BAUAW NEWSLETTER - THURSDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2008

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SAVE TROY DAVIS! TROY DAVIS WILL BE EXECUTED OCTOBER 27 UNLESS WE STOP IT!
PLEASE ADD YOUR VOICE AGAINST THIS IMPENDING TRAGEDY! TROY DAVIS IS INNOCENT!

This article is reprinted below. It's number 4 on the list of "Articles in Full."

Justices Clear Way for Execution in Georgia
By ROBBIE BROWN
October 15, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/washington/15execute.html?hp

Amnesty International is still collecting signatures to send a message to Georgia's Parole Board, which has the power to let him live. Save Troy Davis. Troy is innocent.

http://www.amnestyusa.org/troydavis

WRITE A LETTER TO THE EDITOR:

http://www.amnestyusa.org/death-penalty/troy-davis-finality-over-fairness/write-a-letter-to-the-editor/page.do?id=1011639&tr=y&auid=4119799

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COURAGE TO RESIST
Where we are at. An appeal for support
Jeff Paterson
Courage to Resist Project Director
October 15, 2008
couragetoresist.org/donate

I'm proud to report that we have more than doubled the number of military objectors advised or directly supported since last year. To do this, our organizing collective has stepped up to the challenge in major ways, and we increased our staffing as well.

We're now attempting to do this work in the context of an unprecedented economic meltdown that financially affects every one of us in some way. Even prior to that, we were competing with a historic presidential election campaign for your donation. Of course we hold out hope for a new foreign policy not based on brutal occupations, but we're not holding our breath. If change does happen, it will take time for any new foreign policy to trickle down to the courageous men and women who are refusing to fight today.

Quick facts about our budget:

--86 percent of our entire budget has come directly from folks such as you.
--We currently rely on approximately 2,000 contributors across the U.S.
--The average donation we receive is just over $40.
--About half of our budget goes directly to supporting individual resisters.
--The remaining 14 percent of our budget comes from small grants made by progressive foundations.

Recently, we brought on board Sarah Lazare as Project Coordinator who has hit the ground running working with resisters, publishing articles, and collaborating with our allies in the justice and peace movement. Sarah is a former union organizer, Democracy Now! intern, and volunteer at a refugee camp in Lebanon.

Also new to our staff is our Office Manager Adam Seibert, who like me is a former Marine. Adam served in Somalia prior to going UA / AWOL under threat of another combat deployment.

I've never felt better about our staff and organizing collective. We're undertaking urgent and unique work that directly contributes to ending war. However, we are currently running a $4,000 monthly deficit. Whether we can move forward with our work to support the troops who refuse to fight is in large part based on your shared commitment to this project.

For a review of our current work with resisters Tony Anderson, Blake Ivy, Robin Long, and our women and men fighting to remain in Canada, please check our homepage. We have also posted an organizational timeline of action that details our work since 2003.

Today I'm asking that you consider a contribution of $100 or more, or become a sustainer at $20 or more a month. With your direct assistance, I'm confident we'll be able to move forward together in challenging our government's policies of empire. Together we have the power to end the war.

couragetoresist.org/donate

Sincerely,
Jeff Paterson
Courage to Resist Project Director
First U.S. military serviceperson to refuse to fight in Iraq

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Next NO ON V antiwar community outreach day:

Saturday, October 18, 12:00 Noon
24th Street between Noe and Sanchez Streets in front of the supermarket.

Bay Area United Against War
P.O. Box 318021, San Francisco, CA 94131-8021, 415-824-8730, www.bauaw.org

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A Joint Statement from United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and the ANSWER Coalition

JROTC BALLOT BATTLE IN SAN FRANCISCO

“We’re watching the San Francisco situation very closely,” said Curtis Gillroy, an official in the Defense Department’s office for personnel and military readiness, according to a recent Associated Press report.

The peace and justice movement in San Francisco is engaged in an historic struggle that demands the attention of antiwar activists everywhere.

In 2006, the San Francisco Unified School District became the first major school district in the country to eliminate an existing Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) program from its high schools. JROTC is one of the military’s primary recruitment tools, aimed at students as young as 14 and 15.

The Pentagon and its allies immediately launched their counterattack. Now they have placed Proposition V on the November ballot, asking San Franciscans to support the military program. In 2005, nearly 60% of San Franciscans voted to eliminate military recruiters from their schools. But the proponents of Proposition V are telling the Big Lie, denying that JROTC is a military recruitment program—and they have already collected over $85,000 for their campaign of lies from the likes of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, the San Francisco Police Officers Association, and various military organizations around the country.

The peace and justice movement cannot let the JROTC military recruiters back into our schools. If we do, then our movement will be set back immeasurably—not just in San Francisco, but throughout the country.

This is not a mere symbolic battle. If we can keep JROTC out of our schools, it will materially affect the ability of the warmakers to conduct their ongoing wars of aggression, and save the lives of many young men and women.

Many people in the LGBT community are in this fight as well because we know that the Pentagon’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy is just one facet of the homophobia rampant in the military.

You can help us today. We need to raise thousands more dollars to pay for our campaign coordinator, for literature, for window signs, and, if possible, for mail to San Francisco voters.

Donations can be made on-line, right now, at http://www.nomilitaryrecruitmentinourschools.org/,
or by mail to: No on V, 2467 28th Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94116.

In addition, if you live in the Bay Area, and can put in some volunteer time to hold a sign, staff a table, or to distribute our literature, please immediately contact our campaign coordinator, Marko Matillano, at mmatillano@afsc.org, or at (415) 565-0201, ext. 14.

In gratitude and peace,
Siri Margerin, United for Peace and Justice, Bay Area
Richard Becker, ANSWER Coalition—Act Now to Stop War & End Racism, Bay Area

P.S. Time is of the essence, so please consider how you can support the No on V campaign NOW.

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STOP THE WAR
JOIN IRAQ MORATORIUM
FRI. OCT. 17 2 to 4 pm
UNIVERSITY & ACTON
We gather at the same time & place on the 3rd Friday of every month ...
Demand our tax $s be used for social uplift, not for death, destruction, and bailing out Wall St greed. Bring your signs, music, drums, guitars and ...
DETERMINATION TO END THE MADNESS OF WAR CREATE THE SANITY OF PEACE
STOP THE OCCUPATION NO ATTACK ON IRAN BRING TROOPS HOME
Sponsors: Berkeley Gray Panthers & Strawberry Creek Lodge Tenants Information: 510 548-9696 or 510 841-4143
Take the Iraq Moratorium Pledge at our New Web Site:
www.iraqmoratorium.com

labor donated

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Protest at mortgage bankers associates annual conference in SF

No foreclosures - No evictions
No bank bailouts - Housing is a right!

Sun. Oct. 19, 3pm Protest at opening ceremony of conference, Moscone West, 4th St. and Howard, SF

Mon. Oct. 20, 8am - Protest during Opening General Session, Moscone West, 4th St. and Howard, SF

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Chairmen headline Opening General Session and Annual Business Meeting from 8:30am-10:30am.

Initiated by ANSWER Coalition. To co-sponsor, please reply to this email or call 415-821-6545. http://www.votenobailout.org/

"Piggies"
By George Harrison

Have you seen the little piggies
Crawling in the dirt?
And for all the little piggies
Life is getting worse,
Always having dirt
To play around in.

Have you seen the bigger piggies
In their starched white shirts?
You will find the bigger piggies
Stirring up the dirt,
Always have clean shirts
To play around in.

In their sties, with all their backing,
They don't care what goes on around.
In their eyes, there's something lacking;
What they need's a damn good whacking!

Everywhere there's lots of piggies,
Living piggy lives.
You can see them out for dinner
With their piggy wives,
Clutching forks and knives
To eat their bacon.

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The Howard Thurman Convocation presents:
Chaplain James Yee, Former U.S. Army Chaplain, Guantanamo Bay
Sunday, October 19, 2008, 3:00 PM
The Church for The Fellowship of All Peoples
2041 Larkin Street/Broadway, SF 94109
www.fellowshipsf.org, (415) 776-4910

“The movement of the Spirit of God in the hearts of men often call them to act against the spirit of their times or causes them to anticipate the spirit which is yet in the making. In a moment of dedication, they are given wisdom and courage to dare a deed that challenges and to kindle a hope that inspires.”

~ Howard Thurman, Footprints of a Dream, 1959

Captain James J. Yee is a former US Army Chaplain and graduate of West Point who served as the Muslim Chaplain for the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba that became controversial for its treatment of detainees designated as "enemy combatants" by the U.S. government. While ministering to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Captain Yee objected to the cruel and degrading abuses to which the prisoners were subjected. This outspokenness led to his arrest and imprisonment, while being falsely accused of spying and espionage. After months of government investigation, all criminal charges were dropped. With his record wiped clean, Chaplain Yee resigned from the U.S. Army receiving an Honorable Discharge and was later awarded a second Army Commendation Medal for "exceptionally meritorious service."

Chaplain Yee's gripping account of his Guantanamo experience and struggle for justice has been recently published and is entitled For God And Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire. The Washington Post called it "required reading for all U.S. officials waging war on Islamic terrorists." Chaplain Yee will deliver the keynote address, “Faith in a time of Crisis.”

For faithful courage in pursuit of justice, Chaplain James J. Yee will receive the 2008 Howard Thurman Award.

A reception and book signing will immediately follow the 3pm program, downstairs in Thurman Hall. This is a free event and donations are greatly appreciated. Persons with special needs should contact the church office in advance, at (415) 776-4910. Public transportation is advised as street parking is quite limited.

To learn more about Dr. Howard Thurman, The Howard Thurman Center and the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, please visit our website at www.fellowshipsf.org.

joyce umamoto
nohid@mac.com

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Bring the Anti-War Movement to Inauguration Day in D.C.

January 20, 2009: Join thousands to demand "Bring the troops home now!"

On January 20, 2009, when the next president proceeds up Pennsylvania Avenue he will see thousands of people carrying signs that say US Out of Iraq Now!, US Out of Afghanistan Now!, and Stop the Threats Against Iran! As in Vietnam it will be the people in the streets and not the politicians who can make the difference.

On March 20, 2008, in response to a civil rights lawsuit brought against the National Park Service by the Partnership for Civil Justice on behalf of the ANSWER Coalition, a Federal Court ruled for ANSWER and determined that the government had discriminated against those who brought an anti-war message to the 2005 Inauguration. The court barred the government from continuing its illegal practices on Inauguration Day.

The Democratic and Republican Parties have made it clear that they intend to maintain the occupation of Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, and threaten a new war against Iran.

Both Parties are completely committed to fund Israel’s on-going war against the Palestinian people. Both are committed to spending $600 billion each year so that the Pentagon can maintain 700 military bases in 130 countries.

On this the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, we are helping to build a nationwide movement to support working-class communities that are being devastated while the country’s resources are devoted to war and empire for for the sake of transnational banks and corporations.

Join us and help organize bus and car caravans for January 20, 2009, Inauguration Day, so that whoever is elected president will see on Pennsylvania Avenue that the people want an immediate end to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and to halt the threats against Iran.

From Iraq to New Orleans, Fund Peoples Needs Not the War Machine!

We cannot carry out these actions withour your help. Please take a moment right now to make an urgently needed donation by clicking this link:

https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Donation?ACTION=SHOW_DONATION_OPTIONS&CAMPAIGN_ID=1121&JServSessionIdr011=23sri803b1.app2a

A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.answercoalition.org/
info@internationalanswer.org
National Office in Washington DC: 202-544-3389
New York City: 212-694-8720
Los Angeles: 213-251-1025
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
Chicago: 773-463-0311

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National Assembly
Announcements:

UPDATED: September 26, 2008

The following “Open Letter to the U.S. Antiwar Movement” was adopted by the National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations on July13, 2008. We urge antiwar organizations around the country to endorse the letter. Please send notice of endorsements to natassembly@aol.com

Open Letter to the U.S. Antiwar Movement

Dear Sisters and Brothers:

In the coming months, there will be a number of major actions mobilizing opponents of U.S. wars and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan to demand “Bring the Troops Home Now!” These will include demonstrations at the Democratic and Republican Party conventions, pre-election mobilizations like those on October 11 in a number of cities and states, and the December 9-14 protest activities. All of these can and should be springboards for very large bi-coastal demonstrations in the spring.

Our movement faces this challenge: Will the spring actions be unified with all sections of the movement joining together to mobilize the largest possible outpouring on a given date? Or will different antiwar coalitions set different dates for actions that would be inherently competitive, the result being smaller and less powerful expressions of support for the movement’s “Out Now!” demand?

We appeal to all sections of the movement to speak up now and be heard on this critical question. We must not replicate the experience of recent years during which the divisions in the movement severely weakened it to the benefit of the warmakers and the detriment of the millions of victims of U.S. aggressions, interventions and occupations.

Send a message. Urge – the times demand it! – united action in the spring to ensure a turnout which will reflect the majority’s sentiments for peace. Ideally, all major forces in the antiwar movement would announce jointly, or at least on the same day, an agreed upon date for the spring demonstrations.

The National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations will be glad to participate in the process of selecting a date for spring actions that the entire movement can unite around. One way or another, let us make sure that comes spring we will march in the streets together, demanding that the occupations be ended, that all the troops and contractors be withdrawn immediately, and that all U.S. military bases be closed.

In solidarity and peace,

National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations

National Assembly’s Continuations Body (in formation):
Beth Adams, Connecticut River Valley Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; Zaineb Alani, Author of The Words of an Iraqi War Survivor & More; Alexis Baden-Mayer, Grassroots Netroots Alliance; Steve Bloom, Solidarity; Michael Carano, Progressive Democrats of America/Ohio Branch; Jim Ciocia, AFSCME Staff Representative; Colia Clark, Chair, Richard Wright Centennial Committee; Grandmothers for Mumia Abu-Jamal; Greg Coleridge, Coordinator, Northeast Ohio Anti-War Coalition (NOAC) and Economic Justice and Empowerment Program Director, Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee (AFSC); Victor Crews, Wasatach Coalition for Peace and Justice (of Northern Utah); Alan Dale, Iraq Peace Action Coalition (MN); Donna Dewitt, President, South Carolina AFL-CIO*, Representing U.S. Labor Against the War on the Continuations Body; Jamilla El-Shafei, Founder, Kennebunks Peace Department; Co-Founder and Organizer, Stop-Loss Congress; Mike Ferner, Secretary, Veterans for Peace; Paul George, Peninsula Peace and Justice Center; Jerry Gordon, Former National Co-Coordinator of the Vietnam-era National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) and Member, U.S. Labor Against the War Steering Committee; John Harris, Greater Boston Stop the Wars Coalition; Jonathan Hutto, Navy Petty Officer; Author of Anti-War Soldier; Co-Founder of Appeal for Redress; Tom Lacey, California Peace and Freedom Party; Marilyn Levin, Coordinating Committee, Greater Boston United for Justice with Peace, Middle East Crisis Coalition; Joe Lombardo, Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace, Northeast Peace and Justice Coalition; Jeff Mackler, Founder, San Francisco Mobilization for Peace, Jobs and Justice; Christine Marie, Socialist Action; Logan Martinez, Green party of Ohio; Fred Mason, President, Maryland State and District of Columbia AFL-CIO and Co-Convenor, U.S. Labor Against the War; Atlee McFellin, Students for a Democratic Society, New School University Chapter, New York; Mary Nichols-Rhodes, Progressive Democrats of America/Ohio Branch; Northland Anti-War Coalition; Bill Onasch, Kansas City Labor Against the War; John Peterson, National Secretary, Workers International League; Dan Piper, CT United for Peace; Millie Phillips, Socialist Organizer; Thea Paneth, Arlington/Lexington United for Justice with Peace; Andy Pollack, Adalah/NY; Adam Ritscher, United Steelworkers Local 9460*; Vince Scarich, Los Altos Voices for Peace; Carole Seligman, Active in Campaign to Get Junior ROTC Out of San Francisco Schools; Peter Shell, Thomas Merton Center Antiwar Committee, Pittsburgh; Mark Stahl, Rhode Island Mobilization Committee to Stop War and Occupation; Lynne Stewart, Lynne Stewart Organization/Long Time Attorney and Defender of Constitutional Rights; Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War

Other endorsers (list in formation):
Haidar Abushaqra, Palestine American Congress,* CT; Adalah-NY; Campus Antiwar Network; Andy Anderson, Veterans for Peace, Duluth, MN; Jeff Anderson, Duluth, MN City Councilor; Kathy Anderson, Cuba Solidarity Committee, Duluth, MN; Arlington/Lexington (MA) United for Justice with Peace; Bay Area United Against War; Prof. Hal Bertilson, Psychologists for Social Responsibility, Network of Spiritual Progressives; Scott Bol, Northeast Minnesota Citizens Federation; Heather Bradford, Co-Founder, College of St. Scholastica Students Against War, Superior, WI; Chicago Labor against the War; Coalition for Justice in the Middle East; Connecticut Coalition for Peace and Justice; CT River Valley Chapter, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; CT United for Peace; Duluth Area Green Party; Every Church a Church of Peace; Sharla Gardner, Duluth, MN City Councilor; Sam Goodall, Positively 3rd Street Bakery, Duluth, MN; Grandmothers for Peace, Duluth, MN; Greater Boston Stop the War Coalition; Sadie Green, Teamsters Local 391, Duluth, MN; Jeannie Gugliermino, Middletown Alliance for Peace,* Middletown, CT; Rose Helin, Founder, University of Wisconsin-Superior Students Against War; Melissa Helman, former School of the Americas (SOA) protest prisoner of conscience, Ashland, WI; Donna Howard, Co-Chair, Nonviolent Peaceforce; Iraq Peace Action Coalition (MN); Jeni Johnson, former news editor, Promethean newspaper, Superior, WI; Laurie Johnson, AFSCME Council 5 Business Representative, Duluth, MN; Kansas City Labor Against War; Lake Superior Greens, Superior, WI; Joan Linski, UNITE HERE Local 99; Loaves and Fishes, Catholic Worker Community; Los Angeles County Federation of Labor AFL-CIO; Dorotea Manuela -- Chair, New Mission High School Governing Board*, Co-Chair Boston Rosa Parks Human Rights Committee*; Co-Coordinator Rapid Response Network/Boston May Day Coalition*; Ronald Miller, Progressive Action; Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal/Northern California; Tess Moren, University of Wisconsin -Superior International Peace Studies Student Association; Michelle Naar-Obed, Christian Peacemakers Team; Network of Spiritual Progressives, Duluth, MN Chapter; Northeast Ohio Anti-War Coalition (NOAC); Northland Anti-War Coalition, Duluth, MN; Frank O'Gorman, People of Faith,* Hartford, CT; Ohio State Labor Party; Cheryl Olson, Grandmothers for Peace, Superior, WI; Lyn Clark Pegg, Witness for Peace, Duluth, MN; Peninsula Peace and Justice Center, Palo Alto, CA.; June Pinken, Manchester Peace Coalition,* Manchester, CT; Helen Raisz, Womens' International League for Peace and Freedom,* Hartford, CT; Rhode Island Committee to Stop War and Occupation; Lorena Rodriguez, International Partnership Coordinator of the Student Trade Justice Campaign, Chicago, IL; Mike Rogge, Co-Founder, College of St. Scholastica Students Against War, Superior, WI; Lucy Rosenblatt, We Refuse to Be Enemies,* Hartford, CT; Arielle Schnur, Students for Peace; Ahlam Shalhout, author, Recovering Stolen Memories, New London, CT; Socialist Organizer; Socialist Party of Connecticut; Solidarity; Troops Out Now Coalition (TONC); U.S. Labor Against the War (USLAW); Veterans for Peace, Chapter 80, Duluth, MN; Wasatch Coalition for Peace and Justice of Northern Utah; Steve Wick, President, University of Minnesota- Duluth Students for Peace; Mike Winterfield, We Refuse to Be Enemies,* Hartford, CT; Women's International League for Peace and Freedom/Pittsburgh; Workers International League

* indicates for identification only

National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations
http://natassembly.org/members/index.php?org-id=2

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The NO on Proposition V website:

http://www.NoMilitaryRecruitmentInOurSchools.org

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San Francisco Proposition U is on the November ballot.

Shall it be City policy to advocate that its elected representatives in the
United States Senate and House of Representatives vote against any further
funding for the deployment of United States Armed Forces in Iraq, with the
exception of funds specifically earmarked to provide for their safe and
orderly withdrawal.

If you'd like to help us out please contact me. Donations would be wonderful, we need them for signs and buttons. Please see the link on our web site.

Thank you.

Rick Hauptman
Prop U Steering Commiittee

http://yesonpropu.blogspot.com/

tel 415-861-7425

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WHAT ALL HUMANITY IS UP AGAINST (FROM "60 MINUTES")
[THIS IS TRULY TERRIFYING!...BW]

The Battle Of Sadr City

Weaponry so advanced that it spots the enemy and destroys it from nearly two miles above the battlefield made the difference in the fight for Sadr City last spring. Lesley Stahl's report shows rare footage of the weaponry in action.

October 13, 2008
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4516319n

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"Meditating on the current U.S. public debt—$10,266 trillions—that President Bush is laying on the shoulders of the new generations in that country, I took to calculating how long it would take a man to count the debt that he has doubled in eight years.

"A man working eight hours a day, without missing a second, and counting one hundred one-dollar bills per minute, during 300 days in the year, would need 710 billion years to count that amount of money." —Fidel Castro Ruz, October 11, 2008

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Check out this video of the Oct. 11 protest in Boston:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pPB5IR_hEg

Video: Peace Rally in Providence
October 11th, 2008
Rhode Island Community Coalition for Peace held an anti-war and pro immigration rally at Dexter Training Grounds, beside the Cranston Armory, followed by a march that ended up at Burnside Park around 4:30 p.m. There were 200 people at the rally and more joined the march along the way. Providence Journal video by Kathy Borchers
http://www.projo.com/video/?z=y&nvid=291998

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ARTICLES IN FULL:

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1) Under ‘No Child’ Law, Even Solid Schools Falter
By SAM DILLON
October 13, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/education/13child.html?ref=us

2) More Schools Miss the Mark, Raising Pressure
By KRISTIN HUSSEY
Education
October 12, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/nyregion/connecticut/12nochildct.html?ref=education

3) Teachers Sue Over Right to Politic
By JENNIFER MEDINA
October 11, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/11/nyregion/11button.html?ref=education

4) Justices Clear Way for Execution in Georgia
Take New Action Today!
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/index.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&template=x.ascx&action=11330

5) Downward Spiral
Editorial
"That is one more reason why the next president must plot a swift, orderly exit from Iraq and begin a swift and serious buildup of troops and aid in Afghanistan — the real frontline in the war on terror."
October 15, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/opinion/15wed1.html

6) Booklovers turn to Karl Marx as financial crisis bites in Germany
Kate Connolly in Berlin
"Bookshops around the country are reporting similar findings, saying that sales are up by 300 percent. (Though the fact that they are not prepared to quote actual figures suggests the sales were never that high)."
guardian.co.uk,
Wednesday October 15 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/15/marx-germany-popularity-financial-crisis/print

7) Next Victim of Turmoil May Be Your Salary
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Economic Scene
October 15, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/business/economy/15leonhardt.html?hp

8) The Ice Storm
By GAUTI KRISTMANNSSON
Op-Ed Contributor
"What to do, nobody knows, least of all the politicians, bankers, tycoons; but then again, I heard that a new edition of “The Communist Manifesto” will be published here this autumn."
October 16, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/16/opinion/16kristmannsson.html?scp=1&sq=The%20Ice%20Storm%20By%20GAUTI%20KRISTMANNSSON&st=cse

9) Behind the Money Crash
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
October 8, 2008
PrisonRadio.org

10) Social Security Benefits Rising by 5.8%
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
October 16, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Social-Security.html?hp

11) Afghan Officials Say U.S. Airstrike Killed Civilians
By JOHN F. BURNS
October 17, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/world/asia/17afghan.html?hp

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1) Under ‘No Child’ Law, Even Solid Schools Falter
By SAM DILLON
October 13, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/education/13child.html?ref=us

SACRAMENTO — Prairie Elementary School had not missed a testing target since the federal No Child Left Behind law took effect in 2002. Until now.

The school, perched on a tidy, oak-shaded campus in a working-class neighborhood here, has moved each of its student groups — Hispanics, blacks, Asians, whites, American Indians, Filipinos, Pacific Islanders, English learners, the disabled — toward higher proficiency in recent years.

Over all, the number of its students passing tough statewide tests had increased by more than three percentage points annually, a solid record.

But this year, California schools were required to make what experts call a gigantic leap, increasing the students proficient in every group by 11 percentage points. For the first time, Prairie, and hundreds of other California schools, fell short, a failure that results in probation and, unless reversed, federal sanctions within a year.

“And they’re asking for another 11 percent increase next year and the next, and that’s where I’m saying I just don’t know how,” Fawzia Keval, the school’s principal, said. “I’m spending sleepless nights.”

Across the nation, far more schools failed to meet the federal law’s testing targets than in any previous year, according to new state-by-state data. And in California and some other states, the problem traces in part to the fact that officials chose to require only minimal gains in the first years after the law passed and then very rapid annual gains later. One researcher likens it to the balloon payments that can sink homebuyers.

Part of the reason for the troubles was that the states gambled the law would have been softened when it came up for reauthorization in 2007, but efforts to change it stalled. This year Congress made no organized attempt to reconsider the law. With the nation facing urgent challenges, including two wars and economic turmoil, it could be a year or more before the new president can work with Congress to rewrite the law.

The law requires every American school to bring all students to proficiency in reading and math by 2014. When it was first implemented six years ago, it required states to outline the statistical path they would follow on their way to 100 percent proficiency, and about half set low rates of achievement growth for the first few years and steeper rates thereafter.

Here in California, which in 2002 had only 13.6 percent of students proficient in reading, officials promised to raise that percentage on average by 2.2 points annually from 2002 to 2007, but starting this year greatly accelerate the progress, raising the percentage of proficient students by 11 points per year through 2014.

Now that the time has come for that accelerated improvement, California schools are not keeping up. This year, about half the state’s 9,800 schools fell short.

“We’re hitting a balloon payment scenario, to use a housing analogy, where the expectations set forth in the federal law are far higher than recent performance levels,” said Richard Cardullo, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, who led an analysis of the performance of state elementary schools.

His study, published Sept. 26 in the journal Science, found that the proportion of students scoring at or above proficiency increased, on average, less than four percentage points annually from 2003 to 2007, far short of the 11 percentage points of annual growth required starting this year.

“Lots of schools are no longer going to be able to meet the law’s requirements,” Dr. Cardullo said. His study predicted that virtually every elementary school in California would fall short of the federal law’s expectations before 2014.

Why did California decide on six years of relatively slow achievement growth, followed by six years of extraordinary gains? Officials from many states told the Bush administration in 2002 that they needed time to write new tests and accustom teachers to them.

But the California state school superintendent, Jack O’Connell, said he also bet that Congress might change the law in 2007, perhaps by removing its 100 percent proficiency goal. “It’s true that was in the back of my mind when we negotiated our plan with the feds,” Mr. O’Connell said. “And I’d do the same thing again. I’m still hoping a new administration will change the law.”

Meanwhile, the law has had other unintended consequences — including its tendency to punish states, like California, that have high academic standards and rigorous tests, which have contributed to an increasing pileup of failed schools.

A state-by-state analysis by The New York Times found that in the 40 states reporting on their compliance so far this year, on average, 4 in 10 schools fell short of the law’s testing targets, up from about 3 in 10 last year. Few schools missed targets in states with easy exams, like Wisconsin and Mississippi, but states with tough tests had a harder time. In Hawaii, Massachusetts and New Mexico, which have stringent exams, 60 to 70 percent of schools missed testing goals. And in South Carolina, which has what may be the nation’s most rigorous tests, 83 percent of schools missed targets.

“The law is diagnosing schools that just have the sniffles with having pneumonia,” said Jim Rex, the South Carolina schools superintendent.

Under the law, all public schools must test students every year and if those in any group fall short, the school misses its targets and is put on probation. All states adopt their own curriculums and testing standards, and the rigor of the tests varies greatly.

Schools that miss targets for two consecutive years are labeled “needing improvement” and face escalating sanctions that can include staff changes or closings. Partly because the law is identifying thousands of schools, however, few states have tried to radically restructure more than a few.

Margaret Spellings, the federal education secretary, acknowledged in an interview that the law’s mechanism for holding schools accountable needed refinement because it works as a pass-fail system in which schools with only minor problems are in the same category as chaotic institutions with students running the halls.

“We passed the best law we could seven years ago,” Ms. Spellings said. “There’s wide recognition that this is something we need to address.”

Under a pilot program known as differentiated accountability, Ms. Spellings has given six states — Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland and Ohio — permission to treat schools labeled for improvement that have missed targets for only one group differently than those needing sweeping intervention.

But the rate at which schools have been identified as needing improvement has not yet become worrisome, she said. “Pretty much every organization needs improvement,” she said.

Ms. Spellings has fiercely defended the law’s requirement that all students achieve proficiency by 2014.

Among that provision’s most tenacious critics has been Robert Linn, a University of Colorado professor emeritus who is one of the nation’s foremost testing experts. He argued, almost from the law’s passage, that no society anywhere has brought 100 percent of students to proficiency, and that the annual gains required to meet the goal of universal proficiency were unrealistically rapid, since even great school systems rarely sustain annual increases in the proportion of students demonstrating proficiency topping three to four percentage points.

“If, no matter how hard teachers work, the school is labeled as a failure, that’s just demoralizing,” Dr. Linn said.

Ms. Keval, the principal at Prairie Elementary, has been fighting demoralization herself since learning of this year’s test results, she said.

Educated in British schools in Kenya, she speaks Urdu, Swahili and five other languages, and several teachers said she was an inspirational leader. Ms. Keval described her staff as qualified, hard-working and dedicated to student progress.

Eight out of 10 children at the school are poor — the children of gardeners and maids, retail clerks and short-order cooks, the unemployed — yet all groups have made progress.

When the law took effect in 2002, 22 percent of all students and 19 percent of blacks were proficient in reading. Ms. Keval has for several years used federal money to hire extra reading teachers and to organize additional instructional time for low-scoring students after school and during vacation periods.

As a result, reading proficiency has increased on average by nearly four percentage points each recent year, although black students have improved more slowly. On California’s state tests this year, 42 percent of Prairie’s students schoolwide and 40 percent of Hispanics demonstrated reading proficiency. But only 29 percent of blacks demonstrated proficiency, and since California schools were required to raise the proportion of proficient students in every group from 24 percent to 35 percent this year, that was not good enough. The school has been put on probation.

“I know we’ll continue to make gains with our students, but whether we can meet the next No Child target remains to be seen,” she said. “In one year, its hard to make an 11 percent impact.”

Dr. Linn said Ms. Keval had good reason to worry.

“An 11 percent increase from one year to the next, that is pretty gigantic,” Dr. Linn said, “compared to how most schools improve from one year to the next.”

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2) More Schools Miss the Mark, Raising Pressure
By KRISTIN HUSSEY
Education
October 12, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/nyregion/connecticut/12nochildct.html?ref=education

SINCE 2001, when President Bush signed the federal No Child Left Behind law, schools in Connecticut have scrambled to revamp curriculums, step up professional development for teachers and continually assess students’ test scores to comply with the law’s requirements. It is an effort that has dominated the agendas of school officials not just in Connecticut, but all over the nation, and not everyone is happy that test results have become such a focus.

When results of the latest test scores were announced a few weeks ago, about 40 percent, or 408, of the public schools in Connecticut did not make the grade under the federal law, state officials said. The state added 100 schools to its list of schools that failed to meet the federal benchmarks.

Mark K. McQuillan, commissioner of education for Connecticut, said he does not believe the federal goals are attainable for Connecticut schools.

“I think they’re just unrealistic,” he said in an interview last week. “And the evidence shows that’s true everywhere in the country.

“It’s too much to expect of the country to do that kind of fundamental changing in the time frame and with the dollars they’ve provided,” he said, referring to the federal government.

The law calls for all students in the United States, including English language learners and students with special needs, to perform at grade level by 2014. Some officials complain that because the standards are raised every two years, more and more schools are failing to fulfill the law’s requirements.

But that does not mean the state will not keep working hard to meet the goals, Mr. McQuillan said.

The State Department of Education has introduced a new accountability system that assigns teams and support personnel to struggling districts, and helps districts put improvement plans into action, state officials said.

And the strategy is working in some districts. Two elementary schools in Norwalk found out that they had finally come off the list of schools “in need of improvement.”

Brookside Elementary and Kendall Elementary schools were in a group of only five elementary schools statewide that improved enough to meet this year’s standards.

Salvatore J. Corda, superintendent of Norwalk Public Schools, said the improvements came after systemic shifts in teaching and methodology that the district had been working on for a couple of years. “When you try to move an entire system, it takes a while for things to take hold,” he said.

When Tony Ditrio took over as principal of Kendall Elementary School 10 years ago, his first piece of business was getting order in the building. “There wasn’t any,” he said. “That took a few years. Once we had a safe, orderly environment, we started to tackle the curriculum.”

All of the most recent data is based on scores from testing of 230,000 third through eighth graders and 50,000 tenth graders last spring. The latest results show that keeping children reading at grade level is “a real and growing challenge,” Mr. McQuillan said. At the high school level, he said, “mathematics is the greater issue.”

This year, for the first time, the Greenwich school district as a whole did not make adequate yearly progress. The district is one of 44 of the state’s 171 districts that did not meet this year’s standards.

Districts are considered not making adequate progress when certain student groups fail to meet benchmarks in the same category on both the elementary and high school tests. Students with disabilities and economically disadvantaged students in Greenwich did not score at grade level in both reading and math.

“Does this mean we have a bad school system?” said Betty J. Sternberg, superintendent of Greenwich Public Schools. “The strength of a school system does lie in meeting the needs of each child, no matter what their background is. So to that extent if I’m a parent of a child in a subgroup that hasn’t met it,” she said, referring to the standards, “I would be concerned.”

Special education students should not be expected to perform at grade level, Dr. Sternberg said. “We’ve had reports of special ed students sitting in front of tests and they’re crying. They can’t possibly do it,” she said.

Additionally, testing students every year between third and eighth grade leaves schools inundated with data that needs to be analyzed and reported, said Dr. Sternberg, who served as Connecticut’s commissioner for education from 2003 to 2006. While some teachers and school administrators complain about the tests, others say the law has forced them to take action.

“No Child Left Behind has been a really good kick in the pants for us,” said Joshua P. Starr, superintendent of schools in Stamford. “It was too easy to sweep some kids under the rug. We’re not allowed to do that anymore, and that’s a good thing.”

Connecticut’s attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, sued the Bush administration in 2005, charging that No Child Left Behind illegally requires states to spend their own money to meet the law’s standards. A federal judge threw out the case last April, and Mr. Blumenthal is appealing that decision. The state’s appeal is likely to be argued next spring, according to Mr. Blumenthal’s staff.

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3) Teachers Sue Over Right to Politic
By JENNIFER MEDINA
October 11, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/11/nyregion/11button.html?ref=education

The New York City teachers’ union filed a federal lawsuit on Friday claiming that a policy banning political pins and signs in schools violates teachers’ First Amendment rights by blocking them from political expression.

The lawsuit comes nearly two weeks after the Department of Education sent a memo to principals directing them to enforce the longstanding regulation, which requires that all school staff members show “complete neutrality” while on duty. The policy also prohibits teachers from using school property to promote a candidate.

Randi Weingarten, president of the union, the United Federation of Teachers, said that while the policy has been on the books for more than two decades, it has rarely been enforced, and that teachers have routinely worn political buttons as recently as this year’s presidential primaries.

But in the lawsuit, the union — which has endorsed Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee — states that the principal of Community School 134 in the Bronx removed an Obama poster that a teacher placed on the union bulletin board, and that a teacher at another school who wore political buttons was warned against it.

Ms. Weingarten, who is also president of the American Federation of Teachers, and spoke at the Democratic National Convention in August, said that for a quarter of a century she had watched teachers “balance their obligations as professionals and their responsibilities as citizens.” She added that “teachers, maybe more than others, understand how important democracy is and how important the Constitution is, particularly the Bill of Rights.”

The conflict over political buttons appears to have begun with a Sept. 23 e-mail message Ms. Weingarten sent to union leaders at each city school, advising them how to distribute campaign materials on Mr. Obama’s behalf. Education Department officials soon contacted the union, stating that the chancellor’s regulation prohibited such activity, and Chancellor Joel I. Klein sent a memo to principals on Oct. 1 saying that “it is important that schools comply” with the policy.

The regulation, whose origin officials could not pinpoint on Friday, states that “while on duty or in contact with students, all school personnel shall maintain a posture of complete neutrality with respect to all candidates.” Mr. Klein’s memo added: “Therefore, school staff may not wear buttons or apparel in support of a political candidate while in school or during school activities.”

Ann Forte, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, said that courts have ruled that teachers do not have an “unfettered right to express their personal views at school.”

“We don’t want a school or school staff advocating for any political position or candidate to students, and we don’t want students feeling intimidated because they might hold a different belief or support a different candidate than their teachers,” Ms. Forte said in a statement. “It is unfortunate that the U.F.T. wants to inject politics into our schools.”

But Norman Siegel, a civil liberties lawyer who is helping with the case, said that several courts had ruled in favor of teachers’ expressing political and personal viewpoints when it did not interfere with learning.

At a news conference on Friday afternoon, Ms. Weingarten said: “We are just weeks away from a landmark presidential election that is being discussed in classrooms and at dinner tables across the nation,” and added, “Students can only benefit from being exposed to and engaged in a dialogue about current events.”

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4) Justices Clear Way for Execution in Georgia
Take New Action Today!
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/index.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&template=x.ascx&action=11330

By ROBBIE BROWN
October 15, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/washington/15execute.html?hp

ATLANTA — Two weeks after it temporarily spared a Georgia inmate from the death penalty, the United States Supreme Court on Tuesday declined the inmate’s appeal, a decision that will probably lead to a quick execution.

The inmate, Troy A. Davis, was convicted in 1991 of murdering Mark Allen MacPhail, a Savannah police officer. The court’s decision, made without comment or explanation, allows Georgia officials to obtain a new death warrant and schedule a new date of execution, probably in the next few days or weeks.

The case has led to an outpouring of support for Mr. Davis, largely because seven of nine witnesses against him have recanted their testimony, with two claiming police pressured them to testify against him. Prosecutors presented no physical evidence and no murder weapon, and three witnesses have said another man admitted to the murder.

World leaders including former President Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Pope Benedict XVI have challenged the fairness of his conviction.

“Georgia is willing to risk the credibility of its whole death penalty system in carrying out this one very questionable execution,” said Steven B. Bright, a professor at Yale Law School. “The death penalty should really only be enforced in cases where there is no question about guilt, and that just cannot be said about this case.”

Prosecutors have rejected the claims of the recanting witnesses, and both the Georgia Supreme Court and the state Board of Paroles and Pardons have denied Mr. Davis’s requests for new trials and clemency. Members of the family of the slain police officer expressed relief at the Supreme Court’s decision on Tuesday.

“My son will always be missed in our hearts,” said Anneliese MacPhail, the mother of Officer MacPhail. “But at least we can relax now and don’t have to worry about whether justice will be served.”

The Supreme Court had granted a stay of execution last month, two hours before Mr. Davis was scheduled to die by lethal injection.

Mr. Davis’s lawyers had asked the court to determine whether the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment bars the execution of the innocent. They wrote in a petition in July that the case “allows this court an opportunity to determine what it has only before assumed: that the execution of an innocent man is constitutionally abhorrent.”

Jared Feuer, southern regional director for Amnesty International, said he was “shocked and saddened.”

“This decision shows how flawed and immoral the death penalty is,” he said. “The court had been asked to rule on the basic question of guilt and innocence and the constitutional right of an individual to not be executed when there is doubt of his guilt. The court ducked its obligation.”

Officer MacPhail was shot and killed on Aug. 19, 1989 as he tried to break up a fight in a Burger King parking lot. Mr. Davis testified he was at a nearby pool hall and left before Officer MacPhail arrived.

Ms. MacPhail said she is confident that Mr. Davis committed the murder. “He didn’t give my son a chance,” she said. “He just shot him down in cold blood.”

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5) Downward Spiral
Editorial
"That is one more reason why the next president must plot a swift, orderly exit from Iraq and begin a swift and serious buildup of troops and aid in Afghanistan — the real frontline in the war on terror."
October 15, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/opinion/15wed1.html

After years of denial and negligence, President Bush and his aides are finally waking up to the desperate mess they’ve made in Afghanistan. They have little choice, since the alarms are coming from all corners.

In a rare moment of agreement, America’s 16 intelligence agencies are warning that Afghanistan is on a dangerous “downward spiral.” Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is publicly predicting that next year will be an even “tougher year.”

As The Times reported last week, a draft intelligence report blames three problems for the breakdown in central authority and the Taliban’s rising power: rampant corruption, a booming heroin trade and increasingly sophisticated attacks from militants based across the border in Pakistan. Unless all three are addressed quickly, the war in Afghanistan could be lost.

Under pressure from the United States and other NATO governments, Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, appointed a new interior minister over the weekend who will be charged with cleaning up and strengthening the country’s police force. Mr. Karzai now must cut all ties with corrupt officials. He must take a hard and credible look at allegations that his brother may be involved in the heroin trade that is pouring $100 million annually into the Taliban’s coffers.

The United States will also have to send more troops into Afghanistan and persuade its allies to send more. It’s chilling to watch America’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, begging NATO — and the White House — for help. Germany’s commitment of another 1,000 troops is commendable but marred by its refusal to deploy them in southern Afghanistan where the fighting is heaviest. NATO members that can’t or won’t send more troops must contribute money to build Afghanistan’s national army and finance local development.

NATO’s recent decision to authorize its forces to go after drug lords and drug labs is a (much belated) start, but it still has far too many strings attached.

The Bush administration must drop its resistance to working with tribal leaders to fight the Taliban. The time for worrying about undermining President Karzai is long past. Reconciliation talks should also be explored with members of the Taliban — if they forsake violence.

Washington must also come up with a better mixture of incentives and pressures to persuade Pakistan to shut down Taliban and Al Qaeda havens. The country’s new civilian leaders and army chief say that they understand the threat posed by militants and are willing to fight them. That must be encouraged, including with more carefully monitored military and economic aid.

Imagine if Mr. Bush had not invaded Iraq in 2003 and instead put all of this country’s resources and attention into defeating Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Even optimistic analysts say that things have now gotten so bad that, with the best strategy, it could take another 5 to 10 years to stabilize Afghanistan.

That is one more reason why the next president must plot a swift, orderly exit from Iraq and begin a swift and serious buildup of troops and aid in Afghanistan — the real frontline in the war on terror.

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6) Booklovers turn to Karl Marx as financial crisis bites in Germany
Kate Connolly in Berlin
"Bookshops around the country are reporting similar findings, saying that sales are up by 300%. (Though the fact that they are not prepared to quote actual figures suggests the sales were never that high)."
guardian.co.uk,
Wednesday October 15 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/15/marx-germany-popularity-financial-crisis/print

Karl Marx is back. That, at least, is the verdict of publishers and bookshops in Germany who say that his works are flying off the shelves.

The rise in his popularity has of course, been put down to the current economic crisis. "Marx is in fashion again," said Jörn Schütrumpf, manager of the Berlin publishing house Karl- Dietz which publishes the works of Marx and Engels in German. "We're seeing a very distinct increase in demand for his books, a demand which we expect to rise even more steeply before the year's end."

Most popular is the first volume of his signature work, Das Kapital. According to Schütrumpf, readers are typically "those of a young academic generation, who have come to recognise that the neoliberal promises of happiness have not proved to be true."

Bookshops around the country are reporting similar findings, saying that sales are up by 300%. (Though the fact that they are not prepared to quote actual figures suggests the sales were never that high).

Literature comes and goes and it is nice to see that trends are not always driven by slick marketing campaigns. Just as Rudyard Kipling would have been delighted that his poem The Gods of the Copybook Headings which contains the apt lines: "Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew." is modish once more, so Marx would have reveled in the idea that an economic crisis had reignited interest in his works. (Not, you understand, because of the increased royalties that would be coming his way over the next few months were he still alive.)

Increasing numbers of Germans appear ready to out themselves as Marx fans in a time when it is fashionable to repeat the philosopher's belief that excessive capitalism with all its greed finally ends up destroying itself. When Oskar Lafontaine, the head of Germany's rising left-wing party Die Linke, said he would include Marxist theory in the party's manifesto, in the outline of his plans to partially nationalise the nation's finance and energy sectors, he was labeled as a "mad leftie" who had "lost the plot" by the tabloid Bild. But even Germany's finance minister, Peer Steinbrück, who must have had some sleepless nights over the past few weeks, has now declared himself something of a fan. "Generally one has to admit that certain parts of Marx's theory are really not so bad," he cautiously told Der Spiegel.

"These days Marx is on a winning streak in the charm stakes," Ralf Dorschel commented in the Hamburger Abendblatt.

But for those not quite ready to immerse themselves in Marxist theory, Marx's correspondence to Friedrich Engels at the time of an earlier US economic crisis makes more entertaining reading. "The American Crash is a delight to behold and it's far from over," he wrote in 1857, confidently predicting the imminent and complete collapse of Wall Street.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

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7) Next Victim of Turmoil May Be Your Salary
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Economic Scene
October 15, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/business/economy/15leonhardt.html?hp

It is possible, for the first time in weeks, to imagine that the credit crisis may be about to ease. But one of the big lessons of the last year has been not to underestimate the severity of the economy’s problems. Those problems are not just about housing or Wall Street.

What, then, will the next stage of the downturn be about? It is likely to revolve around the worst slump in worker pay since — you knew this was coming — the Great Depression. This slump won’t be anywhere near as bad as the one during the Depression, but it also won’t be like anything the country has experienced in a long time.

Income for the median household — the one in the dead middle of the income distribution — will probably be lower in 2010 than it was, amazingly enough, a full decade earlier. That hasn’t happened since the 1930s. Already, median pay today is slightly lower than it was in 2000, and by 2010, could end up more than 5 percent lower than its old peak.

If you look back at poll results over the last few decades, you will see that nothing predicts the public mood quite like income growth.

When incomes are growing at a good clip, as they were in the mid-1980s and late ’90s, Americans are upbeat. When incomes stagnate, as they did in the early ’80s, early ’90s and in the last several years, people get worried about the state of the country. In the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, 89 percent of respondents said that the country had “pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” a record high.

So it’s reasonable to expect that the great pay slump of the early 21st century is going to have a big effect on the next several years. Falling pay will weigh on living standards, consumer spending and economic growth and will help set the political atmosphere that awaits the next president.

The events of the last several weeks have removed any serious doubt that the economy is in a recession. In a recession, businesses cut back on their workers’ hours, hand out raises that don’t keep pace with inflation and often skip paying bonuses. These cuts in hours and pay are the main way that a downturn affects families, because only a small share of workers actually lose their jobs.

As the chart next to this column makes clear, every recent recession has brought an effective pay cut of somewhere between 3 and 7 percent for the typical family. The drop typically happens over a period of about three years, lasting longer than the recession officially does, as pay fails to keep up with inflation.

The recent turmoil — the freezing up of credit markets, the fall in stock markets, the acceleration of layoffs — has made it unlikely that the coming recession will be a particularly mild one.

“The biggest hit will be in 2009,” Nariman Behravesh, the chief economist of Global Insight, a research and forecasting firm, told me, “and it probably won’t be until 2011 until we see any kind of pay gains.”

What will make this recession different, no matter how deep or shallow it is, is that it’s following an expansion in which most families received little or no raise. The median household made $50,200 last year, slightly less than the $50,600 that the equivalent household earned in 2000, according to the Census Bureau. That’s the first time on record that income failed to set a new record in an economic expansion.

Why has it happened? There is no single cause.

Medical costs have risen rapidly, which means that health insurance premiums take up a bigger chunk of workers’ paychecks than they used to. Some of this money goes to good use; it pays for treatments that weren’t available even a few years ago. But some of it, the part that disappears into the inefficient American health care system, is clearly wasted.

And in the last couple of years, the value of the typical worker’s benefits package has stopped growing. Since 2005, benefits packages have become slightly smaller, notes Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute. So health benefits can’t come close to explaining the recent pay stagnation.

The bigger factors are probably some combination of the following: new technologies, global trade, slowing gains in educational attainment, the rise of single-parent families, the continued decline in unionization and the sharp increase in inequality, which has concentrated income gains at the top of the ladder. Your political views will probably determine the relative weights that you assign to those causes. Economic research hasn’t yet definitively answered the question.

Whatever the cause, though, the effects of the pay slump are going to be significant. Households have already begun to cut back their spending, and they will do so even more next year. Mr. Behravesh predicts that inflation-adjusted consumer spending in 2009 will be somewhere between flat and down 1 percent. If he’s right, it would be the first year that consumer spending didn’t grow since 1980, which just happens to be the last time that the country suffered through a deep recession.

The pay slump will also make it harder for people to pay off their loans. Last week, Bank of America reported that its losses on consumer credit had tripled over the last year.

In all, banks around the world have acknowledged $600 billion in losses as part of the financial crisis. The latest International Monetary Fund analysis suggests they still have another $800 billion in losses ahead of them — and a good chunk of them will occur in this country.

It’s always possible, of course, that some bit of good and unexpected economic news is just around the corner. The situation also seemed pretty dire in the mid-1990s, until the Internet boom came along and incomes then started rising at their fastest pace since the 1960s.

But you would have to be a pretty zealous optimist to forecast a repeat of that story. For two decades, consumer spending has been an enormous driver of economic growth, thanks in good measure to a long bull market, a housing bubble and a boom in consumer debt.

The bull market, the housing bubble and the debt boom have all ended — and now paychecks are shrinking, too.

At some point, the next big economic engine will indeed arrive. It always does. This time, however, it’s going to have some stiff head winds to overcome.

E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com

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8) The Ice Storm
By GAUTI KRISTMANNSSON
Op-Ed Contributor
"What to do, nobody knows, least of all the politicians, bankers, tycoons; but then again, I heard that a new edition of “The Communist Manifesto” will be published here this autumn."
October 16, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/16/opinion/16kristmannsson.html?scp=1&sq=The%20Ice%20Storm%20By%20GAUTI%20KRISTMANNSSON&st=cse

Reykjavik, Iceland

ICELANDERS have woken up in a new novel by Franz Kafka, where everybody is guilty by default. One by one, the mighty banks have been seized by the government, and Icelanders, aghast, have been told that each and every one of us owes millions of dollars — to whom, we don’t know. The earnest faces of the politicians, of bankers and tycoons almost crying, give us the final touch of the surreal. The situation is comparable only with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the 9/11 attacks — something final and yet beyond one’s individual grasp has happened.

This time, however, instead of looking on we are in the middle of it. The first 500 bankers have lost their jobs in one go; many others are waiting for the double blow of unemployment and losing their house as their mortgage payments soar. When the Reykjavik stock exchange reopened on Tuesday after three days of suspended trading, its index, dominated by bankrupt financial institutions, had lost 75 percent of its value.

Suddenly, there are lines in the bank for foreign currencies, and there is a limit on how much we can get — overseas banks are refusing to accept our freefalling currency, the krona. One of my students, studying in Spain, can’t get money from Iceland for her rent. Importers and exporters can’t get currency to conduct business. Icelandic tourists abroad have problems getting cash from A.T.M.’s. The British government has applied terrorist laws to freeze the assets of an Icelandic bank; the list goes on as if it were a script for the nightmare of globalization.

We thought we had friends, in Europe and in the United States. They were sought in the hour of need and found to be busy with their own problems; only the Scandinavians were prepared to extend a helping hand, and then, all of a sudden, Russia — somehow the world has changed. The disappointment with our old “friends” is great and people ask, did we really behave any worse than the others?

People joke about going back to the ’70s, when there were restrictions on how much currency one could take abroad and the government devalued the krona regularly to reduce spending on foreign luxuries. It wasn’t all that bad then, they say, apart from the bellbottoms and high-heeled shoes for men, perhaps.

But the jokes are not funny, for we did join the party in the 1990s, we did pour money into our apartments, houses, cars, gadgets, stocks; the money was borrowed, too. After an era of deprivation, we were eager to enjoy the newfound freedoms of capitalism and credit cards. We believed everything would add up; certainly the free-market enthusiasts told us so time and again. And most of us could pay our mortgages and credit cards, at least until last week.

Now that we don’t know if we can, the shock is so strong that neither anger nor sorrow have really taken hold. We thought Iceland was an independent country that could take care of itself without the help of Russia or the International Monetary Fund, that our currency amounted to something, that we could own companies and banks all over the world. We thought we could enjoy our beautiful country and clean air in the backyard of the aluminum smelter.

In many ways, we uncritically accepted the capitalist system, which now appears to have been a gigantic casino without an owner. We did in the end believe that we could get “money for nothing” and now we face the fact that we will get nothing for our money.

What to do, nobody knows, least of all the politicians, bankers, tycoons; but then again, I heard that a new edition of “The Communist Manifesto” will be published here this autumn. Coincidence, of course, but like everything else, unreal. Kafka’s Iceland probably has an ending different from anything that we can possibly imagine.

Gauti Kristmannsson is an associate professor of translation studies at the University of Iceland.

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9) Behind the Money Crash
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
October 8, 2008
PrisonRadio.org

For millions of people, the economic crash and crisis seems almost mystical. What happened? Why did it happen? How did it happen?

It seems more complex than it really is. That’s because the corporate media is, more often than not, a contributor to confusion, rather than a source of clarity. The media thrives on conflict, chaos and controversy.

That’s why I found in the (British) left press what I’ve never seen in the corporate media: the text of a 2002 open letter from U.S. financier, Warren Buffett to his Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. Buffett, one of the richest people in the U.S., warned his shareholders to avoid “derivatives,” which he described as “time bombs, both for the parties that deal in them, and the economic system.”

Buffett explained that derivatives are financial agreements for the exchange of money at some future date, which can be 20 years or more. What makes them dangerous is they’re collateralized, or guaranteed, based on often-faulty reference points. For example, derivatives may be traded saying in ten years, GM stocks will double its 2004 value, and if it does in 2014, the instrument buyer will receive say, $10 million. In many cases, before the contract is ripe, not a penny has changed hands, yet some companies assigned these instruments a value, recorded them on their books as assets, when in fact, they had no real value.

Remember Enron? On paper, they were rolling in dough. In fact, however, they were rolling in paper—for, at any time, if they hit a snag, they had no real cash to cover corporate debts—it was on the books, but not in the banks.

Again, Buffett explained six years ago why these instruments should be avoided, writing to his shareholders:

“The derivatives genie is now well out of the bottle, and these instruments will almost certainly multiply in variety and number until some event makes their toxicity clean. Knowledge of how dangerous they are has already permeated the electricity and gas businesses, in which the eruption of major troubles caused the use of derivatives to diminish dramatically. Elsewhere, however, the derivatives business continues to expand unchecked. Central banks and governments have so far found no effective way to control, or even monitor, the risks posed by these contracts.” *

In closing, Buffett warned, “derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that...are potentially lethal.”

*Source: Labor and Trade Union Review (No. 191: Oct. 2008), pp.16-18

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10) Social Security Benefits Rising by 5.8%
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
October 16, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Social-Security.html?hp

Filed at 12:18 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Social Security benefits for 50 million people will go up 5.8 percent next year, the largest increase in more than a quarter century.

The increase, which will start in January, was announced Thursday by the Social Security Administration. It will mean an additional $63 per month for the average retiree.

It's the largest increase since a 7.4 percent jump in 1982 and is more than double the 2.3 percent rise that retirees got in their monthly checks starting in January of this year.

The typical retiree's monthly check will go from $1,090 currently to $1,153.

But the fatter Social Security check may still seem puny to millions of retirees battered this year by huge increases in energy and food costs who have also watched helplessly as their retirement savings have been assaulted by the biggest upheavals on Wall Street in seven decades.

''Right now many senior citizens are feeling depressed because things seem out of control. They feel like they are in a boat being whipped around by rough seas,'' said Sung Won Sohn, an economics professor at the Smith School of Business at California State University. ''Their purchasing power has been going down because of higher prices for food and energy and a lot of other things while their savings have taken a hit because of what is happening in the markets.''

The market turbulence has continued this week with the Dow Jones industrial average plunging by 733 points on Wednesday, the second largest point drop on record. Earlier this month, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that Americans' retirement plans have last as much as $2 trillion over the last 15 months -- more than 20 percent of their value -- because of all the market upheaval.

With all the gloomy news, retirees may take little comfort in the new cost of living adjustment. The benefit change is based on the amount the Consumer Price Index increases from July through September from one year to the next.

The increase would have been even higher, but after racing ahead earlier in the year, energy costs fell in both August and September, helping to moderate the overall price gain.

The 5.8 percent rise in the cost of living adjustment is a sharp departure from recent years. The COLA increases have been below 3 percent for all but three of the past 15 years as the Federal Reserve waged a successful campaign to keep inflation under control.

Even with the big increase, the COLA is well below the gains of the late 1970s and early 1980s when the country was in the grips of a decade-long bout of high inflation. The biggest cost of living benefit on record was a 14.3 percent increase in 1980. Social Security benefits have been adjusted every year since 1975.

In one break for most retirees, the cost of living increase will not be eaten up by higher monthly premiums for the part of Medicare that pays for physician services. Because of gains in the Medicare Part B trust fund, that premium will hold steady at $96.40 a month, although higher-income people including couples making more than $170,000 annually will see their premiums increase.

Next year's cost of living increase will go to more than 55 million Americans. More than 50 million receive Social Security benefits while the rest get Supplemental Security Income payments for the poor.

The average couple, both getting Social Security benefits, will see their monthly check go up by $103 a month to $1,876.

The standard Supplemental Security Income payment for a couple will go from $956 per month to $1,011. The SSI payment for an individual will go from $637 per month to $674 per month.

The average monthly check for a disabled worker will go from $1,006 to $1,064.

Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain have sparred over Social Security during the presidential campaign, although neither has provided much insight into how they would fix the government's largest entitlement program, which is facing severe strains with the upcoming retirement of 78 million baby boomers.

If no changes are made, the Social Security trust fund is projected to deplete its reserves in 2041 and will begin paying out more than it collects in benefits even sooner, starting in 2017.

In addition to the cost of living adjustment, the government announced Thursday that the maximum amount of earnings subject to the Social Security tax will increase next year to $106,800, up from $102,000 this year.

Of the 164 million workers who will pay Social Security taxes in 2009, about 11 million will pay higher taxes as a result of this increase.

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11) Gathering Pupil Data for Military Is Criticized
By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ
"Now, under an order signed last month by Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein, recruiters can access data from each high school simply by going to the Department of Education’s headquarters."
October 16, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/16/nyregion/16recruit.html?ref=nyregion

A new Department of Education policy that gives military recruiters centralized access to high school student data is drawing fire from the New York Civil Liberties Union, as well as some parents and students.

In the past, military recruiters were required to go from school to school to obtain student names, addresses and telephone numbers, sometimes encountering resistance from school employees and students.

Now, under an order signed last month by Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein, recruiters can access data from each high school simply by going to the Department of Education’s headquarters.

At a news conference on Wednesday afternoon, the civil liberties group criticized the change in policy, saying it opened the door to aggressive concentration on certain students.

“The D.O.E. is giving military recruiters a direct line to New York City’s children,” said Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the civil liberties group.

In a letter to Ms. Lieberman on Wednesday, the Department of Education said it had revised the recruiting procedures to add another layer of oversight. Under the new system, the letter said, department officials can scrutinize the number of students choosing to opt out and check to make sure no school has failed to distribute opt-out forms.

Centralizing the data also prevents military recruiters from holding impromptu recruitment sessions while on campuses to get student data, the letter said, and it reduces the flow of communication between military branches and schools that “often proved disruptive.”

Ms. Lieberman called on the city to delay implementing the new policy. She said the Department of Education had shown a “startling disregard for open government” by not asking for public input on the new measure, and she suggested that it solicit feedback for 30 days.

Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, schools are required to provide military recruiters the same access to students granted to colleges and prospective employers. Parents are allowed to block access to a child’s data by signing a form.

But Ms. Lieberman said the city had not made an adequate effort to inform parents of that choice, even though the Department of Education has been telling principals to send letters to parents and students about the opt-out option. The department’s Web site also includes the form, in eight languages.

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11) Afghan Officials Say U.S. Airstrike Killed Civilians
By JOHN F. BURNS
October 17, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/world/asia/17afghan.html?hp

KABUL, Afghanistan - A NATO airstrike Thursday on a village near the embattled provincial capital of Lashkar Gah killed between 25 and 30 civilians, Afghan officials in the area said. While NATO confirmed that an air strike had taken place in the area, where Taliban fighters have been battling NATO forces, it said the incident was being investigated and that the command was “unable to confirm any civilian casualties.”

Reliable information on the air strike — whether it caused the casualties, as local officials and residents reported, and whether the number of civilian deaths were accurate — was elusive. But any substantial civilian death toll would further inflame an Afghan government and public already uneasy over a recent rise in civilian casualties from coalition air strikes. American commanders have acknowledged the war has been going badly in recent months as the Taliban and Al Qaeda have stepped up their campaign of bombings and assassinations.

Residents claiming to have witnessed the strike saidat least 18 bodies, all women and children, one only six months old, were pulled from the rubble left by the bombing and taken to the provincial governor’s compound in protest.

At nightfall in Kabul, the Afghan capital, the NATO command issued a statement confirming only that an air strike had taken place in the Nadali district, about 10 miles northwest of Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province. The command said it expected to give more details on Friday.

The NATO command’s concern about air strikes was heightened dramatically after an incident on Aug. 22 when an American AC-130 gunship attacked a suspected Taliban compound in the village of Azizabad in the western province of Herat, prompting claims by villagers that more than 90 civilians, the majority of them women and children, were killed. The American military under Gen. David D. McKiernan, the top American commander in Afghanistan, initially insisted that only 5 to 7 civilians were killed, but then ordered another investigation after new evidence emerged from the United Nations and reporters who visited the scene. A subsequent report by a Pentagon-based general, released last week, concluded that more than 30 civilians died.

The political ramifications of the Azizabad strike shook the already strained relationship between the Bush administration and the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai, which has become increasingly fractious as the war has worsened. American officials have criticized the Karzai government for what they say is its incompetence and corruption, and Mr. Karzai has struck back with demands that America commanders rein in their airstrikes, saying that civilian casualties have undermined popular support for the war effort. After the Azizabad incident, President Bush telephoned Mr. Karzai to express his regrets.

Reports of the air strike in Nadali on Thursday that were given by local officials and residents said a bomb had hit three houses in a village in the district known as Loy-Bagh that were sheltering seven families fleeing fighting elsewhere in the district over the past week. Mahboob Khan, the district chief, said in a telephone interview that 18 bodies had been pulled from the rubble, and that as many as 12 other bodies remained buried in the ruins. Mr. Khan said the bombing had caused widespread anger among the villagers. “They’re busy burying their family members now,” he said.

“But tomorrow, they will demand to know why their houses were targeted”.

Mr. Khan’s account, and similar ones given by other local officials, could not be verified, since reporters were unable to reach the site of the incident. Mr. Khan’s compound in Nadali is said to be the only place in the district that is under the control of the government. Accounts of the fighting in the area in recent days have said that the Taliban have virtually free run of the area, a situation, if true, that would mean that Taliban commanders would be in a position to exploit the incident by offering their own version of what occurred.

NATO commanders say there have been numerous incidents in which the Taliban have made false allegations of civilian casualties from NATO firepower. But in the case of the Nadali incident, there were factors suggesting that the accounts of heavy civilian casualties might be true. One was the swift NATO confirmation that there had been an air strike in the district. Another was the flurry of eyewitness accounts from Lashkar Gah of the bodies that were laid out in front of the governors’ compound.

The BBC reported that one of its reporters had seen 18 bodies, all women and children, ranging in age from six months to 15. Accounts gathered over the telephone by a reporter for The New York Times in Kandahar, about 120 miles east of Lashkar Gah, were similar. The reporter said he had spoken with Muhammed Akram, a shopkeeper in Lashkar Gah, who told him that the bodies had been brought into the city of 50,000 in a minibus. “They were badly mangled, and they included men, women and children,” he said.

The incident occurred at a time when Gen. McKiernan, who took command here in June, has made curbing civilian casualties a high priority. At the moment when the air strike in Nadali was said to have taken place, at 1 p.m. on Thursday, senior officers on the general’s staff were holding a briefing in Kabul, 340 miles away, at which they laid out for reporters and western aid groups the new measures Gen. McKiernan has ordered for the purpose of “protecting the civilian population” during combat operations.

At a news conference in Kabul on Sunday, Gen. McKiernan, just back from a top-level review of war strategy at the Pentagon, said the International Security Assistance Force, the 39-nation, 52,000-man coalition he commands, had adopted the most elaborate measures ever undertaken in war for avoiding civilian deaths. “Never in history has a military coalition taken greater measures to try and avoid civilian casualties than have been taken by ISAF”, he said.

At the briefing, Lt. Gen. Jonathon Riley, the British officer who is Gen.

McKiernan’s deputy, staunchly defended the way in which air strikes are conducted, saying the combat aircraft involved - mainly from the United States, Britain, France and Canada - used “precision-guided weapons that are much more precise than machineguns” and other battlefield weapons, and that air strikes were not ordered without multiple sources of intelligence indicating that the targets were combatants.

Officers distributed copies of a so-called tactical directive issued by Gen. McKiernan on Sept. 2, less than two weeks after the Azizabad incident, that laid out new instructions aimed at reducing “civilian, non-combatant casualties”. In a section dealing with air-to-ground munitions and artillery, the directive said, “We will demonstrate proportionality, requisite restraint and the utmost discrimination in the use of firepower.

We will only use such munitions against Afghan houses or compounds when there is an imminent threat and when the on-the-scene commander determines there is no other way to protect the force.”

ISAF’s chief spokesman, Brig. Gen. Richard Blanchette of Canada, said in a telephone interview later that the directive had been accompanied by instructions intended to reduce the use of air strikes in situations where they might cause civilian casualties. He said the NATO command had sent a “reminder” to commanders that they had the option of a “tactical withdrawal” from an engagement with the Taliban to avoid civilian casualties, rather than resorting to air strikes or other heavy weapons.

“A commander pinned down by enemy fire from a house where there civilians has to determine his best course of action - whether it is use his firepower, or pull out of the area for a short period until he has better opportunity to engage the enemy without endangering civilians”, the general said.

Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar and Abdul Waheed Wafa from Kabul.

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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES

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Zimbabwe: Inflation Rate Spirals Higher Still
By CELIA W. DUGGER
World Briefing | Africa
Zimbabwe’s inflation rate, already one of the highest in world history, rose from an annual rate of 11 million percent in June to 231 million percent in July, according to official statistics reported by the state media. Rising prices for staple foods are driving the price increases, making it increasingly difficult for people to afford food. Talks on details of a power-sharing deal involving the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai that might halt the economic decline are deadlocked, Mr. Tsvangirai said.
October 10, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/world/africa/10briefs-INFLATIONRAT_BRF.html?ref=world

Germany Seeks Wider Role for Army
By REUTERS
BERLIN - The German government said Monday that it would seek to change the Constitution to give a larger domestic role to the army in the fight against terrorism, including powers to shoot down hijacked passenger planes as a last resort.
Two years ago, the nation’s top court threw out a law that permitted the shooting down of hijacked planes, and the issue has set off a heated debate within the governing coalition over the role of the military in defending Germany against terrorism.
The government is proposing a constitutional change that would allow the German Army to be deployed at home “if police measures do not suffice for protection against very serious disasters,” a spokeswoman for the Interior Ministry said.
Asked whether such circumstances could also imply that the army would have to fend off an attack from the air, the spokeswoman said, “That’s what this is about.”
October 7, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/world/europe/07germany.html?ref=world

Louisiana: FEMA Not Immune From Trailer Suits
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | South
A federal judge in New Orleans says the government is not immune from lawsuits claiming that many Gulf Coast hurricane victims were exposed to potentially dangerous fumes while living in trailers it had provided. The ruling says there is evidence that the Federal Emergency Management Agency delayed its response to concerns about formaldehyde levels in its trailers because of liability concerns.
October 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/us/04brfs-002.html?ref=us

Army Unit to Deploy in October for Domestic Operations
Beginning in October, the Army plans to station an active unit inside the United States for the first time to serve as an on-call federal response in times of emergency. The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent thirty-five of the last sixty months in Iraq, but now the unit is training for domestic operations. The unit will soon be under the day-to-day control of US Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command. The Army Times reports this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to Northern Command. The paper says the Army unit may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control. The soldiers are learning to use so-called nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals and crowds.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/9/22/headlines

Wisconsin: A Gloomy Assessment for Milwaukee Public Schools
By CATRIN EINHORN
National Briefing | Midwest
Members of the Milwaukee Public Schools board passed a resolution to explore dissolving the school system, but state education officials said the board did not have the authority to actually do so. The board’s 6-to-3 vote to research the possibility came after Superintendent William G. Andrekopoulos described the city’s school financing structure as “broken,” painting a bleak picture of steep property tax increases and deep budget cuts. But dissolving the public school system would require action in the Legislature, or else the City Council would have to change Milwaukee’s city classification, sparking other changes in governance, said Patrick Gasper of the Wisconsin Department of Education. While the full nine-member school board voted, it was a committee vote, and the proposal faces a final vote on Thursday.
September 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/20/us/20brfs-AGLOOMYASSES_BRF.html?ref=us

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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS AND INFORMATION

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"These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people, and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people's money to settle the quarrel."

– Abraham Lincoln, speech to Illinois legislature, January 1837

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Subprime crisis explanation by The Long Johns
http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=z-oIMJMGd1Q

Wanda Sykes on Jay Leno: Bailout and Palin
http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=tco5h_ZprMY

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Stop the Carnage, Ban the Cluster Bomb!

Only 20 percent of the hundreds of thousands of unexploded cluster munitions that Israel launched into Lebanon in the summer of 2006 have been cleared. You can help!

1. See the list of more than thirty organizations that have signed a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice calling for Israel to release the list of cluster bomb target sites to the UN team in charge of clearing the sites in Lebanon:

http://www.atfl.org/orgs.htm

2. You can Learn more about the American Task Force for Lebanon at their website:

http://www.atfl.org/

3. Send a message to President Bush, the Secretary of State, and your Members of Congress to stop the carnage and ban the cluster bomb by clicking on the link below:

http://action.atfl.org/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=6644&track=spreadtheword

Take action now at:

http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizations/ATFL/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=6644&t=

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SAVE TROY DAVIS

U.S. Supreme Court stays Georgia execution
"The U.S. Supreme Court granted a last-minute reprieve to a Georgia man fewer than two hours before he was to be executed for the 1989 slaying of an off-duty police officer.
"Troy Anthony Davis learned that his execution had been stayed when he saw it on television, he told CNN via telephone in his first interview after the stay was announced."
September 23, 2008
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/09/23/davis.scheduled.execution/

Dear friend,

Please check out and sign this petition to stay the illegal 9-23-08 execution of innocent Brother Mr. Troy Davis.

http://www.amnestyusa.org/troydavis

Thanks again, we'll continue keep you posted.

Sincerely,
The Death Penalty Abolition Campaign
Amnesty International, USA

Read NYT Op-Ed columnist Bob Herbert's plea on behalf of Troy Davis:

What’s the Rush?
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
September 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/20/opinion/20herbert.html?hp

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New on the Taking Aim Program Archive:

"9/11: Blueprint for Truth: The Architecture of Destruction" part 2 is
available on the Taking Aim Program Archive at
http://www.takingaimradio.com/shows/audio.html

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Labor Beat: National Assembly to End the War in Iraq and Afghanistan:
Highlights from the June 28-29, 2008 meeting in Cleveland, OH. In this 26-minute video, Labor Beat presents a sampling of the speeches and floor discussions from this important conference. Attended by over 400 people, the Assembly's main objective was to urge united and massive mobilizations in the spring to “Bring the Troops Home Now,” as well as supporting actions that build towards that date. To read the final action proposal and to learn other details, visit www.natassembly.org. Produced by Labor Beat. Labor Beat is a CAN TV Community Partner. Labor Beat is affiliated with IBEW 1220. Views expressed are those of the producer, not necessarily of IBEW. For info: mail@laborbeat.org,www.laborbeat.org. 312-226-3330. For other Labor Beat videos, visit Google Video or YouTube and search "Labor Beat".
http://blip.tv/file/1149437/

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12 year old Ossetian girl tells the truth about Georgia.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5idQm8YyJs4

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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

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Canada: American Deserter Must Leave
By IAN AUSTEN
August 14, 2008
World Briefing | Americas
Jeremy Hinzman, a deserter from the United States Army, was ordered Wednesday to leave Canada by Sept. 23. Mr. Hinzman, a member of the 82nd Airborne Division, left the Army for Canada in January 2004 and later became the first deserter to formally seek refuge there from the war in Iraq. He has been unable to obtain permanent immigrant status, and in November, the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear an appeal of his case. Vanessa Barrasa, a spokeswoman for the Canada Border Services Agency, said Mr. Hinzman, above, had been ordered to leave voluntarily. In July, another American deserter was removed from Canada by border officials after being arrested. Although the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper has not backed the Iraq war, it has shown little sympathy for American deserters, a significant change from the Vietnam War era.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/14/world/americas/14briefs-canada.html?ref=world

Iraq War resister Robin Long jailed, facing three years in Army stockade

Free Robin Long now!
Support GI resistance!

Soldier Who Deserted to Canada Draws 15-Month Term
By DAN FROSCH
August 23, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/23/us/23resist.html?ref=us

What you can do now to support Robin

1. Donate to Robin's legal defense

Online: http://couragetoresist.org/robinlong

By mail: Make checks out to “Courage to Resist / IHC” and note “Robin Long” in the memo field. Mail to:

Courage to Resist
484 Lake Park Ave #41
Oakland CA 94610

Courage to Resist is committed to covering Robin’s legal and related defense expenses. Thank you for helping make that possible.

Also: You are also welcome to contribute directly to Robin’s legal expenses via his civilian lawyer James Branum. Visit girightslawyer.com, select "Pay Online via PayPal" (lower left), and in the comments field note “Robin Long”. Note that this type of donation is not tax-deductible.

2. Send letters of support to Robin

Robin Long, CJC
2739 East Las Vegas
Colorado Springs CO 80906

Robin’s pre-trial confinement has been outsourced by Fort Carson military authorities to the local county jail.

Robin is allowed to receive hand-written or typed letters only. Do NOT include postage stamps, drawings, stickers, copied photos or print articles. Robin cannot receive packages of any type (with the book exception as described below).

3. Send Robin a money order for commissary items

Anything Robin gets (postage stamps, toothbrush, shirts, paper, snacks, supplements, etc.) must be ordered through the commissary. Each inmate has an account to which friends may make deposits. To do so, a money order in U.S. funds must be sent to the address above made out to "Robin Long, EPSO". The sender’s name must be written on the money order.

4. Send Robin a book

Robin is allowed to receive books which are ordered online and sent directly to him at the county jail from Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble. These two companies know the procedure to follow for delivering books for inmates.

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Yet Another Insult: Mumia Abu-Jamal Denied Full-Court Hearing by 3rd Circuit
& Other News on Mumia

This mailing sent by the Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal

PLEASE FORWARD AND DISTRIBUTE WIDELY

1. Mumia Abu-Jamal Denied Full-Court Hearing by 3rd Circuit
2. Upcoming Events for Mumia
3. New Book on the framing of Mumia

1. MUMIA DENIED AGAIN -- Adding to its already rigged, discriminatory record with yet another insult to the world's most famous political prisoner, the federal court for the 3rd Circuit in Philadelphia has refused to give Mumia Abu-Jamal an en banc, or full court, hearing. This follows the rejection last March by a 3-judge panel of the court, of what is likely Mumia's last federal appeal.

The denial of an en banc hearing by the 3rd Circuit, upholding it's denial of the appeal, is just the latest episode in an incredible year of shoving the overwhelming evidence of Mumia's innocence under a rock. Earlier in the year, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court also rejected Jamal's most recent state appeal. Taken together, state and federal courts in 2008 have rejected or refused to hear all the following points raised by Mumia's defense:

1. The state's key witness, Cynthia White, was pressured by police to lie on the stand in order to convict Mumia, according to her own admission to a confidant (other witnesses agreed she wasn't on the scene at all)

2. A hospital "confession" supposedly made by Mumia was manufactured by police. The false confession was another key part of the state's wholly-manufactured "case."

3. The 1995 appeals court judge, Albert Sabo--the same racist who presided at Mumia's original trial in 1982, where he said, "I'm gonna help 'em fry the n....r"--was prejudiced against him. This fact was affirmed even by Philadelphia's conservative newspapers at the time.

4. The prosecutor prejudiced the jury against inn ocence until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, by using a slimy tactic already rejected by the courts. But the prosecutor was upheld in Mumia's case!

5. The jury was racially skewed when the prosecution excluded most blacks from the jury, a practice banned by law, but, again, upheld against Mumia!

All of these defense claims were proven and true. But for the courts, these denials were just this year’s trampling on the evidence! Other evidence dismissed or ignored over the years include: hit-man Arnold Beverly said back in the 1990s that he, not Mumia, killed the slain police officer (Faulkner). Beverly passed a lie detector test and was willing to testify, but he got no hearing in US courts! Also, Veronica Jones, who saw two men run from the scene just after the shooting, was coerced by police to lie at the 1982 trial, helping to convict Mumia. But when she admitted this lie and told the truth on appeal in 1996, she was dismissed by prosecutor-in-robes Albert Sabo in 1996 as "not credible!" (She continues to support Mumia, and is writing a book on her experiences.) And William Singletary, the one witness who saw the whole thing and had no reason to lie, and who affirmed that someone else did the shooting, said that Mumia only arriv ed on the scene AFTER the officer was shot. His testimony has been rejected by the courts on flimsy grounds. And the list goes on.

FOR THE COURTS, INNOCENCE IS NO DEFENSE! And if you're a black revolutionary like Mumia the fix is in big-time. Illusions in Mumia getting a "new trial" out of this racist, rigged, kangaroo-court system have been dealt a harsh blow by the 3rd Circuit. We need to build a mass movement, and labor action, to free Mumia now!

2. UPCOMING EVENTS FOR MUMIA --

SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA -- Speaking Tour by J Patrick O'Connor, the author of THE FRAMING OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, in the first week of October 2008, sponsored by the Mobilization To Free Mumia. Contributing to this tour, the Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia will hold a public meeting with O'Connor on Friday October 3rd, place to be announced. San Francisco, South Bay and other East Bay venues to be announced. Contact the Mobilization at 510 268-9429, or the LAC at 510 763-2347, for more information.

3. NEW BOOK ON MUMIA

Efficiently and Methodically Framed--Mumia is innocent! That is the conclusion of THE FRAMING OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, by J Patrick O'Connor (Lawrence Hill Books), published earlier this year. The author is a former UPI reporter who took an interest in Mumia's case. He is now the editor of Crime Magazine (www.crimemagazine.com).

O'Connor offers a fresh perspective, and delivers a clear and convincing breakdown on perhaps the most notorious frame-up since Sacco and Vanzetti. THE FRAMING OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL is based on a thorough analysis of the 1982 trial and the 1995-97 appeals hearings, as well as previous writings on this case, and research on the MOVE organization (with which Mumia identifies), and the history of racist police brutality in Philadelphia.

While leaving some of the evidence of Mumia's innocence unconsidered or disregarded, this book nevertheless makes clear that there is a veritable mountain of evidence--most of it deliberately squashed by the courts--that shows that Mumia was blatantly and deliberately framed by corrupt cops and courts, who "fixed" this case against him from the beginning. This is a case not just of police corruption, or a racist lynching, though it is both. The courts are in this just as deep as the cops, and it reaches to the top of the equally corrupt political system.

"This book is the first to convincingly show how the Philadelphia Police Department and District Attorney's Office efficiently and methodically framed [Mumia Abu-Jamal]." (from the book jacket)

The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal has a limited number of THE FRAMING ordered from the publisher at a discount. We sold our first order of this book, and are now able to offer it at a lower price. $12 covers shipping. Send payment to us at our address below:

The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222 • Oakland CA 94610 • 510.763.2347
www.laboractionmumia.org • LACFreeMumia@aol.com

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Sami Al-Arian Subjected to Worst Prison Conditions since Florida
Despite grant of bail, government continues to hold him
Dr. Al-Arian handcuffed

Hanover, VA - July 27, 2008 -

More than two weeks after being granted bond by a federal judge, Sami Al-Arian is still being held in prison. In fact, Dr. Al-Arian is now being subjected to the worst treatment by prison officials since his stay in Coleman Federal Penitentiary in Florida three years ago.

On July 12th, Judge Leonie Brinkema pronounced that Dr. Al-Arian was not a danger to the community nor a flight risk, and accordingly granted him bail before his scheduled August 13th trial. Nevertheless, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) invoked the jurisdiction it has held over Dr. Al-Arian since his official sentence ended last April to keep him from leaving prison. The ICE is ostensibly holding Dr. Al-Arian to complete deportation procedures but, given that Dr. Al-Arian's trial will take place in less than three weeks, it would seem somewhat unlikely that the ICE will follow through with such procedures in the near future.

Not content to merely keep Dr. Al-Arian from enjoying even a very limited stint of freedom, the government is using all available means to try to psychologically break him. Instead of keeping him in a prison close to the Washington DC area where his two oldest children live, the ICE has moved him to Pamunkey Regional Jail in Hanover, VA, more than one hundred miles from the capital. Regardless, even when Dr. Al-Arian was relatively close to his children, they were repeatedly denied visitation requests.

More critically, this distance makes it extremely difficult for Dr. Al-Arian to meet with his attorneys in the final weeks before his upcoming trial. This is the same tactic employed by the government in 2005 to try to prevent Dr. Al-Arian from being able to prepare a full defense.

Pamunkey Regional Jail has imposed a 23-hour lock-down on Dr. Al-Arian and has placed him in complete isolation, despite promises from the ICE that he would be kept with the general inmate population. Furthermore, the guards who transported him were abusive, shackling and handcuffing him behind his back for the 2.5-hour drive, callously disregarding the fact that his wrist had been badly injured only a few days ago. Although he was in great pain throughout the trip, guards refused to loosen the handcuffs.

At the very moment when Dr. Al-Arian should be enjoying a brief interlude of freedom after five grueling years of imprisonment, the government has once again brazenly manipulated the justice system to deliver this cruel slap in the face of not only Dr. Al-Arian, but of all people of conscience.

Make a Difference! Call Today!

Call Now!

Last April, your calls to the Hampton Roads Regional Jail pressured prison officials to stop their abuse of Dr. Al-Arian after only a few days.
Friends, we are asking you to make a difference again by calling:

Pamunkey Regional Jail: (804) 365-6400 (press 0 then ask to speak to the Superintendent's office). Ask why Dr. Al-Arian has been put under a 23-hour lockdown, despite the fact that a federal judge has clearly and unambiguously pronounced that he is not a danger to anyone and that, on the contrary, he should be allowed bail before his trial.

- If you do not reach the superintendent personally, leave a message on the answering machine. Call back every day until you do speak to the superintendent directly.
- Be polite but firm.

- After calling, click here to let us know you called.

Don't forget: your calls DO make a difference.

FORWARD TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS!

Write to Dr. Al-Arian

For those of you interested in sending personal letters of support to Dr. Al-Arian:

If you would like to write to Dr. Al-Arian, his new
address is:

Dr. Sami Al-Arian
Pamunkey Regional Jail
P.O. Box 485
Hanover, VA 23069

Email Tampa Bay Coalition for Justice and Peace: tampabayjustice@yahoo.com

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Video: The Carbon Connection -- The human impact of carbon trading

[This is an eye-opening and important video for all who are interested in our environment...bw]

Two communities affected by one new global market – the trade in carbon
dioxide. In Scotland, a town has been polluted by oil and chemical
companies since the 1940s. In Brazil, local people's water and land is
being swallowed up by destructive monoculture eucalyptus tree
plantations. Both communities now share a new threat.

As part of the deal to reduce greenhouse gases that cause dangerous
climate change, major polluters can now buy carbon credits that allow
them to pay someone else to reduce emissions instead of cutting their
own pollution. What this means for those living next to the oil industry
in Scotland is the continuation of pollution caused by their toxic
neighbours. Meanwhile in Brazil, the schemes that generate carbon
credits give an injection of cash for more planting of the damaging
eucalyptus plantations.

40 minutes | PAL/NTSC | English/Spanish/Portuguese subtitles.The Carbon Connection is a Fenceline Films presentation in partnership with the Transnational Institute Environmental Justice Project and Carbon Trade Watch, the Alert Against the Green Desert Movement, FASE-ES, and the Community Training and Development Unit.

Watch at http://links.org.au/node/575

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Torture
On the Waterboard
How does it feel to be “aggressively interrogated”? Christopher Hitchens found out for himself, submitting to a brutal waterboarding session in an effort to understand the human cost of America’s use of harsh tactics at Guantánamo and elsewhere. VF.com has the footage. Related: “Believe Me, It’s Torture,” from the August 2008 issue.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/video/2008/hitchens_video200808

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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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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/

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