House last year by a 404-to-6 vote, would establish a commission to study the terrorist threat and propose legislation. The bill, which the Senate has not acted on, has a finding that the Internet promotes radicalization and terrorism.
Although the report by the homeland security committee stopped short of making recommendations for reining in online speech, it did ask “what, if any, new laws” were needed. The answer is that no new laws are needed — or justifiable — any more than it would be tolerable to enact laws restricting speech over the telephone, in a newspaper or a book, on a street corner, or in a church, mosque or synagogue.
While it is fortunate that Mr. Lieberman does not have the power to tell YouTube that it must remove videos, it is profoundly disturbing that an influential senator would even consider telling a media company to shut down constitutionally protected speech. The American Civil Liberties Union has warned that the “Homegrown Terrorism” bill and related efforts “could be a precursor to proposals to censor and regulate speech on the Internet.”
Not only do these efforts contradict fundamental American values, it is not clear if they would help fight terrorism. Even if YouTube pulled down every video Mr. Lieberman did not like, radical groups could post the same videos on their own Web sites. Trying to restrain the Internet is a game of “whack-a-mole” that cannot be won, says John Morris of the Center for Democracy and Technology. Having the videos on YouTube may even be a good thing, because it makes it easier for law enforcement officials, the media and the public to monitor the groups and their messages.
Terrorism is a real concern. All Americans know that. They also know that if we give up our fundamental rights, the terrorists win. If people use speech to engage in criminal acts, they should be prosecuted. Cutting off free speech is never the right answer.
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7) Colombia Rebels Confirm Leader’s Death
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:53 p.m. ET
May 25, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Colombia-FARC-Leader.html?hp
BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- Manuel ''Sureshot'' Marulanda, a peasant's son who built Latin America's mightiest guerrilla army but failed in a half century of struggle to trigger a communist revolution in Colombia, is dead. He was believed to be 78.
The ''comandante maximo'' of the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, died March 26 of a heart attack, senior rebel leader Timoleon Jimenez said in a video broadcast Sunday.
He did not specify where Marulanda died, though military officials say his death coincided with bombings in southern jungles where he was believed to be holed up.
A leathery-faced man with piercing eyes and a sixth-grade education, Marulanda was the world's longest-fighting rebel leader, the archetypal product of Colombia's bloody modern times.
He took up arms in his late teens and spent his entire adult life organizing resistance to governments he considered corrupt.
Famously reclusive and paranoid, Marulanda was never known to have gone abroad or even visited Bogota, Colombia's capital.
Jimenez said Marulanda's death followed a short illness whose nature he did not describe.
The guerrilla leader spent his last moments ''in the arms of his companion, surrounded by bodyguards,'' Jimenez said. Marulanda fathered at least seven children but is not known to have married.
The FARC has suffered a series of setbacks in recent months, including the killings of two other members of its seven-man ruling Secretariat.
Born Pedro Antonio Marin, Marulanda took his nom-de-guerre from a labor leader beaten to death in the 1950s in a secret police dungeon. A master strategist, he earned his nickname ''Tirofijo,'' or ''Sureshot,'' for his skill ambushing army patrols.
Unlike other Latin American guerrilla movements, his survived as the Soviet Union collapsed and Cuba's military influence shrank. Colombia's lucrative drug trade was the enabling engine.
Marulanda's story personifies the political violence that has plagued Colombia since the late 1940s. A farmer's son born in the small southwestern coffee town of Genova, Marulanda took up arms in 1949 after Conservative Party henchmen began slaughtering supporters of the peasant-backed Liberal Party.
''The violence came after me like a shadow, from one town to the other,'' Marulanda told biographer Arturo Alape. Over a decade, at least 200,000 people died in political bloodletting that became known as ''La Violencia.''
When other Liberal guerrillas disarmed in 1953, Marulanda joined up with communist outlaws. Eleven years later, he co-founded the FARC after U.S.-backed government troops overran the isolated agrarian enclave that he and other communist refugees called home.
In the early 1980s, FARC negotiations with the government of President Belisario Betancur led to the creation of a legal rebel political arm called the Union Patriotica. But a truce dissolved in 1984 after a series of assassinations of party leaders, blamed on right-wing death squads.
In all, at least 4,000 Union Patriotica activists were killed, decimating the party and helping explain the FARC's subsequent refusal to disarm.
An avid student of military history and guerrilla warfare, Marulanda was also a tango lover who played violin as a child.
He built the rebels into a 15,000-strong guerrilla army that controlled vast swaths of countryside by the mid-1990s, dealing punishing blows to the military with attacks in which it captured scores of soldiers and police.
The government says the rebels currently hold some 700 hostages, including three U.S. military contractors and the French-Colombian Ingrid Betancourt, who the FARC kidnapped in 2002 while she was running for president.
Over the years, the army branded Marulanda a dangerous terrorist, offering princely rewards for his capture and periodically claiming they had killed him in combat. In his 1989 biography, Alape counts 17 such claims.
But time and again, Marulanda reappeared alive and well -- dressed in simple farmer's clothing or camouflage fatigues and always with the trademark rubber boots, machete on his belt and towel draped over his shoulder to wipe the sweat off his brow.
Alfonso Cano, the FARC ideologue named to replace Marulanda, once said that after a long rainy march in the jungle he asked Marulanda how it was that his boots and pants had no mud stains.
''He told me, 'I never take a step without deciding where I am going to step next,''' Cano recalled.
As the FARC stepped up kidnappings and got deeper into Colombia's cocaine trade in the 1990s, Marulanda insisted the group had not shed its ideal of a more equal distribution of land and wealth.
The closest the grizzled rebel chief came to fulfilling that dream came with the 1998 election of President Andres Pastrana. Shortly after taking office, Pastrana pulled government troops from a rebel-dominated region the size of Switzerland, to facilitate peace negotiations.
The FARC began running the region as its own mini-state, raising taxes and appointing mayors. The peace process brought Marulanda into contact for the first time with scores of visitors -- from Colombian politicians to U.N. envoys and American business executives.
On one occasion, Marulanda exchanged hats and an embrace with America Online founder Jim Kimsey.
Marulanda eschewed interviews, particularly with U.S. journalists that he suspected could be spies. He was so wary of assassination attempts that he would have his companion, ''Sandra,'' taste his food to make sure it wasn't poisoned.
At the peace talks' January 1999 inauguration, he left Pastrana alone onstage next to an empty chair, claiming he'd gotten wind of an assassination attempt. Pastrana said he later learned Marulanda didn't want to be seen embracing the Colombian president.
The peace talks collapsed in February 2002 after the rebels hijacked a plane, kidnapping a senator on board.
President Alvaro Uribe's subsequent landslide victory drastically altered the military landscape. Backed by billions of dollars in U.S. aid, Uribe built up the armed forces and, making defeating the FARC his priority, pushed the rebels deep into Colombia's jungles.
The government now estimates the FARC's strength at about 9,000 fighters.
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8) Brazil Rainforest Analysis Sets Off Political Debate
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
May 25, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/world/americas/25amazon.html?ref=world
SÃO JOSÉ DOS CAMPOS, Brazil — Gilberto Câmara, a scientist who leads Brazil’s national space agency, is more at ease poring over satellite data of the Amazon than being thrust into the spotlight.
But since January, Dr. Câmara has been at the center of a political tug-of-war between scientists and Brazil’s powerful business interests. It started when he and his fellow engineers released a report showing that deforestation of Brazil’s portion of the rainforest seemed to have shot up again after two years of decline.
Since then, Dr. Câmara, who leads the National Institute for Space Research here, has found himself having to defend his agency’s findings against one of Brazil’s richest and most powerful men: Blairo Maggi, who is governor of the country’s largest agricultural state, Mato Grosso, and a business owner known as the “Soybean King.”
Governor Maggi was exercised enough by the report — which led to harsh measures stifling business in his state — that he asked for, and was granted, a meeting with the president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
The stakes could not be higher for Mr. da Silva. Stewardship of the Amazon has always been a touchy subject, with many Brazilians fearful that world powers would try to impose their standards on the rainforest.
In recent years, the debate over the Amazon has intensified, with many outside the country seeing an intact rainforest as a key to controlling global warming. At the same time, Brazil’s economy has taken off — largely because of businesses that are claiming more of the Amazon’s land for crops and livestock, and more of its trees for logging.
Mr. da Silva has spent the last several years walking a careful line, trying to maintain his image as Brazil’s first “green” president, which has gained him international cachet, without threatening Brazil’s agriculture industry at a time of soaring grain and meat prices.
Dr. Câmara’s findings made the president’s balancing act harder and turned up the heat on what had been a long-simmering battle between businesses and environmentalists.
It did not help that the scientists’ report, released in January, relied heavily on progressive deforestation, a relatively new measure that is is widely accepted by environmentalists but that Governor Maggi contends is tantamount to lying. The space agency argues that this slower-paced deforestation, where parts of the forest are thinned out little by little rather than at once, can be just as devastating.
The criticism of the report worried scientists in and out of Brazil, including Dr. Câmara. “Science,” he said, “should not bow to authority.”
The space agency, known as INPE, reported in January that deforestation had hit an estimated 4,300 square miles between August and December of last year. If that pace continues, the yearly total for deforestation would jump; the number was approximately 6,900 square miles from August 2006 to August 2007.
The agency’s data also showed that 54 percent of the deforestation had occurred in Mato Grosso, Governor Maggi’s state, where the scientists said ranchers and loggers pushed farther into the rainforest.
Some of the deforestation is legal. Owners are allowed to clear 20 percent of their land in the rainforest.
Nonetheless, the report was a headache for the government. Mr. da Silva has received international attention in recent years for the country’s growing biofuels program and for the recent two-year drop in deforestation. Suddenly environmentalists across the world were again criticizing Brazil’s efforts to save the rainforest.
The attacks on the space agency made some environmentalists worry publicly that the president might cave in to pressure from businesses. Environmentalists became even more alarmed when Marina Silva, Brazil’s environmental minister and a respected rainforest defender, resigned this month. While leaving, she spoke of heavy pressures being exerted by industry-minded governors, including Governor Maggi, to reverse the federal crackdown on destruction of the forest.
Still, Mr. da Silva responded to the space agency’s report with tough measures, including imposing credit restrictions on those found to be involved in illegal forest-clearing and creating a Arc of Fire, a multi-agency police operation that conducts surprise raids to catch illegal loggers.
The space agency has two systems for measuring deforestation. Prodes, a yearly satellite analysis, measures deforested areas as small as about 15 acres, while Deter, a lower-resolution system, maps areas greater than about 60 acres in real-time, giving law enforcement information to act quickly to stop further destruction.
The dispute over the space agency’s figures has centered on the information provided by Deter.
In the past, Dr. Câmara said, the agency included mostly large swaths of cleared land in its analysis. But environmental researchers have been clamoring for years for satellite researchers to expand monitoring to include areas thinned by logging and surface fires, rather than just areas that have been clear cut.
The agency uses the term progressive deforestation to refer to the slower form of forest degradation that has become increasingly common in the Amazon in recent years and which Dr. Câmara said the agency began including in its analysis in 2005.
The latest deforestation alerts have shown that about one-third of newly deforested areas were from progressive degradation, of which more than 75 percent were “severely degraded,” he said.
“We had to ask ourselves what happened between forest and clear-cut,” said Dr. Câmara, 52, who has been with the agency for 26 years. “With a view that if you are going to do prevention and enforcement, you need to be there as rapidly as possible.”
In other words, if farmers, loggers and others are clearing illegally, but slowly, the government, by identifying thinned-out areas, has a better chance to catch them before a large area has been affected.
“We are satisfied with the technology we have,” Dr. Câmara said. “It is the largest use of remote sensing data for environmental protection worldwide on a systematic basis of any country.”
But for Governor Maggi, who leads the state that has become a locomotive in Brazil’s surging agriculture industry, news that Mato Grosso was once again the worst deforestation offender was difficult to accept. While he is lauded by many for pioneering Brazil’s expansion into the world soybean market, his pro-industry stance and actions as head of a soybean-growing business have made him a frequent target of environmentalists. Greenpeace gave him the Golden Chainsaw Award in 2005 for being the Brazilian who most contributed to the destruction of the rainforest.
Governor Maggi’s chief of staff, Alexander Torres Maia, did not respond to phone calls seeking comment, and he did not reply to a list of questions sent via e-mail last week.
In recent years, critics say Governor Maggi has softened his all-out defense of the rights of businesses out of political necessity. But that did not stop his administration from challenging the satellite data. Officials in Mato Grosso said that the state’s environmental agency had never heard of progressive deforestation.
“We could see this wasn’t deforestation, it was burning of fields and old deforestation,” Luis Henrique Chaves Daldegan, Mato Grosso’s environment secretary, said in an interview.
Mato Grosso’s environmental agency worked to gather evidence to prove the space agency had overreached. Technicians compared satellite images dating from 2000, went to disputed locations and shot photos of what was there today. Mr. Daldegan said the pictures proved that the space agency was declaring land that had been deforested as far back as 2000 as newly cleared.
On March 25, the state agency provided Dr. Câmara with a detailed report that included 854 photos of areas in Mato Grosso that the space agency had included in its tally. The state report contended that only 10 percent of the areas had recently been deforested.
Dr. Câmara put 10 of the 50 specialists that had produced the deforestation analysis onto the task of analyzing Mato Grosso’s photos and data. They worked intensely for six weeks, he said, sometimes time-stamping their analysis of the photos after midnight.
“There was clearly a sense of urgency,” Dr. Câmara said.
In the end, the space agency said that 96 percent of its initial assessments had been correct.
“INPE is very proud, and the internal pressures were almost stronger than the external pressures to show that science would win out,” Dr. Câmara said. He did, however, agree to try using higher-resolution satellites in the future to improve the reliability of his agency’s analysis.
Mr. Daldegan said he is still not satisfied.
“We don’t think this is the end of the story,” Dr. Câmara said. “They did not ask us to stop doing this data. So this was a step forward.”
Andrew Downie contributed reporting from São Paulo, Brazil.
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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Iowa: Lawsuit Filed Over Raid
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Midwest
The nation’s largest single immigration raid, in which nearly 400 workers at an Agriprocessors Inc. meat processing plant in Postville were detained on Monday, violated the constitutional rights of workers at a meatpacking plant, a lawsuit contends. The suit accuses the government of arbitrary and indefinite detention. A spokesman for the United States attorney’s office said he could not comment on the suit, which was filed Thursday on behalf of about 147 of the workers. Prosecutors said they filed criminal charges against 306 of the detained workers. The charges include accusations of aggravated identity theft, falsely using a Social Security number, illegally re-entering the United States after being deported and fraudulently using an alien registration card.
May 17, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/us/17brfs-LAWSUITFILED_BRF.html?ref=us
Senate Revises Drug Maker Gift Bill
By REUTERS
National Breifing | Washington
A revised Senate bill would require drug makers and medical device makers to publicly report gifts over $500 a year to doctors, watering down the standard set in a previous version. The new language was endorsed by the drug maker Eli Lilly & Company. Lawmakers said they hoped the support would prompt other companies to back the bill, which had previously required all gifts valued over $25 be reported. The industry says the gifts are part of its doctor education, but critics say such lavish gestures influence prescribing habits.
May 14, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/washington/14brfs-SENATEREVISE_BRF.html?ref=us
Texas: Sect Mother Is Not a Minor
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Southwest
Child welfare officials conceded to a judge that a newborn’s mother, held in foster care as a minor after being removed from a polygamous sect’s ranch, is an adult. The woman, who gave birth on April 29, had been held along with more than 400 children taken last month from a ranch run by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She was one of two pregnant sect members who officials had said were minors. The other member, who gave birth on Monday, may also be an adult, state officials said.
May 14, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/us/14brfs-SECTMOTHERIS_BRF.html?ref=us
Four Military Branches Hit Recruiting Goals
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Washington
The Marine Corps far surpassed its recruiting goal last month, enlisting 2,233 people, which was 142 percent of its goal, the Pentagon said. The Army recruited 5,681 people, 101 percent of its goal. The Navy and Air Force also met their goals, 2,905 sailors and 2,435 airmen. A Defense Department spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said that if the Marine Corps continued its recruiting success, it could reach its goal of growing to 202,000 people by the end of 2009, more than a year early.
May 13, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/us/13brfs-FOURMILITARY_BRF.html?ref=us
Texas: Prison Settlement Approved
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Southwest
A federal judge has approved a settlement between the Texas Youth Commission and the Justice Department over inmate safety at the state’s juvenile prison in Edinburg. The judge, Ricardo Hinojosa of Federal District Court, signed the settlement Monday, and it was announced by the commission Wednesday. Judge Hinojosa had previously rejected a settlement on grounds that it lacked a specific timeline. Federal prosecutors began investigating the prison, the Evins Regional Juvenile Center, in 2006. The settlement establishes parameters for safe conditions and staffing levels, restricts use of youth restraints and guards against retaliation for reporting abuse and misconduct.
May 8, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/us/08brfs-PRISONSETTLE_BRF.html?ref=us
Michigan: Insurance Ruling
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Midwest
Local governments and state universities cannot offer health insurance to the partners of gay workers, the State Supreme Court ruled. The court ruled 5 to 2 that Michigan’s 2004 ban against same-sex marriage also blocks domestic-partner policies affecting gay employees at the University of Michigan and other public-sector employers. The decision affirms a February 2007 appeals court ruling. Up to 20 public universities, community colleges, school districts and local governments in Michigan have benefit policies covering at least 375 gay couples.
May 8, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/us/08brfs-INSURANCERUL_BRF.html?ref=us
Halliburton Profit Rises
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
HOUSTON (AP) — Increasing its global presence is paying off for the oil field services provider Halliburton, whose first-quarter income rose nearly 6 percent on growing business in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, the company said Monday.
Business in the first three months of 2008 also was better than expected in North America, where higher costs and lower pricing squeezed results at the end of 2007.
Halliburton shares closed up 3 cents, at $47.46, on the New York Stock Exchange.
Halliburton said it earned $584 million, or 64 cents a share, in the three months that ended March 31, compared with a year-earlier profit of $552 million, or 54 cents a share. Revenue rose to $4.03 billion, from $3.42 billion a year earlier.
April 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/business/worldbusiness/22halliburton.html?ref=business
Illegal Immigrants Who Were Arrested at Poultry Plant in Arkansas to Be Deported
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Eighteen illegal immigrants arrested at a poultry plant in Batesville will be processed for deportation, but will not serve any jail time for using fake Social Security numbers and state identification cards, federal judges ruled. Magistrate Judge Beth Deere and Judge James Moody of Federal District Court accepted guilty pleas from 17 of those arrested last week at the Pilgrim’s Pride plant. Federal prosecutors dismissed the misdemeanor charges against one man, but said they planned to ask Immigration and Customs Enforcement to begin deportation proceedings against him. The guilty pleas will give the 17 people criminal records, which will allow prosecutors to pursue tougher penalties if they illegally return to the United States. They had faced up to up to two years in prison and $205,000 in fines. Jane Duke, a United States attorney, said her office had no interest in seeing those arrested serve jail time, as they were “otherwise law-abiding citizens.”
National Briefing | South
April 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/us/22brfs-002.html?ref=us
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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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"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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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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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"Award-Winning Writer/Filmmaker Donald L. Vasicek Launches New Sand
Creek Massacre Website"
May 21, 2008 -- CENTENNIAL, CO -- Award-winning filmmaker, Donald L.
Vasicek, has launched a new Sand Creek Massacre website. Titled,
"The Sand Creek Massacre", the site contains in depth witness
accounts of the massacre, the award-winning Sand Creek Massacre
trailer for viewing, the award-winning Sand Creek Massacre
documentary short for viewing, the story of the Sand Creek Massacre,
and a Shop to purchase Sand Creek Massacre DVD's and lesson
plans including the award-winning documentary film/educational DVD.
Vasicek, a board member of The American Indian Genocide Museum
(www.aigenom.com)in Houston, Texas, said, "The website was launched
to inform, to educate, and to provide educators, historians, students
and all others the accessibility to the Sand Creek Massacre story."
The link/URL to the website is sandcreekmassacre.net.
###
Contact:
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
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