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LET OUR CHILDREN BE! NO ON V!
No Military Recruitment or Training in our Schools!
No to Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC)
COMMUNITY ANTIWAR OUTREACH DAY
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 11, 11:00 A.M.
24TH AND MISSION STREETS, SAN FRANCISCO
[October 11 actions against the war are happening in over 16 cities across the country (see below for cities and links)...bw]
Come out this Saturday, October 11 to pass out No on V flyers! Help defeat Prop. V! Reach out to our friends and fellow San Franciscans to take a stand together against war, military spending and military recruitment in our schools by voting NO on V!
The Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) program in the country's school system is an example of how our government spends taxpayer's money for programs that only benefit the wealthy, which is what the entire U.S. military industrial complex is designed to do.
The resounding defeat of Proposition V, the Pro-JROTC ballot initiative on this November's ballot in San Francisco, is not only a resounding reiteration of the antiwar sentiments of the people of San Francisco, but it's a resounding statement in opposition to a government being governed by, for, and of the wealthy elite we are being asked to bail out!
The October 11 Community Outreach Day is our chance to get out into the streets and explain how important it is to defeat Proposition V and the strong message it will send throughout the country! Not only expressing our opposition to JROTC and military recruitment of our children for illegal and unjust wars, but our ability to rally together to defeat this initiative!
They're are rallies, demonstrations, vigils, forums--a broad variety of actions scheduled for October 11 across the country (see the list below.)
END WAR AND OCCUPATION!
STOP THE ENDLESS MADNESS!
FORECLOSE ON WARS! NOT ON HOMES!
STOP THE WARS AND OCCUPATIONS OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN
MONEY FOR JOBS, EDUCATION, HEALTHCARE, AND HOUSING - NOT FOR WAR AND OCCUPATION
NO SANCTIONS OR ATTACK ON IRAN
STOP THE RACIST SCAPEGOATING OF ARABS AND MUSLIMS
STOP THE ASSAULT ON HUMAN RIGHTS AND CIVIL LIBERTIES
BAIL OUT MAIN STREET, NOT WALL STREET!
NO on V ANTIWAR OUTREACH DAY
Saturday, October 11, 11:00 A.M.
24th and Mission Streets, S.F.
NO TO JUNIOR RESERVE OFFICERS' TRAINING CORPS (JROTC) MILITARY TRAINING AND RECRUITMENT PROGRAM!
MILITARY RECRUITERS OUT OF OUR SCHOOLS!
It was on October 11, 2002 that a bi-partisan Congress approved the “Iraq War Resolution” granting the Bush administration authorization to invade Iraq. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2008--exactly six years after Congress unleashed the dogs of war on Iraq--we will be launching a campaign to label San Francisco an antiwar city again this November, 2008.
In 2004 we voted Yes on N to bring the troops home from Iraq Now; in 2005 we voted Yes on I, College Not Combat, to get military recruiters out of our schools; this year we will vote NO on V, to get the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) military training and recruitment program out of our schools.
JROTC IS A MILITARY TRAINING AND RECRUITMENT PROGRAM THAT TEACHES STUDENTS TO FOLLOW THE LEADER WITHOUT QUESTION, NOT TO BECOME LEADERS!
Proposition V, is a pro-JROTC, pro-military training and recruitment program that is currently being phased out of our schools. Proposition V--a non-binding initiative designed to put pressure on the Board of Education to keep the program in the schools--has been put on the ballot with the financial contributions of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the Republican Party among many other pro-war contributors with big bucks!
WE MUST GET THE WORD OUT TO VOTE NO ON V!
JROTC IS A MILITARY RECRUITMENT PROGRAM CONTROLLED BY THE MILITARY ALONE!
The issues surrounding Proposition V have been made less clear by the lies their campaign is telling about the program, i.e., that JROTC does not recruit students to the military, that it teaches leadership skills, that it keeps children from gang activity and that students should have a "choice" to enroll in JROTC at their school.
But, we don't want the schools used to recruit our children for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan!
JROTC is a military recruitment program that has already been scheduled for phase-out by June 2009 by the San Francisco Board of Education.
JROTC doesn’t teach students the realities of war: that they are likely to kill civilians, or that they are more likely to die or return from war with devastating mental and physical disabilities than earn college degrees.
Proposition V argues that students should have a “choice” to enroll in JROTC, but if they join the military they have no choice about killing or dying. JROTC is a military recruitment program, and it does not belong in our schools!
JROTC is not the way to keep kids away from gangs. There are peaceful ways to keep kids safe. JROTC is not a leadership program. It teaches unquestioning obedience in preparation for military service.
The San Francisco School Board's decision to end JROTC has set a precedent for communities nationwide. Let’s not allow it to be reversed!
We will be outside in the streets October 11 to encourage a resounding NO vote on Proposition V and to join with parents everywhere trying to save their children from being sent to fight these unjust and illegal wars!
MONEY FOR BOOKS NOT BOMBS! COLLEGE NOT COMBAT! JOB-FAIRS NOT WARFARE! FORECLOSE THE WAR NOT MORTGAGES!
We want funding for education, healthcare, the environment, and jobs, not war! U.S. out of Iraq and Afghanistan now!
Join us in community outreach against the war and for NO on V, Saturday, October 11, 11:00-3:00 P.M., 24th and Mission Streets, San Francisco
For information on the many other actions taking place on October 11 around the country against the war go to:
http://oct11.org/
Bay Area United Against War
P.O. Box 318021, San Francisco, CA 94131-8021, 415-824-8730, www.bauaw.org
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The oct11.org
I encourage everyone to include in your local promos and press releases the fact that antiwar actions on October 11 are occurring in at least sixteen cities around the country. I hope that coordinators around the country will post after-action reports about their events on the O11 listserv, along with links to any media reports. We will be setting up a conference call after October 11 to share information and insights about our October 11 actions and discuss possible future actions, including major local actions on March 21 of next year.
Please see below for a list of the cities and locales having actions on October 11. For more information, please visit the website at http://oct11.org/ .
Mark Stahl
Providence, RI
RI Mobilization Committee to Stop War and Occupation
http://www.ristopwar.org/dnn/
Home
Boston
Chicago
Cleveland
Connecticut
Duluth
Minneapolis/St. Paul
New York, NY
Philadelphia
Pittsburgh
Providence, RI
Rockland County, NY
Salt Lake City
San Francisco
Seattle
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JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN
"Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun" movie trailer:
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=42282098
Dalton Trumbo’s 1939 classic anti-war novel, JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN, returns to the silver screen for one week only in its West Coast Premiere at Landmark Theatre’s Shattuck Cinemas (Berkeley) beginning Friday, Oct. 10th.
As one-third of the film’s small, independent production company, I’m asking groups like yours to help spread the word about this powerful new film! We simply cannot compete financially with the big Hollywood film promotion budgets, and therefore depend on help from groups like yours to promote this powerful new film that is actually making audiences THINK, and introducing Trumbo’s anti-war masterpiece to whole new generation!
PLEASE forward this email, or the attached jpeg file (which includes photos and info), to your group and everyone you know! Post the info on your group’s website, share it at meetings, join our MySpace or Facebook pages, and tell people on the street! This movie’s message stays with audiences for a long time, and needs to be shared now more than ever.
Plus, the director, Rowan Joseph, will answer questions following screenings on Friday evening (Oct. 10th), Saturday late afternoon and early evening (Oct. 11th), and Sunday late afternoon and early evenings (Oct. 12th).
I appreciate all of your help and hope to see you at the film! Feel free to contact me with any questions, to request postcards, or to set up a special Q&A for your group.
Peace,
Wesley Horton
Greenwood Hill Productions
p. 323-793-7223
www.JohnnyGotHisGuntheMovie.com
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Johnny-Got-His-Gun/21875439764
http://www.myspace.com/johnnygothisgunthemovie
“A stunning performance...Impressive” –The Daily Texan
“A film of high caliber...a virulent message of pacifism” –Austin American-Statesman
“A starkly powerful film...See this movie” –The Rag Blog
Ripped directly from the pages of Dalton Trumbo’s classic 1939 anti-war novel, JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN, comes a powerful new motion picture filmed in the same emotionally charged, intensely personal, stream-of-consciousness style as the book itself.
Ben McKenzie (The O.C., Junebug, 88 Minutes) gives a riveting tour-de-force performance as an American soldier hit by an artillery shell on the last day of the First World War. The movie takes place in the mind of Joe Bonham, a quadruple amputee who has also lost his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. Slowly regaining consciousness, Joe discovers that while his brain is healthy and able to reason, the rest of his body is irreparably shattered, leaving him trapped forever within the confines of his own imagination. He struggles valiantly to find some way to communicate with the outside world. Tapping his head in Morse code, he breaks through to the outside world and pleads with his caretakers to be put on display as a living example of the cost of war.
Dalton Trumbo’s JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN comes to the Shattuck Cinemas for a special ONE-WEEK limited engagement beginning Friday, October 10th. A portion of all ticket sales are donated to the Fallen Patriot Fund, which helps families of U.S. military personnel who were killed or seriously injured while serving in Iraq . www.JohnnyGotHisGuntheMovie.com
OPENS FRIDAY, OCTOBER 10 - Shattuck Cinemas
2230 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley
(510) 464-5980 www.landmarktheatres.com
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ANNUAL SUNRISE GATHERING
ON ALCATRAZ ISLAND
MONDAY OCTOBER 13th 2008
International Indian Treaty Council and American Indian Contemporary Arts present:
International Day of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples 2008 Celebrating our Survival and Challenging the Myth of Columbus and “Doctrine of Discovery”
Everyone is invited to attend the annual Sun-Rise Gathering at Alcatraz Island on Monday, October 13th, 2008 (State Holiday) on Alcatraz Island, San Francisco Bay, to commemorate 516 years (1492-2008) of Indigenous Peoples Resistance to Colonization in the Americas!
Support Indigenous Peoples’ struggles for Self-Determination, Land and Treaty
Rights, Protection of Sacred Sites, Cultures and Ways of Life. Say “No” to War and
Racism, “Yes” to a Culture of Peace, Human Rights, and Respect for Mother Earth!
Honor those who sacrificed their lives for us to be here, and who stood up for our Peoples.
Tobacco and prayers will be offered to the fire for the Earth and coming generations.
Meeting Place: Fisherman’s Wharf, Pier # 31 in San Francisco
Tickets: $ 11.00 (children under 5 free)
Time: Ticket booths open at 5 AM, last boat departs at 6:00 am, and all return by 9 AM.
Featuring: The All Nations Drum, Traditional Aztec and Pomo Dancers, and updates
and solidarity with special guest speakers. MC: Lenny Foster, Dineh, Alcatraz
Veteran and member of IITC’s Board of Directors. Special Honoring for
Participants of the Long Walks 1 & 2, Alcatraz and Wounded Knee Veterans.
Wheel chair accessible, minimal parking, wear something warm.
For More information call IITC at 415-641-4482 or email AICA:
janeenantoine@mac.com.
Websites:
www.treatycouncil.org and
http://groups.msn.com-bayareaindiancalandar.
Purchase advance tickets at
www.alcatrazcruises.com, or call 415-981-7625.
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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 is now up and running, at:
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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"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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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Post-Apartheid South Africa Enters Anxious Era
By BARRY BEARAK
October 6, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/world/africa/06safrica.html?hp
2) One in Four Mammals Threatened, Study Finds
By JAMES KANTER
October 7, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/science/earth/07mammal.html?ref=world
3) Full of Doubts, U.S. Shoppers Cut Spending
By LOUIS UCHITELLE, ANDREW MARTIN and STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
October 6, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/business/06econ.html?ref=business
4) A Fool’s Paradise
By BOB HERBERT
“Example: The after-tax income of the top 1 percent of Americans rose 228 percent from the late 1970s through 2005. The story for working families over that same stretch was one of constant struggle to just stay even. As the Pew Charitable Trusts reported last year: ‘The earnings of men in their 30s have remained surprisingly flat over the past four decades.’… Disaster was held at bay by the entrance of wives and mothers into the workplace, and by the embrace of colossal amounts of debt for everything from home mortgages, cars, clothing and vacations to food, college tuition and medical expenses.”
Op-Ed Columnist
October 7, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/opinion/07herbert.html?hp
5) Unions Warn of a Fight if Pensions Are Trimmed
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
October 7, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/nyregion/07labor.html?ref=nyregion
6) Fed Announces Plan to Buy Short-Term Debt
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS and MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
October 8, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/business/08fed.html?pagewanted=2&ref=business
7) Are Bad Times Healthy?
By TARA PARKER-POPE
[Leave it to the NYT to have an article questioning whether poverty and unemployment is actually healthier for children than "good times."...bw]
October 7, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/health/07well.html?ref=health
8) Global Fears of a Recession Grow
By MARK LANDLER
October 7, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/business/worldbusiness/07global.html?hp
9) 30 Civilians Died in Afghan Raid, U.S. Inquiry Finds
By ERIC SCHMITT
"An investigation by the military has concluded that American airstrikes on Aug. 22 in a village in western Afghanistan killed far more civilians than American commanders there have acknowledged, according to two American military officials."
October 8, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/washington/08inquiry.html?hp
10) Md. Police Put Activists' Names On Terror Lists
Surveillance's Reach Revealed
"But Sen. James Brochin (D-Baltimore County) noted that undercover troopers used aliases to infiltrate organizational meetings, rallies and group e-mail lists. He called the spying a "deliberate infiltration to find out every piece of information necessary" on groups such as the Maryland Campaign to End the Death Penalty and the Baltimore Pledge of Resistance."
By Lisa Rein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 8, 2008; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/07/AR2008100703245_pf.html
11) Economic Scene
Ignoring Reality Has a Price
By DAVID LEONHARDT
WASHINGTON
October 8, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/business/economy/08leonhardt.html?hp
12) Judge Orders 17 Detainees at Guantánamo Freed
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
October 8, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/washington/08detain.html?ref=us
13) Britain Announces Huge Bank Bailout
By JULIA WERDIGIER
October 9, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/business/worldbusiness/09britain.html?ref=business
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1) Post-Apartheid South Africa Enters Anxious Era
By BARRY BEARAK
October 6, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/world/africa/06safrica.html?hp
DIEPSLOOT, South Africa — A dusty maze of concrete, sheet metal and scrap wood, Diepsloot is like so many of the enormous settlements around Johannesburg, mile after mile of feebly assembled shacks, the impromptu patchwork of the poor, the extremely poor and the hopelessly poor.
Monica Xangathi, 40, lives here in a shanty she shares with her brother’s family. “This is not the way I thought my life would turn out,” she said.
Her disappointment is not only with herself; she is heartsick about her country. Fourteen years after the end of apartheid, South Africa — the global pariah that became a global inspiration — has lapsed into gloom and anxiety about its future, surely not the harmonious “rainbow nation” so celebrated by Nelson Mandela on his inauguration day.
“If only I could make Nelson Mandela come back,” Ms. Xangathi said. “If only I could feed him a potion and make him young again.”
This longing to propel the past into the present is rooted in more than fond reminiscence. Two weeks ago, a vicious power struggle culminated in something like regicide, with the governing African National Congress deposing one of its own, President Thabo Mbeki, and replacing him with a stand-in for Mr. Mbeki’s archrival, Jacob Zuma.
The actual changing of the guard was orderly enough, but months of behind-the-scenes back-stabbing have made many South Africans long for days more abundant with moral clarity, including those fretful about a figure as polarizing as Mr. Zuma.
The past year has been especially unnerving, with one bleak event after another, and it is more than acidic politics that have soured the national mood. Economic growth slowed; prices shot up. Xenophobic riots broke out in several cities, with mobs killing dozens of impoverished foreigners and chasing thousands more from their tumbledown homes.
The country’s power company unfathomably ran out of electricity and rationed supply. Gone was the conceit that South Africa was the one place on the continent immune to such incompetence. The rich purchased generators; the poor muddled through with kerosene and paraffin.
Other grievances were ruefully familiar. South Africa has one of the worst crime rates. But more alarming than the quantity of lawbreaking is the cruelty. Robberies are often accompanied by appalling violence, and people here one-up each other with tales of scalding and shooting and slicing and garroting.
The poor apply padlocks in defense. The rich surround their homes with concrete and barbed wire — and there are suggestions that more are simply fleeing the country.
“On our street alone, just that one small street, three of the husbands in families were killed in carjackings or robberies,” said Antony McKechnie, an electrical engineer who a month ago moved to New Zealand. “If we had stayed and something had happened to any of our three children, we would never be able to forgive ourselves.”
Rich and poor, black, white and mixed race: their complaints may differ, but the discontent is shared. Polls show a pervasive distrust of government, political parties and the police.
In great measure, the tough realities of South Africa’s long haul after apartheid have simply replaced the halo of liberation’s first days. Likewise, while Mr. Mandela seemed a saintly figure to many, his successors seem all too human.
“We are not the world’s greatest fairy tale, but rather a young, messy and not-always-predictable democracy,” said Mark Gevisser, a journalist and the author of “Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred.”
Messy and unpredictable, yes. Scandalous, too.
Mr. Mbeki was president for nine years, and his image slowly warped from someone aloof but well intentioned to someone secretive and conniving. During the past year, he went to extraordinary lengths to protect his police commissioner, accused of shopping with mobsters in an expensive haberdashery and permitting them to pick up the tab.
Mr. Mbeki’s political nemesis is Mr. Zuma, whom he once fired as deputy president and who has image problems of his own. In 2006, he was tried on rape charges and acquitted, testifying that his accuser had encouraged him by wearing a short skirt and sitting provocatively. As a Zulu man, he said, he was duty-bound to oblige her. He then showered, as he described it, to “minimize the risk” of contracting the virus that causes AIDS.
Last December, Mr. Zuma won control of the African National Congress, clearing the way for him to assume the presidency after the 2009 elections. Only lingering corruption charges could frustrate his ambitions, and some of his more prominent followers have declared they will “kill” if Mr. Zuma is thwarted. On Sept. 20, party leaders called an early end to the Mbeki years, installing a caretaker, Kgalema Motlanthe. Mr. Zuma remains the president-in-waiting.
The onslaught of unsettling news has proved too much for some with the means to flee. No reliable numbers are kept on emigration, but “packing for Perth” — a phrase used to describe white flight, not necessarily to the Australian city — is believed to be on the increase.
Since 1996, the black population has risen to a projected 38.5 million from 31.8 million, according to government statistics. The white population has dropped to a projected 4.5 million from 4.8 million.
John Loos, an economist at First National Bank of South Africa, who tracks the reasons given by people who sell homes in white suburban markets, said 9 percent cited emigration in the last quarter of 2007. In the first quarter of 2008, the number rose to 12 percent; in the second quarter it reached 18 percent.
Minority groups — which include whites, Asians and people of mixed race — “are prone to overreacting about anything,” Mr. Loos said. “We have people with the mind-set that this country is just another Zimbabwe in the making.”
Far fewer blacks emigrate out of such despair, but that does not mean they are more cheerful.
“Things are quite scary here, especially during the Zuma court cases with people talking about war and killing,” said Rodney Muzuli, a community development worker. “You wonder if we’re going the path of Rwanda.”
Hlengiwe Dladla, a mother at home with her 1-year-old in Diepsloot, said: “I don’t trust Jacob Zuma. Did you hear what he said at his rape trial? Well, I am also a Zulu, and I can tell you that if he was truly a cultural man, he would respect a woman, short skirt or not.”
Louis Manjanja, 26, a TV installer, blames the African National Congress, which led the liberation struggle, for the troubles. “The A.N.C. is a bunch of greedy guys fighting for positions and ignoring what needs to be done,” he said. “I voted for them before, but not again.”
It is easy to tap into such naysaying. But there is a case to be made that pessimistic South Africans are looking at a glass that is actually more than half full yet describe it as near empty. Not so long ago, people feared that the end of apartheid would set off civil war and a blood bath.
Adam Habib, a political analyst, finds it understandable that the marginalized complain, and he invokes the term “relative deprivation.” The gap between the rich and the poor may be widening, but the lot of the poor is improving, he said: the unemployment rate, however horrendous, is in decline; the incomes of the poor, however meager, are on the rise.
While some critics have likened Mr. Mbeki’s exit to a Stalinist purge, Mr. Habib, a deputy vice chancellor at the University of Johannesburg, pointed out that the transition was smooth and nonviolent, something rare in Africa. “Our democracy is only 14 years old,” he said. “Rather than calling this a crisis, people ought to ask how our institutions came together so well in so short a time.”
Mr. Zuma fares badly in national opinion polls, but there is no denying an allure. A personable man, he seems to win over every audience he meets. He talks tough on crime, and despite his notorious postcoital shower, he seems to address the topic of H.I.V. and AIDS in a reasoned manner. For nearly a year, Mr. Zuma and Mr. Mbeki represented two competing centers of power. Some businessmen are relieved to see the combat decisively at an end.
Indeed, South African pessimism has spawned a countervailing industry of reassurance. Louis Fourie, a noted financial adviser, travels the country delivering a speech called “South Africa, How Are You?” Yes, he confesses, the public education system is deplorable. Yes, crime is horrendous. Yes, 20 million impoverished South Africans are “living in hell, no other way to describe it.”
But, Mr. Fourie reminds people that the country has 1,533 miles of gorgeous coastline, 10 international airports, a robust stock exchange and an open society with a free press. He fondly repeats the phrase that South Africa is “the most unsung success story in modern history.”
Since May, one of the nation’s best-selling books has been a pep talk titled “Don’t Panic!” by a businessman, Alan Knott-Craig. Aimed primarily at downhearted white people, the book laments the “tsunami of negativity” and discourages those packing for Perth.
Mr. Knott-Craig, 31, said in an interview that 67 of his 72 classmates in an accounting course had emigrated. “People are being bombarded by bad news, and at every water cooler it gets reinforced,” he said. “People thank me for helping them snap out of their negativity.”
And yet perhaps even Mr. Knott-Craig is susceptible to gloom.
In the preface to “Don’t Panic!” he seems to praise South Africa with faint damnation. “Will we still have a viable country in 2020?” he asks himself rhetorically, cautiously concluding, “I think we’ve got a better than 50-50 chance.”
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2) One in Four Mammals Threatened, Study Finds
By JAMES KANTER
October 7, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/science/earth/07mammal.html?ref=world
BARCELONA — An “extinction crisis” is under way, with one in four mammals in danger of disappearing because of habitat loss, hunting and climate change, a leading global conservation body warned on Monday.
“Within our lifetime, hundreds of species could be lost as a result of our own actions,” said Julia Marton-Lefèvre, the director general of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, an international network of campaign groups, governments, scientists and other experts.
She called the findings “a frightening sign of what is happening to the ecosystems where they live.”
Among 188 mammals in the highest threat category — critically endangered — was the Iberian lynx, which has a population of 84 to 143 adults and has continued to decline for lack of its primary prey, the European rabbit, which has fallen victim to disease and overhunting.
The research, whose findings were presented at the World Conservation Congress in Barcelona, was the most detailed study of mammals conducted by the conservation union in more than a decade. It formed part of a so-called Red List of Threatened Species issued annually by the group.
Other mammals highlighted in the report included the fishing cat, found in Southeast Asia. The cat was moved to the second most threatened category, endangered, from vulnerable, because of habitat loss in wetlands. The Caspian seal, also now endangered, has seen its population decline by 90 percent over the past 100 years because of unsustainable hunting and degradation of its habitats.
Experts who helped lead the study said the hazards were, if anything, increasing.
“What we’ve found is that one in four mammals are truly in peril, but these assessments were done largely without accounting for the potential impacts of climate change,” said Jonathan Baillie, the director of conservation programs at the Zoological Society of London.
“If we continue emitting greenhouse gases at the current rate, we’re looking at 40 percent loss of biodiversity by the end of the century,” warned Dr. Baillie, referring to the potential extinction of all species.
Jan Schipper, the director of the global mammal assessment for the conservation union and for Conservation International, an environmental group, said it was hard to draw a direct comparison with its last detailed survey on mammals in 1996. New species have been identified, others discovered, and the criteria used to assess species have been changed to make them more broadly applicable across all animals and plants.
But he gave a mostly bleak assessment.
“Although 5 percent of mammals are recovering, what we observe are rates of habitat loss and hunting in Southeast Asia, central Africa and central and South America that are so serious that the overall rate of decline has steadily increased during the past decade,” Mr. Schipper said.
Amphibians, too, are also facing an extinction crisis, with 32 percent either threatened or extinct, the I.U.C.N. reported.
Holdridge’s toad, found only in Costa Rica, was moved to the extinct category. It has not been seen since 1986 despite intensive surveys. The Cuban crocodile, illegally hunted for its meat and skin, was moved to the critically endangered category.
Making the list for the first time were Indian tarantulas, highly prized by collectors and threatened by the international pet trade. The Rameshwaram Parachute Spider, whose habitat has been eroded by new roads, was found to be critically endangered. The spiders’ “natural habitat has been almost completely destroyed,” the group said.
Not every part of the new report was bleak. The African Elephant was removed from the vulnerable list and is now “near threatened,” although its status varied depending on location. The I.U.C.N. said increases in the population of the elephants in southern and eastern Africa were big enough to outweigh any decreases that may be taking place elsewhere.
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3) Full of Doubts, U.S. Shoppers Cut Spending
By LOUIS UCHITELLE, ANDREW MARTIN and STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
October 6, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/business/06econ.html?ref=business
Cowed by the financial crisis, American consumers are pulling back on their spending, all but guaranteeing that the economic situation will get worse before it gets better.
In response to the falling value of their homes and high gasoline prices, Americans have become more frugal all year. But in recent weeks, as the financial crisis reverberated from Wall Street to Washington, consumers appear to have cut back sharply. Even with the government beginning a giant bailout of the financial system, their confidence may have been too shaken for them to resume their free-spending ways any time soon.
Recent figures from companies, and interviews across the country, show that automobile sales are plummeting, airline traffic is dropping, restaurant chains are struggling to fill tables, customers are sparse in stores.
When the final tally is in, consumer spending for the quarter just ended will almost certainly shrink, the first quarterly decline in nearly two decades. Many economists, who began the third quarter expecting modest growth, now believe the cutbacks are so severe that the overall economy did not expand either, and they warn that a consumer-led recession could be more severe than the relatively mild one earlier this decade.
“The last few days have devastated the American consumer,” said Walter Loeb, president of Loeb Associates, a consultancy, who said he worried that the constant drumbeat of negative news about the economy was becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. “They all feel poor.”
For some Americans, the pain is already acute: jobs disappeared at a faster clip in September. For many others, day-to-day finances are fine for now, but the financial outlook is uncertain: 401(k) accounts are dwindling, loans are hard to get and house prices continue to fall.
Claudia Prindiville, a 41-year-old mother of three, is among those feeling anxious. Shopping at a Talbots store in Chicago’s northwest suburbs, she said her own family’s finances had not yet suffered. Still, she pulled out a coupon to buy a two-piece sweatsuit, and at The Children’s Place she bought pants and shirts from the sale rack.
“All the talk about how bad it is out there has started getting in my head,” she said. “I still need to shop for my kids’ school clothes, but I am definitely buying less for myself.”
Consumer spending, which accounts for nearly two-thirds of the economy, grew modestly earlier in the year but fell in July and August on an annualized rate. When the government releases quarterly numbers this month, they are expected to show that consumer spending shrank 3 percent or more. That would be the first quarterly decline since 1990, ahead of the 1991 recession, and the steepest since 1981.
According to interviews with shoppers, analysts and company executives, the impact of the financial news of the last two weeks has been palpable in many corners of the country, from car dealerships, which endured the worst month for sales in 15 years, to the flashy casinos of Las Vegas, where spending at luxury restaurants and stores and at gambling tables has gone from bad to worse.
“In the last few days, there has been a huge drop-off in foot traffic and almost zero sales,” said Gil Colon, sales manager at Villa Reale, a high-end art and furniture store in Las Vegas, who has laid off five sales people in the last five months, leaving three.
“People have lost their confidence. They have no buying power. They are losing their retirements, their vacation funds, and they are scared to commit to buying anything,” he said.
The picture is just as grim at suburban malls and city boutiques, where traffic is disappearing as retailers brace for what many predict will be a dismal holiday shopping season. Some have responded by reducing the number of sales people or their hours.
Taking a break outside an Office Depot store in suburban Chicago, Dave Cargerman, a 25-year-old sales clerk, said his hours had been cut back. “We got killed during the back-to-school sales,” Mr. Cargerman said. “And that time of year is usually our bread and butter.”
Nearby, employees at Lattof Chevrolet were preparing to close the doors this month on a business that opened in 1936. It may not be the last dealership to go: the percentage of people saying they expect to buy a car in the next six months, on a three-month moving average, has fallen to 5 percent, the lowest figure since the Conference Board started asking about such plans in its consumer confidence survey, in 1967.
“We’re not selling S.U.V.’s and trucks at all,” said Raul Trejo, 24, a mechanic. “We saw it coming.”
The situation is so uncertain that some retailers are simply not even trying to estimate their sales. Pier 1 Imports and Circuit City stores recently withdrew their guidance to Wall Street about earnings and said they would not offer any more predictions this year.
At a retail conference in New York on Thursday, Michael W. Rayden, chairman and chief executive of Tween Brands, which owns the Limited Too and Justice chains, spoke about consumer fears. “As I travel around the country and listen to moms and little girls, it is amazing how much even these 10-year-old girls are aware that something is going on,” he said. “Mom is saying, ‘I can’t afford that.’ ”
Even Apple, maker of the iPhone, is not immune as concerns mount about consumer electronics. The stock of Apple ended the week down 19 percent after two stock analysts suggested that the rapid cooldown in consumer spending would put an end to the company’s hot sales streak.
Casual dining restaurants, which have struggled in recent years because of a glut of restaurants and higher-quality fare at fast-food chains, have taken a beating already this year, forcing the Bennigan’s chain to close and leaving several others struggling. “I think September could be the worst month of the year, and we’ve had a lot of bad months,” said Lynne Collier, an analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets who covers the restaurant industry.
At a Chili’s Grill & Bar in the Arlington Heights suburb of Chicago, Nichol Bedsole, a 23-year-old salon manager, said she used to eat at places like Chili’s at least once a week but no longer does.
“Now it’s more like twice a month, and it’s somewhere cheap, like Subway,” she said. “I have a lot of bills to pay.”
Consumers are cutting back on air travel, whether for business or pleasure. Passenger volume is dwindling even faster than airlines can sideline planes and cut poorly performing routes. At American Airlines, domestic passengers flew 11.7 percent fewer miles in September, while the airline cut 9.4 percent of domestic seats.
The consumer slowdown in recent weeks comes after spending drops in July and August, when tax rebates came to an end. The financial shocks on Wall Street accelerated the decline, along with limits on consumer credit imposed by some banks.
“Consumers have become quite concerned that the recession, which they think is already under way, will last longer than they anticipated and will be deeper,” said Richard Curtin, director of the Reuters-University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers, describing the most recent poll. “They see their worst fears coming true.”
In addition, household net worth, which greases spending, fell $6 trillion over the last year, with $1 trillion of that in just the last four weeks, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com.
Less than a month ago, Nigel Gault, chief domestic economist at Global Insight, a forecasting service, predicted that domestic economic output would rise 1.2 percent in the third quarter. “At the moment I’m running close to zero,” he said, “and maybe a negative.”
Of course, the economic malaise has not yet hurt all businesses. It has even been good for some.
Entertainment and media executives remain optimistic about sales of movie tickets, DVDs and games. At Nintendo of America, the popular Wii video game consoles are still selling briskly at about $300.
“My view is that when consumers get concerned about their nest egg, or their country, they need entertainment,” said Bo Andersen, president and chief executive of the Entertainment Merchants Association, which represents distributors and retailers of home entertainment products.
And as fewer people eat at restaurants, food is flying off the shelves at grocery stores. David Driscoll, a stock analyst for Citigroup, said the shares of big food companies have risen about 17 percent this year. By contrast, he said, the restaurant sector is down 4 percent.
“The alternative of restaurants is buying groceries and eating at home,” he said, “and right now, that’s an attractive alternative.”
Daniel Kimble, 31, was putting Mr. Driscoll’s theory into practice on Friday. An independent trucker from Oklahoma, he stopped his rig outside a Wal-Mart in Cleveland on his way to a nearby factory.
Mr. Kimble ticked off a long list of his money-saving steps, from driving his pickup truck less to using less laundry detergent to buying fewer clothes. And he has stopped eating at restaurants on the road, which is why he was parked at Wal-Mart.
“I’m going in to buy some lunch meat and some bread, whatever’s cheap,” he said. “I’ve got to save money, you know?”
Tim Arango, Karen Ann Cullotta, Laurie J. Flynn, Clifford Krauss, Christopher Maag, John Markoff, Joe Sharkey and Bill Vlasic contributed reporting.
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4) A Fool’s Paradise
By BOB HERBERT
“Example: The after-tax income of the top 1 percent of Americans rose 228 percent from the late 1970s through 2005. The story for working families over that same stretch was one of constant struggle to just stay even. As the Pew Charitable Trusts reported last year: ‘The earnings of men in their 30s have remained surprisingly flat over the past four decades.’… Disaster was held at bay by the entrance of wives and mothers into the workplace, and by the embrace of colossal amounts of debt for everything from home mortgages, cars, clothing and vacations to food, college tuition and medical expenses.”
Op-Ed Columnist
October 7, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/opinion/07herbert.html?hp
With less than a month left until Election Day, there is still time for the presidential candidates to focus with great intensity on what should be the most important issue of this campaign. It’s not just the economy, stupid — it’s jobs.
The stock markets were rocked again on Monday, and the need to stabilize the financial system is obvious. But the U.S. economy is never going to be really healthy until the country figures out how to provide work at decent pay for all, or nearly all, of the men and women who want to work.
We’ve been living for years in a fool’s paradise atop a mountain of debt. The masters of the universe on Wall Street lost all sense of reason, no doubt. But most of us have been living above our means through the magic of easy credit, ever lower taxes, ever rising property values, stock market bubbles and the gift of denial, which we used to assure ourselves that the bills would never come due. We’ve even put our wars on a credit card.
The burden of debt for a typical middle-income family, earning about $45,000 a year, grew by a third in just the few years from 2001 to 2004, according to the Center for American Progress. The reason for this unsustainable added weight was the rising cost of such items as housing, higher education, health care and transportation at a time when wages grew only slightly or not at all.
In other words, work was not enough.
As for the debt burden of the federal government, don’t ask. (But you might want to ask your grandchildren how they plan to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.)
With reality now caving in on us — banks and brokerage houses falling like tenpins, a trillion dollars or so in bailout money being added to the nation’s debt burden, families by the hundreds of thousands being driven from their homes by foreclosures — it might make sense to get back to basics. And in the United States, the basic economic component of a sustainable family life is a good job.
What we haven’t paid close enough attention to for many years (a period in which we’ve been oddly obsessed with the financial lives of the rich and famous) is the fact that there haven’t been enough good paying jobs to sustain what most working Americans view as an adequate standard of living. This is a fundamental flaw in the U.S. economic system.
With the latest financial meltdown, there has been widespread outrage over the excessive compensation of top corporate executives. Where has everybody been? The rich have been running the table for the better part of the past 30 or 40 years.
Example: The after-tax income of the top 1 percent of Americans rose 228 percent from the late 1970s through 2005. The story for working families over that same stretch was one of constant struggle to just stay even. As the Pew Charitable Trusts reported last year: “The earnings of men in their 30s have remained surprisingly flat over the past four decades.”
Disaster was held at bay by the entrance of wives and mothers into the workplace, and by the embrace of colossal amounts of debt for everything from home mortgages, cars, clothing and vacations to food, college tuition and medical expenses.
Now middle-class and working families are up against the wall. With most other options exhausted, the only real way for the vast majority of Americans to continue financing a reasonable quality of life is through the proceeds from employment.
Unfortunately, we’re retreating on that front. Nearly 160,000 jobs were lost in September. More than three-quarters of a million have vanished over the past nine months.
The economy won’t be saved by bailing out Wall Street and waiting for that day that never comes when the benefits trickle down to ordinary Americans. It won’t be saved until we get serious about putting vast numbers of Americans back to work in jobs that are reasonably secure and pay a sustaining wage.
And that won’t begin to happen until we roll up our sleeves and begin the immensely hard and expensive work of rebuilding a nation that unconscionably was allowed to slip into a precipitous state of decline. We’ll end up spending trillions for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and another trillion, at least, to clean up after the madmen on Wall Street.
Now we need to find the money and the will to put Americans to work rebuilding the nation’s deteriorating infrastructure, revitalizing its public school system, creating a new dawn of energy self-sufficiency and rethinking our approach to an economy that remains tilted wildly in favor of the rich.
That’s what the presidential campaign should be about.
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5) Unions Warn of a Fight if Pensions Are Trimmed
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
October 7, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/nyregion/07labor.html?ref=nyregion
New York City’s powerful municipal labor unions have been unusually quiet as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg moves to cut the city’s budget, but a fight appears to be brewing over efforts to trim pensions.
The unions have remained silent as the city’s economy and budget have soured, partly because Mr. Bloomberg has worked hard to maintain good relations with labor, and partly because the unions lack leaders like the cantankerous, outspoken giants of municipal crises past, like Albert Shanker and Victor Gotbaum.
Moreover, some labor experts suggested that Mr. Bloomberg had delayed making any painful cuts until after announcing his desire for a third term because he did not want to anger the unions.
Nonetheless, if the city’s budget situation deteriorates, as many experts predict, and if the mayor starts taking tougher actions — like laying off workers or pushing for less generous pensions for future employees — then, labor leaders warn, they will put up a fight.
During past budgetary crunches, municipal unions have sometimes taken a combative approach, sometimes a cooperative one, as mayors have undertaken various deficit-fighting measures, including a two-year wage freeze in the 1990s and layoffs and wage deferrals during the 1975 fiscal crisis.
Edward Skyler, the deputy mayor for operations, did little, in an interview, to reassure labor about the possibility of painful cuts. “The mayor is not going to preclude any option, given the circumstances we find ourselves in,” he said.
Some fiscal watchdog groups are pressing Mr. Bloomberg to move quickly to take deficit-cutting actions that could infuriate municipal unions, including requiring many city employees to start paying health care premiums and creating a new, less generous, fifth tier of pensions for all future city employees.
Randi Weingarten, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, said it would be unfair to penalize municipal workers.
“At the first moment of trouble, the city shouldn’t go after the people who are the backbone of this city,” said Ms. Weingarten, who recently stepped down as head of the Municipal Labor Committee, the umbrella group for municipal unions. “Here we have a situation where the gazillionaires have created a mortgage crisis and credit crisis, and a lot of well-off people have benefited. And so it would be dead wrong to ask workers who average pensions of $19,000 a year to be sacrificed.”
Mr. Skyler said city agencies would soon make recommendations about how they hope to meet the mayor’s goal of cutting agency budgets across the board by 2.5 percent this year and 5 percent next year. That means cuts of $500 million this year and $1 billion next year. And some budget experts warn that there might be more, deeper rounds of cuts.
“As far as cuts in different agencies and how they will affect the work force, we’re in the beginning of the process,” Mr. Skyler said. “We’ve been through tough times before, and we’re entering this period with a spirit of partnership.”
Mr. Skyler said the mayor favored legislation to create a fifth pension tier, which would give future hires a smaller pension than current or retired city workers have. Under state law, the city is prohibited from reducing the pensions promised to current employees.
“The mayor has advocated for a fifth tier in the past, and it’s certainly something, if there’s an opening, we will pursue again,” Mr. Skyler said.
Arthur Cheliotes, president of a communications workers’ local representing 9,800 municipal employees, most of them middle managers, assailed the idea of a new pension tier.
“That’s the wrong solution,” he said. “Too many Americans don’t have enough to retire on as we’ve seen 401(k)’s turn into 101(k)’s. If we’re planning to attack pensions, then we need to look at this again.”
Charles Brecher, research director for the Citizens Budget Commission, a business-backed watchdog group, said that because of the stock market’s recent drop, the city would have to contribute far more to finance pensions for current employees. As a result, he said, the city should seek to create a less generous pension tier, which could save the city billions of dollars over the next decades.
“The mayor has put a 7 percent increase in property taxes on the table, and at some point, people might say, ‘You can’t call for more taxes without asking for some savings from the municipal work force,’ ” Mr. Brecher said.
Mr. Bloomberg’s cost-cutting moves have met little protest partly because the city’s unions are waiting for him to announce specific cuts and whether they will involve layoffs. Several union presidents said they were holding their fire because they have developed a good working relationship with the mayor.
“At this point I’m not worried about layoffs,” said Harry Nespoli, president of the Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association and the new chairman of the Municipal Labor Committee. “When the mayor says, ‘We’re not near layoffs,’ I have to believe him.”
Mr. Nespoli said he was reassured that the mayor seemed intent on cutting municipal services as little as possible to help keep New York an attractive and safe place.
Mr. Bloomberg’s relations with the city’s unions have improved since he stopped demanding that raises be financed by productivity-increasing concessions. Also helping keep the peace are the sizable contracts the city has signed with several unions that have rarely hesitated to attack Mr. Bloomberg, most notably the teachers’ union and the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the largest police union.
Joshua B. Freeman, a labor historian at the City University of New York, said, “Settlements averaging raises of 4 percent a year without any significant givebacks means that, at least for the moment, things have quieted down without any flashpoints.”
While union officials say the 4 percent raises make sense, considering that fuel and food prices have soared, some budget experts, like Ronnie Lowenstein, director of the Independent Budget Office, warns that the 4 percent raises on top of fast-rising health care and pension costs could strain the city’s budget.
At the moment, city officials are bargaining intensely with several important unions, including the Uniformed Firefighters Association and District Council 37, the city’s largest public employee union. That, union leaders acknowledge, has discouraged them from protesting any feared budget cuts.
“We’re always concerned about budget cuts because we’re the people who deliver the services to the community,” said Lillian Roberts, executive director of District Council 37, which represents about 120,000 city workers.
“But when you’re negotiating a contract, you don’t get into picking a fight.”
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6) Fed Announces Plan to Buy Short-Term Debt
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS and MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
October 8, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/business/08fed.html?pagewanted=2&ref=business
WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve announced a radical new plan on Tuesday to jump-start the engine of the financial system.
The Fed said in a statement that it would begin to buy large amounts of short-term debt in an effort to stimulate the credit markets, which have all but dried up.
Under the program, the Fed said that it would buy the unsecured short-term debt that companies rely on to finance their day-to-day activities. “This facility should encourage investors to once again engage in term lending in the commercial paper market,” the Fed said Tuesday in a statement. “An improved commercial paper market will enhance the ability of financial intermediaries to accommodate the credit needs of businesses and households.”
While the move will put more taxpayer dollars at risk, it underscores the growing sense of urgency felt by policy makers in a climate where lending has virtually dried up. The Commercial Paper Funding Facility, “will complement the Federal Reserve’s existing credit facilities to help provide liquidity to term funding markets,” the Fed statement said.
The Fed said it was creating a new entity to buy three-month unsecured and asset-backed commercial paper directly from eligible companies. It hopes to have the program running soon.
Also on Tuesday, European Union finance ministers gathered in Luxembourg to seek common ground to buttress the continent’s banking system in the face of the financial crisis. Despite proposals from France and Italy, the European Union has eschewed any common fiscal approach to the crisis, mainly because Germany refuses to be drawn into a scheme for fear of being burdened with the costs of rescuing non-German banks.
The finance ministers more than doubled the minimum level of guarantees for bank deposits in member countries, to 50,000 euros ($68,000), on Tuesday as they battled to shield the continent’s banks from turmoil and build a measure of confidence in its battered financial system.
The Fed’s plan to buy commercial paper was formulated amid cascading losses in global stock markets, as the banking crisis spread across Europe and investors feared dire consequences for the world economy. The Dow Jones industrial average fell as much as 800 points before a late recovery, finishing down 369.88, below 10,000 points for the first time since 2004.
Even before bankers on Wall Street reached their desks on Monday, European stocks were plunging. The Russian stock market dropped 19.1 percent, the biggest decline since the fall of the Soviet Union. Major indexes in London and Frankfurt lost more than 7 percent; stocks in Paris fell by 9 percent. Stocks in Latin America and other emerging economies took their worst collective tumble in a decade.
Volatility reached the highest level in two decades, and oil prices fell below $90 for the first time since February.
The contagion moved to Asian with the Nikkei index of Japanese stocks closing down 3 percent and the Hang Seng index of stocks in Hong Kong fell 4.9 percent. But shares rebounded Tuesday morning in Europe, with the FTSE up 1.2 percent in London, the CAC 40 was up 1.7 percent in Paris and the DAX in Frankfurt was slightly higher.
Investors around the world are worried about what the evaporation of credit will do to an already-weakened global economy.
“There is a growing recognition that not only has the credit crunch refused to be contained, it continues to spread,” said Ed Yardeni, an investment strategist. “It’s gone truly global.”
In the United States, consumers appear to be significantly curbing spending; last month, employers cut more jobs than any month in five years. The $6 decline in oil prices, which settled at $87.81 a barrel, stemmed in part from fears that demand will slacken in the face of a deteriorating economy.
The Fed plan is intended to renew the flow of credit on which the economy depends. Under its plan, the central bank would buy unsecured commercial paper, essentially short-term i.o.u.’s issued by banks, businesses and municipalities.
The market for that kind of debt has all but shut down in the last week, with many major corporations unable to borrow for longer than a day at a time, as banks become more fearful of giving out cash. The volume of such debt totaled about $1.6 trillion as of Oct. 1, down 11 percent from three weeks earlier.
These credit fears persisted over the weekend despite the $700 billion bailout package that Congress approved last week.
The cost of borrowing from banks and corporations remained high on Monday, increased in part by a series of high-profile bank bailouts in Europe, where governments scrambled to save several major lenders from collapse.
The United States government appears to be pressing ahead with other radical efforts to shore up the financial system, even wading into corners of the markets where it has rarely interfered.
Buying commercial paper could open the Fed to difficult conflicts of interest, because it would be juggling the goals of protecting its investment portfolio with its traditional goals of promoting stable prices and low unemployment.
“The Federal Reserve really would become the buyer of last resort, trying to jump-start the commercial paper market by taking on credit risk,” said Vincent Reinhart, a former top Fed official who worked under Alan Greenspan, a former Fed chairman, and Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman now.
The Federal Reserve has already stretched its resources to the limit by providing hundreds of billions of dollars in short-term loans to banks, Wall Street firms and money market funds.
On Monday, the Fed announced that it would once again redouble one of its key emergency lending programs, increasing the size of its Term Auction Facility to $600 billion, from $300 billion. On top of that, the central bank plans to provide an additional $300 billion to banks to meet their end-of-the-year cash needs.
Most of the loans are for 28 days and 84 days, the Fed said. Some are shorter — 13-day and 17-day loans. Aside from Monday’s auction, auctions for 28-day and 84-day loans are planned Oct. 20, Nov. 3, Nov. 17, Dec. 1, Dec. 15 and Dec. 29. Auctions for the shorter loans will be Nov. 10 and Nov. 24.
To pay for its burgeoning responsibilities, the Fed has no choice but to keep printing more money. To prevent that flood of new money from reducing the central bank’s overnight interest rate to zero, the Fed also announced on Monday that it would start paying interest on the excess reserves that banks keep on deposit at the Fed.
Paying interest on reserves allows the central bank to set a floor on interest rates and retain at least some control over monetary policy.
In its announcement on Monday, the Fed said it would pay an interest rate of 1.25 percent —three-quarters of a point below its target of 2 percent for the overnight Federal funds rate.
But the possibility of propping up the vast market for commercial paper could represent an undertaking even broader than the Treasury Department’s plan to buy as much as $700 billion in mortgage-backed securities.
In statements on Monday morning, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury said they were “consulting with market participants on ways to provide additional support for term unsecured funding markets.”
By referring to “unsecured funding markets,” policy makers signaled that they wanted to intervene directly in the credit markets. Officials said on Monday evening that they wanted to finish a plan as quickly as possible, perhaps as early as Tuesday.
But the effort is fraught with legal complexities. Though the Federal Reserve has sweeping power to create money and lend it out, experts said it was normally prohibited from buying assets that could lose money.
One way around that legal limitation would be to provide money to a separate legal entity that would do the buying and investing on the Fed’s behalf. That would be similar to Maiden Lane Funding L.L.C., a special-purpose entity that officials created last spring to hold $29 billion in hard-to-sell securities from Bear Stearns.
But so far, the myriad efforts by government regulators to shore up confidence have seemed to yield little relief among investors, some of whom believed the actions have taken on a haphazard air.
“People are slowly but surely coming to the realization that playing ‘Whack-a-Mole’ with each of these issues as they arise, on an ad hoc basis, doesn’t get the job done,” said Max Bublitz, chief strategist at SCM Advisors, an investment firm in San Francisco.
On Wall Street, Monday was a frightening day for investors — the type of day where a 369-point deficit in the Dow is considered a relief.
A broad sell-off began at the opening bell and intensified throughout the morning. After 2 p.m., the Dow was down a hair over 800 points, worse than the 777-point drop one week earlier.
But around 2:30, investors began to hunt for bargains, sending the Dow briefly back above the 10,000 mark, before finishing the day at 9,955.50. The broader stock market closed down 3.9 percent, as measured by the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. Shares of financial firms, manufacturing outfits and industrial companies all fell sharply. The Dow has lost 1,187 points, about 10.7 percent, and the S. & P. almost 13 percent in a week.
The sharp slide on Monday came despite assurances from President Bush that it would “take a while to restore confidence to the financial system.”
“We don’t want to rush into this situation and have the program not be effective.”
Following are the results of Monday’s Treasury auction of 72-day cash management bills and three-month and six-month bills.
Mr. Andrews reported from Washington and Mr. Grynbaum from New York. Vikas Bajaj contributed reporting.
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7) Are Bad Times Healthy?
By TARA PARKER-POPE
[Leave it to the NYT to have an article questioning whether poverty and unemployment is actually healthier for children than "good times."...bw]
October 7, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/health/07well.html?ref=health
Most people are worried about the health of the economy. But does the economy also affect your health?
It does, but not always in ways you might expect. The data on how an economic downturn influences an individual’s health are surprisingly mixed.
It’s clear that long-term economic gains lead to improvements in a population’s overall health, in developing and industrialized societies alike.
But whether the current economic slump will take a toll on your own health depends, in part, on your health habits when times are good. And economic studies suggest that people tend not to take care of themselves in boom times — drinking too much (especially before driving), dining on fat-laden restaurant meals and skipping exercise and doctors’ appointments because of work-related time commitments.
“The value of time is higher during good economic times,” said Grant Miller, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford. “So people work more and do less of the things that are good for them, like cooking at home and exercising; and people experience more stress due to the rigors of hard work during booms.”
Similar patterns have been seen in some developing nations. Dr. Miller, who is studying the effects of fluctuating coffee prices on health in Colombia, says that even though falling prices are bad for the economy, they appear to improve health and mortality rates. When prices are low, laborers have more time to care for their children.
“When coffee prices suddenly rise, people work harder on their coffee plots and spend less time doing things around the home, including things that are good for their children,” he said. “Because the things that matter most for infant and child health in rural Colombia aren’t expensive, but require a substantial amount of time — such as breast-feeding, bringing clean water from far away, taking your child to a distant health clinic for free vaccinations — infant and child mortality rates rise.”
In this country, a similar effect appeared in the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression, according to a 2007 paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The data seem to contradict research in the 1970s suggesting that in hard times there are more deaths from heart disease, cirrhosis, suicide and homicide, as well as more admissions to mental hospitals. But those findings have not been replicated, and several economists have pointed out flaws in the research.
In May 2000, the Quarterly Journal of Economics published a surprising paper called “Are Recessions Good for Your Health?” by Christopher J. Ruhm, professor of economics at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, based on an analysis measuring death rates and health behavior against economic shifts and jobless rates from 1972 to 1991.
Dr. Ruhm found that death rates declined sharply in the 1974 and 1982 recessions, and increased in the economic recovery of the 1980s. An increase of one percentage point in state unemployment rates correlated with a 0.5 percentage point decline in the death rate — or about 5 fewer deaths per 100,000 people. Over all, the death rate fell by more than 8 percent in the 20-year period of mostly economic decline, led by drops in heart disease and car crashes.
The economic downturn did appear to take a toll on factors having less to do with prevention and more to do with mental well-being and access to health care. For instance, cancer deaths rose 23 percent, and deaths from flu and pneumonia increased slightly. Suicides rose 2 percent, homicides 12 percent.
The issue that may matter most in an economic crisis is not related to jobs or income, but whether the slump widens the gap between rich and poor, and whether there is an adequate health safety net available to those who have lost their jobs and insurance.
During a decade of economic recession in Japan that began in the 1990s, people who were unemployed were twice as likely to be in poor health than those with secure jobs. During Peru’s severe economic crisis in the 1980s, infant mortality jumped 2.5 percentage points — about 17,000 more children who died as public health spending and social programs collapsed.
In August, researchers from the Free University of Amsterdam looked at health studies of twins in Denmark. They found that individuals born in a recession were at higher risk for heart problems later in life and lived, on average, 15 months less than those born under better conditions.
Gerard J. van den Berg, an economics professor who was a co-author of the study, said babies in poor households suffered the most in a recession, because their families lacked access to good health care. Poor economic conditions can also cause stress that may interfere with parent bonding and childhood development, he said.
He noted that other studies had found that recessions can benefit babies by giving their parents more time at home.
“This scenario may be relevant for well-to-do families where one of the parents loses a job and the other still brings in enough money,” he said. “But in a crisis where the family may have to incur huge housing-cost losses and the household income is insufficient for adequate nutrition and health care, the adverse effects of being born in a recession seem much more relevant.”
In this country, there are already signs of the economy’s effect on health. In May, the market research firm Information Resources reported that 53 percent of consumers said they were cooking from scratch more than they did just six months before — in part, no doubt, because of the rising cost of prepared foods. At the same time, health insurance costs are rising. With premiums and co-payments, the average employee with insurance pays nearly one-third of medical costs — about twice as much as four years ago, according to Paul H. Keckley, executive director of the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions.
In the United States, which unlike other industrialized nations lacks a national health plan, the looming recession may take a greater toll. About 46 million Americans lack health insurance, Dr. Keckley says, and even among the 179 million who have it, an estimated 1 in 7 would be bankrupted by a single health crisis.
The economic downturn “is not good news for the health care industry,” he said. “There may be slivers of positive, but I view this as sobering.”
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8) Global Fears of a Recession Grow
By MARK LANDLER
October 7, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/business/worldbusiness/07global.html?hp
WASHINGTON — When the White House brought out its $700 billion rescue plan two weeks ago, its sheer size was meant to soothe the global financial system, restoring trust and confidence. Three days after the plan was approved, it looks like a pebble tossed into a churning sea.
The crisis that began as a made-in-America subprime lending problem and radiated across the world is now circling back home, where it pummeled stock and credit markets on Monday.
While the Bush administration’s bailout package offers help to foreign banks, it seems to have done little to reassure investors, particularly in Europe, where banks are failing and countries are racing to stave off panicky withdrawals after first playing down the depth of the crisis.
Far from being the cure for the world’s ills, economists said, the rescue plan might end up being a stopgap for the United States alone. With Europe showing few signs of developing a coordinated response to the crisis, there is very little on the horizon to calm rattled investors.
The vertiginous drop in stock markets on both sides of the Atlantic on Monday reflected not only those fears, experts said, but also a growing belief that the crisis could tip the world into a global recession.
Indeed, the ripple effects from Europe and the United States were amplified as they spread to stock markets in Russia, Brazil, Indonesia and the Middle East.
These countries had little to do with the subprime crisis but were vulnerable to a sudden halt in the flow of money. They lack even the veneer of national or regional cooperation that protects Europe and the United States. Stock markets in emerging economies recorded their worst one-day decline in 21 years on Monday, with trading in Russia and Brazil halted to stem an investor panic.
“It looks pretty ugly down the road,” said Simon Johnson, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund who specializes in financial crises. “Everybody is going to get caught up in this.”
The global nature of the crisis and its growing collateral damage ought to galvanize countries to work together to fashion a concerted response, Mr. Johnson said. There is a chance to do that this week, with dozens of finance ministers and central bankers converging on Washington for the annual meetings of the I.M.F. and the World Bank.
The trouble is, these institutions no longer have the resources or authority to lead such an effort. The I.M.F., which played a central role in the Asian crisis, has been relegated to the sidelines this time — its credibility tarnished by that episode and its skills ill-suited to a crisis in advanced economies. These days, it mainly issues lonely warnings about the impact on developing countries.
The Group of 7, which once functioned as a sort of command center for the global economy, is similarly depleted, according to critics. It no longer represents the world’s economic drivers, they said, and badly needs to be expanded to include rising powers like China and India.
“The globalization of the crisis means we need a globalization of responses,” said C. Fred Bergsten, the director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “But most of the responses will be national. For all the institutions we have, we don’t have the right institutions to do this.”
That is particularly true in Europe, which has an effective central bank but lacks a unified legislature or treasury to coordinate or finance a rescue of the banking system. So far, economists say, Europe’s response to the crisis in its banks has been mostly marked by denial and dissension.
From London to Berlin, governments are clinging to a piecemeal approach. The British and the Germans have resisted a broader solution, because they fear they will end up rescuing their neighbors.
A weekend meeting of European leaders in Paris, called by President Nicolas Sarkozy, ended with a pledge that Europe would not countenance a bank failure like that of Lehman Brothers, but little else.
Part of the problem, experts said, is the nature of this crisis: bailouts of banks are costly and unpopular with taxpayers — even more so, as in Europe, where burden sharing is a perennial sore point.
“Taxpayers won’t agree to bail out the banking system of other countries,” said Thomas Mayer, the chief European economist at Deutsche Bank in London. “Not even in Europe, where you have a neutral framework, could you get people to cooperate on a joint effort.”
As the problems in Europe have worsened, the crisis has taken on an “every country for itself” quality. When Ireland placed a guarantee on all bank deposits and debt last week, it angered neighbors, who feared capital would flee their banks to the safer haven of Dublin. Now, Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Austria have all pledged to guarantee deposits.
“If you do this one by one, it destabilizes people’s deposits in other countries,” Mr. Johnson said. “It’s mind-boggling that the Europeans have coordinated so little up until this point.”
With Europe and the United States deep in crisis, economists said, the rest of the world could not help but suffer. Robert B. Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, warned that the crisis could be a “tipping point” for the developing world.
“A drop in exports, as well as capital inflow, will trigger a falloff in investments,” Mr. Zoellick said in a speech on Monday. “Deceleration of growth and deteriorating financial conditions, combined with monetary tightening, will trigger business failures and possibly banking emergencies.”
The immediate danger, economists say, are countries in Eastern and Central Europe, like Bulgaria and Estonia, which run steep trade deficits and are vulnerable to a sudden flight of foreign capital.
Iceland, with an overheated economy and suffocating foreign debt, may prove to be the first national casualty of the crisis. On Monday, threatened by a wholesale financial collapse, the government in Reykjavik assumed sweeping powers to intervene in its banking industry.
“We were faced with the real possibility that the national economy would be sucked into the global banking swell and end in national bankruptcy,” Prime Minister Geir H. Haarde said on Monday.
But with global growth slowing sharply, the problems could spread to larger emerging markets, even China, which has a hefty current account surplus and immense foreign reserves.
“Where is China going to sell its exports?” Mr. Johnson of M.I.T. said. “Everyone is going into recession at the same time.”
This week, the focus will be on the Group of 7, whose finance ministers and central bankers are scheduled to meet on Friday at the Treasury Department. The group issued a perfunctory statement of support for the United States, after the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., briefed members about the rescue plan in a conference call two weeks ago.
But European finance ministers, notably Peer Steinbrück of Germany, noted that the crisis began in the United States, and played down the need for a systemic European response.
Mr. Zoellick, in his speech, said flatly that the Group of 7 “is not working.” He advocates expanding the group — which includes the United States, Canada, Britain, Italy, France, Germany and Japan — to include emerging economies like Brazil, China, India and Saudi Arabia.
The urgency of the moment, experts said, demands a bolder response from the Group of 7. Mr. Bergsten said the group should commit to a coordinated stimulus plan to stave off a recession.
“Just as the U.S. rescue plan may not be enough,” he said, “a U.S. stimulus plan by itself will not be enough.”
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9) 30 Civilians Died in Afghan Raid, U.S. Inquiry Finds
By ERIC SCHMITT
"An investigation by the military has concluded that American airstrikes on Aug. 22 in a village in western Afghanistan killed far more civilians than American commanders there have acknowledged, according to two American military officials."
October 8, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/washington/08inquiry.html?hp
WASHINGTON — An investigation by the military has concluded that American airstrikes on Aug. 22 in a village in western Afghanistan killed far more civilians than American commanders there have acknowledged, according to two American military officials.
The military investigator’s report found that more than 30 civilians — not 5 to 7 as the military has long insisted — died in the airstrikes against a suspected Taliban compound in Azizabad.
The investigator, Brig. Gen. Michael W. Callan of the Air Force, concluded that many more civilians, including women and children, had been buried in the rubble than the military had asserted, one of the military officials said.
The airstrikes have been the focus of sharp tensions between the Afghan government, which has said that 90 civilians died in the raid, and the American military, under Gen. David D. McKiernan, the top American military commander in Afghanistan, which has repeatedly insisted that only a handful of civilians were killed.
The report was requested by General McKiernan on Sept. 7, more than two weeks after the airstrikes, in response to what he said at the time was “emerging evidence” about the raids. While American commanders in Afghanistan have contended that 30 to 35 militants were killed in the raid, the new report concludes that many among that group were in fact civilians, the military officials said.
According to the new report, fewer than 20 militants died in the raid, which was conducted jointly by American and Afghan forces, and in subsequent airstrikes carried out by an AC-130 gunship in support of the allied ground forces.
The revised American estimate for civilian deaths in the operation remains far below the 90 that Afghan and United Nations officials have claimed, a figure that the Afghan government and the United Nations said was supported by cellphone photos, freshly dug grave sites and the accounts of witnesses who saw the dead bodies.
But General Callan’s findings ran counter to those of the earlier American investigations. American Special Operations forces conducted an initial battlefield review, including a building by building search, and four days later, military investigators traveled to the vicinity of the raid. General Callan found that the people who conducted those investigations did not or could not do what was necessary to establish the full extent of the civilian killings, the military officials said.
In contrast, military officials said, General Callan was able to review the scene of the airstrikes more extensively. They said his team interviewed villagers, which the other military units had not done before, and examined new evidence, like cellphone videos and other images showing the bodies of women and children that were not available previously.
The report sticks to the military’s assertion that the compound was a legitimate target, a finding that is likely to rekindle tensions with the government of President Hamid Karzai. As a result of that finding, the report does not single out any individual for blame or recommend that any American troops be punished.
The report’s general findings were described by two American military officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the report has not yet been made public, and Afghan officials have not yet been briefed on the matter.
In recent days, both General McKiernan and Lt. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the acting commander of the military’s Central Command, who appointed General Callan on Sept. 9 to investigate the episode, have received briefings on the report’s findings.
The New York Times on Sept. 8 described freshly dug graves, lists of the dead, and cellphone videos and other images showing bodies of women and children in the village mosque seen on a visit to Azizabad. Cellphone images a Times reporter saw showed at least 11 dead children, some apparently with blast and concussion injuries, among some 30 to 40 bodies laid out in the mosque.
Afghan and United Nations officials backed this accounting of a higher civilian death toll, putting them in direct conflict with the American military’s version of events. In that account, American Special Forces troops and Afghan commandos called in airstrikes after they came under attack while approaching a compound in Azizabad, a village in the Shindand district of Herat Province. Among the militants killed, the military said at the time, was a Taliban leader, Mullah Sadiq.
By the next day, Afghan officials complained of significant civilian casualties and President Karzai strongly condemned the airstrikes. American military officials rejected the claim, saying that extremists who entered the village after the bombardment encouraged villagers to change their stories and inflate the number of dead.
The initial investigating officer, an Army Special Forces major, visited the village after the airstrikes. Guided by aerial photographs, he visited six burial sites within a six-mile range of the attack, a military spokesman said; only one had any freshly dug graves, about 18 to 20. Afghan villagers said there were other burial sites that the Americans did not visit.
One of the military officials who agreed to discuss the new report said the Special Forces troops who had called in the strikes could conduct only a limited assessment of the damage and casualties afterward because they were forced to leave the village soon after the strikes, fearing retaliation from the villagers.
“We were wrong on the number of civilian casualties partly because the initial review was operating under real limitations,” said one of the military officials, who said of the Special Forces soldiers, “They were definitely not welcome there.”
Even before he requested the more senior investigator, General McKiernan issued orders on Sept. 2 tightening the rules about when NATO troops in Afghanistan were authorized to use lethal force. The new rules emphasized putting Afghan forces out front in searches of homes and requiring multiple sources of information before attacking targets.
General McKiernan told reporters in Washington last week that one of his “top challenges” was “to try to make sure we have the right measures in place to minimize the possibility of civilian casualties.”
He said the American military was trying to work with the Afghan authorities to ensure that further allegations involving civilian casualties would be investigated jointly rather than separately.
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10) Md. Police Put Activists' Names On Terror Lists
Surveillance's Reach Revealed
By Lisa Rein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 8, 2008; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/07/AR2008100703245_pf.html
The Maryland State Police classified 53 nonviolent activists as terrorists and entered their names and personal information into state and federal databases that track terrorism suspects, the state police chief acknowledged yesterday.
Police Superintendent Terrence B. Sheridan revealed at a legislative hearing that the surveillance operation, which targeted opponents of the death penalty and the Iraq war, was far more extensive than was known when its existence was disclosed in July.
The department started sending letters of notification Saturday to the activists, inviting them to review their files before they are purged from the databases, Sheridan said.
"The names don't belong in there," he told the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee. "It's as simple as that."
The surveillance took place over 14 months in 2005 and 2006, under the administration of former governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R). The former state police superintendent who authorized the operation, Thomas E. Hutchins, defended the program in testimony yesterday. Hutchins said the program was a bulwark against potential violence and called the activists "fringe people."
Sheridan said protest groups were also entered as terrorist organizations in the databases, but his staff has not identified which ones.
Stunned senators pressed Sheridan to apologize to the activists for the spying, assailed in an independent review last week as "overreaching" by law enforcement officials who were oblivious to their violation of the activists' rights of free expression and association. The letter, obtained by The Washington Post, does not apologize but admits that the state police have "no evidence whatsoever of any involvement in violent crime" by those classified as terrorists.
Hutchins told the committee it was not accurate to describe the program as spying. "I doubt anyone who has used that term has ever met a spy," he told the committee.
"What John Walker did is spying," Hutchins said, referring to John Walker Jr., a communications specialist for the U.S. Navy convicted of selling secrets to the Soviet Union. Hutchins said the intelligence agents, whose logs were obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland as part of a lawsuit, were monitoring "open public meetings." His officers sought a "situational awareness" of the potential for disruption as death penalty opponents prepared to protest the executions of two men on death row, Hutchins said.
"I don't believe the First Amendment is any guarantee to those who wish to disrupt the government," he said. Hutchins said he did not notify Ehrlich about the surveillance. Ehrlich spokesman Henry Fawell said the governor had no comment.
Hutchins did not name the commander in the Division of Homeland Security and Intelligence who informed him in March 2005 that the surveillance had begun. More than a year later, after "they said, 'We're not getting much here,' " Hutchins said he cut off what he called a "low-level operation."
But Sen. James Brochin (D-Baltimore County) noted that undercover troopers used aliases to infiltrate organizational meetings, rallies and group e-mail lists. He called the spying a "deliberate infiltration to find out every piece of information necessary" on groups such as the Maryland Campaign to End the Death Penalty and the Baltimore Pledge of Resistance. When Hutchins called their members "fringe people," the audience of activists who filled the seats in the hearing room in Annapolis sighed.
Some activists said yesterday that they have received letters; others said they were waiting with anticipation to see whether they were on the state police watch list.
Laura Lising of Catonsville, a member of the Baltimore Coalition Against the Death Penalty, received her notification yesterday. She said she wants a hard copy of her file, because she does not trust the police to purge it. "We need as much protection as possible," she said.
Both Hutchins and Sheridan said the activists' names were entered into the state police database as terrorists partly because the software offered limited options for classifying entries.
The police also entered the activists' names into the federal Washington-Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area database, which tracks suspected terrorists. One well-known antiwar activist from Baltimore, Max Obuszewski, was singled out in the intelligence logs released by the ACLU, which described a "primary crime" of "terrorism-anti-government" and a "secondary crime" of "terrorism-anti-war protesters."
Sheridan said that he did not think the names were circulated to other agencies in the federal system and that they are not on the federal government's terrorist watch list. Hutchins said some names might have been shared with the National Security Agency.
Although the independent report on the surveillance released last week said that it was part of a broad effort by the state police to gather information on protest groups across the state, Sheridan said the department is not aware of any surveillance as "intrusive" as the spying on death penalty and war opponents.
The police notified the protesters at the recommendation of former U.S. attorney and state attorney general Stephen H. Sachs, who was appointed by Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) to review the covert monitoring. In a report last week, Sachs also recommended regulations that forbid such spying on protest groups unless the state police chief believes it is justified.
"I can't imagine getting a letter that says, 'You've been classified as a terrorist; come in and we'll tell about it,'" said Sen. Bryan W. Simonaire (R-Anne Arundel). Two senators noted that they had been arrested years ago for civil disobedience. Sen. Jennie Forehand (D-Montgomery) asked Sheridan, "Do you have any legislators on your list?" The answer was no.
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11) Economic Scene
Ignoring Reality Has a Price
By DAVID LEONHARDT
WASHINGTON
October 8, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/business/economy/08leonhardt.html?hp
Thirty billion dollars to keep Bear Stearns from collapsing. Another $85 billion for A.I.G. Hundreds of billions, here and there, lent to banks.
All told, the Federal Reserve has pumped $800 billion into the financial system, Ben Bernanke, its chairman, estimated on Tuesday. That figure doesn’t include the untold sum that the Fed now plans to spend buying short-term debt so that companies can continue to pay for their daily operations. And it doesn’t include any of the money the Treasury Department is laying out, like the $700 billion bailout fund or the $200 billion that could be spent propping up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
After 14 months of crisis, the federal government — meaning you and me — has put serious money on the line. As a point of comparison, the entire annual federal budget is about $3 trillion.
Just how are we going to pay for all this?
The short answer is that the budget problems the country seemed to have a year ago are now even worse. Next year’s deficit (relative to the economy’s size) will probably be the biggest since 1992, and maybe since 1983. Taxes will have to rise or government spending will have to fall, if not both. Trying to contain the mess created by a bubble no doubt costs serious money.
Yet this is also a case in which the short answer isn’t the full answer, or even the best answer.
As expensive as the damage control may be, it isn’t likely to cost near as much as the headline numbers suggest. More to the point, the alternative — not spending some serious money to deal with the crisis — would probably end up costing a lot more. As it is, the various bailouts are not the main reason next year’s deficit is growing. The deteriorating state of the economy is.
So if you want to conjure up some doomsday stories about the federal budget, I’m happy to play along (and will do so momentarily). But those stories aren’t mainly about the credit crisis. They’re about the dangers of ignoring economic realities — which, when you think about it, is how we ended up in this credit crisis in the first place.
The most newsworthy part of Mr. Bernanke’s lunchtime speech on Tuesday was his sober overview of the economy. He called the financial crisis “a problem of historic dimensions” and indicated that the Fed would soon cut its benchmark interest rate once again.
But the bulk of the speech was a catalog of the extraordinary steps that the Fed and Treasury had taken since August and the delicate line they had tried to walk along the way. They have lent enormous amounts of money to banks and trumpeted those efforts to try to restore some confidence to the credit markets. Fed officials have pointed out that they are nowhere close to being out of bullets either. They work for the central bank, after all. They can always print money.
But Mr. Bernanke and the Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, have also emphasized that they’re not being too generous. They are mainly making loans and investments, and they expect to recoup much of the money they’re spreading around.
Outside the government, economists differ about whether Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Paulson have been too aggressive or not aggressive enough and whether they have been aggressive in the right ways. But there is not much concern that they are taking on additional debt — or even about the amount of it.
“The policy actions are not likely to have a large effect on the budget over the next five or 10 years,” Douglas Elmendorf, who has become a go-to Democratic economist during the crisis, told me. John Makin, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, added: “The last thing I’m worried about right now is additional government indebtedness. There really isn’t an alternative.”
Mr. Makin pointed out that during Japan’s long malaise, the government passed a stimulus package almost every year that was equal to more than 2 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (equivalent to about $400 billion in this country today). But interest rates in Japan remained low, a sign that economic weakness, not deficits, was still the problem.
That being said, today’s ever-expanding bailouts do create some dangers. You’ve probably heard the term moral hazard, which is shorthand for the idea that government rescues may lead investors to take new, unwise risks — and ultimately require yet more rescues.
The Fed is also setting itself up for tough decisions about when to end its various emergency programs. If it waits too long, it could leave so much money sloshing around the economy that inflation will take off. Fed officials have suggested they understand that they made precisely this mistake after the 2001 recession, when they kept interest rates low and added to the mania in the housing market.
Finally, there is the net cost of the bailouts, which may well be bigger than Mr. Bernanke has acknowledged. Under the new program announced Tuesday, the Fed will own the commercial paper* that serves as short-term loans for companies. If some of those companies go bankrupt, the Fed could suffer some losses.
The Treasury’s $700 billion bailout fund, meanwhile, is based on the premise that investors are collectively undervaluing assets and that the government can pay above current market prices without losing much money. “One has to be at least a bit skeptical,” the economist Greg Mankiw says, “about the idea that government policy makers gambling with other people’s money are better at judging the value of complex financial instruments than are private investors gambling with their own.”
After talking with budget analysts, I think it’s reasonable to assume that the bailouts will end up costing several hundred billion dollars, spread over several years. Perhaps $100 billion of that cost may come next year. Add in another $100 billion or so for the weakening economy — specifically the fall in tax revenue, increases in spending on social programs and the possibility of another stimulus package.
Even before the crisis, the Bush administration was set to bequeath a $550 billion deficit to its successor. Now, a better estimate appears to be $750 billion — or 5 percent of gross domestic product. The only years since the 1960s that the deficit has been nearly so large were the early 1990s (almost 4.5 percent of G.D.P.) and the mid-1980s (with a peak of 6 percent in 1983).
Obviously, next year’s deficit is a problem. And if you assume the credit crisis isn’t about to lift — which seems smart at this point — the ultimate cost of the bailouts could conceivably go higher. Whatever the final figure, it should still be put in some context.
Despite everything, the biggest fiscal problem remains, far and away, health care. Based on the rate that medical spending has been rising, the Congressional Budget Office forecasts that Medicare and Medicaid will take up 10 percent of G.D.P. within two decades, up from about 4 percent now. In today’s terms, that would be the equivalent of adding at least $900 billion to the deficit every single year, in perpetuity. It makes the cost of the bailouts look like a rounding error.
When it comes to health care, we have a situation that is blatantly unsustainable. With the right choices, we can prevent that. But so far, we instead seem to be hoping that the situation will magically resolve itself, which is a recipe for big problems and perhaps even a crisis.
Let’s see. That doesn’t sound familiar, does it?
E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com
* Commercial Paper:
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/commercial_paper/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier
According to the Federal Reserve, commercial paper "consists of short-term, promissary notes issued primarily by corporations. Maturities range up to 270 days but average about 30 days. Many companies use commercial paper to raise cash needed for current transactions, and many find it to be a lower-cost alternative to bank loans."
Because these companies (or banks and muncipalities, which also issue commercial paper) generally have excellent credit ratings, much of the paper is issued without collateral being pledged, and is regarded as being extremely safe, and therefore attractive to lenders.
Commercial paper is sometimes described as the lubricant that keeps modern economies moving, and the amount of commercial paper issued has increased rapidly in recent years.
But as the credit crisis took hold in 2007 and deepened in 2008, the commercial paper market began to dry up. In October 2008, he market for that kind of debt all but shut down, with many major corporations unable to borrow for longer than a day at a time, as banks become more fearful of giving out cash. The volume of such debt totaled about $1.6 trillion as of Oct. 1, down 11 percent from three weeks earlier.
In response, the Federal Reserve on Oct. 7 announced a radical plan to buy large amounts of the notes directly in the hope of restoring liquidity to the commercial paper market and thereby to the credit markets at large. The purchases, to be conducted through a newly created Commercial Paper Funding Facility, would put large amounts of taxpayer money at risk, but reflect the Fed's dire assessment of the threat to the economy.
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12) Judge Orders 17 Detainees at Guantánamo Freed
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
October 8, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/washington/08detain.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Bush administration to release 17 detainees at Guantánamo Bay by the end of the week, the first such ruling in nearly seven years of legal disputes over the administration’s detention policies.
The judge, Ricardo M. Urbina of Federal District Court, ordered that the 17 men be brought to his courtroom on Friday from the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where they have been held since 2002. He indicated that he would release the men, members of the restive Uighur Muslim minority in western China, into the care of supporters in the United States, initially in the Washington area.
“I think the moment has arrived for the court to shine the light of constitutionality on the reasons for detention,” Judge Urbina said.
Saying the men had never fought the United States and were not a security threat, he tersely rejected Bush administration claims that he lacked the power to order the men set free in the United States and government requests that he stay his order to permit an immediate appeal.
The ruling was a sharp setback for the administration, which has waged a long legal battle to defend its policies of detention at the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, arguing a broad executive power in waging war. Federal courts up to the Supreme Court have waded through detention questions and in several major cases the courts have rejected administration contentions.
The government recently conceded that it would no longer try to prove that the Uighurs were enemy combatants, the classification it uses to detain people at Guantánamo, where 255 men are now held. But it has fought efforts by lawyers for the men to have them released into the United States, saying the Uighurs admitted to receiving weapons training in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The White House press secretary, Dana Perino, said the administration was “deeply concerned by, and strongly disagrees with” the decision. She added that the ruling, “if allowed to stand, could be used as precedent for other detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, including sworn enemies of the United States suspected of planning the attacks of 9/11, who may also seek release into our country.”
Justice Department lawyers said they were filing an emergency application on Tuesday night for a stay from the federal appeals court in Washington.
Judge Urbina’s decision came in a habeas corpus lawsuit authorized by a landmark Supreme Court ruling in June that gave detainees the right to have federal judges review the reason for their detention. Speaking from the bench in a courtroom crowded with Uighur supporters of the detainees, Judge Urbina suggested that the government was seeking a stay as a tactic to keep the men imprisoned.
“All of this means more delay,” he said with evident impatience, “and delay is the name of the game up until this point.” The centuries-old doctrine of habeas corpus permits a judge to demand production of a prisoner, a power Judge Urbina sought to exercise with his order that the men be brought to him.
“I want to see the individuals,” he said.
The Uighurs have long been at the center of contentious legal cases because they said they were swept into detention in Afghanistan in 2001 by mistake. They said they were in Afghanistan to seek refuge from China, where the Uighurs, Turkic Muslims, often bridle at Han Chinese rule.
The Bush administration has fought the Uighurs in court for years, contending that their encampment in Afghanistan had ties to a Uighur terror group. Last summer, a federal appeals court ridiculed as inadequate the government’s secret evidence for holding one of the men. In the months since, the government has said that it would “serve no useful purpose” to continue to try to prove that any of these 17 men were enemy combatants.
Lawyers for the Uighurs said the men would be persecuted or killed if they were returned to China. The administration said that since transferring five Uighur detainees to Albania in 2006, it had been unable to persuade governments to accept the other 17. Diplomats say many governments fear reprisal by China, which considers Uighur separatist groups terrorists.
The administration insisted during arguments on Tuesday that the courts did not have the power to release the men into the United States.
Judge Urbina, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, underscored the significance of his ruling with repeated references to the constitutional separation of powers and the judiciary’s role.
He rejected Justice Department arguments as assertions of executive power to detain people indefinitely without court review. He said that “is not in keeping with our system of government.”
More than 40 Uighurs, a few in native dress that included sequined velvet caps, watched in anxious silence. Only when the judge rose to leave the bench did they break into applause.
“Truth will win at the end,” said Elfidar Iltebir, one of the Uighurs, who is a computer systems manager in Virginia. Some of the men and women had come to court to describe the rooms, in the Washington suburbs, that they would offer the 17 men.
The ruling set the stage for a confrontation between the courts and the administration. John C. O’Quinn, a deputy assistant attorney general, suggested that immigration or Department of Homeland Security officials might detain the men when they were taken to the Washington area. Mr. O’Quinn argued that only the executive branch of the government, not the courts, could decide about immigration.
Mr. O’Quinn said such detainees would have no legal status in the United States. “Normally,” he added, “the law would potentially require them to be taken into some sort of protective custody.”
Judge Urbina said such arrests would not be appropriate. But he did not specify what he might do if the men were seized after being released by the Pentagon.
“I do not expect these Uighurs will be molested by any member of the United States government,” Judge Urbina said sharply. “I’m a federal judge, and I’ve issued an order.”
The Uighurs’ lawyers, Americans who have worked on the cases for years, had come to court prepared to outline a complex plan for support from community and church groups in the Washington area and in Tallahassee, Fla., where some of the men might eventually be resettled.
But Judge Urbina did not call for the testimony, saying he would hold a hearing on that matter on Oct. 16, after the men would already be free. He said he would impose conditions on their release, including appearances before him every six months. Lawyers for the Uighurs were pleased with the ruling.
P. Sabin Willett argued the case on Tuesday. In a crowd in the well of the courtroom after the judge had left the bench, Mr. Willett said there had been so many defeats over the years that he was not sure what to say at the prospect of the first federal case that might bring freedom to men in Guantánamo.
“We’ve had so many hearings where we didn’t even get half a loaf, we got a little crumb,” he said. “I’m emotionally unprepared for this.”
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13) Britain Announces Huge Bank Bailout
By JULIA WERDIGIER
October 9, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/business/worldbusiness/09britain.html?ref=business
LONDON — Britain on Wednesday announced a rescue package for its beleaguered banks, which the prime minister described as more extensive than America’s bailout plan and which could leave the country’s top lenders partly owned by the government.
Britain’s government offered banks like Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays and HSBC Holdings up to £50 billion, or $87 billion, to shore up their capital in exchange for preference shares. It will also provide a guarantee of about £250 billion to help banks refinance debt and the Bank of England will double the amount it lends to banks under the special liquidity scheme to £200 billion.
“This is not a time for outdated thinking,” Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Wednesday. “We had to do more than just buy up assets.”
The package, mainly put together over the last 48 hours, was intended to restore confidence and trust in British banks that saw billions of pounds wiped off their market values. Its aim is to allow banks to again lend to each other and as a result to consumers and companies to try and prevent a dramatic downturn. Executives, investors and lawmakers welcomed the package as a first step to stabilize the banking system.
“Anything that’s at least trying to unblock the global credit markets has to be seen as a positive step,” said Guy de Blonay, a fund manager at New Star Asset Management in London. “It looks like it’s going to be slightly more effective than to have a bailout fund.”
British banks eligible under the rescue scheme must increase their capital ratios to be better equipped to cope with a possible further decline of the value of their assets, the government said. Most banks said they planned to adhere to the new requirement and welcomed the government intervention but stopped short of saying they will make use of the offer to exchange preferred shares for capital. HSBC said it “has no current plans to utilize the U.K. recapitalization initiative.”
Banks may be reluctant to use the program unless absolutely necessary to avoid government intervention, some analysts said. Prime Minister Brown said banks would continue to be run by their management and not the government but that the government will have to be “satisfied” with executive remuneration systems, dividend payments and the lending activities.
Mr. Brown said there would be “strings attached and conditions to be met” by the banks as the government expects taxpayers to be “rewarded for the support we provide.”
“This is not the American plan,” he said. “Our plan is to buy shares in the banks themselves and therefore we will have a stake in the banks. We are not simply giving money.”
With the plan, Prime Minister Brown hopes to avoid turning a decadelong British banking boom, which he helped to create as chancellor of the Exchequer, into a bust. Philip Isherwood, head of equity strategy at Dresdner Kleinwort in London, said the initiative was “sensible because it’s trying to deal with the capital side of things.”
“Banks needed more permanent capital,” Mr. Isherwood said. “You can’t run a big financial institution on overnight financing.”
Questions remained about how much capital each bank can get. The government did not offer details about how it will ensure taxpayers’ money can be recouped and some analysts raised concerns about creating an uneven playing field in Europe.
“Assuming the U.K. plan becomes the norm, European banks outside of the U.K. could be asked to raise between 70 billion euros and 130 billion euros in capital,” said Vasco Moreno, an analyst at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods in London. “European banks likely can’t raise these amounts from private investors in the current environment so governments would probably have to inject capital into these banks.”
Mr. Darling rejected criticism from some executives and business leaders that the government let British banking stocks collapse while it delayed in coming up with a rescue plan. Pointing toward the United States, where a plan was rushed in front of Congress, he said Britain preferred to consider its options.
“It takes time to get the thing right,” he said.
The announcement of the plan coincided with an emergency interest rate cut by the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England and three other central banks intended to ease pressure on the economy by lowering interest rates.
Shares in British banks, including Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays, fell early on Wednesday, reflecting the fear that a government capital injection would dilute existing shareholders, but they rebounded after the interest rate cuts.
The British initiative came as signs of European economic weakness deepened, and as Iceland, whose troubles are mounting from the global credit crisis, warned that it was working to avoid tumbling into all-out bankruptcy.
European leaders continued to clash over measures to ease the financial crisis. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany opposes paying into a joint European Union fund to rescue banks. In Spain, where a shakeout in the housing market has hit the banking industry hard, Prime Minister José Luis RodrÃguez Zapatero announced he would create a 30 billion euro fund to buy assets from the nation’s banks to try to grease the wheels of lending. The fund could be raised to 50 billion euros and will buy only healthy, not impaired, assets, he said, raising questions about how useful it would be for banks laden with subprime-tainted loans.
Iceland decided to take over two of the country’s largest banks and Germany, Ireland and Greece are among countries that promised to guarantee consumers’ deposits.
Landon Thomas Jr. contributed reporting from London and Carter Dougherty from Frankfurt.
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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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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
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