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EMERGENCY PICKET LINE S.F.
STOP THE ICE RAIDS!
EMERGENCY PICKET
TODAY! TUESDAY, May 27th, 5 PM
Mission Police Station
630 Valencia (17th & Valencia) SF
On Wednesday March 21 the police arrested a Latina woman selling
strawberries on the corner of 22nd and Valencia. Her two children were
arrested with her because, according to the police, they attacked the
arresting officer!!! The police needed 3 police cars and 6-8 policemen
to arrest our sister and her children.
There is a likelihood that she will be expelled by the ICE Migra, who have
been visiting the county jail twice a week, with the cooperation of the
Sheriff.
It is clear that San Francisco is not a "sanctuary city" if the Migra is
allowed to grab undocumented brothers and sisters from the county jail.
sponsored by:
BRIGADES AGAINST THE RAIDS
Project of BARRIO UNIDO
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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
9) The World Food Crisis
By Fred Magdoff
Znet
May 26, 2008
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/17742
10) The Dogs of War
By RAYMOND BONNER
May 25, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/books/review/Bonner-t.html?ref=world
11) The Working Wounded
By DAVID M. UHLMANN
Op-Ed Contributor
May 27, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/opinion/27uhlmann.html?hp
12) His Life With the Deaths That the State Carried Out
By FELICIA R. LEE
May 27, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/arts/television/27docu.html?ref=us
13) Efficiently and Methodically Framed--Mumia is innocent!
FRAMING OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, by J Patrick O'Connor (Lawrence Hill Books 2008)
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222, Oakland CA 94610, 510.763.2347
www.laboractionmumia.org
LACFreeMumia@aol.com
14) Woman on oxygen machine dies when company shuts off power
May. 19, 2008 07:15 AM
Associated Press
http://www.azcentral.com/offbeat/articles/2008/05/19/20080519oxygen19-on.html
15) Most Homeless in New Orleans From City, Survey Finds
By SHAILA DEWAN
May 28, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/us/28tent.html?hp
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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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9) The World Food Crisis
By Fred Magdoff
Znet
May 26, 2008
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/17742
An acute food crisis has struck the world in 2008. This is on top of a longer-term crisis of agriculture and food that has already left billions hungry and malnourished. In order to understand the full, dire implications of what is happening today it is necessary to look at the interaction between these short-term and long-term crises. Both crises arise primarily from the for-profit production of food, fiber, and now biofuels, and the rift between food and people that this inevitably generates.
“Routine” hunger before the current crisis
Of the more than six billion people living in the world today, the United Nations estimates that close to one billion suffer from chronic hunger. But this number, which is only a crude estimate, leaves out those suffering from vitamin and nutrient deficiencies and other forms of malnutrition. The total number of food insecure people who are malnourished or lacking critical nutrients is probably closer to three billion—about half of humanity. The severity of this situation is made clear by the United Nations estimate of over a year ago that approximately 18,000 children die daily as a direct or indirect consequence of malnutrition (Associated Press, February 18, 2007).
Lack of production is rarely the reason that people are hungry. This can be seen most clearly in the United States, where despite the production of more food than the population needs, hunger remains a significant problem. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2006 over 35 million people lived in food-insecure households, including 13 million children. Due to a lack of food adults living in over 12 million households could not eat balanced meals and in over seven million families someone had smaller portions or skipped meals. In close to five million families, children did not get enough to eat at some point during the year.
In poor countries too, it is not unusual for large supplies of wasted and misallocated food to exist in the midst of widespread and persistent hunger. A few years ago a New York Times article had a story with the following headline “Poor in India Starve as Surplus Wheat Rots” (December 2, 2002). As a Wall Street Journal headline put it in 2004 “Want Amid Plenty, An Indian Paradox: Bumper Harvests and Rising Hunger” (June 25, 2004).
No “right to food”
Hunger and malnutrition generally are symptoms of a larger underlying problem—poverty in an economic system that recognizes, as Rachel Carson put it, no other gods but those of profit and production. Food is treated in almost all of the world’s countries as just another commodity, like clothes, automobiles, pencils, books, diamond jewelry, and so on. People are not considered to have a right to purchase any particular commodity, and no distinction is made in this respect between necessities and luxuries. Those who are rich can afford to purchase anything they want while the poor are often not able to procure even their basic needs. Under capitalist relations people have no right to an adequate diet, shelter, and medical attention. As with other commodities, people without what economists call “effective demand” cannot buy sufficient nutritious food. Of course, lack of “effective demand” in this case means that the poor don’t have enough money to buy the food they need.
Humans have a “biological demand” for food—we all need food, just as we need water and air, to continue to live. It is a systematic fact of capitalist society that many are excluded from fully meeting this biological need. It’s true that some wealthy countries, especially those in Europe, do help feed the poor, but the very way capitalism functions inherently creates a lower strata of society that frequently lacks the basics for human existence. In the United States there are a variety of government initiatives—such as food stamps and school lunch programs—aimed at feeding the poor. Yet, the funding for these programs does not come close to meeting the needs of the poor, and various charities fight an uphill battle trying to make up the difference.
In this era relatively few people actually die from starvation, aside from the severe hunger induced by wars and dislocations. Most instead become chronically malnourished and then are plagued by a variety of diseases that shorten their lives or make them more miserable. The scourge of malnutrition impedes children’s mental and physical development, harming them for the rest of their lives.
The acute and growing crisis: The Great Hunger of 2008
At this moment in history there are, in addition to the “routine” hunger discussed above, two separate global food crises occurring simultaneously. The severe and acute crisis, about two years old, is becoming worse day by day and it is this one that we’ll discuss first. The severity of the current crisis cannot be overstated. It has rapidly increased the number of people around the globe that are malnourished. Although statistics of increased hunger during the past year are not yet available, it is clear that many will die prematurely or be harmed in other ways. As usual, it will be the young, the old, and the infirm that will suffer the worst effects of the Great Hunger of 2008. The rapid and simultaneous rise in the world prices for all the basic food crops—corn (maize), wheat, soybeans, rice, and cooking oils—along with many other crops is having a devastating effect on an increasing portion of humanity.
The increases in the world market prices over the past few years have been nothing short of astounding. The prices of the sixty agricultural commodities traded on the world market increased 37 percent last year and 14 percent in 2006 (New York Times, January 19, 2008). Corn prices began their rise in the early fall of 2006 and within months had soared by some 70 percent. Wheat and soybean prices also skyrocketed during this time and are now at record levels. The prices for cooking oils (mainly made from soybeans and oil palm)—an essential foodstuff in many poor countries—have rocketed up as well. Rice prices have also risen over 100 percent in the last year (“High Rice Cost Creating Fears of Asia Unrest,” New York Times, March 29, 2008).
The reasons for these soaring food prices are fairly clear. First, there are a number of issues related directly or indirectly to the increase in petroleum prices. In the United States, Europe, and many other countries this has brought a new emphasis on growing crops that can be used for fuel—called biofuels (or agrofuels). Thus, producing corn to make ethanol or soybean and palm oil to make diesel fuel is in direct competition with the use of these crops for food. Last year over 20 percent of the entire corn crop in the United States was used to produce ethanol—a process that does not yield much additional energy over that which goes into producing it. (It is estimated that over the next decade about one-third of the U.S. corn crop will be devoted to ethanol production [Bloomberg, February 21, 2008].) Additionally, many of the inputs for large-scale commercial agricultural production are based on petroleum and natural gas—from building and running tractors and harvesting equipment to producing fertilizers and pesticides and drying crops for storage. The price of nitrogen fertilizer, the most commonly used fertilizer worldwide, is directly tied to the price of energy because it takes so much energy to produce.
A second cause of the increase in prices of corn and soybeans and soy cooking oil is that the increasing demand for meat among the middle class in Latin America and Asia, especially China. The use of maize and soy to feed cattle, pigs, and poultry has risen sharply to satisfy this demand. The world’s total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the last twenty years alone. (New York Times, January 27, 2008.) Feeding grain to more and more animals is putting growing pressure on grain stores. Feeding grain to produce meat is a very inefficient way of providing people with either calories or protein. It is especially wasteful for animals such as cows—with digestive systems that can derive energy from cellulose—because they can obtain all of their nutrition from pastures and will grow well without grain, although more slowly. Cows are not efficient converters of corn or soy to meat—to yield a pound of meat, cows require eight pounds of corn; pigs, five; and chickens, three (Baron’s, March 4, 2008).
A third reason for the big jump in world food prices is that a few key countries that were self-sufficient—that is, did not import foods, although plenty of people suffered from hunger—are now importing large quantities of food. As a farm analyst in New Delhi says “When countries like India start importing food, then the world prices zoom.... If India and China are both turning into bigger importers, shifting from food self-sufficiency as recently we have seen in India, then the global prices are definitely going to rise still further, which will mean the era of cheaper food has now definitely gone away” (VOA News, February 21, 2008). Part of the reason for the pressure on rice prices is the loss of farmland to other uses such as various development projects—some 7 million acres in China and 700,000 acres in Vietnam. In addition, rice yields per acre in Asia have reached a plateau. There has been no per acre increase for ten years and yield increases are not expected in the near future (Rice Today, January-March 2008).
Some of the reasons for the recent price increase for wheat and rice are related to weather. The drought in Australia, a major wheat exporting country, and low yields in a few other exporters has greatly affected wheat prices. A 2007 cyclone in Bangladesh destroyed approximately 600 million dollars worth of its rice crop, leading to rice price increases of about 70 percent (The Daily Star [Bangladesh], February 11, 2008). The drought last year in north-central China combined with the unusual cold and snow during the winter will probably lead the government to greater food purchases on the international markets, keeping the pressure on prices.
Speculation in the futures market and hoarding at the local level are certainly playing a part in this crisis situation to make food more expensive. As the U.S. financial crisis deepened and spread in the winter of 2008, speculators started putting more money into food and metals to take advantage of what is being called the “commodities super cycle.” (The dollar’s decline relative to other currencies stimulates “investment” in tangible commodities.) While it would be a mistake to see these aspects, however despicable and inhumane, as the cause of the crisis, they certainly add to the misery by taking advantage of tight markets. It is certainly possible that the commodity bubble will burst, bringing down food prices a bit. However, speculation and local hoarding will continue to put an upward pressure on food prices. Transnational corporations that process agricultural products, manufacture various foods, and sell food to the public are, of course, all doing exceptionally well. Corporate profits usually do well in a time of shortages and price increases.
Although not a cause for the increase in prices of other foods, the higher prices for ocean fish have created an added burden for the poor and near poor. Over-fishing of many ocean species is removing this important protein source from the diet of a large percentage of the world’s population.
The response to the crisis has come in the form of demonstrations and riots as well as changes in government policies. Over the past few months there have been protests and riots over the increasing cost of food in many countries, including Pakistan, Guinea, Mauritania, Morocco, Mexico, Senegal, Uzbekistan, and Yemen. China has instituted price controls for basic foods and Russia has frozen the price of milk, bread, eggs, and cooking oil for six months. Egypt, India, and Vietnam have banned or placed strict control on the export of rice so that their own people will have sufficient food. Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer, has expanded the number of people eligible to receive food aid by over 10 million. Many countries have lowered protectionist tariffs to try to lessen the blow of dramatically higher prices of imported foods. Countries heavily dependent on food imports such as the Philippines, the world’s largest importer of rice, are scrambling to make deals to obtain the needed imports. But these various stopgap efforts have mainly marginal effects on the problem. Almost all people are forced into a lower standard of living as those in the middle class become increasingly careful about the foods they purchase, the near poor drop into poverty, and the formerly poor become truly destitute and suffer greatly. The effects have been felt around the world in all classes of society except the truly wealthy. As Josette Sheeran, the head of the UN’s World Food Program, said in February, “This is the new face of hunger.... There is food on shelves but people are priced out of the market. There is vulnerability in urban areas we have not seen before. There are food riots in countries where we have not seen them before” (The Guardian, Feb. 26, 2008).
Although Haiti has been a very poor country for years—80 percent of the people try to subsist on less than what two dollars a day can purchase in the United States—the recent situation has brought it to new depths of desperation. Two cups of rice, which cost thirty cents a year ago, now cost sixty cents. The description of an Associated Press article from earlier this year (January 29, 2008) is most poignant in its details:
It was lunchtime in one of Haiti’s worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country’s central plateau.
The “cookies” also contain some vegetable shortening and salt. Toward the end of the article is the following:
Marie Noel, 40, sells the cookies in a market to provide for her seven children. Her family also eats them.
“I’m hoping one day I’ll have enough food to eat, so I can stop eating these,” she said. “I know it’s not good for me.”
Many countries in Africa and Asia have been severely impacted by the crisis with hunger spreading widely—but all nations are affected to one extent or another. In the United States—where over the past year the price of eggs increased 38 percent, milk by 30 percent, lettuce by 16 percent, and whole wheat bread by 12 percent—many people are starting to purchase less costly products. “Higher Food Prices Start to Pinch Consumers” is the way the Wall Street Journal put it in a headline (January 3, 2008).
It should be noted here that while wheat prices are at record levels and prices of wheat products in the United States will certainly go higher, the cost of the wheat in a loaf of bread is only small part of the retail price. When wheat prices double, as they have, the price of a loaf of bread may increase by 10 percent, perhaps from $3 to $3.30. However, the effect of a doubling of prices for corn, wheat, soybeans, and rice is devastating for poor people in the third world who primarily purchase raw commodities.
With food pantries and soup kitchens stretched to the breaking point, the U.S. poor are experiencing deepening suffering. In general, the poor in the United States tend to first pay their rent, heat, gas (for a car to get to work), and electricity bills. That leaves food as one of the few “flexible” items in their budgets. In the central part of my home state of Vermont, over the last year the use of food shelves (i.e., aid from local, charitable food assistance programs that give groceries directly to the needy) has increased 133 percent among all users and 180 percent among the working poor! (Hal Cohen, with the Central Vermont Community Action Council, personal communication February 20, 2008.)
The economic recession is beginning to be felt in many parts of the United States, adding to the rise in requests for help from the various government food assistance programs (“As Jobs Vanish and Prices Rise, Food Stamp Use Nears Record,” New York Times, March 31, 2008). But, frequently people using the inadequately funded government programs tend to run out of food toward the end of the month, resulting in a huge increase in demand at food shelves and soup kitchens at that time. And as the need for food has increased, food donations have actually declined—with a large drop in federal donations (with high prices there are fewer “surplus” commodities from farm programs, so $58 million in food was given to food shelves last year versus $242 million five years before).
Supermarkets have found ways to make money from damaged or dated goods they previously donated to charities. In Connecticut, there has been a surge in demand for food while supply is not keeping up. A food pantry in Stamford is supplying food to four hundred families, double the number of a year ago. According to the food pantry’s director, “I have had to turn people away.... There were times I went home and wanted to cry” (New York Times, December 23, 2007). A professor at Cornell University who studies food-assistance programs in the United States has summarized the situation: “There is a nascent crisis building.... Demand for food-bank assistance is climbing rapidly when the resources are falling in dramatic terms because the dollars just don’t go as far” (Wall Street Journal, March 20, 2008).
The long-term food crisis
As critical as the short-term food crisis is—demanding immediate world notice as well as attention within every country—the long-term, structural crisis is even more important. The latter has existed for decades and contributes to, and is reinforced by, today’s acute food crisis. Indeed, it is this underlying structural crisis of agriculture and food in third world societies, which constitutes the real reason that the immediate food crisis is so severe and so difficult to surmount within the system.
There has been a huge migration of people out of the countryside to the cities of the third world. They leave the countryside because they lack access to land. Often their land has been stolen as a result of the inroads of agribusiness; while they are also forced from the land by low prices they have historically received for their products and threats against campesino lives. They move to cities seeking a better life but what they find is a very hard existence—life in slums with extremely high unemployment and underemployment. Most will try to scrape by in the “informal” economy by buying things and then selling them in small quantities. Of the half of humanity that lives in cities (three billion), some one billion, or one-third of city dwellers, live in slums. The chairman of a district in Lagos, Nigeria described it as follows: “We have a massive growth in population with a stagnant or shrinking economy. Picture this city ten, twenty years from now. This is not the urban poor—this is the new urban destitute.” A long New Yorker article on Lagos ended on a note of extreme pessimism: “The really disturbing thing about Lagos’ pickers and vendors is that their lives have essentially nothing to do with ours. They scavenge an existence beyond the margins of macroeconomics. They are, in the harsh terms of globalization, superfluous” (November 13, 2006).
One of the major factors pushing this mass and continuing migration to the cities—in addition to being landless or forced off land—is the difficulty to make a living as a small farmer. This has been made especially difficult, as countries have implemented the “neoliberal” policies recommended or mandated by the IMF, the World Bank, and even some of the western NGOs working in the poor countries of the third world. The neoliberal ideology holds that the so-called free market should be allowed to work its magic. Through the benign sanctions of the “invisible hand,” it is said; the economy will function most efficiently and will be highly productive. But in order for the market to be “free” governments must stop interfering.
With regard to agriculture, governments should stop subsidizing farmers to purchase fertilizers, stop being involved in the storage and transportation of food, and just let farmers and food alone. This approach also holds that governments should stop subsidizing food for poor people and then the newly unbridled market will take care of it all. This mentality was evident as the Haitian food crisis started to develop late in 2007. According to the Haitian Minister of Commerce and Industry, “We cannot intervene and fix prices because we have to comply with free market regulations” (Reuters, December 9, 2007). This was the same response that colonial Britain adopted in response to the Irish potato famine as well as to the famines in India in the late 1800s. But to a certain extent this way of thinking is now internalized in the thinking of many leaders in the “independent” countries of the periphery.
This ideology, of course, has no basis in reality—the so-called free market is not necessarily efficient at all. It is also absolutely unable to act as a mechanism to end poverty and hunger. We should always keep in mind that this ideology represents the exact opposite of what the core capitalist countries have historically done and what they are actually doing today. For example, the U.S. national government has supported farmers in many ways for over a century. This has occurred through government programs for research and extension, taking land from Indians and giving it to farmers of European origin, subsidizing farmers directly through a variety of programs including low-cost loans, and stimulating the export of crops. It should also be noted that the United States, Europe, and Japan all developed their industrial economies under protectionist policies plus a variety of programs of direct assistance to industry.
The effects of the governments of the third world stopping their support of small farmers and consumers has meant that the life for the poor in those countries has become more difficult. As an independent report commissioned by World Bank put it: “In most reforming countries, the private sector did not step in to fill the vacuum when the public sector withdrew” (New York Times, October 15, 2007). For example, many African governments under pressure from the neoliberal economic policies promoted by the World Bank, the IMF, and the rich countries of the center of the system stopped subsidizing the use of fertilizers on crops. Although it is true that imported fertilizers are very expensive, African soils are generally of very low fertility and crop yields are low when you use neither synthetic nor organic fertilizers. As yields fell after governments were no longer assisting the purchase of fertilizers and helping in other ways, more farmers found that they could not survive and migrated to the city slums. Jeffrey Sachs—a partially recovered free-trade shock doctor—has had some second thoughts. According to Sachs, “The whole thing was based on the idea that if you take away the government for the poorest of the poor that somehow these markets will solve the problems.... But markets can’t step in and won’t step in when people have nothing. And if you take away help, you leave them to die” (New York Times, October 15, 2007).
Last year one country in Africa, Malawi, decided to reverse course and go against all the recommendations they had received. The government reintroduced subsidies for fertilizers and seeds. Farmers used more fertilizers, the yields increased, and the country’s food situation improved greatly (New York Times, December 2, 2007). In fact, they were able to export some food to Zimbabwe—although there are those in Malawi, who consider that to have lowered their own supplies too far.
Another problem occurs as capitalist farmers in some of the poor countries of the periphery enter into world markets. While subsistence farmers usually sell only a small portion of their crops, using most for family consumption, capitalist farmers are those that market all or a large portion of what they produce. They frequently expand production and take over the land of small farmers, with or without compensation, and use fewer people than previously to work a given piece of land because of mechanized production techniques. In Brazil, the “Soybean King” controls well over a quarter of a million acres (100,000 hectares) and uses huge tractors and harvesting equipment for working the land. In China corrupt village and city officials frequently sell “common land” to developers without adequate compensation to the farmers—sometimes there is no compensation at all.
Thus, the harsh conditions for farmers caused by a number of factors, made worse by the implementing of free-market ideology, have created a continuing stream of people leaving the countryside and going to live in cities that do not have jobs for them. And those now living in slums and without access to land to grow their own food are at the mercy of the world price for food.
One of the reasons for the growing consolidation of land holdings and forcing out of subsistence farmers is the penetration of multinational agricultural corporations into the countries of the periphery. From selling seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides to processing raw agricultural products to exporting or selling them through new, large supermarkets, agribusiness multinationals are having a devastating effect on small farmers. With the collapse of extension systems for helping farmers save seeds and with the disbanding of government seed companies the way was paved for multinational seed companies to make major inroads.
The giant transnational corporations such as Cargill and Monsanto now reach into most of the third world—selling seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and feeds while buying and processing raw agricultural products. In the process they assist larger farms to become “more efficient”—to grow over larger land areas. The main advantage of genetically modified organism (GMO) seeds is that they help to simplify the process of farming and allow large acreages to be under the management of a single entity—a large farmer or corporation—squeezing out small farmers.
The negative effects of the penetration of large supermarket chains are being felt as well. As a 2004 headline in the New York Times put it “Supermarket Giants Crush Central American Farmers” (December 28, 2004). Large supermarkets would rather deal with a few farmers growing on a large scale than with many small farmers. And the opening of large supermarkets does away with the traditional markets used by small farmers.
The prolonged crisis is intensifying
It seems logical that with higher food prices, farmers should be better off and produce more to satisfy the “demand” indicated by the market. To a certain extent that is true—especially for farmers that can take advantage of all the physical and monetary advantages of large-scale production. Yet, the input costs for just about everything used in agricultural production have also increased, thus profit gains for farmers are not as large as might be expected. This is a particularly difficult problem for farmers raising animals fed on increasingly expensive grains.
In addition, things are not necessarily going well for small and subsistence farmers. Many are stuck in debt so deep that it’s hard for them to get back on their feet. An estimated 25,000 Indian farmers committed suicide last year because they could see no other way out of their predicament. (The Indian government has proposed a budget that includes loan wavers for small farmers that have borrowed through banks. However, if it actually goes into effect, the millions that have borrowed from local usurers will not benefit.) The consolidation of land holdings and the removal of small farmers and landless workers from the land have been exacerbated by the exceptional crop price increases over the last few years.
Rising crop prices cause the price of farmland to increase—especially of large fields that can be worked by large-scale machinery. This is happening in the United States and in certain countries of the periphery. For example, Global Ag Investments, a company based in Texas, owns and operates 34,000 acres of Brazilian farmland. At one of its farms, a single field of soybeans covers 1,600 acres—that’s two and a half square miles! A New Zealand company has purchased approximately 100,000 acres in Uruguay and has hired managers to operate dairy farms established on their land.
Private equity firms are purchasing farmland in the United States (Associated Press, May 7, 2007) as well as abroad. A U.S. company is cooperating with Brazilian and Japanese partners to purchase 385 square miles in Brazil, approximately a quarter of a million acres! This is also happening with South American capital taking the lead—a Brazilian investment fund, Investimento em Participacoe, is buying a minority stake in a an Argentine soybean producer that owns close to 400,000 acres in Uruguay and Argentina.
Rising crop prices have also led to an acceleration of deforestation in the Amazon basin—1,250 square miles (about the size of Rhode Island) in the last five months of 2007—as capitalist farmers hunger for more land (BBC, January 24, 2008). In addition, huge areas of farmland have been taken for development—some of dubious use, such as building suburban style housing and golf courses for the wealthy.
In China during 2000 to 2005, there was an average annual loss of 2.6 million acres as farmland is used for development. The country is fast approaching the self-defined minimum amount of arable farmland that it should have—approximately 290 million acres (120 million hectares)—and the amount of farmland will most likely continue to fall. As part of an effort to gain access to foreign agricultural production, a Chinese company has made an agreement to lease close to 2.5 million acres of land in the Philippines to grow rice, corn, and sugar—setting off a huge protest in the Philippines that has temporarily stalled the project (Bloomberg, February 21, 2008). As one farmer put it: “The [Philippine] government and the Chinese call it a partnership, but it only means the Chinese will be our landlords and we will be the slaves.’’
Ending world hunger
Ending world hunger is conceptually quite simple. However, actually putting it into practice is far from simple. First, the access to a healthy and varied diet needs to be recognized for the basic human right that it clearly is. Governments must commit to ending hunger among their people and they must take forceful action to carry out this commitment. In many countries, even at this time, there is sufficient food produced to feed the entire population at a high level of nutrition. This is, of course, most evident in the United States, where so much food is produced. It is nothing less than a crime that so many of the poor in the United States are hungry, malnourished, or don’t know where their next meal will come from (which itself takes a psychological toll) when there is actually plenty of food.
In the short run, the emergency situation of increasingly severe hunger and malnutrition needs be addressed with all resources at a country’s disposal. Although mass bulk distribution of grains or powdered milk can play a role, countries might consider the Venezuelan innovation of setting up feeding houses in all poor neighborhoods. When the people believe that the government is really trying to help them, and they are empowered to find or assist in a solution to their own problems, a burst of enthusiasm and volunteerism results. For example, although the food in Venezuela’s feeding program is supplied by the government, the meals for poor children, the elderly, and the infirm are prepared in, and distributed from, peoples’ homes using considerable amounts of volunteer labor. In addition, Venezuela has developed a network of stores that sell basic foodstuffs at significant discounts over prices charged in private markets.
Brazil started a program in 2003 that is aimed at alleviating the conditions of the poorest people. Approximately one-quarter of Brazil’s population receives direct payments from the national government under the Bolsa Família (Family Fund) antipoverty program. Under this program a family with a per capita daily income below approximately $2 per person per day receives a benefit of up to $53 per month per person (The Economist, February 7, 2008). This infusion of cash is dependent on the family’s children attending school and participating in the national vaccination program. This program is certainly having a positive effect on peoples’ lives and nutrition. It is, however, a system that does not have the same effect as Venezuela’s programs, which mobilize people to work together for their own and their community’s benefit.
Urban gardens have been used successfully in Cuba as well as other countries to supply city dwellers with food as well as sources of income. These should be strongly promoted—with creative use of available space in urban settings.
Agriculture must become one of the top priorities for the third world. Even the World Bank is beginning to stress the importance of governments assisting agriculture in their countries. As Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, managing director of the World Bank, has stated,
Today the attention of the world’s policy makers is focused on the sub-prime woes, and the financial crises. But the real crisis is that of hunger and malnutrition...this is the real problem that should grab the world’s attention. We know that 75 percent of the world’s poor people are rural and most of them depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. Agriculture is today, more than ever, a fundamental instrument for fighting hunger, malnutrition, and for supporting sustainable development and poverty reduction. (All-Africa Global Media, February 19, 2008)
Almost every country in the world has the soil, water, and climate resources to grow enough food so that all their people can eat a healthy diet. In addition, the knowledge and crop varieties already exist in most countries so that if farmers are given adequate assistance they will be able to grow reasonably high yields of crops.
Although enhanced agricultural production is essential, much of the emphasis in the past has been on production of export crops. While this may help a country’s balance of payments, export oriented agriculture does not ensure sufficient food for everyone nor does it promote a healthy rural environment. In addition to basic commodities such as soybeans, export-oriented agriculture also leads naturally to the production of high-value luxury crops demanded by export markets (luxuries from the standpoint of the basic food needs of a poor third world country), rather than the low-value subsistence crops needed to meet the needs of the domestic population. Production of sufficient amounts of the right kinds of food within each country’s borders—by small farmers working in cooperatives or on their own and using sustainable techniques—is the best way to achieve the goal of “food security.” In this way the population may be insulated, at least partially, from the price fluctuations on the world market. This, of course, also means not taking land out of food production to produce crops for the biofuel markets.
One of the ways to do this and at the same time help with the problem of so many people crowded into urban slums—the people most susceptible to food price increases—is to provide land through meaningful agrarian reforms. But land itself is not enough. Beginning or returning farmers need technical and financial support in order to produce food. Additionally, social support systems, such as cooperatives and community councils, need to be developed to help promote camaraderie and to solidify the new communities that are developed. Perhaps each community needs to be “seeded” with a sprinkling of devoted activists. Also, housing, electricity, water, and wastewater need to be available to make it attractive for people living in the cities to move to the countryside. Another way to encourage people to move to the country to become farmers is to appeal to patriotism and instill the idea that they are real pioneers, establishing a new food system to help their countries gain food self-sufficiency, i.e., independence from transnational agribusiness corporations and provision of healthy food for all the nation’s people. These pioneering farmers need to be viewed by themselves, the rest of the society, and their government as critical to the future of their countries and the well being of the population. They must be treated with the great respect that they deserve.
Conclusion
Food is a human right and governments have a responsibility to see that their people are well fed. In addition, there are known ways to end hunger—including emergency measures to combat the current critical situation, urban gardens, agrarian reforms that include a whole support system for farmers, and sustainable agriculture techniques that enhance the environment. The present availability of food to people reflects very unequal economic and political power relationships within and between countries. A sustainable and secure food system requires a different and much more equitable relationship among people. The more the poor and farmers themselves are included in all aspects of the effort to gain food security, and the more they are energized in the process, the greater will be the chance of attaining lasting food security. As President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, a country that has done so much to deal with poverty and hunger, has put it,
“Yes, it is important to end poverty, to end misery, but the most important thing is to offer power to the poor so that they can fight for themselves.”
—Znet, May 26, 2008
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/17742
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10) The Dogs of War
By RAYMOND BONNER
May 25, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/books/review/Bonner-t.html?ref=world
After the abuse of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib was exposed in April 2004 by The New Yorker and “60 Minutes,” the Bush administration sought to portray the reprehensible misconduct as the work of a few bad apples. Seeming to underscore that verdict was the fact that soldiers took pictures of themselves, smiling, holding thumbs up, with the naked, dead, abused and humiliated prisoners.
Unfortunately, the truth, which emerges with painful clarity from “Standard Operating Procedure,” is that what happened at Abu Ghraib was not only tolerated but condoned and encouraged. Harsh treatment wasn’t punished; it was rewarded. When First Lt. Carolyn Wood of the Army was in charge of the interrogation center at Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan in 2003, she established a policy that allowed prisoners to be held in solitary confinement for a month, to be stripped, shackled in painful positions, kept without sleep, bombarded with sound and light. Three prisoners were beaten to death on her watch. She was awarded a Bronze Star, one of the armed forces’ highest combat medals, promoted to captain and sent to Iraq.
At Abu Ghraib, a Marine Corps lawyer and an Army lawyer witnessed prisoners being suspended from their cell doors. Occasionally they expressed mild concern, but over all they said nothing, which was taken as “implied consent.” When a prisoner interrogated by the C.I.A. died from the beatings, a “parade of senior officers” viewed the corpse. Army medics cleaned up the body, and the official reason given for the death was a heart attack.
Sometimes just for fun, Cpl. Charles Graner and other guards hauled prisoners out of their cells, stripped them, punched them, put sandbags over their heads and forced them to masturbate. Soldiers gleefully snapped photographs.
Pfc. Lynndie England, whose name along with that of Cpl. Graner became almost synonymous with Abu Ghraib, said “it was standard operating procedure.” Specialists Sabrina Harman and Megan Ambuhl later thought that perhaps the soldiers had gone too far. They reported what had gone on to a sergeant. “Nothing really happened,” said Harman, whose letters to her partner were given to the authors, and whose personal story adds to the power of this book. Graner himself showed photographs he had taken to senior officers, including a lieutenant colonel. Nothing happened.
“Standard Operating Procedure” and a documentary film of the same name are the collaborative effort of Philip Gourevitch, the author of a highly acclaimed book about the Rwandan genocide, and Errol Morris, the filmmaker whose credits include “The Fog of War,” the Academy Award-winning documentary about the former defense secretary Robert S. McNamara, and “The Thin Blue Line,” which succeeded in getting a man off death row.
For the documentary, Morris taped interviews with a score of soldiers and civilians, several of whom witnessed the abuse or participated in it. Some of the interviews are, of course, self-serving, but many of the individuals appear to be deeply troubled by what went on at Abu Ghraib. The interviews ran to about two and a half million words, and Gourevitch has woven excerpts, along with transcripts from military investigations and trials, into a tightly knit and damning narrative.
The authors do themselves and their readers a disservice, however, by failing to provide detailed notes or an index. It is not always clear whether their information comes from the interviews, from the military investigations, from sworn court statements or even from other journalists. And recently Morris acknowledged that he paid some of the people he interviewed, without saying whom. Still, this is one of the most devastating of the many books on Iraq.
The Justice Department sent only four men to set up a corrections system in Iraq, in May 2003, and two left quickly in frustration, leaving Lane McCotter, who had made a career running military and civilian prisons, and Gary Deland, who had worked with McCotter in Utah. “We were going to make it into a model prison,” McCotter said. Deland established a police academy, where he fired any recruit found to be taking bribes. But the men had neither the time nor the resources to carry out their mission. A four-month assessment period was shortened to 30 days. They concluded that Iraq needed 75,000 prison beds. Fewer than 3,000 were provided, and civilian and military prisoners were held together, in violation of Army doctrine and the Geneva Conventions. Many were innocent, picked up in sweeps, guilty of nothing other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Deland said.
Later in 2003, the American military took over running the prisons. The job was given to combat units of the military police. “We had no training, we were vastly outnumbered and we were given lots of responsibilities that we didn’t have any knowledge about how to carry out,” said Specialist Ambuhl, who was one of only seven M.P.’s assigned to cell blocks housing more than 1,000 prisoners. “They couldn’t say that we broke the rules because there were no rules,” she said.
Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller had commanded the prison at Guantánamo before coming to Iraq. Breaking with Army doctrine, but following the procedure he had established at Guantánamo, he put the military police, who normally run military prisons, at the service of the interrogators, military, C.I.A. and civilian contractors. The guards must “be actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees,” Miller wrote. “You’re treating the prisoners too well,” he told the guards. “You have to treat the prisoners like dogs.”
But the military’s dogs were treated better and, as is now well known, were used to frighten the prisoners — exploit their phobias, in the Pentagon’s euphemistic jargon. Two dog handlers “had an ongoing contest to see which of them could make the most prisoners piss in fear.”
Steven Stefanowicz, a civilian interrogator known as Big Steve, ordered the dogs to be used on a prisoner nicknamed A. Q., because he was thought to be an Al Qaeda operative. One picture shows the man, his arms tied behind him, cowering against the wall, the snarling dog’s teeth inches away. “He would tell us to put A. Q. in this position or that position, then put the dogs on him,” Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick said. “Then he would tell them to pull the dogs off, then he would go in the cell, shut the door and I guess interrogate him.”
After several months of torturing A. Q. with “dogs and bondage and hooding and noise and sleeplessness and heat and cold,” the authorities realized that he had no connection to Al Qaeda or any criminal activity, and he was released.
One of the lingering questions has been the degree of complicity within the Pentagon and White House in what happened at Abu Ghraib. No “smoking gun” linking the abuses to Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney or George W. Bush has ever been found, and it is unlikely that one will be. But it isn’t needed, the authors say. “Abu Ghraib was the smoking gun.”
What occurred at Abu Ghraib is deeply disturbing, and Americans, individually and collectively, need to ask, How could this have happened? How could our sons and daughters, good kids from Pennsylvania, Virginia, New Jersey, Maryland, engage in this conduct? How could so many have looked the other way? What happened at Abu Ghraib was not the work of a few bad apples — of Lynndie England or Charles Graner or Ivan Frederick or Megan Ambuhl or Sabrina Harman, all of whom were eventually court-martialed on various charges. (Only one senior officer was court-martialed, and he was found not guilty.)
“The stain is ours,” Gourevitch and Morris write. It is hard to come away from their book with any other conclusion.
Raymond Bonner is a Times correspondent, currently living in London.
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11) The Working Wounded
By DAVID M. UHLMANN
Op-Ed Contributor
May 27, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/opinion/27uhlmann.html?hp
Ann Arbor, Mich.
ON a hot August morning in 1996, Scott Dominguez reported to work at Evergreen Resources, a small fertilizer manufacturing plant in his hometown, Soda Springs, Idaho. The workday began like any other, with gruff commands barked out by the owner of the company, Allan Elias, who was a Wharton graduate, a lawyer and one of the most notorious violators of environmental and worker-safety laws in the state.
Mr. Elias wanted his workers to clean out a 25,000-gallon tank that contained cyanide waste. He refused to test the air or the waste inside the tank. He ignored the pleas of his workers for safety equipment. When the workers complained of sore throats and difficulty breathing, Mr. Elias told them to finish the job or find work somewhere else.
Mr. Dominguez, a 20-year-old high school graduate, wanted to keep his job. Wearing just jeans and a T-shirt, he used a ladder to descend into the tank. Two hours later, covered in sludge and barely breathing, he was removed from the tank, a victim of cyanide poisoning at the hands of a ruthless employer who would blame his “stupid and lazy” employees for the incident.
Mr. Dominguez suffered severe and permanent brain damage. He now has the rigid body movement and stammering speech found in patients with Parkinson’s disease.
The Justice Department opened a criminal investigation of Evergreen Resources. I was one of the lead prosecutors on the case. We quickly discovered that we had a major problem.
Mr. Elias did not commit a crime under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which is the primary federal worker-safety law in the United States. Why not? Because Mr. Dominguez did not die.
My colleagues and I were shocked to learn that an employer who breaks the nation’s worker-safety laws can be charged with a crime only if a worker dies. Even then, the crime is a lowly Class B misdemeanor, with a maximum sentence of six months in prison. (About 6,000 workers are killed on the job each year, many in cases where the deaths could have been prevented if their employers followed the law.) Employers who maim their workers face, at worst, a maximum civil penalty of $70,000 for each violation.
We ended up prosecuting Mr. Elias for environmental crimes, and he was sentenced to 17 years in prison. I later became chief of the Justice Department’s environmental crimes section, and we started an initiative — based on this case and others like it — to seek justice when workers were seriously injured or killed during environmental crimes. We prosecuted some of the largest companies in America. But in cases where no environmental crimes were committed, we often could not prosecute.
Employers rarely face criminal prosecution under the worker-safety laws. In the 38 years since Congress enacted the Occupational Safety and Health Act, only 68 criminal cases have been prosecuted, or less than two per year, with defendants serving a total of just 42 months in jail. During that same time, approximately 341,000 people have died at work, according to data compiled from the National Safety Council and the Bureau of Labor Statistics by the A.F.L.-C.I.O.
It is long past time for Congress to change the law. First, Congress should amend the Occupational Safety and Health Act to make it a crime for an employer to commit violations that cause serious injury to workers or that knowingly place workers at risk of death or serious injury. Whether good fortune intervenes and prevents harm to workers should not determine whether an employer commits a crime.
Congress should make it a felony to commit a criminal violation of the worker-safety laws, and the penalties for lawbreakers should be stiffened. The maximum sentence ought to be measured in years, not months.
Congress also should change the worker-safety laws so that ignorance of the law is no longer a defense. Employers have a duty to know their responsibilities under the Occupational Safety and Health Act.
Finally, Congress should make clear who can be prosecuted. Some courts have held that prosecution is limited to companies and their owners. Supervisors who order workers to break the law, as well as responsible corporate officers who fail to stop violations that they know are occurring, should also be held criminally responsible, just as they are under most other federal laws.
Most companies care about protecting their workers. But without a serious threat of criminal enforcement, more workers will be put at risk by companies that put profits before safety.
David M. Uhlmann is a law professor at the University of Michigan.
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12) His Life With the Deaths That the State Carried Out
By FELICIA R. LEE
May 27, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/arts/television/27docu.html?ref=us
A lonely field of concrete crosses, engraved with dates and numbers and surrounded by weeds, is the first thing a viewer sees in the film “At the Death House Door.” Some of the graves in that field belong to inmates who were executed by the state at the prison in Huntsville, Tex.
Walking tenderly among those crosses is the Rev. Carroll Pickett, the laconic, soft-spoken prison chaplain for 15 years and witness to 95 executions. The documentary, which will be shown Thursday night on the Independent Film Channel, reveals that Mr. Pickett, a 74-year-old Presbyterian minister, was anguished by his job, and that he finally concluded that the death penalty served neither justice nor morality. He says he believes that some of the men he helped lead to death were innocent.
“After each execution I made a tape on everybody that I walked with to the death chamber,” Mr. Pickett says early in the film as the camera trains on his office, full of boxes of cassette tapes. “I knew I had to talk to somebody, and the only thing in my house at that time was a tape recorder.”
Of all those executions, he was most haunted by that of Carlos De Luna, convicted of stabbing to death a gas station clerk in Corpus Christi, Tex., in 1983. Mr. De Luna asked if he could call the minister Daddy on the day in 1989 when, at 27, he was executed despite his protestations of innocence. Two reporters for The Chicago Tribune wrote a series of articles in 2006 that made a case that Mr. De Luna was wrongfully convicted. Mr. Pickett said he believes that Mr. De Luna was innocent, and the minister’s relationship with the condemned man is a focus of the film.
Steve James and Peter Gilbert, the director and cinematographer of the 1994 high school basketball documentary “Hoop Dreams,” are the co-directors of “At the Death House Door,” which they hope will renew debate about the death penalty.
In April the United States Supreme Court upheld Kentucky’s method of capital punishment by lethal injection. “At the Death House Door” had its premiere in March at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Tex., and has received laudatory reviews, winning awards at the Atlanta Film Festival and the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, N.C.
“It’s the kind of film we gravitate to, letting one person’s story tell you about a much bigger issue,” Mr. Gilbert said in an interview.
Their film started out as a Tribune editor’s idea to chronicle the investigation of Mr. De Luna’s case, articles that were written by the Tribune reporters Steve Mills and Maurice Possley. But after the filmmakers met the quietly charismatic Mr. Pickett and listened to some of his tapes, they said, they decided that the minister would be the heartbeat of a film that they hoped would be as poetic as it is polemical.
The divisive issue of capital punishment has a new urgency because the high court’s Kentucky decision means that many more inmates might be executed in coming months. The Death Penalty Information Center, a research and advocacy group that campaigns against executions, recently put the death row census at 3,263.
Of all the states Texas began May with the most people scheduled for execution, five, between June 3 and Aug. 20 in the Walls Unit, the state prison unit where Mr. Pickett worked. There he prayed with the death-row inmates, listened to their beliefs about death and the afterlife, and watched as the lethal drugs flowed into their veins.
“I never sat in judgment,” Mr. Pickett said during a recent interview in New York, part of a national tour to promote the film. “I believed everybody needed to die with a friend. I felt that God had called me to be at the prison.”
The white-haired Mr. Pickett said that his tenure from 1980 to 1995 as a prison chaplain made it easier to face his own death. For years, he said, he believed that capital punishment was just because of his own grandfather’s murder and the 1974 prison siege in Huntsville, which killed two of Mr. Pickett’s parishioners.
“It was a process,” he said of his conversion to opposing the death penalty. “I began to see the system wasn’t working properly.” He said the executions did not bring closure to anyone, did not deter crime and that the sentences were unevenly applied.
“What does it accomplish?” he said. “There is a better way.”
Mr. Pickett’s audiotapes — some of which are heard in the film — bear witness to the small, often mundane details of the deaths he witnessed. Who watched the prisoner die? What did he say? What was his last meal? How did he react to the drugs that ended his life?
The film also includes interviews with Mr. Pickett’s family members, who talk about the impact of his work; tracks the Tribune investigation; and includes the opinions of prison employees and of Rose Rhoton, Mr. De Luna’s sister.
Ms. Rhoton grieves over her inability to help her brother as she recalls their hardscrabble childhood and a promise to their mother to look out for him.
“And by Carlos going through this, I made myself a promise that I wasn’t going to be this uneducated Mexican person,” Ms. Rhoton says in the film. “And that pushed me to better my life.”
IFC contacted audiences interested in both sides of the death penalty debate and provided them with DVDs of the documentary and a discussion guide. There have been dozens of gatherings organized by the American Civil Liberties Union, in church communities and on college campuses, according to Erik Batt, an IFC spokesman. “People were moved to tears,” said Rosalyn Park, a staff lawyer at the Advocates for Human Rights in St. Paul, a nonprofit organization that hosted a recent screening with the Innocence Project of Minnesota and a Catholic church.
Still, Mr. Pickett said that in his speaking engagements since the film has been screened, he meets people who believe capital punishment is right. “A lot of people think it’s a deterrent,” he said.
Whether “At the Death House Door” ends up mostly playing to the converted is an open question. But Ms. Park and Robin Phillips, the executive director of Advocates for Human Rights, said it reminds audiences, whatever their viewpoint, that hundreds of imprisoned people are waiting to die.
Mr. De Luna has the last words in the film.
“I want to say that I hold no grudges,” reads a declaration on the screen. “I hate no one. I love my family. Tell everyone on death row to keep the faith and don’t give up.”
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13) Efficiently and Methodically Framed--Mumia is innocent!
FRAMING OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, by J Patrick O'Connor (Lawrence Hill Books 2008)
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222, Oakland CA 94610, 510.763.2347
www.laboractionmumia.org
LACFreeMumia@aol.com
That is the conclusion of a new book on the case of former Black Panther, and internationally-known political prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has now spent over a quarter of a century on death row for a crime he didn't commit. The book is, THE FRAMING OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, by J Patrick O'Connor (Lawrence Hill Books 2008). The author is a former UPI reporter who took an interest in Mumia's case. He is now the editor of Crime Magazine (www.crimemagazine.com).
O'Connor offers a fresh perspective, and delivers a clear and convincing breakdown on perhaps the most notorious frame-up since Sacco and Vanzetti. This is a case not just of police corruption, or a racist lynching, though it is both. The courts are in this just as deep as the cops, and it reaches to the top of the equally corrupt political system.
"This book is the first to convincingly show how the Philadelphia Police Department and District Attorney's Office efficiently and methodically framed [Mumia Abu-Jamal]." (from the book jacket)
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal (LAC) wants to alert you to this important new work. THE FRAMING OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL is in bookstores now, at $16.95. but a little research in the SF Bay Area suggests that it may be hard to find. Contact the Labor Action Committee if you can't find it. We have a limited number ordered from the publisher at a discount.
Send a check or money order for $15 (includes shipping)
pay to/send to: Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222, Oakland CA 94610
Author J Patrick O'Connor says Mumia was framed at the hands of corrupt cops and courts, who were bent on vengeance against one of their most prominent critics.
"What makes getting to the truth of this case so difficult is that the prosecution built its case on perjured testimony with a calculated disregard for what the actual evidence established," says O'Connor (p. xii).
THE FRAMING OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL is based on a thorough analysis of the 1982 trial and the 1995-97 appeals hearings, as well as previous writings on this case, and research on the MOVE organization, with which Mumia identifies, and the history of racist police brutality in Philadelphia. While leaving some of the evidence of Mumia's innocence unconsidered or disregarded, this book nevertheless makes clear that there is a veritable mountain of evidence--most of it deliberately squashed by the courts--that shows that Mumia was blatantly and deliberately framed, that he is innocent, that somebody else did the crime, and that corrupt cops and courts have "fixed" this case against Mumia from the beginning.
Upcoming Events with the Author
NEW YORK: SAVE THE DATE! Thursday, June 24th, New York City book signing party with author J. Patrick O'Connor for 'The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal' at 7:30PM at the Brecht Forum, 451 West Street (between Bank and Bethune Streets). Bring your questions and be prepared for surprise guests! For more information, call the Hotline: (212) 330-8029
SF BAY AREA: A book tour by the author is in planning stages. For more information, send your request to: LACFreeMumia@aol.com
For an interview with the author and other material about this book, visit Journalists For Mumia, www.Abu-Jamal-News.com. The publisher is Chicago Review Press. Get your local bookstore or library to order a copy!
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222, Oakland CA 94610, 510.763.2347
www.laboractionmumia.org
LACFreeMumia@aol.com
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14) Woman on oxygen machine dies when company shuts off power
May. 19, 2008 07:15 AM
Associated Press
http://www.azcentral.com/offbeat/articles/2008/05/19/20080519oxygen19-on.html
WELLINGTON, New Zealand - A New Zealand woman dependent on an oxygen machine for survival died when the power company shut off the electricity to her home because of an overdue bill, a coroner's court heard Monday.
Folole Muliaga, 44, a nursery school teacher, needed an oxygen machine to help her breathe and died two hours after Mercury Energy cut power to her home, Auckland Coroner Gordon Matenga heard in the inquest.
Muliaga's death on May 29, 2007, outraged New Zealanders and saw Prime Minister Helen Clark denounce the company's actions as heartless and intolerable.
Muliaga's husband, Lopaavea, told the court that he contacted Mercury Energy in early May 2007 to try to arrange paying their overdue power bill in installments but was unsuccessful.
He made a payment in May but the power was disconnected eight days later. At the time, he testified, he thought he only owed $26.67.
Mercury Energy said at the time that $130.12 was owed.
An emotional Lopaavea Muliaga said he was at work when the power was cut and arrived home to find his wife dead and two ambulance officers at the house.
He said by the time of her death his overweight wife needed the oxygen machine 16 hours a day to help her breathe.
In the wake of Folole Muliaga's death, the power company said it would review the way it deals with customers with medical dependencies and those in financial difficulty.
Lawyers for Mercury Energy and its subcontractor have expressed condolences to the Muliaga family, and have said they hoped some answers would come from the inquest.
A police investigation last year found no grounds for filing criminal charges against the utility.
Coroners in New Zealand can order inquests into unusual deaths to assess the circumstances surrounding them so they can make recommendations to prevent future occurrences. The inquest does not assign blame.
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15) Most Homeless in New Orleans From City, Survey Finds
By SHAILA DEWAN
May 28, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/us/28tent.html?hp
NEW ORLEANS — Mayor C. Ray Nagin recently suggested a way to reduce this city’s post-Katrina homeless population: give them one-way bus tickets out of town.
Mr. Nagin later insisted the off-the-cuff proposal was just a joke. But he has portrayed the dozens of people camped in a tent city under a freeway overpass near Canal Street as recalcitrant drug and alcohol abusers who refuse shelter, give passers-by the finger and, worst of all, hail from somewhere else.
While many of the homeless people do have addiction problems or mental illness, a survey by advocacy groups in February showed that 86 percent were from the New Orleans area. Sixty percent said they were homeless because of Hurricane Katrina. And about 30 percent had received rental assistance at one time from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Not far from the French Quarter, flanking Canal Street on Claiborne Avenue, they are living inside a long corridor formed not of walls and a roof but of the thick stench of human waste and sweat tinged with alcohol, crack and desperation.
The inhabitants are natives like Ronald Gardner, 54, an H.I.V.-positive man who said he had never before slept on the streets until Katrina. Or Ronald Berry, 57, who despite being a paranoid schizophrenic said he had lived on his own, in a rented house in the Lower Ninth Ward, for a dozen years before Katrina. Both men receive disability checks for $637 a month, not nearly enough to cover post-hurricane rents.
“If I could just get a warm room,” Mr. Gardner said, sitting on the cot under which all his belongings are stored, “I could take it from there.”
Lurlene Newell, 54, said the Federal Emergency Management Agency had paid her rent in Texas after the storm, but when she moved back to New Orleans, she could not find a place to live.
By one very rough estimate, the number of homeless people in New Orleans has doubled since the storm. Homelessness has also become a much more visible problem — late last year Unity of Greater New Orleans, a network of agencies that help the homeless, cleared an encampment of 300 people that had sprung up in Duncan Plaza, in full view of City Hall. About 280 of those people are now in apartments, but others have flocked to fill several blocks of Claiborne Street at Canal, near enough to the French Quarter to regularly encounter tourists.
Unity workers are hoping that Congress will include $76 million in the supplemental appropriation for Iraq to pay for vouchers that would give rent subsidies and services to 3,000 disabled homeless people.
On Thursday, the Senate passed a version of the bill that included the vouchers; the current House version, not yet approved, does not include them. Without the vouchers, according to Martha J. Kegel, Unity’s executive director, even those people already in apartments will be in jeopardy. Their current vouchers, issued under a “rapid rehousing” program, expire at the end of 2008.
New Orleans had 2,800 beds for the homeless before the storm; now it has 2,000, Ms. Kegel said. Those beds are full, but even if they were not, many of the people living on Canal Street are not the sort who can stay in a group shelter. According to the survey, which was conducted before dawn one morning so that only those who actually sleep in the camp would be counted, 80 percent have at least one physical disability, 58 percent have had some kind of addiction, 40 percent are mentally ill, and 19 percent were “tri-morbid” — they had a disability, an addiction and mental illness.
For these difficult cases, permanent housing with supportive services, like counseling, has become a preferred method. But it takes time, patience, money and one thing New Orleans is short of: apartments. Many apartment developers who applied for tax credits after Hurricane Katrina were required to set aside 5 percent of their units for supportive housing, but because of high construction costs and other factors, far fewer units than expected are in the pipeline. And without the vouchers, even those units will not be affordable.
Unity has already moved 60 of the most vulnerable people from the camp to hotel rooms, paid for with a city health department grant, including a woman who is eight months pregnant and a paranoid schizophrenic who is diabetic and a double amputee. In the filth of the camp, the amputee’s stumps had become infected.
Outreach workers have found clients with cancer and colostomy bags, and one so disabled that he was unable to talk. On average, people have stayed in hotels for six weeks before Unity finds an apartment and cobbles together the necessary funds.
Mike Miller, the director of supportive housing placement at Unity, said that since the city removed some portable toilets from the camp in February, the camp had become a public health hazard.
“Two outreach workers have tested positive for tuberculosis,” Mr. Miller said. “There’s hepatitis C, there’s AIDS, there’s H.I.V. Everyone out there’s had an eye infection of some sort. I got one.”
On Thursday, Herman Moore Jr. was hanging out with a friend in the camp. Mr. Moore had lived in a Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer, then a FEMA-financed hotel room, but had not realized that he was eligible for further assistance after the 30-day hotel stay ended last fall. Tipped off by his brother, Mr. Moore had only recently rented a house under the emergency management agency’s program, but had yet to pay the deposit or turn on the utilities because he had no money.
“If I had a TV and some electricity, you all wouldn’t even see me,” he said.
Clara Gomez, 45, told an outreach worker that she had just discovered she was pregnant. Like about 14 percent of the homeless people under the bridge, Ms. Gomez had come to New Orleans to work as a builder, but acknowledged that she had problems with drug and alcohol abuse.
After getting fired from one job, she wound up under the bridge, where she met Patrick Pugh, 36, a New Orleanian who said he had been in drug rehabilitation, turning his life around, when the storm hit. Their IDs had been stolen, they said, making it difficult to get jobs or food stamps.
Seated on a mattress, Ms. Gomez shifted nervously, changing positions every few seconds, all the while keeping her arms anchored around Mr. Pugh’s neck.
“We’re ready,” she said. “We’re ready to get out of here.”
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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Israel: Carter Offers Details on Nuclear Arsenal
By REUTERS
World Briefing | Middle East
Former President Jimmy Carter said Israel held at least 150 nuclear weapons, the first time a current or former American president had publicly acknowledged the Jewish state’s nuclear arsenal. Asked at a news conference in Wales on Sunday how a future president should deal with the Iranian nuclear threat, he sought to put the risk in context by listing atomic weapons held globally. “The U.S. has more than 12,000 nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union has about the same, Great Britain and France have several hundred, and Israel has 150 or more,” he said, according to a transcript. The existence of Israeli nuclear arms is widely assumed, but Israel has never admitted their existence and American officials have stuck to that line in public for years.
May 27, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/world/middleeast/27briefs-CARTEROFFERS_BRF.html?ref=world
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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