BAUAW NEWSLETTER - FRIDAY, JUNE 6, 2008

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JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps) MUST GO! EMERGENCY!

BIG END OF THE SCHOOL-YEAR PUSH TO END JROTC THIS YEAR!

There are still two holdouts whose votes could make the difference on whether JROTC stays in San Francisco schools for another year or whether the Board of Education sticks to their original resolution passed in 2006 to phase-out JROTC by the end of this school year, 2008.

They are:

Vice President, Ms. Kim-Shree Maufas,
MaufasKS@sfusd.edu

and

Commissioner, Ms. Jane Kim
kimj7@sfusd.edu

Board of Education
555 Franklin Street
San Francisco, CA 94102
415-241-6427

We urge you to contact them and let them know that JROTC MUST GO! NOW!

You can address them in person at the next meeting of the Board of Education:

Tuesday, June 10th, 7:00 P.M.
555 Franklin Street near McAllister Street.

To get on the speaker’s list call the Monday before the meeting from 8:30 AM - 4:00 PM or Tuesday, the day of the meeting from 8:30 AM - 3:30 PM.

415/241-6427 or (415) 241-6493

(You will get at most, two minutes and most probably only one minute to speak. Time your remarks carefully--prepare a one-minute and two-minute version--because they will simply shut off your microphone if you go over.)

Please note that this is really a national issue. The San Francisco Board of Education should be proud that it was the first in the country to vote to phase-out JROTC from public schools. That's why it's so important for them to carry out their original decision setting a real precedent for school districts throughout the country.

JROTC MUST GO! NOW!

http://www.jrotcmustgo.blogspot.com/

The next meeting of JROTC MUST GO! is:

Wednesday, June 18, 7:00 P.M.
ANSWER Office
2489 Mission Street, Rm. 28
(Near 21st Street)
San Francisco

Here's an article that appeared in the BayView News:

JROTC must go now!
http://www.SFBayview.com/News/Thiswk_nopics/Our_Readers_Write.html

San Francisco made history in November 2006 when the school board voted to make this the first big city in the nation to ban JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps), one of the military’s prime recruiting tools, in June 2008.

Unfortunately, the board – except for Mark Sanchez and Eric Mar – reversed itself, extending JROTC.

In another vote this June, two progressives on the board – Kim-Shree Maufas and Green Party member Jane Kim – are critical to send the military packing.

An open letter to Jane Kim and Kim-Shree Maufas:

My name is Mara Kubrin.

I am a graduate of Lowell High School in San Francisco.

Last school year I presented the student petition to the school board in support of the resolution to phase out JROTC in the San Francisco Unified School District.

I was thrilled when the resolution passed; I had made one final contribution before heading off to college.

Unfortunately, my impression did not last.

The same issue has resurfaced just in time for me to come home and urge—no demand— that you finish what I thought we had already finished last year. JROTC must go now.

To me the issue seems so clear that I have trouble understanding your hesitation. San Franciscans have voted to prohibit recruitment in our schools. Case should be closed, but I will continue.

The anti-JROTC coalition has many concrete reasons, any of which is grounds to immediately pull JROTC out of the schools. Let me re-state them.

* The SFUSD has an anti-discrimination hiring policy. In order to be a JROTC instructor, one must have served in the military. In order to successfully serve in the military, one may not be openly homosexual. Therefore, in order to be an SFUSD JROTC teacher, one may not be openly gay. Strike one.

* State law requires that Physical Education credit only be given by properly credentialed teachers. JROTC instructors do not have these credentials, yet students get credit. Strike two.

* International law prohibits the military from trying to recruit anyone under the age of 17. Most JROTC students are well under the age of 17. Strike three.

JROTC should have been outa here a long time ago based on any one of those reasons.

So why is JROTC still here?

I have listened to supporters and I will admit that many students like JROTC. However, if schools offered a class on video games, kids would also love it. Students would rush to sign up for a class on celebrity gossip. Have we forgotten that sometimes kids are not the ones to make these decisions? The school board is here to determine the best curriculum for students.

Despite students’ enjoyment, this “class” is not beneficial to them.
What are we trying to teach here?

We are cutting music and arts, but somehow we think that learning how to salute is a good use of educational time?

Others argue that JROTC provides discipline and leadership, that it turns kids around in ways other programs can’t.

In my mind, any extra-curricular activity that requires attendance and focus, and encourages growth and maturity, will do the exact same thing.

There are plenty of available sports leagues, leadership groups, community service organizations, and clubs available to high school students. They do not need one that is explicitly a military recruitment device.

Politicians are afraid of openly opposing JROTC because of the visible student support for the program. The support is more clearly visible than the opposition because the “support” is bused in to meetings, while the opposition has been intimidated and physically threatened, myself included. Clearly, the cadets’ discipline and leadership only go so far.

So here is my suggestion:

JROTC can stay in San Francisco but not on school campuses.

JROTC is a recruitment tool, so have the program at recruitment centers.

If students are so insistent that this and only this program will provide the discipline, leadership, and family element that they want, then they can seek it out in their own time, using the military’s own funding, and on its own recruitment grounds.

The military does not belong in our schools simply based on an understanding of what is right and what is wrong, let alone the legal evidence.

Vote to make it happen.

Be the progressive you claim to be.

Kick JROTC out of our schools once and for all.

Thank you,

Mara Kubrin

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SAN FRANCISCO IS A SANCTUARY CITY! STOP THE MIGRA-ICE RAIDS!

Despite calling itself a "sanctuary city", S.F. politicians are permitting the harrassment of undocumented immigrants and allowing the MIGRA-ICE police to enter the jail facilities.

We will picket any store that cooperates with the MIGRA or reports undocumented brothers and sisters. We demand AMNESTY without conditions!

BRIGADES AGAINST THE RAIDS
project of BARRIO UNIDO
(415)431-9925

Next planning meeting Thursday June 26th 7PM at 474 Valencia St. S.F.
(near 16th St.) in Room 145

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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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Alison Bodine defense Committee
Lift the Two-year Ban
http://alisonbodine.blogspot.com/

Watch the Sept 28 Video on Alison's Case!
http://alisonbodine.blogspot.com/2007/10/blog-post.html

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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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Not So Sweet
Why Dunkin' Donuts shouldn't have caved in the controversy over Rachael Ray's 'kaffiyeh' scarf.
By Lorraine Ali
Newsweek Web Exclusive
May 30, 2008
Read Article [#4 Below] on line at:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/139334
Sign Petition:
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Advocacy?JServSessionIdr007=7nginw7ml3.app8a&cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=221

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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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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) A City Where Hospitals Are as Ill as the Patients
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
June 5, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/us/05southla.html?ref=us

2) Research Finds Wide Disparities in Health Care by Race and Region
By KEVIN SACK
June 5, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/health/research/05disparities.html?ref=us

3) Opposition to Menthol Cigarettes Grows
By STEPHANIE SAUL
June 5, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/business/05tobacco.html?ref=health

4) The Truth About the War
Editorial
June 6, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/opinion/06fri1.html?pagewanted=2&hp

5) Unemployment Rate Hits 5.5%; Payrolls Shrink for Fifth Month
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
"In the last 12 months, hourly earnings have risen 3.5 percent, below the pace of inflation, which is running at about 4 percent a year."
June 7, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/07/business/07jobs.html?hp

6) JROTC: BEYOND EXAM
Copyright © 2008 Marc Norton
MARC NORTON ONLINE
http://www.marcnorton.us/98827/107054.html
First published in Beyond Chron on June 6, 2008
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=5744
FLASH:
JROTC allies begin ballot drive to retain program
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/06/BAVM1141B2.DTL

7) U.N. Food Meeting Ends With a Call for ‘Urgent’ Action
By ANDREW MARTIN
June 6, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/world/06food.html?ref=world

8) Killings Lead to Checkpoints for All Drivers in Washington Neighborhood
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 6, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/us/06district.html?ref=us

9) Highly Rated Auto Plants Set to Close
By NICK BUNKLEY
June 6, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/business/06auto.html?ref=business

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1) A City Where Hospitals Are as Ill as the Patients
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
June 5, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/us/05southla.html?ref=us

LOS ANGELES — The patients line up at 6:30 a.m. outside the tidy clinic. Two hours later, when it opens, they will sit and wait some more.

There are 22-year-olds, holding neat piles of pills on their laps, small children whose mothers try to distract them with plastic rattles, elderly immigrants who sit silently, staring at nothing in particular, until their names are called.

And there are nearly 70 percent more of them walking into the clinic, the St. John’s Well Child and Family Center in Compton, since nearby Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital closed last summer.

For thousands of residents of South Los Angeles who had depended on the large county-run King-Harbor hospital, the past 10 months have been a grueling exercise in cobbling together medical care. When King-Harbor was shut by federal officials, it became the 15th general acute care hospital to close in Los Angeles County since 2000, about half of which served residents in South Los Angeles.

The loss of King-Harbor was less a seminal moment than another episode in the continuing health care ordeal among this city’s sickest and poorest residents.

South Los Angeles is one of the most difficult places in the nation to both receive and give medical care. Family doctors are few and far between, and the area is one of the hardest to draw new doctors to, physician recruiters say.

Chronically ill residents say they never quite know what a call to 911 will yield.

“You call an ambulance and you think you’re going to St. Francis and they say it’s full,” said Denise Provost, whose largely untreated asthma routinely sends her to the emergency room. “So they take you to Kaiser. If that’s full, then it’s Long Beach. You go way out of your way.”

Julia Villalobos, among those waiting at St. John’s one recent morning, heads to a different clinic in Long Beach when she is sick. She takes her mother, who suffers seizures, to St. Francis Medical Center in neighboring Lynwood. And when her two young sons need checkups, she parks herself at St. John’s.

“They are good here,” Ms. Villalobos said. “They explain everything really good.”

The vast majority of residents in central Los Angeles are uninsured or are on the state’s Medicaid program — known as Medical — which offers the lowest reimbursement rates in the nation, and a growing population of illegal immigrants who are not eligible for government insurance have flooded the ranks of the uninsured.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has proposed another 10 percent cut in the state’s Medicaid program to balance the state’s budget while Congress contemplates a host of reductions to the program that, if approved, would mean $240 million less for Los Angeles.

Los Angeles County’s health department, the provider of last resort, is sagging under its own budget woes, and it adopted complex patient-transfer policies that have shifted an increasing number of its indigent patients to private hospitals, which are in barely better financial shape.

“We have an all-out crisis here,” said Carol Meyer, the director of governmental relations for the Los Angeles County Health Services Department. “In terms of lack of access to care, emergency room overcrowding and total underfunding of the health care system.”

In many ways, the woes of South Los Angeles mirror other poor urban health care systems. Medical centers in Philadelphia, Washington, Cleveland and elsewhere have closed or fallen into bankruptcy in recent years, leaving patients scrambling.

Also, Medicaid reductions in recent years have helped contribute to the rising tide of the uninsured — roughly 2.2 million more in 2006 than in the previous year — largely because of a decrease in employer-sponsored insurance and Medicaid reductions.

“Over the course of the last 10 to 15 years, there are entire populations that have been wiped off Medicaid,” said Larry S. Gage, president of the National Association of Public Hospitals.

But even against that backdrop, the situation in South Los Angeles is particularly grave. Most strikingly, the state Medicaid program offers the lowest reimbursement rate per capita in the nation, nearly 12 percent less than the second lowest-paying state, Arizona, according to 2005 figures.

Roughly 14 percent of the nation’s uninsured live in California, and one in three visits to a Los Angeles emergency room are made by someone without insurance. Many of those patients have conditions that have gone untreated for months and need to be admitted, further straining hospital resources.

From 2000 to 2006, the number of Medicaid-covered patients using the South Los Angeles hospitals on Medicaid increased 18 percent and the uninsured ranks rose more than 20 percent, while patients with commercial coverage fell 20 percent, according to the hospital association’s figures.

As a result, many hospitals in the South Los Angeles area are unable to stay afloat, and centers that once served 100,000 patients here have closed.

“I don’t think we have seen that many closures occur in any part of the U.S. in the last 25 years,” said Jim Lott, vice president of the Hospital Association of Southern California. “We have less than one hospital bed per 1,000 residents here compared to 4.3 per 1,000 in the U.S. When you add up all the forces, the price of indigent care is putting people over the edge.”

King-Harbor hospital, as it has been known in recent years, opened after the Watts riots in 1965, and quickly became a jewel of the largely minority community, serving as a medical home for many and a steady source of employment for black doctors and local residents. But in recent years the hospital had been found to have myriad management and quality problems, including patient deaths that health officials said were related to poor care.

The hospital shut down last August after federal regulators found the center was out of compliance in 8 of 23 conditions. (The state has been looking for a private operator to reopen the hospital, but has found no takers.) Only an outpatient clinic remained, leaving Watts and other neighboring communities without an emergency room for several miles.

While nine hospitals in the area are officially considered “impacted” by the closing of King-Harbor, the closest, St. Francis Medical Center, has clearly taken on much of the burden. Its emergency room has added 14 beds, for a total of 46, as the number of patients has increased to almost 180 a day, from about 155, since King-Harbor closed.

St. Francis’s intensive care unit once had about 26 patients on any given day; it now houses about 33, which has greatly strained the staff, said Gerald Kozai, the hospital’s president.

“All of us would say it has probably been our most challenging year,” Mr. Kozai said.

And it has gotten harder to find help. South Los Angeles is rated 9 on a scale of 10 of undesirable places for doctors to work, said Phil Miller, a spokesman for Merritt Hawkins & Associates, a large physician recruiting firm. “It has become fairly well known in the physician community that the Medical reimbursement rate is not good, and you add the negative publicity from the closures there,” and few doctors are willing to step in, Mr. Miller said.

After it closed, King-Harbor maintained a clinic that set a target of 190,000 visits a year, but it is falling well below that goal. On a recent visit, the waiting room was nearly empty, while the St. John’s clinic was filled.

Health care providers and patients said King-Harbor’s reputation for poor care had sent patients to other emergency rooms or area clinics. “It has a bad reputation,” Ms. Villalobos said. “I wouldn’t want to go there.”

Indeed, area clinics have been absorbing needy patients. Among the nine clinics run by St. John’s, there has been a 157 percent increase in visits since King-Harbor closed, said Jim Mangia, who runs the consortium.

The clinics provide free or low-cost health care to its patients — 65 percent of whom are uninsured — via subsidies from grants and money distributed by the county beginning in July. Those funds usually get the clinics through most of the year, but the St. John’s clinic in Compton ran out in February.

“Community clinics are picking up the slack and not getting reimbursed from those services,” Mr. Mangia said, “and many community clinics are teetering on the brink of insolvency.”

If patients are not using King-Harbor’s clinic, its emergency room is missed. “I know they called it Killer King, but they always took good care of me,” said Lionel Waller, a lifelong resident of Watts.

Mr. Waller, like others in the neighborhood, said that since the hospital closed, seriously injured people had to be taken to centers 10 to 15 miles away, including a friend of his who recently died of a gunshot wound.

“I keep wondering if they would have taken him some place closer if he would have made it,” Mr. Waller said. “We need that hospital here.”

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2) Research Finds Wide Disparities in Health Care by Race and Region
By KEVIN SACK
June 5, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/health/research/05disparities.html?ref=us

Race and place of residence can have a staggering impact on the course and quality of the medical treatment a patient receives, according to new research showing that blacks with diabetes or vascular disease are nearly five times more likely than whites to have a leg amputated and that women in Mississippi are far less likely to have mammograms than those in Maine.

The study, by researchers at Dartmouth, examined Medicare claims for evidence of racial and geographic disparities and found that on a variety of quality indices, blacks typically were less likely to receive recommended care than whites within a given region. But the most striking disparities were found from place to place.

For instance, the widest racial gaps in mammogram rates within a state were in California and Illinois, with a difference of 12 percentage points between the white rate and the black rate. But the country’s lowest rate for blacks — 48 percent in California — was 24 percentage points below the highest rate — 72 percent in Massachusetts. The statistics were for women ages 65 to 69 who received screening in 2004 or 2005.

In all but two states, black diabetics were less likely than whites to receive annual hemoglobin testing. But blacks in Colorado (66 percent) were far less likely to be screened than those in Massachusetts (88 percent).

The study was commissioned by the nation’s largest health-related philanthropy, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which on Thursday planned to announce a three-year, $300 million initiative intended to narrow health care disparities across lines of race and geography. Officials said it would be the largest effort to improve health care quality ever undertaken by a charity in the United States.

The foundation hopes to better understand and confront the causes of those regional variations by focusing its spending on 14 regions, like the city of Memphis and the state of Wisconsin.

Dr. Bruce Siegel, the George Washington University professor who will direct the program, said one community might use its grant money to study how long it takes hospitals to move heart attack patients from emergency room to catheterization laboratory. Others might work to coordinate electronic record-keeping or to provide patients with better information about taking medications after discharge.

“In my book,” Dr. Siegel said, “health care is local, just like politics, so you’re going to see a lot of differences in what communities do.”

That point is reinforced time and again in the new research conducted by the Dartmouth Atlas Project of the college’s Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, which has used Medicare data to document health care disparities over the last two decades. It found substantial variation in the proportion of Medicare beneficiaries who had been seen in a two-year period by a primary care physician, ranging from 86 percent in Nebraska and South Dakota to 65 percent in New Jersey. It found far higher rates of unnecessary hospitalizations in Hawaii, Utah and Washington than in Kentucky, Louisiana and West Virginia.

Disparities in the rate of leg amputations were particularly stark. The rate for blacks was about 6 per 1,000 in Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina, but less than 2 per 1,000 in Colorado and Nevada. The rates for whites in the three Southern states were much lower, about 1.3 per 1,000, but were still more than double the rates for whites in the two Western states.

Such variations may be partly explained by regional differences in education and poverty levels, but researchers increasingly believe that variations in medical practice and spending also are factors.

“In U.S. health care, it’s not only who you are that matters; it’s also where you live,” wrote the study’s authors, led by Dr. Elliott S. Fisher.

Dr. John R. Lumpkin, senior vice president of the foundation, said that more than a third of the $300 million would be spent to hire national experts to help regional coalitions tailor their quality improvement plans. The remainder of the money will be devoted to research, evaluation and the promotion of quality standards.

“We want to build a template in each of these communities that will teach America how to improve health care quality in a dramatic way,” Dr. Lumpkin said.

The areas selected for the grants are Cincinnati; Cleveland; Detroit; Humboldt County, Calif.; Kansas City, Mo.; Maine; Memphis; Minnesota; Seattle; south central Pennsylvania; western Michigan; western New York; Willamette Valley in Oregon; and Wisconsin.

The foundation’s endowment, now about $10 billion, was financed originally from the wealth of its namesake, who died in 1968 after building Johnson & Johnson into one of the world’s largest sellers of health and medical products. The group has been a major force in curbing tobacco use, and has more recently turned its attention to obesity, announcing a five-year, $500 million effort on that front last year.

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3) Opposition to Menthol Cigarettes Grows
By STEPHANIE SAUL
June 5, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/business/05tobacco.html?ref=health

Seven former federal health secretaries joined on Wednesday to protest menthol’s special treatment in a tobacco bill pending in Congress.

The seven, from Democratic and Republican administrations, faxed a letter to members of the Senate and House of Representatives demanding that menthol-flavored cigarettes be banned just like various other cigarette flavorings the legislation would outlaw.

One of the former secretaries, Joseph A. Califano Jr., said the legislation was “clearly putting black children in the back of the bus.” He was referring to menthol cigarettes as being the choice of three out of four black smokers and being frequently preferred by young smokers.

An estimated 80 percent of African-American teenage smokers pick menthol brands, the letter said.

The letter reflects a growing controversy over the bill’s current exemption of menthol from a list of banned flavorings — an exemption some lawmakers said was intended to garner support from Philip Morris. The maker of Marlboro Menthol, the second-leading menthol brand after Lorillard’s Newport, Philip Morris has endorsed the bill, although most other cigarette companies oppose it.

The bill would for the first time give the Food and Drug Administration the power to regulate tobacco. While several groups have said the bill does not go far enough to regulate the tobacco industry and fails to promote safer tobacco products, most major public health advocacy groups have endorsed it.

Some antismoking advocates have said they see the menthol exemption as a necessary compromise toward getting the legislation passed, and they have said that the bill as currently drafted would give the F.D.A. the authority to limit or eliminate additives, including menthol, if they are proved to be harmful.

As now written the legislation would ban cigarettes flavored with strawberry, chocolate and a number of other fruit, candy and spice flavorings. Those flavorings have occasionally been added to cigarettes in what critics say are a lure to children. But the bill specifically protects menthol from the ban, even though menthol is the most widely used flavoring. Menthol brands account for 28 percent of the $70 billion American cigarette market.

The bill has cleared key committees in both the Senate and the House but it is not yet scheduled for floor votes.

Responding to the letter from the former secretaries, the bill’s House sponsor, Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, said Wednesday that he believes an outright ban on menthol is not the best way to address it.

“I’m determined to see tobacco legislation pass Congress that protects all our children,” Mr. Waxman said. “Leading public health experts have told us that giving F.D.A. the authority to ban menthol is the best way to balance both public health considerations with the reality that many adults only smoke menthol cigarettes. I’ll continue our ongoing review to make sure we are dealing with this issue in the most effective way possible."

Menthol is derived from mint and is also available synthetically. Smoking menthol-flavored cigarettes gives the mouth a cool feeling, similar to sucking on a peppermint, and can help mask the harsh taste of tobacco.

The bill’s treatment of menthol “caves to the financial interests of tobacco companies and discriminates against African-Americans — the segment of our population at greatest risk for the killing and crippling smoking-related diseases,” the letter from the former secretaries said. “It sends a message that African American youngsters are valued less than white youngsters.”

Mr. Califano said that even though the bill gives the F.D.A. the authority to remove additives it would require a lengthy process that “could go on and on and on, and you’re talking about years before you get through the administrative process and the courts.”

Mr. Califano, who served as health secretary under President Jimmy Carter, said the idea to send the letter began when Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, the health secretary during the administration of President George H. W. Bush, called him to complain about the bill’s treatment of menthol.

“We both got our blood boiling,” Mr. Califano said in a telephone interview. They also decided to contact other past health secretaries. Five of them were reached and all agreed to sign onto the letter, according to Mr. Califano, who now runs the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.

They are Tommy G. Thompson, who was a health secretary under the current President Bush; Donna E. Shalala, from the Clinton administration; Richard S. Schweicker and Dr. Otis R. Bowen, from the Reagan administration; and F. David Matthews from the Ford administration.

In a telephone interview, Dr. Sullivan, the president emeritus of Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, said, “My issue is that menthol should not be added because it’s added as an inducement, an enabler, to induce young people to smoke.”

In 1990, Dr. Sullivan was instrumental in pressuring R. J. Reynolds not to market its Uptown cigarette, a menthol brand intended to appeal to black smokers.

In addition to the former secretaries, two other people signed the letter. They were Dr. Julius B. Richmond, who served as surgeon general in the Carter administration, and William S. Robinson, the executive director of the National African American Tobacco Prevention Network, a nonprofit organization in Durham, N.C.

Mr. Robinson’s organization said last week that it was withdrawing its support from the bill because of the menthol exemption.

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4) The Truth About the War
Editorial
June 6, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/opinion/06fri1.html?pagewanted=2&hp

It took just a few months after the United States’ invasion of Iraq for the world to find out that Saddam Hussein had long abandoned his nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. He was not training terrorists or colluding with Al Qaeda. The only real threat he posed was to his own countrymen.

It has taken five years to finally come to a reckoning over how much the Bush administration knowingly twisted and hyped intelligence to justify that invasion. On Thursday — after years of Republican stonewalling — a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee gave us as good a set of answers as we’re likely to get.

The report shows clearly that President Bush should have known that important claims he made about Iraq did not conform with intelligence reports. In other cases, he could have learned the truth if he had asked better questions or encouraged more honest answers.

The report confirms one serious intelligence failure: President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration officials were told that Iraq still had chemical and biological weapons and did not learn that these reports were wrong until after the invasion. But Mr. Bush and his team made even that intelligence seem more solid, more recent and more dangerous than it was.

The report shows that there was no intelligence to support the two most frightening claims Mr. Bush and his vice president used to sell the war: that Iraq was actively developing nuclear weapons and had longstanding ties to terrorist groups. It seems clear that the president and his team knew that that was not true, or should have known it — if they had not ignored dissenting views and telegraphed what answers they were looking for.

Over all, the report makes it clear that top officials, especially Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, knew they were not giving a full and honest account of their justifications for going to war.

The report was supported by only two of the seven Republicans on the 15-member Senate panel. The five dissenting Republicans first tried to kill it, and then to delete most of its conclusions. They finally settled for appending objections. The bulk of their criticisms were sophistry transparently intended to protect Mr. Bush and deny the public a full accounting of how he took America into a disastrous war.

The report documents how time and again Mr. Bush and his team took vague and dubious intelligence reports on Iraq’s weapons programs and made them sound like hard and incontrovertible fact.

“They continue to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago,” Mr. Cheney said on Aug. 26, 2002, adding that “we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.”

On Oct. 7, 2002, Mr. Bush told an audience in Cincinnati that Iraq “is seeking nuclear weapons” and that “the evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.” Saddam Hussein, he said, “is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon.”

Later, both men talked about Iraq trying to buy uranium in Africa and about the purchase of aluminum tubes that they said could only be used for a nuclear weapons program. They talked about Iraq having such a weapon in five years, then in three years, then in one.

If they had wanted to give an honest accounting of the intelligence on Iraq’s nuclear weapons, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney would have said it indicated that Mr. Hussein’s nuclear weapons program had been destroyed years earlier by American military strikes.

As for Iraq’s supposed efforts to “reconstitute” that program, they would have had to say that reports about the uranium shopping and the aluminum tubes were the extent of the evidence — and those claims were already in serious doubt when Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney told the public about them. That would not have been nearly as persuasive, of course, as Mr. Bush’s infamous “mushroom cloud” warning.

The report said Mr. Bush was justified in saying that intelligence analysts believed Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. But even then, he and his aides glossed over inconvenient facts — that the only new data on biological weapons came from a dubious source code-named Curveball and proved to be false.

Yet Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney persisted in talking as if there were ironclad proof of Iraq’s weapons and plans for global mayhem.

“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use them against our friends, against our allies and against us,” Mr. Cheney said on Aug. 29, 2002.

Actually, there was plenty of doubt — at the time — about that second point. According to the Senate report, there was no evidence that Mr. Hussein intended to use weapons of mass destruction against anyone, and the intelligence community never said there was.

The committee’s dissenting Republicans attempted to have this entire section of the report deleted — along with a conclusion that the administration misrepresented the intelligence when it warned of a risk that Mr. Hussein could give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups. They said Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney never used the word “intent” and were merely trying to suggest that Iraq “could” do those terrible things.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone drew that distinction after hearing Mr. Bush declare that “Saddam Hussein would like nothing more than to use a terrorist network to attack and to kill and leave no fingerprints behind.” Or when he said: “Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime gives anthrax or VX nerve gas or someday a nuclear weapon to a terrorist ally.”

The Senate report shows that the intelligence Mr. Bush had did not support those statements — or Mr. Rumsfeld’s that “every month that goes by, his W.M.D. programs are progressing, and he moves closer to his goal of possessing the capability to strike our population, and our allies, and hold them hostage to blackmail.”

Claims by Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld that Iraq had longstanding ties to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups also were false, and the Senate committee’s report shows that the two men knew it, or should have.

We cannot say with certainty whether Mr. Bush lied about Iraq. But when the president withholds vital information from the public — or leads them to believe things that he knows are not true — to justify the invasion of another country, that is bad enough.

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5) Unemployment Rate Hits 5.5%; Payrolls Shrink for Fifth Month
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
"In the last 12 months, hourly earnings have risen 3.5 percent, below the pace of inflation, which is running at about 4 percent a year."
June 7, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/07/business/07jobs.html?hp

The American unemployment rate surged to 5.5 percent last month, the government said on Friday, the biggest increase in more than two decades. The report was the latest sign that workers face a darker outlook even as they struggle to cope with the housing slump and high energy prices that have cut into their spending power.

Employers also shed 49,000 jobs in May, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said in its monthly report. Payrolls have shrunk every month this year, the worst losing streak since 2003. Manufacturers, construction companies and the retail sector were the hardest hit, as businesses struggled with lower demand and looked to cut costs.

The jump in the unemployment rate, which was 5 percent in April, led to a sharp increase in the number of Americans who looked for jobs in May. The size of the work force grew, but fewer jobs were available, nudging up the percentage of unemployed to its highest level since October 2004.

The major stock exchanges fell sharply Friday morning as investors weighed the report’s implications on consumer spending and the broader economy. The Dow industrials dived more than 200 points, while the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was down about 1.3 percent.

The presumptive presidential candidates traded blows over the report, with Senator John McCain describing the economic plan of his opponent, Senator Barack Obama, as “backward.”

In a statement, Senator Obama fired back. “We can’t afford John McCain’s plan to spend billions of dollars on tax breaks for big corporations and wealthy C.E.O.s,” he said. “That’s why I’m offering change that will provide working families with a middle-class tax cut, affordable health care and college.”

Many economists were caught off guard by the sharp rise in unemployment.

“This is a pretty weak report. And you can’t dismiss a five-tenths of a jump in the unemployment rate, even if you figure there’s some flukiness to the data,” Ethan Harris, the chief United States economist at Lehman Brothers, said.

That flukiness referred to teenagers, who tend to enter the job market in May as schools let out for the summer; the result is a bloated labor pool, Mr. Harris said.

But the bad news could not be entirely blamed on the adolescent set.

“It’s unambiguously ugly,” said Robert Barbera, chief economist at the research and trading firm ITG. “The average American already knows that gas prices are up a ton and it’s really hard to find a job. Sally and Sam on Main Street are already well aware of this, and that’s why sentiment surveys are lower than they were in each of the last two recessions.”

Economists said the report may keep the Federal Reserve from tightening interest rates in the near future. Fed policy makers meet again at the end of the month.

The government also revised down its payroll estimates for April and March for a net loss of 15,000 jobs.

The weak labor market is likely to raise anxieties among Americans, putting a pall on consumer spending. Many workers could be left with little room to maneuver if they lose their jobs, as home values decline and equity lines are maxed out.

Even employed Americans are feeling pressure. Salaries continued to shrink in May, after adjusting for inflation. Workers’ wages grew in May but at an anemic pace, with rank-and-file employees earning $17.94 an hour, on average. That was a 5 cent increase — or 0.3 percent — from April.

In the last 12 months, hourly earnings have risen 3.5 percent, below the pace of inflation, which is running at about 4 percent a year.

Peter S. Goodman contributed reporting.

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6) JROTC: BEYOND EXAM
Copyright © 2008 Marc Norton
MARC NORTON ONLINE
http://www.marcnorton.us/98827/107054.html
First published in Beyond Chron on June 6, 2008
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=5744
FLASH:
JROTC allies begin ballot drive to retain program
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/06/BAVM1141B2.DTL
(more to come...)

The San Francisco Examiner ran an article on Monday, June 2 boldly titled "JROTC STILL MARCHING STRONG." The article approvingly quotes Colonel Doug Bullard, who runs JROTC at Lowell High School, bragging that JROTC kids "ski, go rafting and compete in drum competitions." He doesn't even mention that JROTC is a creature of the Pentagon. Nor does the article mention that there is a serious campaign in process to end JROTC in our schools, right now, today.

There was also a letter in Beyond Chron on Monday stating that school board members Mark Sanchez, Eric Mar, Jane Kim and Kim-Shree Maufas all have the "same position." Not hardly...

Last December 2007, Sanchez and Mar voted against the resolution that extended JROTC for another year. If that resolution had failed, JROTC would be outa here this very month.

The rest of the school board -- including Green Party member Jane Kim and Kim-Shree Maufas -- voted to extend JROTC for another year. As a consequence, JROTC is still with us. That is the public record.

I talked to Sanchez on Monday, June 2. I asked him if he had changed his position since December. He said, and I quote, "No." I then asked him if he would vote the same way if the same resolution was before the school board now. He said, and I quote, "Most likely."

There is every reason to believe that Eric Mar feels the same way as Sanchez. That makes two votes to end JROTC now. That makes Kim and Maufas -- two board members who have progressive reputations to protect, and who have expressed distress about having a military recruitment program in our schools -- the two swing votes.

IN CASE ANYBODY FAILS TO UNDERSTAND THE URGENCY OF THE MATTER, LISTEN UP. There is going to be an election in November. Sanchez and Mar will be gone from the school board. The military and their allies are laying plans to overturn the original decision of the school board to phase out JROTC, in order to keep the program in place, forever.

The only reliable way to avoid this scenario is to get JROTC out of our schools, now, before our two solid votes -- Mark Sanchez and Eric Mar -- go away.

THOSE WHO COUNSEL DELAY ARE DOING THE MILITARY'S DIRTY WORK, KNOWINGLY OR UNKNOWINGLY. That's the public record.

As Tom Ammiano, Mark Sanchez and Tommi Avicolli Mecca wrote in the San Francisco Bay Guardian back in 2006:

"Let's not sell our youth short. Or make them fodder for oil wars. Or subject them to antiqueer discrimination and hate crimes. Let's give them all the skills they need to make their lives the best they can be. We can do that without the military."

You won't read that in the Examiner.

SEND A MESSAGE to the two swing votes on the school board, today.
Urge them to END JROTC NOW:

Jane Kim
Kimj7@sfusd.edu

Kim-Shree Maufas
Maufasks@sfusd.edu

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7) U.N. Food Meeting Ends With a Call for ‘Urgent’ Action
By ANDREW MARTIN
June 6, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/world/06food.html?ref=world

ROME — A three-day United Nations conference on spiraling food costs concluded late on Thursday with the delegates calling on countries and financial institutions to provide more food for the world’s poor and increase agriculture production to ensure adequate supplies in the future.

The final declaration, completed Thursday, sought “urgent and coordinated action” to address the problems associated with higher food prices, to raise food production, to lower trade barriers and to increase research in agriculture.

The draft declaration largely sidestepped the issue of biofuels, which had emerged as the most contentious matter at the conference.

Some developing countries argued that food crops should not be used for fuel, but the declaration simply urged more research on the subject.

The draft also made no mention of biotechnology, despite arguments by United States officials that genetically modified crops were crucial to improving yields worldwide. Instead, it suggested more investment in “science and technology for food and agriculture.”

Approval of the declaration was delayed because of objections by a handful of Latin American countries, including Argentina and Cuba. They argued that the declaration did not criticize wealthy nations for policies that they believe have contributed to the food crisis, like farm subsidies and the promotion of biofuels.

Some other delegates, meanwhile, were skeptical that anything meaningful would emerge from the three days of news conferences and nearly nonstop speeches that included everyone from Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France, to Denzil L. Douglas, the prime minister of St. Kitts and Nevis.

“Such international get-togethers have ended with lofty statements and commitments which have not, sadly, been delivered or moved to implementation,” said Mary Chinery-Hesse, chief adviser to President John Agyekum Kufuor of Ghana. “The food crisis which the world faces today is so serious that it would be disastrous for the survival of mankind if the conclusions reached suffer the same fate.”

Even so, Lennart Bage, president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, an arm of the United Nations, said the conference was a success if only because it focused the world’s attention on the needs of agriculture.

“I think there is momentum that is unique over the last 25 years,” he said. “When did you have heads of state coming to talk about seeds and fertilizer?”

Jacques Diouf, the host of the conference as secretary general of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, said the results of the conference had exceeded his hopes, even if some of the thornier issues remain unresolved.

“We took the measure of the problem of hunger in the world correctly,” he said. “It is only together that we can confront it.”

The conference was originally scheduled to address climate change and biofuels. But the focus turned to food costs, which have reached their highest level in real terms in three decades, and have caused riots and starvation in some of the world’s poorest countries.

From the start, organizers of the conference challenged the world’s wealthiest countries in unusually sharp language to provide money to help the world’s poor and to reinvigorate agricultural research. They also called on governments to revise or scrap policies that they said contributed to the problems, like government mandates for biofuels, export restrictions and subsidies for wealthy farmers.

The United States was a frequent punching bag, and the agriculture secretary, Ed Schafer, was the recipient of many of the jabs. Many of those focused on government mandates for biofuels, which Mr. Schafer maintained played only a minor role in increasing food prices.

United Nations officials estimated that solving the world’s food problem would cost anywhere from $15 billion to $30 billion a year.

By late on Thursday, there had been pledges totaling several billion dollars, spread over several years, but no major policy concessions from the participants in the conference.

Several groups representing small farmers complained that they were not given much chance to participate, even as heads of state talked about programs to help them.

“The serious and urgent food and climate crises are being used by political and economic elites as opportunities to entrench corporate control of world agriculture and the ecological commons,” said La Via Campesina, an organization of farmers, indigenous people and farm workers, in a statement.

Donald Kaberuka, president of the African Development Bank, said the world food crisis was challenging Africa’s poor but also presented an opportunity to change the course of agriculture on the continent, where crop yields have remained stagnant for decades.

Now, he said, “The test will be in implementing the solutions.”

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8) Killings Lead to Checkpoints for All Drivers in Washington Neighborhood
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 6, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/us/06district.html?ref=us

WASHINGTON (AP) — Stung by an outbreak of violence, including eight killings last weekend, the police here are taking the unusual step of establishing vehicle checkpoints in a crime-ridden neighborhood.

Starting on Saturday night, officers will check drivers’ IDs and turn away any who do not have a “legitimate purpose” in the area, a plan that has been criticized by civil liberties groups.

“The Constitution and the Bill of Rights should not become the next victim of the street violence,” said Johnny Barnes, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of the National Capital Area. “This plan will treat every resident of that area the way criminals are treated.”

The checkpoints come as the police try to combat a spike in killings, which rose 7 percent in 2007 after several years of decline.

Most of last weekend’s killings occurred in the Fifth Police District in the city’s northeast section, where the authorities plan to set up the checkpoints. Already this year, the police district has had 22 killings, one more than in all of 2007.

“The reality is, this is a neighborhood that has been the scene of many violent crimes, and something had to be done,” said a police spokeswoman, Traci Hughes.

But the initiative has raised the ire of the A.C.L.U., which plans to watch what happens with the checkpoints before deciding on any legal action.

Officers will stop motorists traveling through the main thoroughfare of the Trinidad neighborhood, which consists of mostly tidy two-story brick row houses and includes Gallaudet University. It is near the National Arboretum.

The police will ask motorists to show proof that they live in the area. If they lack proof, drivers must explain whether they have a reason to be in the neighborhood, like a doctor’s appointment or a church visit.

The checkpoints will be enforced at random hours for at least five days, although they could be extended to 10 days, the police said.

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9) Highly Rated Auto Plants Set to Close
By NICK BUNKLEY
June 6, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/business/06auto.html?ref=business

DETROIT — Some of the most productive automobile factories, as rated by an influential study released Thursday, are closing down or losing large numbers of jobs in the motor industry’s upheaval.

Among the factories scheduled to close are a General Motors minivan plant in Doraville, Ga., and the Ford Motor Company’s midsize pickup truck plant in St. Paul, both of which ranked first in their segments in this year’s Harbour Report on automotive productivity. The top-rated full-size pickup plant, a Ford factory in Norfolk, Va., closed a year ago, showing that even the best-run plants are not immune to cuts.

Two of the top three large S.U.V. plants are closing, as is the second-ranked midsize S.U.V. plant. The plant that ranked fourth over all, where Chrysler builds compact cars and crossovers in Belvidere, Ill., recently lost one of its three shifts.

“We’ve always said that if we’re going to go, we’ll go out with our heads held high, building a good-quality pickup truck,” said Roger Terveen, president of the United Automobile Workers union’s Local 879, whose members make the Ford Ranger in St. Paul.

Ford has not revealed its plans for the Ranger after September 2009, when the plant is to shut down, and the union still hopes it can change executives’ minds with the help of government officials and the plant’s high productivity ranking. “I think it makes good business sense to keep us open a little bit longer,” Mr. Terveen said.

But the Detroit automakers’ roster of closings shows that a plant’s efficiency “is not a big enough differentiator anymore” when companies need to decrease production, said Ron Harbour, a partner in the North American automotive practice of Oliver Wyman, which publishes the study.

In today’s market, a manufacturer may view the industry’s least productive plant, if it makes a hot-selling fuel-efficient car, as a more valuable asset than the most productive of truck plants.

G.M.’s plant in Orion Township, Mich., ranked last in the midsize-car segment, taking 65 percent longer to build each vehicle than the top performer, while its plant in Moraine, Ohio, ranked second in midsize S.U.V.’s. But this week G.M. said it would add a third shift in Orion and close the Moraine factory.

“Those decisions were made not lightly, but based upon market demand,” said a G.M. spokeswoman, Pam Reese. “You can build the best-quality product in the world or be the most productive plant, but there are a lot of different factors that go into a decision to stop production at a facility.”

Mr. Harbour said the automakers needed more adaptable plants, so that they did not have to shut their most productive factories or spend millions of dollars retooling them to build different vehicles.

“We can’t have a ‘truck plant’ and a ‘car plant’ anymore,” Mr. Harbour told the Automotive Press Association in releasing the productivity study. “It needs to just be ‘a plant,’ and it’s got to be flexible enough to build whatever the market needs.”

The 2008 Harbour Report showed that all three Detroit automakers continued to close in on their more productive Japanese competitors, with Chrysler making the most progress. Both Toyota and Chrysler needed about 30 hours to build each vehicle, the fewest among major automakers.

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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES

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Tennessee: State to Retry Inmate
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | South
The Union County district attorney said the county would meet a federal judge’s deadline for a new trial in the case of a death row inmate whose trial was questioned by the United States Supreme Court. The state is facing a June 17 deadline to retry or free the inmate, Paul House, who has been in limbo since June 2006, when the Supreme Court concluded that reasonable jurors would not have convicted him had they seen the results of DNA tests from the 1990s. The district attorney, Paul Phillips, said he would not seek the death penalty. Mr. House, 46, who has multiple sclerosis and must use a wheelchair, was sentenced in the 1985 killing of Carolyn Muncey. He has been in a state prison since 1986 and continues to maintain his innocence.
May 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/us/29brfs-STATETORETRY_BRF.html?ref=us

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