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JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps) MUST GO! EMERGENCY!
Board of Education Meeting Tonight!
Tuesday, June 10th, 7:00 P.M.
555 Franklin Street near McAllister Street.
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
NEWS ALERT! NEW CAMPAIGN TO KEEP JROTC IN THE SCHOOLS!
Dear All,
I was contacted by KPFA radio yesterday to comment on the news that a group calling itself "Friends of JROTC" a "volunteer group led by parents" launched a petition drive Saturday, June 7, that aims to qualify a ballot measure asking voters to express support for the military-sponsored program (see articles below.) According to the KPFA interviewer, the groups claim is that the Board doesn't have the right to kick JROTC out of our schools and they are demanding that they "have the right to choose" to keep JROTC. The initiative--an advisory ballot measure--would let the school board members how how the majority of San Franciscans feel about the JROTC program which they are sure will pass.
They are claiming that a majority vote would underscore their democratic right to participate in JROTC and that the Board and those opposed to JROTC have no right to prevent students from participating in the program they like.
When I was questioned about their "right to choose" to participate in JROTC I responded by saying that, indeed, they do have the right to participate in JROTC. No one is questioning that. But not on school grounds.
School is no place for military recruiters. I suggested that the military could establish JROTC programs off school grounds--they certainly have the budget for it. And if parents want their children to have this kind of military training they also have every right to seek it off school grounds.
Both the original Board of Education resolution and the recent, important ACLU report entitled, "Soldiers of Misfortune," clearly documents that JROTC is an important recruiting arm for the U.S. Military. The Army's own "Recruiter Training" manual also underscores this fact.
The military and J/ROTC's job is to convince students that by following the rules and obeying orders, not only will they survive anything that is thrown at them--including a military battle itself--but they will come out of the military with a high-paying career of their choice! If you haven't seen their youth recruitment propaganda just look on the GoArmy website:
http://www.goarmy.com/JobCatList.do?redirect=true
And you can read up on the U.S. Army JROTC Mission at:
http://www.jrotc.org/Army%20Program.htm
http://www.jrotc.org/new_page_9.htm
http://www.jrotc.org/new_page_10.htm
http://www.jrotc.org/
And just a sample from the Marines for your information:
“The MARINE CORPS JROTC Mission
http://www.jrotc.org/Marine%20Program.htm
[There’s the Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force Programs in all.]
“Marine Corps Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (MCJORTC) teaches young men and women the kind of self discipline, self-confidence, and leadership skills that can help them successfully meet the challenges of adulthood.
“MCJROTC: Marine Corps Junior ROTC Leadership Education develops good citizenship, self-confidence and self-discipline. Leadership Education classes introduce cadets to the elements of Leadership, Military Customs, Drill and ceremonies, Uniform Inspections, Physical Fitness Training, Marksmanship, and Marine Corps history. Cadets are required to participate in civic service, wear a uniform and dress up at least twice a month.
“Exhibition Drill: Exhibition drill is designed for cadets who wish to participate on a drill team and perfect their skills in IDR and exhibition drill. A typical week consists of three days of Drill, an inspection and Physical Training. Cadets drill with the M-14 rifles and study General Knowledge.
“Character Development: Character Development is designed to foster citizenship and community service. The class is designed around the book: Don't Sweat the Small Stuff... and it's all small stuff.”
What they don’t talk about speaks volumes:
They don't concern themselves with PTSD; or amputations; or missing brain-parts; or nightmares; or depleted uranium poisoning; or the life-long guilt for the murder of millions of innocent Iraqi and Afghani people and the torture and illegal imprisonment of thousands more because you were just following orders!
And make no mistake about it--this pro-JROTC campaign is a pro-war campaign to build up the image of the military as some sort of "peace keeping" career opportunity for underprivileged kids, when it's about turning our children into lean, mean killing machines!
It is also meant to overturn the decisions already made by San Francisco voters two years in a row; who signed the petition to get Proposition I, the College Not Combat initiative, on the ballot and who voted November 5, 2005 by an overwhelming 60 percent in favor of Prop. I--to get the military out of our schools. And who also voted overwhelmingly for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, just a year before that, on November 2, 2004; as well as the tens-of-thousands of San Francisco residents who have voted with their feet by participating in antiwar rallies, marches and demonstrations against the war since before it began.
JROTC MUST GO! NOW! It is clear they have already done enough damage to the children in the San Francisco Unified School District! In fact, our schools should do all they can to convince children to get an education and to discourage them from military service that practices violent solutions to problems and sacrifices children to an illegal and immoral war that trades children's blood for oil.
Get the military out of our schools NOW!
And put the money our district spends on JROTC back into our schools!
In solidarity,
Bonnie Weinstein
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SF Students Petition to Save JROTC
Posted: Saturday, 07 June 2008 12:36PM
http://www.kcbs.com/pages/2328075.php?
SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS) -- Several San Francisco high school students took to the streets this weekend urging the public to help save the junior ROTC program. They need 7000 signatures to qualify for the November ballot.
The San Francisco Board of Education decided to do away with Junior ROTC in high schools, meaning that the program ends next year.
"It teaches us leadership, life skills and values; things you need to be prepared," said Jorge Pinto a 15-year-old Mission High School student.
San Francisco Supervisor Sean Elsbernd says the petition drive has to reach all corners of the city.
"We've got to reinforce to the voters out there that this is about opportunity, this is about leadership, and this is about choice," said Elsbernd.
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Group begins signature drive to retain JROTC
Jill Tucker, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, June 6, 2008
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/06/BAVM1141B2.DTL
A group fighting to keep the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps in San Francisco high schools is beginning a campaign to take the battle to city voters in November.
Friends of JROTC, a volunteer group led by parents, will launch a petition drive Saturday that aims to qualify a ballot measure asking voters to express support for the military-sponsored program.
The school board voted in 2006 to phase out the seven JROTC programs in city high schools by this month. A separate vote in December allowed the program to continue until June 2009 while the district identified and piloted a replacement program.
The proposed ballot measure would be advisory only, meaning it couldn't save the district's JROTC program, but it would show school board members how the majority of San Franciscans feel about the program, said Mike Bernick, the campaign's co-chair.
Bernick, an attorney and former director of California's labor department, said the effort "reflects really the outpouring of support we've found among San Franciscans across the political spectrum."
The group will kick off the petition drive at 9 a.m. Saturday at the Taraval Police Station community room. To qualify for the ballot, the group must submit about 7,200 signatures by July 7, Bernick said. The group has collected about 1,000 signatures already.
Four school board seats are up for election in November, including the seats of Eric Mar and Mark Sanchez, who oppose the JROTC program and are running for the county Board of Supervisors.
Jill Wynns and Norman Yee, who voted against eliminating the program two years ago, are expected to run for re-election.
About 1,200 students are enrolled in the JROTC program this year, down from about 1,600 in 2006, said Robert Powell, a JROTC instructor at Lincoln High School.
"It's not that kids are losing interest," Powell said. "It's because they don't know whether it's going to be around or not."
Sanchez, who led the effort to eliminate JROTC, has said he opposes the program because of its ties to the military, which discriminates against gays. Other opponents have argued that the program has no place in public schools because they say it's a recruitment tool for the military.
Sanchez said he doesn't think the proposed ballot measure would pass because it's not a "salient issue for voters."
JROTC has a 90-year history in San Francisco schools and has been popular among students looking for a leadership program and, in some cases, as an alternative to required physical education classes. The program currently gives PE credit.
The school board Curriculum Committee is scheduled Monday to consider alternative programs that could replace JROTC. The committee is expected to discuss altering current courses, including ethnic studies, to include more leadership training.
E-mail Jill Tucker at jtucker@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/06/BAVM1141B2.DTL
This article appeared on page B - 7 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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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
10) Politics and Hunger
Editorial
June 9, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/opinion/09mon1.html
11) States Take New Tack on Illegal Immigration
By DAMIEN CAVE
June 9, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/us/09panhandle.html?ref=us
12) Marijuana Hotbed Retreats on Medicinal Use
By JESSE McKINLEY
June 9, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/us/09pot.html?ref=us
13) Rural U.S. Takes Worst Hit as Gas Tops $4 Average
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
June 9, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/business/09gas.html?ref=us
14) Out of Sight
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
June 10, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/opinion/10herbert.html
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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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10) Politics and Hunger
Editorial
June 9, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/opinion/09mon1.html
One might expect that food riots in Egypt and Haiti would convince the world’s wealthy nations of the need to do more to feed the world’s poorest. If not, maybe the threat of 100 million more people falling into poverty due to soaring food prices would spur them to help.
Yet at last week’s United Nations food summit, the world’s more-developed nations proved, once again, that domestic politics trumps both humanitarian concerns and sound strategic calculations.
Over the past year, the prices of grains and vegetable oils have nearly doubled. Rice has jumped by about half. The causes include soaring energy costs, drought in big agricultural producers, like Australia, and rising demand by a burgeoning middle class in China and India. But misguided mandates and subsidies in the United States and Europe to produce energy from crops are also playing an important role.
The International Monetary Fund estimated that biofuels — mainly American corn ethanol — accounted for almost half the growth in worldwide demand for major food crops last year. About a third of this country’s corn crop will go to ethanol this year. Yet at the summit meeting in Rome, the Bush administration insisted that ethanol is playing a very small role in rising food prices and resisted calls to limit the drive to convert food into fuel. The United States wasn’t alone.
Brazil, which has an enormous sugar-based ethanol industry, also rejected demands to curb biofuel production. Argentina objected to calls to end export taxes that it and other countries have erected to slow food exports. The United States and Europe also rejected suggestions that their farm subsidies should be blamed for depressing agricultural investment in poor countries.
Today, Africa has less large-scale commercial agriculture than it had 50 years ago. Productivity has slowed to a crawl in India, Indonesia and China.
Several countries have pledged more aid in response to the crisis, but not nearly enough. The Bush administration wants to increase food assistance to $5 billion over two years.
According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, there are 37 countries in critical need of food assistance. Many need not only food, but also seed and fertilizer to plant this season.
According to the U.N. secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, world food production must rise 50 percent by 2030. This will require investments exceeding $15 billion to $20 billion a year in the farm economies of poor countries, including research into robust, high-yielding crops suited to poor regions like sub-Saharan Africa.
After 9/11 the world’s richest nations saw the link between hunger, alienation and terrorism. They offered a trade deal to eliminate the agricultural subsidies and tariffs that were pushing farmers in developing countries out of the market and further into poverty. Seven years later the tariffs and subsidies are still there.
One of the most useful things industrialized countries could do would be to deliver on their promise and end the fat subsidies they provide their farmers no matter how high prices go. These subsidies depressed food prices for years and discouraged investment in agriculture across much of the developing world.
In a world of growing demand and far too much hunger, they have no justification at all.
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11) States Take New Tack on Illegal Immigration
By DAMIEN CAVE
June 9, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/us/09panhandle.html?ref=us
MILTON, Fla. — Three months after the local police inspected more than a dozen businesses searching for illegal immigrants using stolen Social Security numbers, this community in the Florida Panhandle has become more law-abiding, emptier and whiter.
Many of the Hispanic immigrants who came in 2004 to help rebuild after Hurricane Ivan have either fled or gone into hiding. Churches with services in Spanish are half-empty. Businesses are struggling to find workers. And for Hispanic citizens with roots here — the foremen and entrepreneurs who received visits from the police — the losses are especially profound.
“It was very hard because the community is very small, and to see people who came to eat here all the time then come and close the business,” said Geronimo Barragan, who owns two branches of La Hacienda, Mexican restaurants where the police arrested 10 employees.
“I don’t blame them,” Mr. Barragan added. “It’s just that it hurts.”
Sheriff Wendell Hall of Santa Rosa County, who led the effort, said the arrests were for violations of state identity theft laws. But he also seemed proud to have found a way around rules allowing only the federal government to enforce immigration laws. In his office, the sheriff displayed a framed editorial cartoon that showed Daniel Boone admiring his arrest of at least 27 illegal workers.
His approach is increasingly common. Last month, 260 illegal immigrants in Iowa were sentenced to five months in prison for violations of federal identity theft laws.
At the same time, in the last year, local police departments from coast to coast have rounded up hundreds of immigrants for nonviolent, often minor, crimes, like fishing without a license in Georgia, with the end result being deportation.
In some cases, the police received training and a measure of jurisdiction from the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, under a program that lets officers investigate and detain people they suspect to be illegal immigrants.
But with local demand for tougher immigration enforcement growing, 95 departments are waiting to join the 47 in the program. And in a number of places, including Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, police officers or entire departments are choosing to tackle the issue on their own.
State lawmakers, in response to Congressional inaction on immigration law, are giving local authorities a wider berth. In 2007, 1,562 bills related to illegal immigration were introduced nationwide and 240 were enacted in 46 states, triple the number that passed in 2006, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. A new law in Mississippi makes it a felony for an illegal immigrant to hold a job. In Oklahoma, sheltering or transporting illegal immigrants is also a felony.
It remains unclear how the new laws will be enforced. Yet at the very least, say both advocates and critics, they are likely to lead to more of what occurred here: more local police officers demanding immigrants’ documents; more arrests for identity theft; more accusations of racial profiling; and more movement of immigrants, with some fleeing and others being sent to jail.
“It is a way to address illegal immigration without calling it that,” said Jessica Vaughan, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports intensified local enforcement. She added, “They don’t just have to sit and wait for Washington.”
Community Complaints
Police officers here in a handful of Gulf Coast counties from Pensacola to Tallahassee said they started hearing complaints about illegal immigrants last year. With the national debate raging and the local economy sagging, many residents began to question whether illegal immigrants were taking Americans’ jobs.
It did not show up in statistics — the unemployment rate in Santa Rosa County was 3.6 percent in 2007, below state and national averages — so the arguments focused in part on unfair competition.
Donna Tucker, executive director of the Santa Rosa County Chamber of Commerce, said illegal immigration “creates havoc within the system” because businesses that used illegal labor often did not pay into workers’ compensation funds and paid workers less.
“Those businesses can survive a lot longer than the ones that are trying to do things right,” Ms. Tucker said.
Some of the frustrations also veered into prejudice.
George S. Collins, an inspector in charge of the illegal trafficking task force in Okaloosa County, said many people wanted to know “why we weren’t going to Wal-Mart and rounding up the Mexicans” — a comment Mr. Collins said was racist and offensive.
Usually though, the complaints were cultural and legal.
Interviews with more than 25 residents and police officers suggest that the views of Harry T. Buckles, 68, a retired Navy corpsman, are common. Outside his home in Gulf Breeze, Mr. Buckles said the main problem with today’s Hispanic immigrants was that they did not assimilate.
Even after hundreds flowed in to rebuild Santa Rosa County, Mr. Buckles said: “They didn’t become part of the community. They didn’t speak the language.”
Echoing the comments of others, he said he became irritated when he heard Spanish at the Winn-Dixie and saw a line of immigrants sending money home at the Western Union. Mr. Buckles said he feared his community would lose its character and become like Miami, with its foreign-born majority and common use of Spanish.
“We see things nationwide and we know that we could be overwhelmed,” he said.
In fact, only about 3 percent of the population of Santa Rosa County is Hispanic, according to census figures compiled in 2006. As a proportion of its population, the Hispanic community here is less than half the size of what is in Omaha or Des Moines — mostly white cities where the Hispanic population is still below the national average.
Santa Rosa is hardly the only place to use a tough approach against a small immigrant population. In Mississippi, where strict laws on false documentation recently passed, only about 1.7 percent of the state’s 2.9 million people were born abroad and more than half of them are in the United States legally, according to estimates from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors tightening restrictions on immigration.
But here, the result is a divide often marked by a lack of in-depth interaction.
On one side are longtime residents like Sheriff Hall, who said immigrant laborers were not involved in fixing his office or home after the hurricanes, and Mr. Buckles, who said his relationship with Hispanics was based mainly on seeing them at stores or construction sites.
On the other side are a smaller number of immigrants and employers who use immigrant labor.
Some of the immigrants are newly arrived, sticking mostly to themselves. But the group also includes Antonio Tejeda, 38, a roofer and naturalized American citizen from Mexico who wears an N.F.L. jersey to church and speaks English with a slight drawl; and Ruben Barragan, 19, one of the workers arrested in one of the La Hacienda restaurant raids who, though illegal, spoke English and called his infant son Eric because he wanted him to have an American name.
When told about such men, Mr. Buckles said perhaps the government could find ways to create exceptions. But he was not convinced they deserved to stay.
“They got here illegally,” Mr. Buckles said. “They broke the law as soon as they came.”
The Raids
The half-dozen officers involved in the Santa Rosa operations did not announce their arrival. They detained 13 workers at Panhandle Growers. At the two branches of La Hacienda the police quietly detained 10 workers without resistance. And at Emerald Coast Interiors, a boat-cushion factory, the police arrested a handful more.
Sheriff Hall said that his department received tips that led him to all the locations he visited and that he was responding to a steep rise in complaints about illegal immigration. He said he had been frustrated a year ago by a lack of response from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And this time, customs officials said, he did not contact the agency for input before forming a multicounty task force that led to the February operation.
Sheriff Hall said his men were focused on identity theft and did not need special training because “it’s the same thing we do every day.” He insisted that the officers treated everyone fairly. Unlike Bay County officers, who surrounded construction sites last year and arrested immigrants who ran, “we didn’t chase anyone,” he said.
And at many locations witnesses said the police treated all workers equally.
Managers at the restaurants Okki, El Rodeo, China Sea and La Hacienda said police officers checked all employees’ documents, regardless of their ethnicity.
But other business owners, employees and residents said the police focused disproportionately on Hispanics or the foreign born and seemed determined to scare immigrants out of the area. In many cases, employers said, the officers did not even mention identity theft, narrowing their scope to immigrants.
“They were targeting all the places with Hispanic workers,” said Elvin Garcia, 26, a waiter at El Rodeo.
At Red Barn Barbecue, witnesses said that skin color clearly influenced police procedure. When several officers visited and saw no one who was Hispanic in the kitchen, they moved on. “We offered to give them records, and they said, ‘No, it’s not necessary,’ ” said Randy Brochu, whose family owns the business.
Meanwhile, at Emerald Coast Interiors, three employees — one black, one white, one Hispanic — independently said the police did, in fact, chase a handful of Hispanic employees who ran. Three women, they said, were caught in a ditch behind the main building.
Luis Ramirez, the plant’s operations manager, said the officers asked to see documentation only for the workers who fled. “It was racial profiling,” Mr. Ramirez said.
His company has not filed a lawsuit, so his accusations have not been tested. But Florida courts have repeatedly held that flight alone is not enough to justify a suspicion of criminal activity or arrest. In Bay County, officials said they tried to avoid chasing people now because prosecutors have warned that it undermines their cases.
Even without a chase, immigrant advocates say that local efforts to track down illegal immigrants undermine community safety by scaring immigrants from reporting violent crimes.
“It’s a dangerous route to take,” said David Urias, a staff lawyer with the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, which sued Otero County in New Mexico this year after the police raided Hispanics’ homes for minor violations like an unleashed dog. “What you’re going to see,” Mr. Urias said, “is more people pushed into the shadows.”
The Aftermath
Indeed, three months after the sweeps, nearly everyone agrees that the fabric of this community has changed. Hundreds of Hispanic families, both legal and illegal, seem to have disappeared.
John Davy, a co-owner of Panhandle Growers, said some employers “treated their guys humanely” by helping them flee to other areas. “What we’re victims of is a system that’s broken,” he said.
Many residents said they felt torn between competing loyalties to compassion and the law.
“On one hand, I’m sitting here thinking when Ivan was here, you could not get enough people to do the thing that needed to get done,” said Mrs. Tucker at the Chamber of Commerce. “And these illegal aliens, people welcomed them with open arms because they were working hard, they were helping our community. But from a chamber standpoint, you’re operating on the side of the law. It’s a hard thing.”
In the immigrant community, fears now cloud the most basic routines. Many Hispanics said they avoided being seen or heard speaking Spanish in Wal-Mart, even if they live here legally. Others detailed their habit of meticulously checking their cars’ headlights, blinkers and registration to avoid being pulled over.
The message many Hispanics have taken from the raids is simple. “We’re Mexican — they don’t want us here,” said Erika Barragan, 20, whose husband, Ruben, came here illegally roughly six years ago and was one of 23 people scheduled to be deported after the February raids. She said she would go back to Mexico this summer.
Her husband’s employers, Geronimo Barragan (no relation) and his wife, Guilla, are trying to remain positive.
They are citizens and parents of four American-born children, ages 2 to 16. They have lived in Santa Rosa County for more than a decade, founding a Baptist church here and working 16-hour days, six days a week to build two restaurants known for their affordable food and Christian atmosphere, which extends to a ban on alcohol.
They said the raids came as a shock.
“We love the community, and we always tried to do our best,” Mr. Barragan said.
Mrs. Barragan put it more bluntly. “This,” she said, “is like our promised land.”
The Barragans said they did not know their workers were illegal because they provided Social Security numbers and other information that was required. Like most employers, they asked for nothing more.
They have not publicly opposed the sheriff’s actions, and in their effort to move on, they have distanced themselves from his critics. Mr. Barragan even visited Sheriff Hall at his office to tell him he had no hard feelings and would do everything he could to comply in the future.
And yet, the cost has been significant. Both of the restaurants were closed for more than two months. Only one has recently reopened.
Unable to find people in the area who can cook Mexican food, Mr. Barragan, 41, has been scouring the nation, recruiting in Houston, Chicago and Baton Rouge. He has yet to find all the workers he needs, relying on a handful of new hires with work visas that expire in November. He said he wished that Congress could find a way to bring more foreign workers to America legally.
For Mrs. Barragan, 39, a warm, thin woman with hair to her waist, the consequences have been more personal. On a recent Wednesday night, her church’s prayer service was half-empty. Many of her friends have left. And many of the employees that her family mentored in the ways of America are gone, taken away by the police.
“That’s what had the most effect on our lives,” Mrs. Barragan said, speaking in Spanish so she could be more specific. “Not closing La Hacienda, or ‘we’re not going to make money,’ or ‘how are we going to pay our bills?’ I personally didn’t think about that. It hurt me more to see them there — handcuffed. The way they went out.”
Her husband agreed, explaining between bouts of tears that some of the deported workers’ families had become victims of more violent crime. “One of them has a small daughter and someone robbed their house while he was in jail,” Mr. Barragan said. “Twice.”
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12) Marijuana Hotbed Retreats on Medicinal Use
By JESSE McKINLEY
June 9, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/us/09pot.html?ref=us
UKIAH, Calif. — There is probably no marijuana-friendlier place in the country than here in Mendocino County, where plants can grow more than 15 feet high, medical marijuana clubs adopt stretches of highway, and the sticky, sweet aroma of cannabis fills this city’s streets during the autumn harvest.
Lately, however, residents of Mendocino County, like those in other parts of California, are wondering if the state’s embrace of marijuana for medicinal purposes has gone too far.
Medical marijuana was legalized under state law by California voters in 1996, and since then 11 other states have followed, even though federal law still bans the sale of any marijuana. But some frustrated residents and law enforcement officials say the California law has increasingly and unintentionally provided legal cover for large-scale marijuana growers — and the problems such big-money operations can attract.
“It’s a clear shield for commercial operations,” said Mike Sweeney, 60, a supporter of both medical marijuana and a local ballot measure on June 3 that called for new limits on the drug in Mendocino. “And we don’t want those here.”
The outcome of the ballot measure is not known, as votes are still being counted, but such community push-back is increasingly common across the state, even in the most liberal communities. In recent years, dozens of local governments have banned or restricted cannabis clubs, more formally known as dispensaries, that provide medical marijuana, in the face of public safety issues involved in its sale and cultivation, including crime and environmental damage.
“If folks had to get their dope, sorry, they would just have to get it somewhere else,” said Sheriff Mark Pazin of Merced County, east of San Francisco, one of the many jurisdictions to impose new restrictions.
Under the 1996 law, known as Proposition 215, patients need a prescription to acquire medicinal marijuana, but the law gave little guidance as to how people were to acquire it. That gave rise to some patients with marijuana prescriptions growing their own in limited quantities, the opening of clubs to make it available and growers going large scale to keep those outlets supplied.
In turn, that led to the kind of worries that have bubbled up in Arcata, home of Humboldt State University, where town elders say roughly one in five homes are “indoor grows,” with rooms or even entire structures converted into marijuana greenhouses.
That shift in cultivation, caused in part by record-breaking seizures by drug agents of plants grown outdoors, has been blamed for a housing shortage for Humboldt students, residential fires and the powerful — and distracting — smell of the plant in some neighborhoods during harvest.
“I naïvely thought it was a skunk,” said Jeff Knapp, an Arcata resident who has a neighbor who is a grower.
In May, Arcata declared a moratorium on clubs to allow the city council time to address the problem. Los Angeles, which has more than 180 registered marijuana clubs, the most of any city, also declared a moratorium last year.
“There were a handful initially and then all the sudden, they started to sprout up all over,” said Dennis Zine, a member of the Los Angeles City Council. “We had marijuana facilities next to high schools and there were high school kids going over there and there was a lot of abuse taking place.”
But while even advocates of medical marijuana say they recognize that the system has problems, they question the bans. “I think there’s no doubt there’s been abuse, but there’s probably no system created by human beings that hasn’t been abused,” said Bruce Mirken, the director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, which promotes the drug’s legalization. “But the answer to that is not the wholesale throwing out the baby with the bath water.”
All told, about 80 California cities have adopted moratoriums with more than 60 others banning the clubs outright, according to Americans for Safe Access, which advocates for medical marijuana research and treatment. Eleven counties have adopted some sort of ban or moratorium.
Such laws have led to a kind of Prohibition patchwork of “wet” and “dry” areas. In Visalia, a city of 120,000 in the state’s Central Valley, the local club was denied a permit on Main Street, so instead set up shop on a lonely section of country highway. Other clubs have retreated into people’s homes.
Kris Hermes, legal campaign director for Americans for Safe Access, said that despite the bans, 8 counties and about 30 cities had also established regulations meant to legitimize the clubs.
Mr. Zine said the moratorium in Los Angeles would allow city officials time to develop regulations and zoning, something advocates for medical marijuana say they welcome.
“There’s tons of human behavior that you and I might not want to have anything to do with,” said Allen St. Pierre, the executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or Norml, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington. “But if they are legal, there ought to be a legal means to purchase the commodity and do business.”
Such regulations were passed in 2005 in San Francisco, which now has a 10-page application for a club permit.
Kevin Reed, owner of the Green Cross, was the first owner to get a permit in January. But he said some of the city’s other two dozen clubs were struggling to get their paperwork. “It’s taking substantially more time to move through the permit process than was envisioned,” Mr. Reed said in an e-mail message. The city’s board just extended the permit deadline until next year.
New regulations are also in the offing for local and state law enforcement, which has often found itself confused by the overlapping — and sometimes contradictory — federal, state and local laws. Under a state law that took effect in 2004, counties can set their own limits on the amount of medical marijuana; in Mendocino, for example, growers are allowed 25 mature plants, while most counties allow six.
Jerry Brown, the state attorney general, plans to release guidelines this summer to clarify the differences.
“These dispensaries aren’t supposed to be big profit centers,” Mr. Brown said. “This is supposed to be for individual use.”
The 2004 law also recognized the right of patients and caregivers to cultivate marijuana as a group, something law enforcement officials say has been abused.
Bob Nishiyama, the major crimes task force commander in Mendocino County, said there were places with 500 plants and 20 Proposition 215 letters tacked to a fence. “And technically, that’s legal because people can have 25 plants,” he said.
By any measure, medical marijuana in California is a moneymaker. In March, a group of California club owners testified before the state Board of Equalization that their industry had pumped some $100 million in sales tax into state coffers, representing more than $1 billion in sales.
Like many law enforcement officials, Mr. Nishiyama says he does not have a problem with medical marijuana, just with those who are exploiting it.
“If you’re growing six plants and smoking it in your own house, I could care less,” he said.
Most states that have passed subsequent medical marijuana laws have been more precise than California voters were in 1996. New Mexico, for example, allows only patients with seven medical conditions, including cancer, AIDS and epilepsy, to receive medical marijuana.
“California is an aberration, because it does not designate specific disease types, it does not designate weights or plant source, and it has what might be the most fungible or elastic definition of care-giver,” said Mr. St. Pierre, of Norml. Every proposition after Proposition 215 has been “narrower and narrower and more restrictive in scope,” he said.
Also complicating law enforcement’s job is that marijuana is still illegal in the eyes of the federal government, which has been increasingly aggressive about prosecuting club owners they feel have crossed the line into commercial drug dealing.
Among those recently convicted in California include a doctor and his wife from Cool who were given five years each in March for conspiracy to sell marijuana and growing more than 100 plants; a club owner from Bakersfield who pleaded guilty in March to possession of 40 pounds of marijuana with intent to distribute; and Luke Scarmazzo, a 28-year-old club owner and aspiring rapper who faces 20 years to life in prison after a conviction last month for running a multimillion-dollar club in Modesto that the government called a criminal enterprise.
And last year, the Drug Enforcement Administration threatened to seize buildings from landlords who rented space to clubs, resulting in some closings across the state.
For all the federal and local opposition, marijuana as medicine has become an accepted part of life in many communities in California. Advocates say the drug helps patients with everything from the wasting effects of chemotherapy and AIDS to treatment of anxiety and headaches.
But it is not cheap. At Med X, the raided Los Angeles club, the most expensive marijuana, called Blueberry Kush, was priced at $490 an ounce. That economic impact includes numerous ancillary businesses that serve the cannabis culture, including thriving horticulture shops, and Oakland’s Oaksterdam University, a trade school where students can sign up for semester-long courses on marijuana cultivation.
For some, growing has become a second career. In Arcata, a 29-year-old man, who asked that his name not to be used for fear of arrest, said that he earned about $25,000 every three months from selling marijuana grown in a back room to club owners from Southern California.
But others in Arcata are less welcoming. Kevin L. Hoover, the editor of the local newspaper, The Eye, has made a practice of confronting people he believes are growing marijuana. Their houses are easy to spot, he said — covered windows, tall fences, cars coming and going late at night. “Sometimes the whine of fans,” he said.
Those fans, of course, are eating electrical power, something that also irks many.
“We’re all trying to reduce our carbon footprint, but in these places the meters are spinning off the wall,” said Mayor Mark Wheetley of Arcata. “When do you say, enough is enough?”
Jigar Mehta and Carolyn Marshall contributed reporting.
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13) Rural U.S. Takes Worst Hit as Gas Tops $4 Average
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
June 9, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/business/09gas.html?ref=us
TCHULA, Miss. — Gasoline prices reached a national average of $4 a gallon for the first time over the weekend, adding more strain to motorists across the country.
But the pain is not being felt uniformly. Across broad swaths of the South, Southwest and the upper Great Plains, the combination of low incomes, high gas prices and heavy dependence on pickup trucks and vans is putting an even tighter squeeze on family budgets.
Here in the Mississippi Delta, some farm workers are borrowing money from their bosses so they can fill their tanks and get to work. Some are switching jobs for shorter commutes.
People are giving up meat so they can buy fuel. Gasoline theft is rising. And drivers are running out of gas more often, leaving their cars by the side of the road until they can scrape together gas money.
The disparity between rural America and the rest of the country is a matter of simple home economics. Nationwide, Americans are now spending about 4 percent of their take-home income on gasoline. By contrast, in some counties in the Mississippi Delta, that figure has surpassed 13 percent.
As a result, gasoline expenses are rivaling what families spend on food and housing.
“This crisis really impacts those who are at the economic margins of society, mostly in the rural areas and particularly parts of the Southeast,” said Fred Rozell, retail pricing director at the Oil Price Information Service, a fuel analysis firm. “These are people who have to decide between food and transportation.”
A survey by Mr. Rozell’s firm late last month found that the gasoline crisis is taking the highest toll, as a percentage of income, on people in rural areas of the South, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming and North and South Dakota.
With the exception of rural Maine, the Northeast appears least affected by gasoline prices because people there make more money and drive shorter distances, or they take a bus or train to work.
But across Mississippi and the rural South, little public transit is available and people have no choice but to drive to work. Since jobs are scarce, commutes are frequently 20 miles or more. Many of the vehicles on the roads here are old rundown trucks, some getting 10 or fewer miles to the gallon.
The survey showed that of the 13 counties where people spent 13 percent or more of their family income on gasoline, 5 were located in Mississippi, 4 were in Alabama, 3 were in Kentucky and 1 was in West Virginia. While people here in Holmes County spent an average of 15.6 percent of their income on gasoline, people in Nassau County, N.Y., spent barely more than 2 percent, according to the survey.
Economists say that despite widespread concern about gasoline prices, the nationwide impact of the oil crisis has so far been gentler than during the oil crises of the 1970s and 1980s, when shortages caused long lines at the pump, set off inflation and drove the economy into recession.
Americans on average now spend about 4 percent of their after-tax income on transportation fuels, according to Brian A. Bethune, an economist at Global Insight, a forecasting firm. That compares with 4.5 percent in early 1981, the highest point since World War II. At its lowest point, in 1998, that share dropped to 1.9 percent.
“Gas prices have doubled over the last year but the economy has not fallen off the cliff,” said Rajeev Dhawan, director of the Economic Forecasting Center at Georgia State University. “But for the rural lower income people, as a proportion of their income the rise of gas prices is very high.”
While people everywhere are talking about gasoline prices these days, some folks in Tchula (the T is silent) have gone beyond talking.
Anthony Clark, a farm worker from Tchula, says he prays every night for lower gasoline prices. He recently decided not to fix his broken 1992 Chevrolet Astro van because he could not afford the fuel. Now he hires friends and family members to drive him around to buy food and medicine for his diabetic aunt, and his boss sends a van to pick him up for the 10-mile commute to work.
A trip from Tchula to the nearest sizable town about 15 minutes away can cost him $25 roundtrip — for the driving and the waiting. That is about 10 percent of what he makes in a week.
Taking a break under some cottonwood trees beside a drainage ditch filled with buzzing mosquitoes, Mr. Clark and members of his work crew spoke of the big and little changes that higher gas prices have brought. The extra dollars spent at the pump mean electric bills are going unpaid and macaroni is replacing meat at supper. Donations to church are being put off, and video rentals are now unaffordable.
Cleveland Whiteside, who works with Mr. Clark and used to commute 30 miles a day, said his Jeep Cherokee was repossessed last month, because “I paid so much for gas to get to work I couldn’t pay my payments anymore.” His employer, Larry Clanton, has lent him a pickup truck so he can get to work.
Signs of pain and adaptation because of the cost of gas are everywhere. Local fried chicken restaurants are closing because people are eating out less. At the hardware store here, sales have plummeted to $30 a day from $250 a day a month ago.
“Money goes to gasoline — I know mine does,” said the hardware store’s manager, Pam Williams, who tries to attract customers by putting out choice crickets for fishing bait beside the front door.
Local governments are leaving grass high along the roads and doing fewer road repairs to save on fuel costs. The Holmes County government has cut the work week to four days to give workers gasoline relief (keeping the same total of hours), and politicians are even considering replacing sanitation workers with prison inmates on some shifts to conserve money for fuel.
The local price for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline was roughly $3.85 last week, slightly below the national average, but the median family income in Holmes County is about $18,500.
Nationwide, regular unleaded gasoline reached an average of $4.005 on Sunday, according to the American Automobile Association. That is the highest price ever and about a dollar higher than at the start of the year.
While looking to cut workers at his fish processing plant in nearby Isola, Miss., Dick Stevens, president of Consolidated Catfish Producers, said that 10 workers walked into his office last week and volunteered to take a buyout rather than continue commuting from Charleston, Miss., 65 miles away. “The gas ate them alive,” he said.
Workers at the plant are trying to find ways to cope. Josephine Cage, who fillets fish, said her 30-mile commute from Tchula to Isola in her 1998 Ford Escort four days a week is costing her $200 a month, or nearly 20 percent of her pay.
“I make it by the grace of God,” she said, and also by replacing meat at supper with soups and green beans and broccoli. She fills her car a little bit every day, because “I can’t afford to fill it up. Whatever money I have, I put it in.”
Sociologists and economists who study rural poverty say the gasoline crisis in the rural South, if it persists, could accelerate population loss and decrease the tax base in some areas as more people move closer to urban manufacturing jobs. They warn that the high cost of driving makes low-wage labor even less attractive to workers, especially those who also have to pay for child care and can live off welfare and food stamps.
“As gas prices rise, working less could be the economically rational choice,” said Tim Slack, a sociologist at Louisiana State University who studies rural poverty. “That would mean lower incomes for the poor and greater distance from the mainstream.”
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14) Out of Sight
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
June 10, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/opinion/10herbert.html
When the dismal unemployment numbers were released on Friday (at the same time that oil prices were surging to record highs), I thought about the young people at the bottom of the employment ladder.
Below the bottom, actually.
A shudder went through the markets when the Labor Department reported that the official jobless rate had jumped one-half a percentage point in May to 5.5 percent — the sharpest spike in 22 years.
The young people I’m talking about wouldn’t have noticed. These are the teenagers and young adults — roughly 16 to 24 years old — who are not in school and basically have no hope of finding work. The bureaucrats compiling the official unemployment rate don’t even bother counting these young people. They are no one’s constituency. They might as well not exist.
Except that they do exist. There are four million or more of these so-called disconnected youths across the country. They hang out on street corners in cities large and small — and increasingly in suburban and rural areas.
If you ask how they survive from day to day, the most likely response is: “I hustle,” which could mean anything from giving haircuts in a basement to washing a neighbor’s car to running the occasional errand.
Or it could mean petty thievery or drug dealing or prostitution or worse.
This is the flip side of the American dream. The United States economy, which has trouble producing enough jobs to keep the middle class intact, has left these youngsters all-but-completely behind.
“These kids are being challenged in ways that my generation was not,” said David Jones, the president of the Community Service Society of New York, which tries to develop ways to connect these young men and women with employment opportunities, or get them back into school.
It is extremely difficult because, for the most part, the jobs are not there and the educational establishment is having a hard enough time teaching the kids who are still in school.
“Schools have not made much of an effort to bring this population back in,” said Mr. Jones. “Once you fall out of the system, you’re basically on no one’s programmatic radar screen.”
So these kids drift. Some are drawn to gangs. A disproportionate number become involved in crime. It is a tragic story, and very few people are paying attention.
The economic policies of the past few decades have favored the wealthy and the well-connected to a degree that has been breathtaking to behold. The Nation magazine has devoted its current issue to the Gilded Age-type inequality that has been the result.
Just a little bit of help to the millions of youngsters trying to get their first tentative foothold in that economy should not be too much to ask.
It’s not as if these kids don’t want to work. Many of them search and search until they finally become discouraged. The summer job market, which has long been an important first step in preparing teenagers for the world of work, is shaping up this year as the weakest in more than half a century, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.
Now, with the overall economy deteriorating, the situation for poorly educated young people will only grow worse. As Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies, told The Times recently:
“When you get into a recession, kids always get hit the hardest. 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.”
As the ranks of these youngsters grow, so does their potential to become a destabilizing factor in the society.
More important, the U.S. needs the untapped talent (and the potential buying power) in this large pool of young people, just as it needs the talents of the many other Americans of all ages whose energy, intelligence and creativity are wasted in an economic system that is not geared toward providing jobs for everyone who wants to work.
America needs to dream bigger, and in this election year, job creation should be issue No. 1. If I were running for president, I would pull together the smartest minds I could find from government, the corporate world, the labor movement, academia, the nonprofits and ordinary working men and women to see what could be done to spark the creation of decent jobs on a scale that would bring the U.S. as close as possible to full employment.
We’ve maxed out the credit cards, floated mindlessly in stock market bubbles, refinanced mortgages to death — now’s the time to figure out how to put all Americans to work.
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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
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