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SAVE RENT CONTROL! NO ON PROP. 98!
http://leftinsf.com/blog/index.php/archives/2492
[The catch is, that while it's true that the landlord can increase rents to whatever he or she wants once a property becomes vacant, the current rent-control law now ensures that the new tenants are still under rent-control for their, albeit higher, rent. Under the new law, there simply will be no rent control when the new tenant moves in so their much higher rent-rate can increase as much as the landlord chooses each year from then on!!! So, no more rent-control at all!!! Tricky, huh?...BW]
READ PROP. 98 AND PLEASE NOTE THAT IT READS:
"- Government may not set the price at which property owners sell or lease their property."
THIS MEANS NO MORE RENT CONTROL!
Read the whole thing at: http://yesprop98.com/read/?_adctlid=v%7Cwynx8c5jjesxsb%7Cwziq39twoqov52
"Proposition 98, the California Property Owner & Farmland Protection Act is simple -- it provides property rights protections for all. Right now, government has the right to take private property - our homes, family farms, mom-and-pop small businesses - to build a sports stadium, big-box chain store, or a hotel. Politically connected special interests use and abuse government's power of eminent domain to take and develop private property. The is what the initiative does:
- Private property may not be taken by eminent domain for private use under any circumstances (i.e. to build a shopping center, auto mall or industrial park).
- Property may be taken by eminent domain only for public use (i.e. freeway construction, parks, schools).
- Property may not be taken by government and used for the same purposes (i.e. residential housing cannot be used for government housing).
- Family farms and open space are protected from seizures by government for the purpose of selling the natural resources.
- If a public agency takes property under false pretenses, or abandons its plans, the property must be offered for sale to the original owner at the original price and the property tax would be assessed at the value of the property when it was originally condemned.
- If farmers or business owners are evicted by eminent domain, they would be entitled to compensation for temporary business losses, relocation expenses, business reestablishment costs and other reasonable expenses.
- Government may not set the price at which property owners sell or lease their property.
...SECTION 6. EFFECTIVE DATE
The provisions of this Act shall become effective on the day following the election ("effective date"); except that any statute, charter provision, ordinance, or regulation by a public agency enacted prior to January 1, 2007, that limits the price a rental property owner may charge a tenant to occupy a residential rental unit ("unit") or mobile home space ("space") may remain in effect as to such unit or space after the effective date for so long as, but only so long as, at least one of the tenants of such unit or space as of the effective date ("qualified tenant") continues to live in such unit or space as his or her principal place of residence. At such time as a unit or space no longer is used by any qualified tenant as his or her principal place of residence because, as to such unit or space, he or she has: (a) voluntarily vacated; (b) assigned, sublet, sold or transferred his or her tenancy rights either voluntarily or by court order; (c) abandoned; (d) died; or he or she has (e) been evicted pursuant to paragraph (2), (3), (4) or (5) of Section 1161 of the Code of Civil Procedure or Section 798.56 of the Civil Code as in effect on January 1, 2007; then, and in such event, the provisions of this Act shall be effective immediately as to such unit or space."
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Mike Prysner (Part 1 and Part 2 -- please watch both parts. Wow! This is powerful testimony. Thank you, Mike Prysner! ...bw)
Winter Soldier Testimonies
http://answer.pephost.org/site/News2?abbr=ANS_&page=NewsArticle&id=8795#video
or try:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iTdxBECos8
Winter Soldier Mike Prysner testimony, Pt1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i5ZUfpxnV0&feature=related
Winter Soldier Mike Prysner testimony Pt2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iTdxBECos8&feature=related
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Tent Cities, USA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnnOOo6tRs8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmeHiFZUWtE&NR=1
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The Paris Commune Told in Pictures
http://www.katardat.org/marxuniv/2002-COMPARIS/comparis-text/comparis-strip.html
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"What are they recruiting for?
Murder, rape, torture, war!"
JROTC MUST GO!
March with us to demand:
No Military in our Schools!
Wednesday, March 19, 5 P.M.
Civic Center, (Near Grove Street) San Francisco
Join with parents, teachers, students, and anti-war activists who demand that schools are for teaching about life skills, not military careers. Together we must demand that the San Francisco school board end JROTC at the end of this current school year, as they originally voted to do in 2006, but then, this year, caved in to Pentagon pressure and voted to extend JROTC for another year—reversing their original, well thought-out decision.
When in 2006, San Franciscans voted overwhelmingly to get the military out of our schools, the school board followed through with a strong resolution stating in part:
"The SFUSD (San Francisco Unified School District) has restricted the activities of military recruiters on our campuses...JROTC is a program wholly created and administrated by the United States Department of Defense, whose documents and memoranda clearly identify JROTC as an important recruiting arm; and...JROTC manifests the military's discrimination against LGBT people..."
It is legally and morally repugnant for the school district to continue to facilitate the military’s access to our students and become fixtures in our schools! As this illegal war in Iraq enters its 6th year, and a war with Iran looms ahead, JROTC must go NOW!
Contact JROTC Must Go!
(415) 575-5543
Bjrotcmustgo@gmail.com
THE NEXT MEETING OF JROTC MUST GO!
TUESDAY, APRIL 1, 7:00 P.M.
GLOBAL EXCHANGE
2017 Mission St (@ 16th), San Francisco
For more information on how you can become involved contact:
Bonnie Weinstein, (415) 824-8730
Nancy Macias, (415) 255-7296 ext. 229
NEW DANGER: ASSEMBLY BILL NUMBER 2429
California Assembly Bill Number 2429.
Bill Number 2429 was introduced by Assembly member Strickland on February 21, 2008 in the California Legislature. "This bill would require that a school district that prohibits JROTC programs from being established or conducting activities on its campus or campuses, or that prohibits or hinders its pupils from participating in an off-campus JROTC program, be prohibited from expending state funds on any extracurricular activity, as defined." For more information see
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/0708/bill/asm/ab_24012450/ab_2429_bill_20080221_introduced.pdf
ASSEMBLY BILL No. 2429
California legislature—2007–08 regular session
Introduced by Assembly Member Strickland
February 21, 2008
An act to add Article 5 (commencing with Section 52760) to Chapter
11 of Part 28 of Division 4 of Title 2 of the Education Code, relating
to extracurricular activities.
Legislative counsel’s digest
AB 2429, as introduced, Strickland. Extracurricular activities: Junior
Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) programs.
Existing law establishes the public school system in this state, and,
among other things, provides for the establishment of school districts
throughout the state and for their provision of instruction at the public
elementary and secondary schools they operate and maintain. Existing
law establishes a public school funding system that includes, among
other elements, the provision of funding to local educational agencies
through state apportionments, the proceeds of property taxes collected
at the local level, and other sources. Existing law authorizes public
schools to sponsor various extracurricular activities for their pupils.
This bill would require that a school or school district that prohibits
Junior Reserve Officers’Training Corps (JROTC) programs from being
established or conducting activities on its campus or campuses, or that
prohibits or hinders its pupils from participating in an off-campus
JROTC program, be prohibited from expending state funds on any
extracurricular activity, as defined.
Vote: majority. Appropriation: no. Fiscal committee: no.
State-mandated local program: no.
99
The people of the State of California do enact as follows:
1-17
SECTION 1. Article 5 (commencing with Section 52760) is
added to Chapter 11 of Part 28 of Division 4 of Title 2 of the
Education Code, to read:
Article 5. Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC)
Programs
52760. A school or school district that prohibits Junior Reserve
Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) programs from being
established or conducting activities on its campus or campuses, or
that prohibits or hinders its pupils from participating in an
off-campus JROTC program shall be prohibited from expending
state funds on any extracurricular activity. As used in this article,
“extracurricular activity” includes, but is not necessarily limited
to, cultural activities such as dramatic or musical performances,
field trips, and interscholastic sports events, and payments made
to school personnel who provide supervision for those activities.
O
99
— 2 — AB 2429
and
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/0708/bill/asm/ab_24012450/ab_2429_bill_20080225_status.html
Send a letter to the Board of Education
JROTC MUST GO!
Please expand upon or send the letter below to the members of the
San Francisco Board of Education declaring:
We/I demand that the San Francisco school board phase
out JROTC at the end of the current 2007-2008 school
year, as you voted to do in 2006.
The reasons for phasing out JROTC are laid out very
clearly in the 2006 resolution.
http://portal.sfusd.edu/data/board/pdf/memberreso/sanchez%20kelly%20sub%20motion%20jrotc%20to%20budget%2010%2018%2006.pdf
(see below)
"The SFUSD has restricted the activities of military
recruiters on our campuses...
"JROTC is a program wholly created and administrated
by the United States Department of Defense, whose
documents and memoranda clearly identify JROTC as an
important recruiting arm; and...
"JROTC manifests the military's discrimination against
LGBT people..."
Given the dangerous role that the U.S. military is
playing in the world today, and given the military's
ongoing discrimination against LGBT people, it would
be legally and morally repugnant for the school
district to continue to facilitate the military's
access to our students.
Send letters to: (please send copies to Bonnie Weinstein at giobon@comcast and Riva Enteen at riva187@yahoo.com
Mr. Norman Yee
YeeN1@sfusd.edu
Hydra Mendoza
MendozaH@sfusd.edu
Eric Mar, Esq.
mare@sfusd.edu
Kim-Shree Maufas
MaufasKS@sfusd.edu
Jane Kim
kimj7@sfusd.edu
Mark Sanchez
sanchezm5@sfusd.edu
Jill Wynn
wynnj@sfusd.edu
Substitute Motion , As Amended
Adopted by the Board of Education at its Regular Meeting of November 14, 2006.
Subject: Resolution No. 65-23A1
PHASING OUT THE JROTC PROGRAM
- Mark Sanchez and Dan Kelly
WHEREAS: The San Francisco Unified School District has banned educational partnerships with outside organizations that discriminate against any group based upon sexual orientation; and
WHEREAS: Civilian control of the military, and restriction of military involvement in civilian affairs is a fundamental characteristic of a healthy democracy; and
WHEREAS: The San Francisco Unified School District has restricted the activities of military recruiters on our campuses; and
WHEREAS: The San Francisco Unified School District has adopted violence prevention and conflict resolution strategies that promote non-violent behavior; and
WHEREAS: The San Francisco Unified School District requires that teachers of all academic courses be fully credentialed; and
WHEREAS: JROTC is a program wholly created and administrated by the United States Department of Defense, whose documents and memoranda clearly identify JROTC as an important recruiting arm; and
WHEREAS: No other potential employer or recruiter is given such a high profile, nor such extensive contact with students; and
WHEREAS: JROTC instructors are not certificated teachers, and may not even possess a college degree of any kind; and
WHEREAS: The San Francisco Unified School District share of JROTC salaries is provided from central budget, while regular PE teachers are charged against each school’s site-based budget; and
WHEREAS: JROTC manifests the military’s discrimination against LGBT people by offering non-LGBT students preferential enlistment options; and
WHEREAS: JROTC is one of the largest after school activities at some High Schools; and
WHEREAS: The Board of Education has received extensive testimony that JROTC promotes self-esteem, community service, and academic and leadership skills; and
WHEREAS: Many other student extra-curricular activities also develop self-esteem, academic and leadership skills, and a commitment to service; and
WHEREAS: The California Education Code permits, and some SFUSD schools allow, students to receive PE credit for sports participation, independent study, or other classes deemed equivalent.
Therefore Be It Resolved: The Board of Education finds that credentialing requirements for academic instructors and courses are not met by the JROTC, except where specifically allowable as a substitute for Physical Education; and
Be it Further Resolved: The Board of Education finds that JROTC programs on campus constitute a form of military recruitment and are in violation of our policy governing fair access for recruiters on campuses; and
Be it Further Resolved: The Board of Education finds that the JROTC program violates our anti discrimination policies with regard to LGBT students and adults; and
Be it Further Resolved: The Board of Education finds that the funding mechanism of the JROTC creates inequities between High Schools in SFUSD; and
Be it Further Resolved: The Board of Education finds that the JROTC is an inappropriate extension of the nation’s military into the civilian sphere; and
Be it Further Resolved: The Board of Education hereby begins a two-year phase out of all JROTC programs in the SFUSD resulting in no JROTC classes in the 2008-2009 school year and beyond; and
Be it Further Resolved: No new JROTC units or programs may be initiated at any SFUSD schools, effective immediately; and
Be it Further Resolved: That SFUSD staff shall not direct or require that students enroll in JROTC as an alternative to PE, or for any other reason; and
Be it Further Resolved: The Board of Education will grant PE credits for sports participation, independent study, and other courses deemed appropriate, and requests staff to provide guidelines for Board approval by the first meeting in January 2007; and
Be It Further Resolved: That the Board of Education calls for the creation of a special task force to develop alternative, creative, career driven programs with the elements of the existing JROTC program that students have indicated important to them, which then will provide students with a greater sense of purpose and respect for self and humankind; and
Be It Further Resolved: That any new programs being implemented beginning academic year 2007-08 are evaluated before the end of the school year to test student satisfaction.
11/14/06
Please Note:
Taken up by the Curriculum and Program Committee on August 23, 2006. Substitute motion accepted by general consent of the Committee. Substitute Motion forwarded to the Board with a positive recommendation from Committee, and to be taken up for action at the September 12, 2006 Regular Board Meeting by a vote of 2 ayes (Mar and Kelly), and 1 nay (Lipson).
Taken up by the Budget and Business Services Committee on 10/18/06. Substitute motion, as amended, forwarded to the Board with a positive recommendation (2 ayes, l nay (Wynns) ). The Budget and Business Services Committee recommends to the Board that the intention of the original motion to develop an alternative program be addressed.
Substitute motion amended and adopted on 11/14/06.
JROTC FACT SHEET
On November 14, 2006 the San Francisco Board of Education approved phasing out JROTC in the schools over two years [see 65-23A1 - Phasing Out The JROTC Program at www.sfusd.gov]. The current Board has delayed implementation. The State Superintendent of Education Jack O’Connell is entertaining an exemption from State law, which will allow JROTC to continue to count as Physical Education credit.
Myth: JROTC doesn’t recruit, it teaches citizenship and leadership.
Fact: Between 35 - 50% of JROTC students who spend three or more years in the program join the military.
Myth: JROTC does not cost the district monies.
Fact: JROTC costs SFUSD almost $ 1 million per year in S.F. taxpayers’ monies. All taxpayers kick in another $750,000 each year through the Department of Defense subsidy. And this $1.75 million goes to a handful of high schools with JROTC programs, causing a funding inequity in the District.
Myth: JROTC doesn’t discriminate; LGBT students participate in JROTC programs.
Fact: There are three tangible benefits for JROTC participation which are denied LGBT graduates of JROTC: (1) enlistment at a higher grade of E2 or E3, meaning greater pay: (2) eligibility for ROTC scholarships and ROTC credit; and (3) eligibility for nominations to the military academies. It is against the law for openly LGBT high school graduates to serve in the US military. And SFUSD is discriminating in hiring staff instructors since they are retired commissioned or non-commissioned officer (i.e., lasted 20 years before being separated from the military), none of whom could have been openly LGBT people. That is discrimination.
Myth: The military provides educational opportunities and job skills that students need.
Fact: Only 12% of male veterans and 6% of female veterans use skills learned in the military in their current jobs. Soldiers must make a $1,200 non-refundable deposit to be eligible for G.I. Bill money starting the first year of service. From 1986 – 93 the military took in $720 million more from G.I.s in non-refundable deposits than it paid out in college benefits. Only 15% of those who pay into the G.I. Bill graduate with four-year degrees.
LET THEM KNOW JROTC MUST GO!
Mr. Norman Yee
YeeN1@sfusd.edu
Hydra Mendoza
MendozaH@sfusd.edu
Eric Mar, Esq.
mare@sfusd.edu
Kim-Shree Maufas
MaufasKS@sfusd.edu
Jane Kim
kimj7@sfusd.edu
Mark Sanchez
sanchezm5@sfusd.edu
Jill Wynn
wynnj@sfusd.edu
(916) 319-0800
JROTC Must Go! - (415) 575-5543 - jrotcmustgo@gmail.com
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Call for an Open U.S. National Antiwar Conference
Stop the War in Iraq! Bring the Troops Home Now!
ORGANIZING MEETING:
SATURDAY, APRIL 19, 11 A.M. - 2 P.M.
474 VALENCIA STREET,
SAN FRANCISCO, NEAR 16TH STREET
Join us in Cleveland on June 28-29 for the conference.
Crown Plaza Hotel
Sponsored by the National Assembly to End the Iraq War and Occupation
P.O. Box 21008; Cleveland, OH 44121; Voice Mail: 216-736-4704; Email: NatAssembly@aol.com
http://natassembly.org/thecall/
List of Endorsers (below call):
http://natassembly.org/thecall/
Endorse the conference:
http://natassembly.org/endorse/
THE PURPOSE OF THE CONFERENCE:
2008 has ushered in the fifth year of the war against Iraq and an occupation "without end" of that beleaguered country. Unfortunately, the tremendous opposition in the U.S. to the war and occupation has not yet been fully reflected in united mass action.
The anniversary of the invasion has been marked in the U.S. by Iraq Veterans Against the War's (IVAW's) Winter Soldier hearings March 13-16, in Washington, DC, providing a forum for those who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan to expose the horrors perpetrated by the U.S. wars. A nonviolent civil disobedience action against the war in Iraq was also called for March 19 in Washington and local actions around the country were slated during that month as well.
These actions help to give voice and visibility to the deeply held antiwar sentiment of this country's majority. Yet what is also urgently needed is a massive national mobilization sponsored by a united antiwar movement capable of bringing hundreds of thousands into the streets to demand "Out Now!"
Such a mobilization, in our opinion, commemorating the fifth anniversary of the war -- and held on a day agreeable to the IVAW -- could have greatly enhanced all the other activities which were part of that commemoration in the U.S. Indeed, a call was issued in London by the World Against War Conference on December 1, 2007 where 1,200 delegates from 43 nations, including Iraq, voted unanimously to call on antiwar movements in every country to mobilize mass protests against the war during the week of March 15-22 to demand that foreign troops be withdrawn immediately.
The absence of a massive united mobilization during this period in the United States -- the nation whose weapons of terrifying mass destruction have rained death and devastation on the Iraqi people -- when the whole world will mobilize in the most massive protests possible to mark this fifth year of war, should be a cause of great concern to us all.
For Mass Action to Stop the War: The independent and united mobilization of the antiwar majority in massive peaceful demonstrations in the streets against the war in Iraq is a critical element in forcing the U.S. government to immediately withdraw all U.S. military forces from that country, close all military bases, and recognize the right of the Iraqi people to determine their own destiny.
Mass actions aimed at visibly and powerfully demonstrating the will of the majority to stop the war now would dramatically show the world that despite the staunch opposition to this demand by the U.S. government, the struggle by the American people to end the slaughter goes on. And that struggle will continue until the last of the troops are withdrawn. Such actions also help bring the people of the United States onto the stage of history as active players and as makers of history itself.
Indeed, the history of every successful U.S. social movement, whether it be the elementary fight to organize trade unions to defend workers' interests, or to bring down the Jim Crow system of racial segregation, or to end the war in Vietnam, is in great part the history of independent and united mass actions aimed at engaging the vast majority to collectively fight in its own interests and therefore in the interests of all humanity.
For an Open Democratic Antiwar Conference: The most effective way to initiate and prepare united antiwar mobilizations is through convening democratic and open conferences that function transparently, with all who attend the conferences having the right to vote. It is not reasonable to expect that closed or narrow meetings of a select few, or gatherings representing only one portion of the movement, can substitute for the full participation of the extremely broad array of forces which today stand opposed to the war.
We therefore invite everyone, every organization, every coalition, everywhere in the U.S. - all who oppose the war and the occupation -- to attend an open democratic U.S. national antiwar conference and join with us in advancing and promoting the coming together of an antiwar movement in this country with the power to make a mighty contribution toward ending the war and occupation of Iraq now.
Everyone is welcome. The objective is to place on the agenda of the entire U.S. antiwar movement a proposal for the largest possible united mass mobilization(s) in the future to stop the war and end the occupation.
Join us in Cleveland on June 28-29 for the conference.
List of Endorsers
http://natassembly.org/thecall/
Join us in Cleveland on June 28-29 for the conference.
Sponsored by the National Assembly to End the Iraq War and Occupation
P.O. Box 21008; Cleveland, OH 44121; Voice Mail: 216-736-4704; Email: NatAssembly@aol.com
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For Immediate Release
UPDATE: SIXTH AL-AWDA CONVENTION TO MARK 60 YEARS OF PALESTINIAN NAKBA
Embassy Suites Hotel Anaheim South, 11767 Harbor Boulevard,
Garden Grove, California, 92840
May 16-18, 2008
The 6th Annual International Al-Awda Convention will mark a devastating event in the long history of the Palestinian people. We call it our Nakba.
Confirmed speakers include Bishop Atallah Hanna, Supreme Justice Dr. Sheikh Taiseer Al Tamimi, Dr. Adel Samara, Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, Dr. Ghada Karmi, Dr. As'ad Abu Khalil, Dr. Saree Makdisi, and Ramzy Baroud. Former Prime Minister of Lebanon Salim El Hos and Palestinian Legislative Council member Khalida Jarrar have also been invited.
Host Organizations for the sixth international Al-Awda convention include Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, Palestinian American Women Association, Free Palestine Alliance, National Council of Arab-Americans, Middle East Cultural and Information Center - San Diego, The Arab Community Center of the Inland Empire, Campaign to End Israeli Apartheid - Southern California, Palestine Aid Society, Palestinian American Congress, Bethlehem Association, Al-Mubadara - Southern California, Union of Palestinian American Women, Birzeit Society , El-Bireh Society, Arab American Friends of Nazareth, Ramallah Club, A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition, International Action Center , Students for Justice in Palestine at CSUSB, Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA, Students for Justice in Palestine at UCR, Students for International Knowledge at CSUSB, Muslim Students Association at Palomar College, Muslim Students Association at UCSD, and Muslim Students Association at Mira Costa.
BACKGROUND
In May of 1948, with the support of the governments of the United States, Britain, and other European powers, Zionists declared the establishment of the "State of Israel" on stolen Palestinian Arab land and intensified their full-scale attack on Palestine. They occupied our land and forcibly expelled three quarters of a million of our people. This continues to be our great catastrophe, which we, as Palestinians with our supporters, have been struggling to overcome since.
The sixth international Al-Awda convention is taking place at a turning point in our struggle to return and reclaim our stolen homeland. Today, there are close to 10 million Palestinians of whom 7.5 million are living in forced exile from their homeland. While the Zionist "State of Israel" continues to besiege, sanction, deprive, isolate, discriminate against and murder our people, in addition to continually stealing more of our land, our resistance has grown. Along with our sisters and brothers at home and elsewhere in exile, Al-Awda has remained steadfast in demanding the implementation of the sacred, non-negotiable national, individual and collective right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and lands.
The sixth international Al-Awda convention will be a historic and unique event. The convention will aim to recapitulate Palestinian history with the help of those who have lived it, and to strengthen our ability to educate the US public about the importance and justness of implementing the unconditional right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and lands. With symposia and specialty workshops, the focus of the convention will be on education that lead to strategies and mechanisms for expanding the effectiveness of our advocacy for the return.
INVITATION
We invite all Al-Awda members, and groups and individuals who support the implementation of the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes of origin, and to reclaim their land, to join us in this landmark Sixth Annual International Convention on the 60th year of Al-Nakba.
MASS RALLY FOR THE RETURN TO PALESTINE
The convention will culminate in a major demonstration to mark 60 years of Nakba and to call for The RETURN TO PALESTINE. The demonstration will be held in solidarity and coordination with our sisters and brothers who continue the struggle in our beloved homeland.
DON'T DELAY! REGISTER TODAY!
Organizational endorsements welcome. Please write to us at convention6@ al-awda.org
For information on how to become part of the host committee, please write to convention6@ al-awda.org
For more information, please go to http://al-awda. org/convention6 and keep revisiting that page as it is being updated regularly.
To submit speaker and panel/workshop proposals, write to
info@al-awda. org or convention6@ al-awda.org
Until return,
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition
PO Box 131352
Carlsbad, CA 92013, USA
Tel: 760-685-3243
Fax: 360-933-3568
E-mail: info@al-awda. org
WWW: http://al-awda. org
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition (PRRC) is the largest network of grassroots activists and students dedicated to Palestinian human rights. We are a not for profit tax-exempt educational and charitable 501(c)(3) organization as defined by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of the United States of America. Under IRS guidelines, your donations to PRRC are tax-deductible.
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SUPPORT THE DAY AFTER DEMONSTRATIONS TO FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL
SEE THE "TODAY SHOW" STORY ON MUMIA ABU-JAMAL - NOW ON YOUTUBE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz-NL0Ju6aE
From: LACFreeMumia@aol.com
A ruling by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals on Mumia's case, based on the hearing in Philadelphia on May 17th 2007, is expected momentarily. Freeing Mumia immediately is what is needed, but that is not an option before this court. The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal calls on everyone who supports Mumia‚s case for freedom, to rally the day after a decision comes down. Here are Bay Area day-after details:
OAKLAND:
14th and Broadway, near the Federal Building
4:30 to 6:30 PM the day after a ruling is announced,
or on Monday if the ruling comes down on a Friday.
Oakland demonstration called by the Partisan Defense Committee and Labor Black Leagues, to be held if the Court upholds the death sentence, or denies Mumia's appeals for a new trial or a new hearing. info at (510) 839-0852 or pdcbayarea@sbcglobal.org
SAN FRANCISCO:
Federal Courthouse, 7th & Mission
5 PM the day after a ruling is announced,
or Monday if the decision comes down on a Friday
San Francisco demo called by the Mobilization To Free Mumia,
info at (415) 255-1085 or www.freemumia.org
Day-after demonstrations are also planned in:
Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Toronto, Vancouver
and other cities internationally.
A National Demonstration is to be held in Philadelphia, 3rd Saturday after the decision
For more information, contact: International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal, www.mumia.org;
Partisan Defense Committee, www.partisandefense.org;
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC), www.freemumia.com;
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL IS INNOCENT!
World-renowned journalist, death-row inmate and political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal is completely innocent of the crime for which he was convicted. Mountains of evidence--unheard or ignored by the courts--shows this. He is a victim, like thousands of others, of the racist, corrupt criminal justice system in the US; only in his case, there is an added measure of political persecution. Jamal is a former member of the Black Panther Party, and is still an outspoken and active critic of the on-going racism and imperialism of the US. They want to silence him more than they want to kill him.
Anyone who has ever been victimized by, protested or been concerned about the racist travesties of justice meted out to blacks in the US, as well as attacks on immigrants, workers and revolutionary critics of the system, needs to take a close look at the frame-up of Mumia. He is innocent, and he needs to be free.
FREE MUMIA NOW!
END THE RACIST DEATH PENALTY!
FOR MASS PROTESTS AND LABOR ACTION TO FREE MUMIA!
In 1995, mass mobilizations helped save Mumia from death.
In 1999, longshore workers shut West Coast ports to free Mumia, and teachers in Oakland and Rio de Janeiro held teach-ins and stop-works.
Mumia needs powerful support again now. Come out to free Mumia!
- The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222, Oakland CA 94610
510.763.2347
LACFreeMumia@aol.com
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Center for Labor Renewal Statement and Call for the Elimination of Two-Tier Workplaces
On Saturday, January 26, 2008, over 80 U.S. and Canadian auto industry worker/activists met in Flint, Michigan, birthplace of militant unionism in the Auto Industry in the late 1903s. The agenda was how to measure and respond to the crippling impact of the 2007 auto industry collective bargaining agreements. The daylong discussions led to the issuance of the following Statement and Call for a:
Campaign to oppose two-tier wages
The United States has never been an equal opportunity society. During periods of intense collective struggle workers made economic gains, but sustained progress in equity distribution has not been achieved. Capital’s effort to exploit labor is never put on hold for long. Over the past 30 years corporate America, often supported by government, has engaged in an all-out assault on working people. That relentless campaign has increased and extended social inequality to levels many had not thought possible without triggering a concerted rebellion from the ranks of labor. Such an upsurge of resistance has not yet coalesced but there are indications that worker anger and disillusionment is rising.
Corporate aggression, particularly in historically well-organized, higher wage industries is increasingly tied to capital’s global restructuring agenda, which is capitalizing on the low standard of living prevalent in impoverished countries and regions around the world. The rising demand for U.S. worker concessions in such sectors as auto, metalwork, electronics, communications, etc. is part of that restructuring process and, unchallenged, sweeps all workers into a downward spiral of wage and working conditions. Employer claims that competition necessitates wage and benefit reductions in order to save jobs has become the weapon of choice. Workers are told they have to choose between massive reductions for future generations of workers or no job at all.
That this is happening in the most heavily unionized industries reveals the effectiveness of the corporate strategy to both disarm and attract many union leaders and some portion of the base to accept the proposition that pursuing their agenda of “competitiveness” is in our mutual interest. The U.S. labor leadership has not put forward any meaningful alternatives to global corporate restructuring. Embracing the companies’ “competitiveness” agenda is a flawed, if not fatal strategy.
The corporations are demanding, and the unions are accepting, permanent two-tier wage schemes whereby new hires work side by side with workers earning substantially higher wages for the same tasks. This new, generalized wage retreat comes after years of unresolved wage inequities that have disproportionately affected women and workers of color in U.S. workplaces. The introduction of both two-tier and “permanent temporary” workers in auto plants adds more layers of blatant discrimination. We must continue to fight against all forms of discrimination in two-tier wage structures, whether directed at workers of color or women, or now “the new hire” and the defenseless temp workers.
Our acceptance makes us an accessory to corporate divide and conquer schemes
Allowing the employers to expand inequality, rather then resolve it fosters additional resentment among workers and recklessly severs solidarity between generations. Two-tier wage agreements and the use of permanent temporary workers make the union partners in the business of exploiting workers.
Big Three auto contracts institutionalize second-class workers
In the 2007 Big Three auto negotiations the UAW, a once powerful wage and benefits pacesetter, agreed to a radically reduced two-tier wage and benefit package. The Big Three auto agreement cuts wages for new workers by up to 50 percent (67 percent if you include benefits) for doing the same work as current workers. The need to help the companies be more “competitive” to insure “job security” was the advertised selling point. The 25-year history of concession bargaining in auto has not stopped the massive decline in the ranks of the Big Three from 750,000 in 1979 when the concession era began to 170,000 today. Yet contract after contract during that period were heralded as “historic job security” agreements.
In 200 the UAW negotiated a Supplemental Two-Tier Wage Agreement for new hires at Delphi Corporation, a former GM Parts division, which had been “spun-off” as an independent parts supplier in 1999. Members of one UAW-Delphi Local, Local 2151 voted to appeal the International Union’s decision not to permit the thousands of Delphi union members to vote on the Supplemental Two-Tier Agreement, which affected them. In defense of their decision to evade ratification the UAW International Executive Board argued that the “future hire group is a null class.”
The segregation of future union members into a “null class” is a ruthless act of discrimination against an entire generation, and another example of the failure of competitiveness to secure jobs. Delphi subsequently used bankruptcy as a strategy to further restructure and destroy jobs and incomes. Within four years 27,000 out of 33,000 union members were eliminated at Delphi and the remaining workers were brought down to the lower wage and benefit scale.
Wage costs are not the problem
Wages and benefits of assembly workers account for less than 10 percent of the cost of a car and differentials between companies are not significant, especially since GM, Ford, and Chrysler’s competitors are primarily building cars inside the U.S. Furthermore, productivity in the auto industry has been rising rapidly: real output per worker has more than doubled since 1987. Even the Harbour-Felax Report—which analysts consider the industry bible on productivity—has acknowledged that: the Big Three has now largely eliminated the productivity gap with Japanese manufacturers.
In a globally restructured auto industry, it was inevitable that the Big Three would not sustain their monopoly control of the domestic market. Their arrogance toward foreign producers is only matched by their greed and arrogance toward consumers. This resulted in decades of marketing second rate, unimaginative, and shoddily engineered products at the same time union workers were making concessions allegedly to help them be more competitive. Yet, coming on the heels of the Delphi bankruptcy, the 2007 negotiations were pitched as if the sacrifices of workers was the only thing that could help the domestic auto manufacturers out of the “competitiveness” hole they’d dug themselves into. Making workers pay for the bosses’ mistakes is as much a national pastime as baseball.
The new-hire wage rates in UAW contracts with the Big Three automakers are now set below the average industrial wage in the U.S. which is already below that of other major developed countries. The competitive spiral will accelerate as foreign transplants are relieved of the pressure to match union wages. The failure to protect wages, benefits, and working conditions means that it will be even more difficult for the UAW to organize new workers. Yet the real answer to the “competitiveness” question lies in organizing the workers employed by the anti-union foreign owned producers and taking wages, benefits, and working conditions out of competition through solidarity-unionism.
For Canadian Auto Workers whose collective agreements with the same Big Three companies expire in September of 2008, the reduced new worker hire rate and permanent two-tier precedents set in the U.S. will represent a huge challenge. CAW members have traditionally resisted the concession patterns of their neighbors to the South; their continued resistance in their negotiations this Fall would be reinforced by a rising tide of opposition from U.S. auto workers to slashing wages and attacks on worker dignity.
The Japanese companies have already introduced the two-tier half-wage system in Japan. The threat of unionization had, until now, blocked their trying it here. But with the implementation of two-tier in the Big Three plants, they can now do the same in this country. Net result: no shift in relative competitiveness, but a destructive further lowering of wages for all auto industry workers.
Furthermore, now that the new hire wage rate is set below the industry average for the Big Three, workers in the auto parts supply industry will be confronted with a stark choice: accept lower wages or their jobs will be outsourced, or more correctly “re-insourced,” to the big auto companies at the radically reduced new lower tier wages. Once again the net result is zero security for workers and a further collapse in living standards. As part and parcel of the concessions mentality, the auto union failed to pursue its own longstanding demand for single-payer national healthcare (for all). Instead, they agreed to relieve Big Three automakers of billions of dollars in legacy costs for retiree healthcare protection by accepting responsibility for future coverage through an under-funded Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association, or VEBA.
The UAW is not the only union that has bargained away equality within the workforce. This trend is the deathwatch for the labor movement in our era. Union collaboration in wage discrimination for the sake of competitiveness is the counsel of despair. The future of active and retired workers is inextricably bound with the future of new workers. The segregation of future union members into a “null class” is an invitation for “payback” at some future time. If new hires are treated as a “null class,” one day they will in turn classify senior workers and retirees as a “null class.” There is no seniority date for dignity and should be no retirement from solidarity.
The corporate blitzkrieg on working people is subsidized with tax abatements while health, education, and social programs are slashed to the bone. The parrots of the status quo insist there is no alternative to an economic system that degrades workers, deprives the unfortunate of health care, undermines the security of the elderly, and desecrates the environment. It’s a lie. The degradation of the working class is chronic and contagious. We need strategic collective action with allies here and around the world.
History suggests that UAW members would have followed the lead of a progressive leadership to militantly resist the destruction of wage parity and other hard won gains in the workplace. But nearly 30 years of concession bargaining and yielding to the “logic of the competitiveness agenda” produced an opposite result.
Workers throughout all employment sectors face this same assault on wages, benefits, and working conditions in one form or another. It is time for all workers to reject the false logic of corporate competitiveness and reinvigorate the logic of solidarity.
Today, we stand at the crossroad knowing full well where both roads lead. One road leads to division, despair, and social isolation, and the other road points to hope, solidarity, and the dignity of collective struggle.
Call for national campaign
In conjunction with the Center for Labor Renewal, participants at the Flint, January 26, 2008 meeting issue the following Call:
In the face of the continuing assault on worker wages, benefits, and the quality of work life where rising economic injustice is destroying the stability and hopes of an increasing numbers of workers and their families, here and around the world; and where inequality and income discrimination are celebrated by a protected few at the desperate expense of so many others; we call on all workers of conscience everywhere to join a campaign to bring our collective strength and renewed solidarity to the struggle against the agenda of social devaluation and despair.
Workers in the auto industry have a critical role to play in this campaign given the destructive events in that industry which now, more than ever, seeks to validate the pitting of workers against workers, and communities against communities, and the glorification of the false dog-eat-dog, workplace agenda of the corporations today. In that world its “winner-take-all,” and the winner has been pre-determined. We call on all auto workers to reject all forms of wage discrimination and renew the fight for industrial democracy through worker solidarity, and to:
• Build within our workplaces, a movement against two-tier wages, and a renewal of solidarity unionism by means of varied communications vehicles including the internet; web sites; newsletters and plant gate handbills, etc.
• Promote crosscurrents of opposition against the creation of second-class workers in all workplaces.
• Where a two-tier system is in place, concretely demonstrate to the new workers that there is a strong base of resistance against the discrimination they face, and that we all need to remember the lesson that “an injury to one, is an injury to all.”
• Within the Big Three, or any auto workplaces, target the rejection of future agreements (2011 in the Big Three ) if they do not reverse the two-tier system.
• Promote internal democracy to encourage the inclusion and participation of the second tier workers alongside the entire rank and file to change the concessionary path followed by the current leadership.
Such a campaign will need mechanisms to facilitate links, exchange information, and assist in the coordination of future actions. Coming out of a meeting organized by the Center for Labor Renewal (CLR) of 80 activists in Flint, Michigan, the CLR commits to:
• Collect and develop material for building the necessary base in the workplace and its electronic dissemination. Assist in the development and proliferation of additional vehicles of communication.
• Develop an information clearinghouse to gather and disseminate reports and updates on local struggles and developments.
• Support regional forums to assist activists in developing the arguments and organizational capacities to build the solidarity program at the base
• Facilitate national meetings through which local activists can assess the campaign and collectively strategize on further events and actions.
• Promote the development of the analytical tools required by union activists to successfully integrate this campaign with a workers’ struggle that is increasingly global in dimension.
This fight is winnable. The U.S. working class needs a victory and it needs this victory in particular. The one-sided class war against workers has gone on far too long. The defeat of the two tier system is a crucial step in the struggle to address broader inequalities in our society. It’s time to draw the line.
—Center for Labor Renewal/
—Future of the Union/
—Factory Rat/
—Soldiers of Solidarity
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Guantanamo, NY--USA v Hashmi
Lynne Stewart
lynneportia@earthlink.net
2) Estimates of Iraq War Cost Were Not Close to Ballpark
“Five years in, the Pentagon tags the cost of the Iraq war at roughly $600 billion and counting. Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and critic of the war, pegs the long-term cost at more than $4 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office and other analysts say that $1 trillion to $2 trillion is more realistic, depending on troop levels and on how long the American occupation continues.”
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
March 19, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/19/washington/19cost.html?ref=world
3) Recession, Depression or Stagflation
of Another Kind
By the Editors
March/April 2008
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/
4) Disposable Children, Disposable Slaves
By Bonnie Weinstein
March/April 2008
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/marapr_08/marapr_08_07.html
5) Mourning Baghdad, pushing peace
By David Dionisi
15:17 MECCA TIME, 12:17 GMT
TUESDAY, MARCH 18, 2008
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/11F7857C-325B-494C-B652-DB4FC772DFE2.htm
6) Partying Like It’s 1929
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
March 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/opinion/21krugman.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
7) Socialized Compensation
Editorial
March 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/opinion/21fri1.html?hp
8) Washington’s Grand Experiment to Rehouse the Poor
By ERIK ECKHOLM
March 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/us/21housing.html
9) Slump Moves From Wall St. to Main St.
By PETER S. GOODMAN
March 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/business/21econ.html
10) An Agent, a Green Card, and a Demand for Sex
By NINA BERNSTEIN
March 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/nyregion/21immigrant.html?em&ex=1206331200&en=9f3f0cfc6fdcf8c2&ei=5087%0A
11) March 22, 2008
Debt-Gorged British Start to Worry That the Party Is Ending
By JULIA WERDIGIER
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/22/business/worldbusiness/22debt.html?ref=world
12) Pentagon Urges Delay in U.S. Troop Reductions in Iraq
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
March 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/22/world/middleeast/22policy.html?ref=world
13) Melting Pace of Glaciers Is Accelerating, Report Says
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
March 18, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/science/earth/18melt.html?ref=science
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1) Guantanamo, NY--USA v Hashmi
Lynne Stewart
lynneportia@earthlink.net
ALERT; I have just become aware of the latest assault on the 6th Amendment in the case of a young Pakistani Muslim American citizen extradited from Britain and held PRE-TRIAL incommunicado by the use of SAMS at the MCC in Lower Manhattan.
Syed Hashmi was brought to my attention through the Brooklyn Greens who were contacted by his former professor at U Mass Amherst who is mounting a campaign to arouse public officials and the public to the outrageous denigration of Fair Trial the case represents. I have attached the fact sheet and the sign on letter of concern.
Contact should be to Dan Clawson clawson@sadri.umass.edu, 413 545 5974; 413 586 6235(home) To sign on the letter email corey.robin@gmail.com This should be widely publicized. Please bring to the attention of your organization. Love Struggle Lynne
Lynne Stewart
lynneportia@earthlink.net
EarthLink Revolves Around You.
A Statement of Concern
Syed Hashmi is a Muslim American citizen being held in a federal jail on two counts of providing material support – and two counts of making a contribution of goods or services – to Al Qaida. As his case goes to trial, we wish to register our concern about the conditions of his detention, constraints on his right to a fair trial, and the potential threat his case poses to the First Amendment rights of others.
The conditions of Hashmi’s detention are draconian. He is in solitary confinement and subject to a regime of severe deprivation. Under special administrative measures (SAMs) imposed by the Attorney General, his communication with other prisoners, attorneys, family, the media, and people outside the jail – as well as access to the news and other reading material – is either prohibited or highly restricted. He is subject to 24-hour electronic monitoring and 23-hour lockdown, has no access to fresh air, and must take his one hour of daily recreation – when it is given – inside a cage.
Hashmi’s right to a fair trial is in jeopardy. The prosecution may present new allegations against him up until the day before his trial begins. It may withhold evidence from him and/or his attorneys yet share that evidence with the judge. He may not communicate with the news media, either directly or through his attorneys. The conditions of his detention may impair his mental state and ability to testify on his own behalf.
The prosecution’s case against Hashmi, an activist within the Muslim community, threatens the First Amendment rights of others. While Hashmi’s political and religious beliefs, speech, and associations are constitutionally protected, the government may attempt to use them as evidence of his criminal intent. This could have a chilling effect on the First Amendment rights of others, particularly in activist and Muslim communities.
We call upon the United States government to review and alleviate the conditions of Hashmi’s detention, particularly his solitary confinement and the SAMs imposed upon him; to remove or revise the constraints on his right to a fair trial; and to guarantee that his actions – rather than his constitutionally protected statements, beliefs, and associations – constitute the basis of the government’s case against him, in court and in the public arena.
The Case of Syed Hashmi
Syed Hashmi is a 27-year-old Muslim American citizen. He is currently being held in solitary confinement in a federal jail on two counts of providing material support – and two counts of making a contribution of goods or services – to Al Qaida. His trial is set for July 2008. If convicted, he faces seventy years in prison. His case raises concerns about the conditions of his detention, his ability to receive a fair trial, and threats to the First Amendment rights of others.
Hashmi came to the United States from Pakistan with his family when he was three and grew up in Flushing, Queens. He attended Brooklyn College, majored in political science, and graduated in spring 2003. He then attended the London Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom; two members of the Brooklyn College political science faculty wrote him letters of recommendation. At London Metropolitan, Hashmi studied for an MA in international relations, which he received in October 2005.
In June 2006, he was arrested by the British police at Heathrow Airport (he was about to travel to Pakistan, where he has family) on a warrant issued by the US government. In May 2007, he was extradited to the United States, where he has since been held in solitary confinement at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan.
Under special administrative measures (SAMs) imposed by the Attorney General, Hashmi must be held in solitary confinement and may not communicate with anyone inside the prison other than prison officials. Family visits are limited to one person every other week for one and a half hours and cannot involve physical contact. While his correspondence to members of Congress and other government officials is not restricted, he may write only one letter (of no more than three pieces of paper) per week to one family member. He may not communicate, either directly or through his attorneys, with the news media. He may read only designated portions of newspapers – and not until thirty days after their publication – and his access to other reading material is restricted. He may not listen to or watch news-oriented radio stations and television channels. He may not participate in group prayer. He is subject to 24-hour electronic monitoring and 23-hour lockdown, has no access to fresh air, and must take his one hour of daily recreation – when it is given – inside a cage. While the Attorney General claims that these measures are necessary because “there is substantial risk that [Hashmi’s] communications or contacts with persons could result in death or serious bodily injury to persons,” he was held with other prisoners in a British jail for eleven months without incident.
The US government alleges that during February or March 2004, a man by the name of Junaid Babar, also a Pakistani-born US citizen, stayed with Hashmi at his London apartment for two weeks. According to the government, Babar stored luggage containing raincoats, ponchos, and waterproof socks in Hashmi’s apartment and then delivered these materials to the third-ranking member of Al Qaida in South Waziristan, Pakistan. In addition, Hashmi allegedly allowed Babar to use his cell phone to call other conspirators in terrorist plots.
The government claims that Babar’s testimony is the “centerpiece” of its case. Babar, who has pleaded guilty to five counts of material support for Al Qaida, faces up to 70 years in prison. While awaiting sentence, he has agreed to serve as a government witness in terrorism trials in Britain and Canada as well as in Hashmi’s trial. Under a plea agreement reported in the media, Babar will receive a reduced sentence in return for his cooperation.
The events described above comprise the main allegation that the government has presented to the defense. According to the rules of discovery in federal criminal cases, however, the government may present additional allegations up until the day before the trial begins. Other factors compromise Hashmi’s right to a fair trial: the government may withhold evidence from his attorneys yet share that evidence with the judge; the government may share evidence with his attorneys but not allow Hashmi to see it; Hashmi may not communicate with the news media, either directly or through his attorneys; and the conditions of Hashmi’s detention may impair his mental state and ability to testify on his own behalf.
In addition to Babar’s testimony, much of the government’s case hinges upon evidence about Hashmi’s beliefs, associations, and speech. When Hashmi was a student at Brooklyn College, he was a member of Al Muhajiroun. This group takes and advocates positions well outside the mainstream of American public opinion. The US government, however, has not designated it a terrorist organization nor deemed membership in it illegal. While Hashmi’s beliefs, speech, and associations are constitutionally protected, the government may attempt to use them as evidence of his criminal intent. This could have a chilling effect on the constitutionally protected beliefs, speech, and associations of others, particularly in activist and Muslim communities. Unlike other high-profile post-9/11 cases, in which the defendants were not particularly political, Hashmi is an activist. The government’s increasing attention to this kind of political activity further raises the specter of a chilling effect on First Amendment rights throughout the country.
Hashmi’s case thus raises three concerns: first, the draconian conditions of his detention; second, the undermining of his Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial; third, the threats it poses to the First Amendment rights of others. Please help make these concerns heard by signing the attached statement.
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2) Estimates of Iraq War Cost Were Not Close to Ballpark
“Five years in, the Pentagon tags the cost of the Iraq war at roughly $600 billion and counting. Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and critic of the war, pegs the long-term cost at more than $4 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office and other analysts say that $1 trillion to $2 trillion is more realistic, depending on troop levels and on how long the American occupation continues.”
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
March 19, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/19/washington/19cost.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON — At the outset of the Iraq war, the Bush administration predicted that it would cost $50 billion to $60 billion to oust Saddam Hussein, restore order and install a new government.
Five years in, the Pentagon tags the cost of the Iraq war at roughly $600 billion and counting. Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and critic of the war, pegs the long-term cost at more than $4 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office and other analysts say that $1 trillion to $2 trillion is more realistic, depending on troop levels and on how long the American occupation continues.
Among economists and policymakers, the question of how to tally the cost of the war is a matter of hot dispute. And the costs continue to climb.
Congressional Democrats fiercely criticize the White House over war expenditures. But it is virtually certain that the Democrats will provide tens of billions more in a military spending bill next month. Some Democrats are even arguing against attaching strings, like a deadline for withdrawal, saying the tactic will fail as it has in the past.
All of the war-price tallies include operations in the war zone, support for troops, repair or replacement of equipment, reservists’ salaries, special combat pay for regular forces and some care for wounded veterans — expenses that typically fall outside the regular Defense Department or Veterans Affairs budgets.
The highest estimates often include projections for future operations, long-term health care and disability costs for veterans, a portion of the regular, annual defense budget, and, in some cases, wider economic effects, including a percentage of higher oil prices and the impact of raising the national debt to cover increased war spending.
The debate raging on Capitol Hill, on the presidential campaign trail, in research institutes and in academia touches on such esoteric factors as the right inflation index for veterans’ health care costs; the monetary value of nearly 4,000 soldiers killed; and what role, if any, the war has had in higher oil prices.
Some economists who track the war expenses say they worry that politicians are making mistakes similar to those made in 2002, by failing to fully come to grips with the short- and long-term financial costs.
“The relevant question now is: what do we do now going forward? Because we can’t do anything about the costs that have already happened,” said Scott Wallsten, an economist and vice president of research with iGrowthGlobal, a Washington research institute. “We still don’t hear people talking about that.”
Congressional Democrats, led by Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, have sought to spotlight the rising costs and limited political progress in Iraq.
“This administration still has no clear exit strategy for our troops, no path to political reconciliation, and no accounting of the costs to our budget or economy,” Mr. Schumer said.
The White House press secretary, Dana M. Perino, acknowledged that costs had risen higher than predicted, but said the administration was committed to giving the military everything it needed for success.
“None of these calculations take into account the cost of failure in Iraq,” Ms. Perino said. “Should Al Qaeda have safe haven in Iraq, we are more likely to be attacked again on our homeland. We know the cost of that.”
On the campaign trail, the Democratic candidates, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, often say that money for the war would be better spent at home, as Mrs. Clinton did Tuesday when she pegged the war costs at “well over $1 trillion.”
“That is enough,” she continued, “to provide health care for all 47 million uninsured Americans and quality pre-kindergarten for every American child, solve the housing crisis once and for all, make college affordable for every American student and provide tax relief to tens of millions of middle-class families.”
But what the candidates often fail to note when making such points is that the full cost of the war has been added to the national debt, and that the money spent in Iraq would not necessarily be available for other programs. And, of course, anything short of an immediate withdrawal will entail billions more in continuing expenses.
Debate aside, there is general consensus that Congress will have allocated slightly more than $600 billion for Iraq operations through the 2008 fiscal year.
And some analysts say that may be half the final price.
“Under reasonable scenarios, assuming we don’t pull out rapidly, we may only be halfway through,” said Steven M. Koziak, of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, a nonpartisan research group. “Even in direct budgetary costs, it’s quite easy to get up on the order of $1 trillion for Iraq alone.”
Meanwhile, the five-year anniversary of the war has focused a spotlight on the costs so far and on future projections.
In a new book, called “The Three Trillion War,” Mr. Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate, and a co-author, Linda J. Bilmes, a professor at Harvard, say the total economic impact may be a staggering $4 trillion or more. Even some economists who call themselves fans of Mr. Stiglitz say they think that number is exaggerated; the authors insist their projections are moderate.
Lawrence B. Lindsey, who was ousted as President Bush’s first economic adviser partly because he predicted the war might cost $100 billion to $200 billion, also has a new book that serves in part as an I-told-you-so.
“Five years after the fact, I believe that one of the reasons the administration’s efforts are so unpopular is that they chose not to engage in an open public discussion of what the consequences of the war might be, including its economic cost,” Mr. Lindsey wrote in an excerpt in Fortune magazine.
Mr. Lindsey insists that his projections were partly right. “My hypothetical estimate got the annual cost about right,” he wrote. “But I misjudged an important factor: how long we would be involved.”
He was not alone.
Congressional Democrats, for instance, predicted that the Iraq war would cost roughly $93 billion, not including reconstruction.
Virtually every forecast was off in this way. “It’s clear that operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have gone on longer and have been more expensive than the projections initially suggested,” Peter R. Orszag, director of the Congressional Budget Office, said in an interview.
Only one economist, William D. Nordhaus of Yale, seems to have come close. In a paper in December 2002, he offered a worst-case estimate of $1.9 trillion, “if the war drags on, occupation is lengthy, nation-building is costly.”
Getting at the true costs is difficult though. Expenses like an overall increase in troops were paid from the base defense budget, not the war bills.
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3) Recession, Depression or Stagflation
of Another Kind
By the Editors
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/
Before the Great Depression of the 1930s, the words recession and depression were virtually synonymous. Both terms referred to the beginning of a cycle of economic contraction. However the recessions that have occurred since the end of World War II were not actual contractions. On the contrary, these post-WWII recessions were characterized by a slowing of the rate of economic expansion rather than a contraction of the overall economy.
These days, if we read between the lines of the reports appearing in the mass media, it can be seen that Washington and Wall Street’s economic experts believe that an old-fashioned recession of the worst kind is heading our way.
Thus, one of the New York Times’s most perceptive economic commentators, Floyd Norris, was among the first to recognize and comment on the critical state of the U.S. economy in his December 28, 2007 column titled, “Credit Crisis? Just Wait For a Replay.” He begins by posing the key question:
“What if it’s not just subprime?
“As 2007 ends, it seems that the financial world shakes every time a company reveals some new exposure to the disastrous world of sub-prime mortgage lending.
“But just how different was sub-prime lending from other lending in the days of easy money that prevailed until this summer? The smug confidence that nothing could go wrong, and that credit quality did not matter, could be seen in the many other markets as well.
“‘The severity of the sub-prime debacle may be only a prologue to the main act, a tragedy on the grand stage in the corporate credit markets,’ Ted Seldes, the director of investments at Protégé Partners, a hedge fund of funds, wrote in Economics and Portfolio Strategy.
“‘Over the past decade, the exponential growth of credit derivatives has created unprecedented amounts of financial leverage on corporate credit,’ he added. ‘Similar to the growth of sub-prime mortgages, the rapid rise of credit products required ideal economic conditions and disconnected the assessors of risk from those bearing it....’
“But if the credit insurers turn out to have had inadequate reserves, what are we to make of the credit default swap market? Mr. Seldes calls it ‘an insurance market with no loss reserves,’ and points out that $45 trillion in such swaps are now outstanding. That is, he notes, almost five times the United States national debt. [Emphasis added.]”
He goes on to explain that one of the most remarkable results of the sub-prime crisis is “that total losses to the financial system may be about equal to the amount of sub-prime loans that were issued.” Norris reports the hedge fund director, Seldes, as also having said in an interview “the financial leverage placed on the underlying assets was so high that the losses multiplied, as the profits did when times were good.”
Norris ends by saying that it was the “greatest credit party in history, made possible by a new financial architecture that moved much of the activities out of regulated institutions and into financial instruments that emphasized leverage over safety. The next year may be the one when we learn whether the sub-prime crisis was a relatively isolated problem in that system, or just the first indication of a systemic crisis.”
Posing the threat of a “systemic crisis” is as close as a responsible bourgeois economist like Norris can go toward suggesting that the threatening recession may turn out to be much longer and deeper than any of the post-World War II recessions. After all, one of the differences between a recession and a depression is that a depression is far deeper and much longer lasting.
Then in the January 25 edition of the British financial journal, The Economist, the editors, reflecting the fact that the American crisis is global, in a piece titled, “It’s Rough Out There,” said this:
“The financial storm that blew up in America’s subprime mortgage market last year has become a hurricane. The ill wind from reckless property lending blasted first the market in asset-backed securities, then banks’ balance sheets and, most recently, stock markets. Across the globe, more than $5 trillion has disappeared from the value of public companies in the first three weeks of January....”
A couple of days later, in an op-ed piece, “Paying the Price for the Fed’s Success,” James Grant, the influential editor of the Wall Street publication, Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, rakes the “experts” over the coals for allowing the “supposedly ‘contained’ sub-prime mortgage problem [to] metastasize into a global financial panic—some days to the down side, other days to the up side.” ( New York Times, January 27)
Grant’s criticisms essentially reflect the generalized concerns over the deeply troubled U.S. economy that has the most serious economic experts in Washington and Wall Street in a tizzy of befuddlement, fear and panic. Grant sums it all up in two sentences:
“Striving so mightily to make one and one add up to three or four or five, Wall Street, Main Street and Washington collectively brought us to the impasse of 2008, in which a debt crisis is superimposed on a downturn in the economy, which is overlaid on a bear market in real estate, which is conjoined with a persistent and worrying weakness in the overseas value of the dollar. As for the crackup in complex mortgage-backed securities, now at the center of the debt predicament, the global bank, UBS, has justly called it the biggest failure of ratings and risk management ever.”
Barely a month later, the Times published a report by another of its seasoned economic commentators, David Leonhardt, titled, “Worries that the Good Times Were Mostly a Mirage.” The headline was followed by the more pointed subhead, “So how bad could it get?” Leonhardt writes:
“Until a few months ago, it was accepted wisdom that the American economy functioned far more smoothly than in the past. Economic expansions lasted longer, and recessions were both shorter and milder. Inflation had been tamed. The spreading of financial risk, across institutions and around the world, had reduced the odds of a crisis. Back in 2004, Ben Bernanke, then a Federal Reserve governor, borrowed a phrase from an academic research paper to give these happy developments a name: ‘the great moderation.’
“These days, though, the great moderation isn’t looking quite so great—or so moderate.
“The recent financial turmoil has many causes, but they are tied to a basic fear that some of the economic successes of the last generation may yet turn out to be a mirage. That helps explain why problems in the American sub-prime mortgage market could have spread so quickly through the world’s financial system. On Tuesday, Mr. Bernanke, who is now the Fed chairman, presided over the steepest one-day interest rate cut in the central bank’s history.
“The great moderation now seems to have depended—in part—on a huge speculative bubble, first in stocks and then real estate, that hid the economy’s rough edges. Everyone from first-time home buyers to Wall Street chief executives made bets they did not fully understand, and then spent money as if those bets couldn’t go bad. For the past 16 years, American consumers have increased their overall spending every single quarter, which is almost twice as long as any previous streak.
“Now, some worry, comes the payback. Martin Feldstein, the éminence grise of Republican economists, says he is concerned that the economy “could slip into a recession and that the recession could be a long, deep, severe one.” [January 23, 2008.]
Thus, it has become increasingly evident to these economic analysts that the U.S. capitalist economy is sinking ever more deeply toward one of history’s most destructive of all economic crises, combining what now appears to be a long and deep crisis of overproduction together with a jump in the rate of inflation. In a word, the demon of inflation joins the devil of recession causing more than a few economic commentators to hark back to the late 1970s when stagflation, the worst of both worlds, roiled the U.S. economy.
This is a most significant departure from the initial impact of a classic economic contraction, which had historically been accompanied by falling, not rising, prices. However, ever since the dollar replaced gold as the international, measure of value, standard of price, and medium of exchange, the value incorporated in commodities by human labor power tends to fall as science and technology produces ever-more sophisticated labor-saving machines.
That is, under normal conditions, when the cost of production falls, prices also fall. But after the global monetary system was separated from its golden base we no longer live under normal conditions. In effect, the falling value incorporated in commodities by labor-saving machines is not only hidden from view by the steadily increasing quantity of valueless paper dollars in circulation; it also explains why prices can rise while the value of commodities fall.
Stagflation, the worst of both worlds
We say the worst of both worlds advisedly. Bad as was the stagflation of the 1970s, it was not as bad as it could get. For example, one of history’s most destructive combinations of economic contraction and inflation—stagflation—sent Germany into a prolonged crisis following its defeat in World War I.
Forced to sign the Versailles Treaty along with the draconic reparations demanded of Germany by the victors of the first Great War, as WWI was known at the time, Germany, which had been one of the richest and most dynamic industrialized imperialist powers in Europe before the war, was transformed into the poorest and hungriest after its defeat.
Thus, in the few short years after it was forced to sign the “peace treaty,” a period of stagnation began that combined mass unemployment and an inflationary crisis best illustrated by the change in the value of Germany’s 1-mark note, which as late as July 1921, could buy a half-dozen eggs and a loaf of bread. The mark fell in value to such a point that by November 1923, the 1-mark note had 9 zeroes added to it, but it could still only buy what the 1-mark note could buy in 1921.
Meanwhile, unemployment had soared to levels nearly as high as during the early years of the Great Depression. The rest is history: Germany entered a period of rising revolutionary struggle that could well have ended in socialist revolution. However, because of the failure of leadership, it ended with the victory of Adolph Hitler’s fascist Brown Shirts, the smashing of the revolutionary German working class, the holocaust and World War II. 1
Though it would be premature to predict that a German-style hyperinflation, joined together with mass unemployment is in the making, it cannot be excluded. After all, the main weapon to combat the kind of economic contraction we saw in the 1930s, now in the hands of the Federal Reserve, remains what boils down to the continued pumping of valueless paper dollars into circulation—reducing the value of all dollars—to combat the threat of a recession of the pre-WWII kind.
This takes us to the source of the current crisis and why something like a German-style combination of inflation and economic contraction has already begun, creating episodes of panic among masses of investors as well as among the economic experts in Washington and Wall Street.
Once again on the debt bomb
The monetary system launched in 1944 at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, by representatives of 44 governments including most of the capitalist world’s imperialist powers was set into motion in order to prevent another Great Depression such as the one that led to World War II. That is, all the measures that attempted to bring the Depression to a halt did not work.
Today, no one knows the true size of America’s public and private debt. However, before the adoption of the Keynesian scheme separating the global monetary system from its golden base one could estimate the extent of any capitalist nation’s indebtedness by measuring the quantities of gold—the most reliable objective measure of value—backing up its outstanding currency. That not only served as a measure of a nation’s solvency but also the creditworthiness of the private sector.
Now that the world monetary system is no longer based on gold, the only measure of the value of currencies is its value relative to the purchasing power of all other currencies; thus no one knows for sure how much each of the world’s paper currencies are really worth. That means that the bottom can drop out of the monetary system suddenly and with little or no warning.
Behind Bernanke’s appointment
According to a report in the Sunday, January 20, New York Times magazine titled, “The Education of Ben Bernanke,” by Roger Lowenstein, “the current Chairman of the Federal Reserve devoted much of his career to studying the causes of the Great Depression.” Lowenstein starts off by pointing out why Bernanke was selected to replace Alan Greenspan. He writes:
“By the time President Bush nominated him to run the Federal Reserve, at the end of 2005, Bernanke knew more about central banking than any economist alive. On virtually every topic of significance—how to prevent deflationary panics, for instance, or to gauge the effect of Fed moves on stock-market prices—Bernanke wrote one of the seminal papers.... And having devoted much of his career to studying the causes of the Great Depression, Bernanke was the academic expert on how to prevent financial crises from spinning out of control and threatening the general economy.”
Thus, if we knew nothing else about the current economic crisis, we now know this much: The appointment of Ben Bernanke to head the Federal Reserve by the real U.S. decision-makers, means that they had anticipated the possibility, if not the likelihood, of an approaching breakdown of U.S. economic equilibrium. It also suggests that they had reason to believe that the next recession would be nothing like the ten previous post-WWII recessions which were all milder, of shorter duration and accompanied by longer periods of expansion than their pre-war predecessors.
In other words, those in charge of keeping the economy on an even keel knew that it was in trouble when Bernanke was chosen to head the Federal Reserve in October 2005. But they also knew that there’s nothing that the Fed can do in the upper reaches of the political, financial and monetary superstructure of the U.S. economy that can fix the source of the unfolding capitalist economic crisis—which lies deep inside the economy at the point of production. The most they can do in the superstructure of the extraordinarily complex American capitalist economic order is keep the underlying contradictions from worsening.
The real problem is, of course, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. And while it cannot be fixed once and for all time, it can be boosted temporarily by reducing wages and benefits at the point of production and by shifting the tax burden from the rich and superrich to the backs of those on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder.
That’s where the auto industry’s attack on the autoworkers and their union comes into the picture.
GM’s attack on the UAW was an attack on all workers
It doesn’t take a Nobel prize-winning economist to know that the relation between wages and profits is like the two ends of a seesaw; when wages go up profits go down and when wages go down profits go up.
Readers of this magazine know that for the last two years we have focused on the campaign initiated and led by General Motors to lower the wages, benefits and living standards of all members of the United Auto Workers union by more than 50 percent. As we now know, Detroit’s Big Three—GM, Chrysler and Ford—will have already gone a long way toward accomplishing their objective well before the new UAW contract expires in 2011.
We also made clear in our coverage that the attack on the UAW was only the first stage of an attack by capitalist America on the wages, benefits and living standards of all American workers.
The significance of this two-sided attack by Washington and Wall Street on both the fundamental contradictions at the point of production and in the upper reaches of the capitalist economy is a measure of capitalist America’s growing fear of another Great Depression made far more life-threatening by the growing mountain of public and private debt.
History repeats itself—but always with a difference
The “Roaring Twenties,” as it was then known for a variety of reasons, roared in more ways than one. America in the 1920s, was a decade of phenomenal economic growth while the rest of the world’s advanced industrial countries were in a slump. It gave rise to something once known as American exceptionalism, which had been born and reborn more than a few times in American history. It was also a part of the widely touted myth at the time that because the United States was prospering while the world was stagnating it was no longer subject to the laws of capitalist economics.
To be sure, America’s economic health in a stagnating world was indeed an exception to the rule, but it had nothing whatever to do with its exemption from the laws of capitalist economy as laid down by all of history’s most respected economic theoreticians ranging from Adam Smith to Karl Marx. As a matter of fact, the main difference between America in the 1920s and today, is the fact that America was then the world’s biggest creditor nation, while the rest of the world was mired in debt in the aftermath of the Great War, as World War I was known in those days.
That is, from the 1920s until the early 1960s the United States was the world’s largest creditor nation with virtually the entire world paying interest on loans made by Washington and Wall Street to both sides of World War I.
The 1930s and today
If, as the evidence suggests, the U.S. economy is heading toward a major economic crisis on the order of the 1930s, there are several important differences between then and now that must be taken into account starting with the existence of an exactly opposite financial relationship between America and the world in the 1920s and 1930s, and America and the world today.
While the U.S. was the world’s creditor nation back then, America today is the world’s major debtor nation by far. Moreover, in addition to borrowing on a grand scale in order to offset its balance of payments and budgets deficits, it must now also borrow to help pay the interest on its growing mountain of debt.
That is—like the millions of American “homeowners” with sub-prime mortgages, many of whom are already unable to so much as pay the interest on their mortgages, the government of the United States faces a similar problem but on a grander scale.
In other words, like homeowners, corporations and banks defaulting on their debts because they can no longer pay the interest, much less the principal. Capitalist America now is in the exact same position as the millions of workers who owe more than they can ever repay.
In fact, taking all its obligations into account—economic, political and military—capitalist America is locked in an inescapable debt trap of its own making. Worse yet, unlike the homeowner with a mortgage worth more than the house they live in, capitalist America cannot walk away from its mortgage and rent another house!
1 Search the Internet for Leon Trotsky’s, Germany: The Only Road, (September 1932). It provides the best analysis of Hitler’s rise to power and why the two mass workers’ parties, Social Democrat and Communist, failed to form a united front that could have easily crushed the fascist threat and overthrown German capitalism and conquered state power and carried through a socialist revolution.
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4) Disposable Children, Disposable Slaves
By Bonnie Weinstein
March/April 2008
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/marapr_08/marapr_08_07.html
Many on the left criticize Marxists for predicting the economic collapse of capitalism. They say that Marxists have been predicting the “death struggle” of capitalism for years and it hasn’t happened yet. They say, capitalism has been able to placate and immobilize the working class. These thoughts are epitomized by the comments of Joaquin Bustelo, a contributor to the Marxism discussion list on the internet, who wrote on January 14, 2008:
“Thus quite often you can read on this list how wages have been going down for decades and so forth and so on. Yet every single material indicator of living standards in this country has been rising over the decades, the size of housing units, how they’re equipped, number of cars, radios and TV sets, energy consumed, etc. etc. etc. And whatever crisis of the moment is said to be sure to doom capitalism—the [Vietnam] War, the [1970s] energy crisis, stagflation, deindustrialization, the S&L crisis, low productivity growth, all the way down to the dot-com, stock markets and housing bubbles of the last decade—have thus far failed to produce the predicted effect.
“To me that says the left underestimates the real resources and strengths of U.S. capitalism, and above all how parasitic it is and how much wealth it siphons off from other countries. Which doesn’t mean that this ‘crisis’ won’t be ‘the’ crisis, but it does tend to make me rather skeptical.”
But Bustelo leaves out the fact that while workers can consume more stuff, the rate of exploitation of workers has increased sharply. Workers are working harder due to speed-up and the general rollback of working conditions across the board. In addition, due to technological production improvements, workers are producing a higher yield for the bosses for his or her labor time while earning a smaller portion of the extra value they now produce.
Bustelo also claims that the reason the antiwar movement has failed to produce youth activists like it did during the war in Vietnam was that there was a draft back then.
Our children live in a different world
What he and everyone seems to ignore is that there is a very different reality for youth today than that of their parents. The gutted organized-labor movement, including two- and three-tier contracts, has qualitatively changed reality for our young people.
To say there isn’t a draft is not quite true either, because there is an economic draft that leads young people to join the military if they have any hope of reaching the economic heights their parents were able to reach—to buy a house or even a new car—without plunging themselves into unmanageable debt or, indeed, being able to even qualify to get into debt. That the military is the only way out of this economic reality is certainly what the Department of Defense is trying to convince young people of. And it spends billions of dollars in advertising money to do so.
Their parents live there, too
Even once-comfortable parents are beginning to feel the pinch. They have to borrow to send their kids to college, and are unable to help them buy a house, something working-class parents in the ’60s and ’70s could afford to do for their coming-of-age kids.
Young adults are finding it much harder to leave the nest. When I was 18 years old, one lousy, unskilled weekly paycheck (in cash, by the way) could take care of my rent for a month and I had plenty left over to buy clothes and eat good food! Those days are gone!
When I struck out on my own, I wasn’t even a high school graduate and could barely type 20 words-per-minute. I hadn’t turned 18 yet and got my first job (as a waitress) in late July of 1963 at Schrafft’s restaurant on 34th Street in New York. My 18th birthday was August 10, 1963. I was working there on August 28, the day of the great March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, led by Martin Luther King, and I was working there on November 22, when Kennedy got killed. Most of the waitresses were Irish and the whole restaurant came to a halt. People were crying all around me. I was fired soon after because, one, I was a lousy waitress and complained about my tips. And I also complained about hearing about Kennedy incessantly. It was driving me insane—you couldn’t escape it. But even still, as poor as my typing was, I gave it a try and was able to go out the next day and get a job in a little print shop in the Bowery that paid $72.00 a week—cash. Newly married, our rent was $75.00 a month and my husband, a union house painter, made much more than me, although his work was seasonal.
Now, young people need to be able to go into debt in order to qualify for a rental unit that will cost half their monthly income! They’d better be able to qualify for a credit card or a car loan and to withstand a credit check (which they will likely have to pay for themselves) when applying to rent an apartment! This leaves them either straitjacketed to credit before they are even out on their own, and, hence, to their low-paid multiple jobs, or out in the streets selling drugs to get the cash for what they need.
For black youth the depression is already here. Their communities are police-occupied and more go to prison than to college.
Kids, you’re on your own
Our youth have no unified voice. They must fend for themselves. Their parents can give them little help—except, perhaps, by babysitting their children. We mustn’t minimize this tremendous problem, because more than half of the children born today are born into single-parent families that have no one but the grandparents to look after them, while the parents do whatever they can to earn the money to feed them. If you have no family to help with the kids, there’s always your car in the parking lot at your jobsite: in other words, you’re on your own. Often your kids are on their own, with older siblings taking care of the younger ones.
This is the effect of multi-tiered pay-scales—whether you work for a union shop or not. All kinds of jobs have multi-tiered pay-scales, where far fewer employees fall into the higher pay-scale category. Young people today make about half what their parents made, adjusting for inflation, and are working even more hours, and fewer have any benefits at all.
Meanwhile, prices have risen. Rents and medical bills are through the roof. The higher costs of real food—fresh meats, produce and dairy products—makes the higher calorie content of fast foods the practical option for the working poor—unhealthy, but affordable. More bang for your buck.
In an interview with Michael Polan entitled, “The Cornification of Food,” broadcast December 4, 2007, by radio station KLCC in Portland, Oregon, he pointed out:
“You can get something like 1,200 calories for a dollar in the snack food aisle and only 250 in produce. You can get 875 calories of soda for $1 and only 170 calories of real fruit juice, of orange juice. So you see, our Darwinian inheritance is to get as much energy with as little expenditure as possible. This is what we’re programmed to do as a species. If you don’t have a lot of money, the way to do that is to eat badly.”
And what of the lives of little kids—today’s grandchildren? They can’t even go out and play. Their only socialization is in school, under restriction and supervision. They have no freedom. They are always being watched, and yet when they’re home from school they are completely ignored, often left alone and cooped up in their homes by parents who have to work long hours.
They live virtual lives in front of the TV or playing video games. They talk to or text-message their friends over the phones if have them. They don’t climb trees or play by the edge of a pond catching frogs, or even hang out in front of the ice cream parlor. Those things exist for them only in the virtual world. They virtually play over the telephone and on MySpace.
There’s an article in the March/April 2007 issue of Orion magazine, entitled “Leave No Child Inside,” about the reduction of attention deficit disorder (ADD) among kids who get to go out and play in nature with other kids. It turns out that letting kids have this opportunity for 30 minutes a day eliminates the need for any ADD drugs. Who’d’a thunk? But most kids rarely get this chance.
“Within the space of a few decades, the way children understand and experience their neighborhoods and the natural world has changed radically. Even as children and teenagers become more aware of global threats to the environment, their physical contact, their intimacy with nature, is fading. As one suburban fifth grader put it to me, in what has become the signature epigram of the children-and-nature movement: ‘I like to play indoors better ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.’. . . In a typical week, only 6 percent of children ages nine to thirteen play outside on their own. Studies by the National Sporting Goods Association and by American Sports Data, a research firm, show a dramatic decline in the past decade in such outdoor activities as swimming and fishing. Even bike riding is down 31 percent since 1995. In San Diego, according to a survey by the nonprofit Aquatic Adventures, 90 percent of inner-city kids do not know how to swim; 34 percent have never been to the beach.... Studies at the University of Illinois show that time in natural settings significantly reduces symptoms of attention-deficit (hyperactivity) disorder in children as young as age five. The research also shows the experience helps reduce negative stress and protects psychological well-being, especially in children undergoing the most stressful life events.”
Our youth are cooped-up, criminalized, incarcerated, unemployed and underemployed, underpaid, undereducated, and neglected by parents who have to work two and three jobs just to pay the rent and bring home the Mickey D’s, and who must also neglect themselves, their health, and their well-being. Their children have become society’s disposable children! They have become disposable slaves.
They have no champions. They have no hope. To them, the world’s gone to hell in a hand-basket and their own parents haven’t been able to do a damn thing to stop it, let alone make it better even for themselves, or to show them a way to improve their lives.
According to an article that appeared in The New York Times of January 16, 2008, “Blue-Collar Jobs Disappear, Taking Families’ Way of Life Along,” by Erik Eckholm, about job loss in Jackson, Ohio,
“Throughout the state, the percentage of families living below the poverty line—just over $20,000 for a family of four last year—rose slightly from 14 percent in 2005 to 16 percent in 2007, one study found. But equally striking is the rise in younger working families struggling above that line. The numbers are more dismal in the southeastern Appalachian part of the state, where 32 percent of families lived below the poverty line in 2007, according to the study, and 56 percent lived with incomes less than $40,000 for a family of four.
“‘These younger workers should be the backbone of the economy,’ said Shiloh Turner, study director for the Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati, which conducted the surveys. But in parts of Ohio, Ms. Turner said, half or more ‘are barely making ends meet.’ . . . ‘As $15-an-hour factory jobs are replaced by $7- or $8-an-hour retail jobs, more men in their 30s and 40s are moving in with their parents or grandparents,’ said Cheryl Thiessen, the director of Jackson/Vinton Community Action, which runs medical, fuel and other aid programs in Jackson and Vinton Counties.
“‘Other unemployed or low-wage workers, some with families, find themselves staying with one relative after another,’ Ms. Thiessen said, ‘serially wearing out their welcome.’
“‘A lot of major employers have left, and the town is drying up,’ Ms. Thiessen said of Jackson. ‘We’re starting to lose small shops, too—Hallmark, the jewelry and shoe stores, the movie theater and most of the grocery stores.’
“Shari Joos, 45, a married mother of four boys in nearby Wellston, said, ‘If you don’t work at Wal-Mart, the only job you can get around here is in fast food.’
“Between her husband’s factory job and her intermittent work, they made $30,000 a year in the best of times, Mrs. Joos said. Since last fall, when her husband was laid off by the Merillat cabinet factory, which downsized to one shift a day from three, keeping anywhere near that income required Mrs. Joos to take a second job. She works at a school cafeteria each weekday from 9:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. and then drives to Wal-Mart, where she relaxes in her car before starting her 2:00-to-10:00 p.m. shift at the deli counter.
“Her 20-year-old son went to college for two years, earning an associate degree in information science, but cannot find any jobs nearby. He still works at McDonald’s and lives at home as he ponders whether to move to a distant city, as most local college graduates must. Her 22-year-old son works at Burger King and lives with his grandparents—‘That was his way of moving out,’ Mrs. Joos said.”
Our youth are a giant tinderbox waiting to explode. They have very few opportunities left to them—no home loans, no credit cards, nor decent jobs that pay more than the streets. Many of our children are living in fight-or-flight mode all the time, looking for whatever they can to bolt themselves out of this bleak reality.
Those who are addicted to drugs and/or have criminal records are 75 percent likely to be unemployable. And those numbers are increasing at a phenomenal rate. Prisons are a booming business and education and rehabilitation are becoming more and more expensive and, in fact, unavailable to those who need it the most. Drastic cuts have been and still are being made to drug-rehab clinics that cater to the poor and uninsured.
The working class throughout the world is being pushed further and further toward the brink as the newer generations come of age. That’s what it means when they say the gap between the rich and poor is widening.
Will a kinder and gentler capitalism be able to save the day?
The capitalists and their puppet politicians are not even claiming that. The candidates—all of them—are saying how the American people have had it too good. That we all have to learn to tighten our belts. It’s just that none of this applies to those who have all the money. And everyone in the world knows that. It’s flaunted all over the mass media, on the movie screens, and on the TV—the wealthy draped in their diamonds and designer gowns coyly sporting $30,000 purses; the Forbes 500 moving into the billion-dollar range; the CEOs and their billion-dollar bonuses. Everyone knows about these things, even if they’re selling drugs to their friends in the streets or chatting behind bars in jail.
The question is, what politics will capture the imagination, hope, and hearts of our youth? What politics will offer them a way out of this miserable future? What politics will offer them the strength to change the world for the better for everyone? What politics will make it crystal clear to them that such change is in their own self-interest as well as in the interests of everyone and the planet itself, if they take that power into their own hands and out of the hands of the capitalist class?
Socialism—a world socialist revolution to abolish capitalism and establish a planned economy that serves human needs rather than private profit—is the answer that will secure the gift of a thriving future for all.
Everything has changed for the lives of our children except the one, most fundamental reality: capitalism and its inexorable road back to barbarism. Modern capitalism will pull itself out of the impending worldwide economic crisis of the falling rate of profit—enough to appease the working class—or it won’t. The thing is, to our young people, it sure looks like it won’t. In fact, to our youth it looks like there will be no future.
There is a way out of capitalism’s greed, chaos and inevitable degeneration to barbarism. It is clearly outlined and spelled out in the rich legacy of Marxist literature. These words by Leon Trotsky from his book, The Revolution Betrayed, illustrate the human sentiment behind the transformation of society from a for-private-profit mode of production to production for the satisfaction of the needs and wants of all. Trotsky said :
“The hypocrisy of prevailing opinion develops everywhere and always as the square, or cube, of the social conditions. Such approximately is the historic law of ideology translated into the language of mathematics. Socialism, if it is worthy of the name, means human relations without greed, friendship without envy and intrigue, love without base calculation.”
Socialism will be the evolutionary leap in human social relations that will end human slavery in every form because it is based on human solidarity and love. A worldwide socialist revolution is the gift that we, the world’s working class, can open for our children and grandchildren and the future of humankind. We have only our chains to lose and a world to gain!
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5) Mourning Baghdad, pushing peace
By David Dionisi
15:17 MECCA TIME, 12:17 GMT
TUESDAY, MARCH 18, 2008
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/11F7857C-325B-494C-B652-DB4FC772DFE2.htm
Anniversaries are a time for reflection.
As I reflect on the last five years, I pray for all victims of violence, especially the children.
I think about Baghdad. Baghdad was the leading metropolis of the Arab and Muslim world for five centuries. Now, it is polluted with radioactive depleted uranium that will be lethal to humans for billions of years, which means suffering and death will continue long after the fighting has ended.
While many historical parallels can be drawn between the war and the Mongol invasion in the 13th century or British imperialism in the 20th century, the horror inflicted on the Iraqi people by my country is far worse.
Killing for oil
The "green light" given to Saddam Hussein to attack Iran in 1979 and invade Kuwait in 1990, given by former US presidents Jimmy Carter and George Bush, respectively, provide essential context with regard to today's Iraqi body count.
In addition, Bush senior killed over a million Iraqis with the economic sanctions initiated in 1990, the 1991 war and the betrayal of promises to support Shia and Kurdish uprisings. Like his father, Bush junior, current US president, has also entered the history books as a mass murderer with the blood of over one million Iraqis on his hands.
Together, they are the only father and son in history to have each killed directly or indirectly over one million Iraqis.
Historical context
It is important to understand the past five years of occupation in a historical context because the student of history knows that the US lost the Iraq war the day it started. The only question that remains is whether the war will end before or after it bankrupts the collective soul of my country.
If my fellow Americans better understood the British 1914-1918 Mesopotamia campaign, they would not be fooled by the claim that the surge is working. Britain invaded the area we now call Iraq because in 1912 it started building warships that needed oil.
Soon after the British invasion, local resistance resulted in the creation of the League of the Islamic Awakening, the Muslim National League and the Guardians of Independence. Members of these anti-colonial secret societies, now called insurgents by the US government, have fought for independence long before the 2003 invasion.
History repeats in uncanny ways. One theme is the loss of national treasure; the Mongols destruction of Baghdad's House of Wisdom in 1258 was not dissimilar to the looting of Iraq's National Museum in 2003.
Another parallel is the defiance of the 1920 British Mandate by the grand mujahid of Karbala, Imam Shirazi, who called for war. Then, just as now, Sunnis and Shias fought to defeat a foreign occupying power that sought to exploit oil.
Unfortunately for the Iraqi people, the occupation continued by the British, although interrupted at times, until 1961 when the British Colonial Office separated a province of Iraq (what is now Kuwait) in order to exploit the oil under its sands.
Holding Bush accountable
I have spent the last five years working to end the Iraq war. I am not alone in this endeavour. As the result of the efforts of many peacemakers, the vast majority of Americans now see the war as harmful to everyone, whether in Iraq or here in the US.
Bush has depended on lies and secrecy to survive. As a result, his approval rating dropped to 19 percent in February, the lowest of any president.
Though he has repeatedly violated his oath to uphold the constitution, congress has also failed by not beginning the impeachment process. Hearings in the Judicial Committee, the first step in that process, would make Bush's crimes apparent to everyone.
The failure of lawmakers in congress to act is especially disappointing because there is overwhelming evidence of deception. For example, the Center for Public Integrity published a report in January that found Bush and seven of his top officials made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001.
Big blunder
On this fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, I see the US invasion on March 19, 2003 as the beginning of the mass murder of a proud people.
Bush, by invading Iraq, committed what may be the greatest US foreign policy blunder in history. As dreadful as this reality is, I believe the voices of the majority of Americans will ultimately be heard and the power of truth will prevail.
There are many organisations trying to get the facts out to the people. For instance, the Teach Peace Foundation delivers peace education to students and makes available over 100 free online documentaries. To learn how you can get involved so that we can end the war in 2009 instead of 2029, please visit www.teachpeace.com. Our motto is "the facts, calmly".
David Dionisi, a former US military intelligence officer and Fortune 500 executive, has written extensively on the failures in Iraq and campaigns against a war with Iran. Author of American Hiroshima, he also works for the Teach Peace Foundation.
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6) Partying Like It’s 1929
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
March 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/opinion/21krugman.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
If Ben Bernanke manages to save the financial system from collapse, he will — rightly — be praised for his heroic efforts.
But what we should be asking is: How did we get here?
Why does the financial system need salvation?
Why do mild-mannered economists have to become superheroes?
The answer, at a fundamental level, is that we’re paying the price for willful amnesia. We chose to forget what happened in the 1930s — and having refused to learn from history, we’re repeating it.
Contrary to popular belief, the stock market crash of 1929 wasn’t the defining moment of the Great Depression. What turned an ordinary recession into a civilization-threatening slump was the wave of bank runs that swept across America in 1930 and 1931.
This banking crisis of the 1930s showed that unregulated, unsupervised financial markets can all too easily suffer catastrophic failure.
As the decades passed, however, that lesson was forgotten — and now we’re relearning it, the hard way.
To grasp the problem, you need to understand what banks do.
Banks exist because they help reconcile the conflicting desires of savers and borrowers. Savers want freedom — access to their money on short notice. Borrowers want commitment: they don’t want to risk facing sudden demands for repayment.
Normally, banks satisfy both desires: depositors have access to their funds whenever they want, yet most of the money placed in a bank’s care is used to make long-term loans. The reason this works is that withdrawals are usually more or less matched by new deposits, so that a bank only needs a modest cash reserve to make good on its promises.
But sometimes — often based on nothing more than a rumor — banks face runs, in which many people try to withdraw their money at the same time. And a bank that faces a run by depositors, lacking the cash to meet their demands, may go bust even if the rumor was false.
Worse yet, bank runs can be contagious. If depositors at one bank lose their money, depositors at other banks are likely to get nervous, too, setting off a chain reaction. And there can be wider economic effects: as the surviving banks try to raise cash by calling in loans, there can be a vicious circle in which bank runs cause a credit crunch, which leads to more business failures, which leads to more financial troubles at banks, and so on.
That, in brief, is what happened in 1930-1931, making the Great Depression the disaster it was. So Congress tried to make sure it would never happen again by creating a system of regulations and guarantees that provided a safety net for the financial system.
And we all lived happily for a while — but not for ever after.
Wall Street chafed at regulations that limited risk, but also limited potential profits. And little by little it wriggled free — partly by persuading politicians to relax the rules, but mainly by creating a “shadow banking system” that relied on complex financial arrangements to bypass regulations designed to ensure that banking was safe.
For example, in the old system, savers had federally insured deposits in tightly regulated savings banks, and banks used that money to make home loans. Over time, however, this was partly replaced by a system in which savers put their money in funds that bought asset-backed commercial paper from special investment vehicles that bought collateralized debt obligations created from securitized mortgages — with nary a regulator in sight.
As the years went by, the shadow banking system took over more and more of the banking business, because the unregulated players in this system seemed to offer better deals than conventional banks. Meanwhile, those who worried about the fact that this brave new world of finance lacked a safety net were dismissed as hopelessly old-fashioned.
In fact, however, we were partying like it was 1929 — and now it’s 1930.
The financial crisis currently under way is basically an updated version of the wave of bank runs that swept the nation three generations ago. People aren’t pulling cash out of banks to put it in their mattresses — but they’re doing the modern equivalent, pulling their money out of the shadow banking system and putting it into Treasury bills. And the result, now as then, is a vicious circle of financial contraction.
Mr. Bernanke and his colleagues at the Fed are doing all they can to end that vicious circle. We can only hope that they succeed. Otherwise, the next few years will be very unpleasant — not another Great Depression, hopefully, but surely the worst slump we’ve seen in decades.
Even if Mr. Bernanke pulls it off, however, this is no way to run an economy. It’s time to relearn the lessons of the 1930s, and get the financial system back under control.
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7) Socialized Compensation
Editorial
March 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/opinion/21fri1.html?hp
How can one feel sorry for James Cayne? The potential losses of the chairman and former chief executive of Bear Stearns must rank up there with the biggest in modern history. The value of his stake in Bear Stearns collapsed from about $1 billion a year ago to as little as $14 million at the price JPMorgan Chase offered for the teetering bank on Sunday.
Still, Mr. Cayne was paid some $40 million in cash between 2004 and 2006, the last year on record, as well as stocks and options. In the past few years, he has sold shares worth millions more. There should be financial accountability for the man who led Bear Stearns as it gorged on dubious subprime securities to boost its profits and share price, helping to set up one of the biggest financial collapses since the savings-and-loan crisis in the 1980s. Some might argue that he should have lost it all.
But that’s not how it works. The ongoing bailout of the financial system by the Federal Reserve underscores the extent to which financial barons socialize the costs of private bets gone bad. Not a week goes by that the Fed doesn’t inaugurate a new way to provide liquidity — meaning money — to the financial system. Bear Stearns isn’t enormous. It doesn’t take deposits from the public. Yet the Fed believed that letting it implode could unleash a domino effect among other banks, and the Fed provided a $30 billion guarantee for JPMorgan to snap it up.
Compared to the cold shoulder given to struggling homeowners, the cash and attention lavished by the government on the nation’s financial titans provides telling insight into the priorities of the Bush administration. It’s not simply a matter of fairness, though. The Fed is probably right to be doing all it can think of to avoid worse damage than the economy is already suffering. But if the objective is to encourage prudent banking and keep Wall Street’s wizards from periodically driving financial markets over the cliff, it is imperative to devise a remuneration system for bankers that puts more of their skin in the game.
Financiers, of course, dispute that they are being insufficiently penalized. “I received no bonus for 2007, no severance pay, no golden parachute,” E. Stanley O’Neal, the former chief executive of Merrill Lynch, told a House committee recently. That doesn’t seem like much of a blow to Mr. O’Neal, who was removed earlier this year following gargantuan subprime-related losses.
Indeed, the pain that is being inflicted on financial-industry executives as a result of their own actions and decisions is not proving much of an encouragement. Rather, the knuckle-rapping seems only to encourage bankers to make up for any losses they may suffer by finding another way to navigate their companies, the financial system and the economy into the next maelstrom — from Internet stocks to what the industry calls zero-down, negative amortization, no-doc, adjustable-rate mortgages.
(Translation: derivatives based on incomprehensible mortgages with unpredictable interest rates given to people who have no reasonable chance of understanding them, let alone paying them back. )
Bankers operate under a system that provides stellar rewards when the investment strategies do well yet puts a floor on their losses when they go bad. They might have to forgo a bonus if investments turn sour. They might even be fired. Their equity might become worthless — or not, if the Fed feels it must step in. But as a rule, they won’t have to return the money they made in the good days when they were making all the crazy bets that eventually took their banks down.
The costs of such a lopsided system of incentives are by now clear. Better regulation of mortgage markets would help avoid repeating current excesses. But more fundamental correctives are needed to curb financiers’ appetite for walking a tightrope. Some economists have suggested making their remuneration contingent on the performance of their investments over several years — releasing their compensation gradually.
That’s an idea worth studying. Certainly, trying to put specific limits on bankers’ salaries is a nonstarter. But until bankers face a real risk of losing their shirts, they will continue blithely ratcheting up the risks to collect the rewards while letting the rest of us carry the bag when their punts go bad.
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8) Washington’s Grand Experiment to Rehouse the Poor
By ERIK ECKHOLM
March 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/us/21housing.html
Correction Appended
WASHINGTON — When District of Columbia officials tore down the decrepit housing project in southeast Washington where Samantha Jackson lived with her teenage son, they promised that they would build a more attractive, mixed-income community and that former tenants like herself could come back.
“I was very happy,” recalled Ms. Jackson, 42, a school custodian. “The area was rough and scary.”
Ms. Jackson, who has been staying with a friend since the demolition in 2004, is now in line to buy, with subsidies, a new apartment in a town house in the same neighborhood, and she can hardly wait. “It looks like Hollywood to me,” Ms. Jackson said of the onetime slum where glossy buildings and the Washington Nationals stadium are also rising.
Bucking national trends and citing what they call “a moral goal,” District of Columbia officials have pledged to preserve and even expand low-income housing, replacing dangerous projects with new communities that keep both poor and “work force” residents — firefighters, teachers and laborers — in the mix.
The redevelopment of the Arthur Capper and Carrollsburg projects, where Ms. Jackson lived, is the first in the country to promise replacement of all low-income units within the same neighborhood, said Michael Kelly, director of the city Housing Authority.
“Mr. Kelly is undertaking a great experiment to see if he can turn around distressed neighborhoods and keep the original residents there to benefit,” said Sue Popkin, a housing expert at the Urban Institute. “It’s a gamble. We don’t know how to take a terrible neighborhood and make it nice while keeping the same people there.”
The federal government no longer pays to build housing projects, which in Washington, Chicago and other cities became symbols of concentrated poverty.
Since the early 1990s, it has given money under a program called Hope VI to tear down distressed projects, to be replaced by mixed communities built with private partners. In a pattern that critics disparage as “demolish and disperse,” some former tenants return but most scatter with rental vouchers, destroying community ties. District officials say they have learned from past mistakes.
The issues are in contention at the federal level now: the Bush administration proposes to eliminate Hope VI, while the House of Representatives has passed a bill that would extend it and require that all razed public housing be replaced.
The Washington venture will preserve housing, but social ties have been undermined by the stretched-out construction schedule; some former tenants will wait as long as eight years to return, in the meantime using vouchers or staying in other public housing.
Martha Queen, 72, who is raising her 17-year-old great-grandson, has been lonely and depressed since she moved to a public unit in a different neighborhood, away from her friends.
“All the things you’re familiar with, they’re gone,” she said of her former home. “It’s all rubble now.”
“I just sit upstairs and look out the window,” she added.
She has been offered a new two-bedroom at Capper-Carrollsburg, but it is smaller than the place she had before and she has resisted, fearing she would have to get rid of half of her furniture.
The Housing Authority, which controls 8,000 units, has received federal grants to tear down six projects and create mixed communities. The city says it will use bonds and private investors to redevelop more sites, but critics ask if that is financially feasible.
The current site had 707 low-income units. In the expanded community, as many low-income rentals will blend in with more than 800 homes rented or sold to working-class and more affluent people, as well as an office building, new stores and parks.
In the meantime, former tenants are offered social aid, from credit repair and job advice to drug treatment.
Ms. Jackson, who expects to buy her home in 2010, had an unpaid medical bill that tarnished her credit rating. The support program put her in touch with a legal aid center that persuaded an insurance company to pay.
Poor people will pay 30 percent of their incomes in rent. Other units are for sale, with subsidies, to the working poor, including families making as little as $25,000, while others will sell at market rates.
Many residents were suspicious. A group organized to press for a stronger role in shaping the Capper-Carrollsburg project, and fought, for example, to keep a youth center open before the final demolition.
A committee of residents, officials and neighbors decided that any returnees with a serious criminal conviction within three years of the move-in date, and anyone with seriously bad credit, would be excluded. They will keep their current vouchers or public units, officials promise.
One-for-one replacement of units will be more difficult in cities lacking high land prices, which enabled Washington to issue bonds tied to future tax revenues. Still, the drive to save public housing reflects a growing sense among urban experts of the limits of rental vouchers. Vouchers help families move out of crime-infested projects but in cities with tight housing, landlords may not accept them, driving tenants to new slums on the urban fringes.
“Vouchers sometimes have the unintended consequence of just shifting burdens around,” said Robert J. Sampson, chairman of the sociology department at Harvard.
Vouchers also depend on annual appropriations; for the coming year, the funds proposed by President Bush would reduce vouchers and aid to low-income housing, according to Barbara Sard, housing director at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington.
Dwayne Todd, 20, grew up in the Capper-Carrollsburg projects. “I was mad when I found out they were tearing down our home,” said Mr. Todd, who has a girlfriend and two babies. “All my friends are scattered.” But the case worker helped him get a job as a security officer, and he looks forward to returning to his own place.
“I want to move back there, I have so many childhood memories,” he said. “Some people didn’t really want them to change the neighborhood this way, but for me it’s a pretty decent thing. I don’t want my kids to grow up in a project.”
Correction, Friday, March 20
An article Thursday misidentified an organization is Washington that said the President's budget proposals would reduce funds for low-income housing. It is the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, not the Center on Budget and Policy Alternatives.
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9) Slump Moves From Wall St. to Main St.
By PETER S. GOODMAN
March 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/business/21econ.html
In Seattle, sales at a long-established hardware store, Pacific Supply, are suddenly dipping. In Oklahoma City, couples planning their weddings are demonstrating uncustomary thrift, forgoing Dungeness crab and special linens. And in many cities, the registers at department stores like Nordstrom on the higher end and J. C. Penney in the middle are ringing less often.
With Wall Street caught in a credit crisis that has captured headlines, the forces assailing the economy are now spreading beyond areas hit hardest by the boom-turned-bust in real estate like California, Florida and Nevada. Now, the downturn is seeping into new parts of the country, to communities that seemed insulated only months ago.
The broadening of the slowdown, the plunge in home prices and near-paralysis in the financial system are fueling worries that what most economists now see as an inevitable recession could end up being especially painful.
Indeed, some economists fear it will last longer and inflict more bite on workers and businesses than the last two recessions, which gripped the economy in 2001 and for eight months straddling 1990 and 1991. This time, these experts say, a recession in which economic activity falls over a sustained period and joblessness rises across the board could even persist into next year.
“It’s not hard to construct very dark scenarios, primarily because the financial system is in disarray, and it’s not clear how to get it all back together again,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com.
To be sure, there are many places where talk of recession still seems as out of place as a diner trying to score a table at a trendy Los Angeles restaurant without reservations on a Saturday night. First-class cabins of airplanes are jammed. So are spas, cigar bars and children’s clothing boutiques selling upscale dresses.
Unemployment, meanwhile, still remains at a relatively low 4.8 percent.
But even after the Federal Reserve’s extraordinary efforts to prevent the collapse of Bear Stearns from spreading to other financial institutions, the danger still lurks that banks will grow even tighter with their funds and will starve the economy of capital.
“If lenders and debtors don’t trust each other, that causes a power outage,” said Michael T. Darda, chief economist at MKM Partners. “And that’s where we are now.” Until recently, Mr. Darda was among those still holding to the notion that the economy could generate enough jobs to keep the economy rolling. But the private sector has shed jobs for three consecutive months. Mr. Darda is now worried.
“We’ll be lucky to make it out of this without something that looks like a recession,” he said.
On Thursday, FedEx , whose global courier business tends to rise and fall with swings in the economy, reported that its earnings actually dropped in the United States and warned that in future months it expected to fall well short of its customary double-digit annualized profit gains.
“We just aren’t going to be able to do that,” Alan Graf, FedEx’s chief financial officer, said in a call with Wall Street analysts. “The crystal ball for everybody is very cloudy here.”
For now, there are still pockets of prosperity across the country. Farmers are enjoying record crop prices as the adoption of ethanol makes corn a way to fill gas tanks, and as rising incomes in China, India and elsewhere spell growing demand for meat. The weak dollar is helping exporters and retailers that cater to foreign tourists.
Eastern Mountain Sports, the outdoor clothing dealer, says sales increased by one-third this month compared with the year before at its store in SoHo. “A lot of that is Europeans coming over,” said Will Manzer, the company’s president.
With oil selling at approximately $100 a barrel, the Taste of Texas Steakhouse in Houston — a popular spot for events held by BP, Shell and Exxon Mobil — is reveling in days of plenty.
Even those areas suffering the downturn can bank on considerable help on the way, economists say, as the impact of lowered interest rates kicks in later this year, encouraging businesses to expand and hire. Tax rebate checks to be mailed out by the government this spring may lubricate spending as well.
Despite fears that the odds for a particularly severe recession have now increased, Mr. Zandi still subscribes to the consensus that the economy will shrink only modestly during the first half of 2008, then resume expanding as more money washes through the system. That would limit the damage to the type of relatively modest recession that hit the economy earlier this decade.
For the country as a whole, recent data shows that the economy is deteriorating at an accelerating rate. From September to January, average home prices fell 6 percent compared with a year earlier. Consumer confidence has been plummeting. The private sector shed 26,000 jobs in January and 101,000 in February, while those out of work have stayed jobless longer, according to the Labor Department.
Now, the broader discomfort is filtering into cities and towns that only recently seemed beyond reach.
Seattle’s real estate market has slowed, but prices have held relatively steady. Even so, sales at the Pacific Supply Company, a hardware store in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, have fallen by 5 to 10 percent in the last few months.
“There’s a general sense of caution,” Michael Go, the store’s general manager, said.
Ritz Sisters sells gift items like soaps and chocolates to shops and catalogs throughout the Pacific Northwest. In recent months, orders have fallen by one-fifth, said Tim Creveling, a co-owner of the business.
“People are just hunkering down,” he said.
In Oklahoma City, Aunt Pittypat’s Catering has lost one-fifth of its business in the last two months, as $25,000 weddings are scaled down to smaller affairs.
“People are just being a lot more conservative,” said Maggie Howell, a co-owner. “They want crab and seafood, but they’re settling for cheese displays.”
In Cleveland, Lincoln Electric, which makes welding gear, has also experienced a slowdown. “Our growth is relatively anemic in North America,” said Vincent Petrella, its chief financial officer.
The slowdown has proved severe enough to poke a hole in the idea that sales abroad can carry the economy even if they dip at home.
In North Carolina, Power Curbers, which makes equipment that turns concrete into curbs, has been sending more gear abroad. But domestic sales plummeted by one-fourth during the first two months of the year, Dyke Messinger, the company’s president, said. In mid-February, Power Curbers laid off 6 of the 80 workers at its factory near Charlotte.
Many economists forecast that overall consumer spending will slip 1 percent for the first three months of the year.
“That’s a wow,” said Robert Barbera, chief economist for the trading and research firm ITG. “Outright declines for real consumer purchases are unusual.”
What is shaping up as the second recession of the 2000s is the product of declines in home values, which play a far bigger role in most Americans’ personal finances than the stock market. Households have borrowed against the increased value of their property to buy cars, send their children to college and add home theater systems.
“This is the bedrock asset for the lion’s share of the population of the United States,” Mr. Barbera said. “It’s not like dot-com stocks, where I bought Webvan for 1,000 times the imaginary earnings, and now it’s worth nothing but I go and have a beer. You’re talking about the value of people’s houses.”
As economists try to assess the likely contours of the unfolding downturn, many see parallels in the recession of 1990 and 1991.
Then, as now, the dollar was weak, oil prices were high and trouble started with a sharp slide in housing prices, followed by major losses for mortgage lenders. The resulting savings and loan crisis spurred a buyout that cost taxpayers $240 billion in inflation-adjusted terms, and it brought a severe tightness of credit.
That recession lasted eight months, slightly less than the average for downturns going back to 1946, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. This one, though, could drag on longer, some economists say, because the underlying forces are more difficult to attack, even though Washington has been much more active, much earlier in lowering interest rates, sending out tax rebates and taking other measures to arrest an economic decline.
Back in the late 1980s, lending was concentrated in fewer hands. Once the government calculated the size of the problem in the saving and loan industry and assented to the bailout, confidence was restored and the wheels of finance turned anew.
This time, the size of the bad debts remains a mystery, with estimates reaching $400 billion. Markets fret that the next Bear Stearns could pop up anywhere.
The first signs of what became the mortgage crisis emerged back in August.
“Yet we’re still fighting it,” Mr. Darda said. “We’re still dealing with this paralysis.”
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10) An Agent, a Green Card, and a Demand for Sex
By NINA BERNSTEIN
March 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/nyregion/21immigrant.html?em&ex=1206331200&en=9f3f0cfc6fdcf8c2&ei=5087%0A
No problems so far, the immigration agent told the American citizen and his 22-year-old Colombian wife at her green card interview in December. After he stapled one of their wedding photos to her application for legal permanent residency, he had just one more question: What was her cellphone number?
The calls from the agent started three days later. He hinted, she said, at his power to derail her life and deport her relatives, alluding to a brush she had with the law before her marriage. He summoned her to a private meeting. And at noon on Dec. 21, in a parked car on Queens Boulevard, he named his price — not realizing that she was recording everything on the cellphone in her purse.
“I want sex,” he said on the recording. “One or two times. That’s all. You get your green card. You won’t have to see me anymore.”
She reluctantly agreed to a future meeting. But when she tried to leave his car, he demanded oral sex “now,” to “know that you’re serious.” And despite her protests, she said, he got his way.
The 16-minute recording, which the woman first took to The New York Times and then to the Queens district attorney, suggests the vast power of low-level immigration law enforcers, and a growing desperation on the part of immigrants seeking legal status. The aftermath, which included the arrest of an immigration agent last week, underscores the difficulty and danger of making a complaint, even in the rare case when abuse of power may have been caught on tape.
No one knows how widespread sexual blackmail is, but the case echoes other instances of sexual coercion that have surfaced in recent years, including agents criminally charged in Atlanta, Miami and Santa Ana, Calif. And it raises broader questions about the system’s vulnerability to corruption at a time when millions of noncitizens live in a kind of legal no-man’s land, increasingly fearful of seeking the law’s protection.
The agent arrested last week, Isaac R. Baichu, 46, himself an immigrant from Guyana, handled some 8,000 green card applications during his three years as an adjudicator in the Garden City, N.Y., office of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of the federal Department of Homeland Security. He pleaded not guilty to felony and misdemeanor charges of coercing the young woman to perform oral sex, and of promising to help her secure immigration papers in exchange for further sexual favors. If convicted, he will face up to seven years in prison.
His agency has suspended him with pay, and the inspector general of Homeland Security is reviewing his other cases, a spokesman said Wednesday. Prosecutors, who say they recorded a meeting between Mr. Baichu and the woman on March 11 at which he made similar demands for sex, urge any other victims to come forward.
Money, not sex, is the more common currency of corruption in immigration, but according to Congressional testimony in 2006 by Michael Maxwell, former director of the agency’s internal investigations, more than 3,000 backlogged complaints of employee misconduct had gone uninvestigated for lack of staff, including 528 involving criminal allegations.
The agency says it has tripled its investigative staff since then, and counts only 165 serious complaints pending. But it stopped posting an e-mail address and phone number for such complaints last year, said Jan Lane, chief of security and integrity, because it lacks the staff to cull the thousands of mostly irrelevant messages that resulted. Immigrants, she advised, should report wrongdoing to any law enforcement agency they trust.
The young woman in Queens, whose name is being withheld because the authorities consider her the victim of a sex crime, did not even tell her husband what had happened. Two weeks after the meeting in the car, finding no way to make a confidential complaint to the immigration agency and afraid to go to the police, she and two older female relatives took the recording to The Times.
Reasons to Worry
A slim, shy woman who looks like a teenager, she said she had spent recent months baby-sitting for relatives in Queens, crying over the deaths of her two brothers back in Cali, Colombia, and longing for the right stamp in her passport — one that would let her return to the United States if she visited her family.
She came to the United States on a tourist visa in 2004 and overstayed. When she married an American citizen a year ago, the law allowed her to apply to “adjust” her illegal status. But unless her green card application was approved, she could not visit her parents or her brothers’ graves and then legally re-enter the United States. And if her application was denied, she would face deportation.
She had another reason to be fearful, and not only for herself. About 15 months ago, she said, an acquaintance hired her and two female relatives in New York to carry $12,000 in cash to the bank. The three women, all living in the country illegally, were arrested on the street by customs officers apparently acting on a tip in a money-laundering investigation. After determining that the women had no useful information, the officers released them.
But the closed investigation file had showed up in the computer when she applied for a green card, Mr. Baichu told her in December; until he obtained the file and dealt with it, her application would not be approved. If she defied him, she feared, he could summon immigration enforcement agents to take her relatives to detention.
So instead of calling the police, she turned on the video recorder in her cellphone, put the phone in her purse and walked to meet the agent. Two family members said they watched anxiously from their parked car as she disappeared behind the tinted windows of his red Lexus.
“We were worried that the guy would take off, take her away and do something to her,” the woman’s widowed sister-in-law said in Spanish.
As the recorder captured the agent’s words and a lilting Guyanese accent, he laid out his terms in an easy, almost paternal style. He would not ask too much, he said: sex “once or twice,” visits to his home in the Bronx, perhaps a link to other Colombians who needed his help with their immigration problems.
In shaky English, the woman expressed reluctance, and questioned how she could be sure he would keep his word.
“If I do it, it’s like very hard for me, because I have my husband, and I really fall in love with him,” she said.
The agent insisted that she had to trust him. “I wouldn’t ask you to do something for me if I can’t do something for you, right?” he said, and reasoned, “Nobody going to help you for nothing,” noting that she had no money.
He described himself as the single father of a 10-year-old daughter, telling her, “I need love, too,” and predicting, “You will get to like me because I’m a nice guy.”
Repeatedly, she responded “O.K.,” without conviction. At one point he thanked her for showing up, saying, “I know you feel very scared.”
Finally, she tried to leave. “Let me go because I tell my husband I come home,” she said.
His reply, the recording shows, was a blunt demand for oral sex.
“Right now? No!” she protested. “No, no, right now I can’t.”
He insisted, cajoled, even empathized. “I came from a different country, too,” he said. “I got my green card just like you.”
Then, she said, he grabbed her. During the speechless minute that follows on the recording, she said she yielded to his demand out of fear that he would use his authority against her.
How Much Corruption?
The charges against Mr. Baichu, who became a United States citizen in 1991 and earns roughly $50,000 a year, appear to be part of a larger pattern, according to government records and interviews.
Mr. Maxwell, the immigration agency’s former chief investigator, told Congress in 2006 that internal corruption was “rampant,” and that employees faced constant temptations to commit crime.
“It is only a small step from granting a discretionary waiver of an eligibility rule to asking for a favor or taking a bribe in exchange for granting that waiver,” he contended. “Once an employee learns he can get away with low-level corruption and still advance up the ranks, he or she becomes more brazen.”
Mr. Maxwell’s own deputy, Lloyd W. Miner, 49, of Hyattsville, Md., turned out to be an example. He was sentenced March 7 to a year in prison for inducing a 21-year-old Mongolian woman to stay in the country illegally, and harboring her in his house.
Other cases include that of a 60-year-old immigration adjudicator in Santa Ana, Calif., who was charged with demanding sexual favors from a 29-year-old Vietnamese woman in exchange for approving her citizenship application. The agent, Eddie Romualdo Miranda, was acquitted of a felony sexual battery charge last August, but pleaded guilty to misdemeanor battery and was sentenced to probation.
In Atlanta, another adjudicator, Kelvin R. Owens, was convicted in 2005 of sexually assaulting a 45-year-old woman during her citizenship interview in the federal building, and sentenced to weekends in jail for six months. And a Miami agent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement responsible for transporting a Haitian woman to detention is awaiting trial on charges that he took her to his home and raped her.
“Despite our best efforts there are always people ready to use their position for personal gain or personal pleasure,” said Chris Bentley, a spokesman for Citizenship and Immigration Services. “Our responsibility is to ferret them out.”
When the Queens woman came to The Times with her recording on Jan. 3, she was afraid of retaliation from the agent, and uncertain about making a criminal complaint, though she had an appointment the next day at the Queens district attorney’s office.
She followed through, however, and Carmencita Gutierrez, an assistant district attorney, began monitoring phone calls between the agent and the young woman, a spokesman said. When Mr. Baichu arranged to meet the woman on March 11 at the Flagship Restaurant on Queens Boulevard, investigators were ready.
In the conversation recorded there, according to the criminal complaint, Mr. Baichu told her he expected her to do “just like the last time,” and offered to take her to a garage or the bathroom of a friend’s real estate business so she would be “more comfortable doing it” there.
Mr. Baichu was arrested as he emerged from the diner and headed to his car, wearing much gold and diamond jewelry, prosecutors said. Later released on $15,000 bail, Mr. Baichu referred calls for comment to his lawyer, Sally Attia, who said he did not have authority to grant or deny green card petitions without his supervisor’s approval.
The young woman’s ordeal is not over. Her husband overheard her speaking about it to a cousin about a month ago, and she had to tell him the whole story, she said.
“He was so mad at me, he left my house,” she said, near tears. “I don’t know if he’s going to come back.”
The green card has not come through. “I’m still hoping,” she said.
Angelica Medaglia contributed reporting.
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11) March 22, 2008
Debt-Gorged British Start to Worry That the Party Is Ending
By JULIA WERDIGIER
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/22/business/worldbusiness/22debt.html?ref=world
LONDON — At one point, Alexis Hall had more than 50 pairs of designer shoes and handbags. It never occurred to the 39-year-old media relations executive from Glasgow that her £31,500 in debt ($63,000) would be a problem.
“It was so easy to get the loans and the credit that you almost think the goods are a gift from the shop,” she said. “You don’t fully realize that it’s real money you are spending until you actually sit down and consolidate your bills and then it’s a shock.”
As the United States economy weakens, many Americans are being overwhelmed by personal debt, but Britons are even more profligate. For most of the last decade, consumers here went on a debt-financed spending spree that made them the most indebted rich nation in the world, racking up a record £1.4 trillion in debt ($2.8 trillion) — more than the country’s gross domestic product.
By comparison, personal debt in the United States is $13.8 trillion, including mortgage debt, slightly less than the country’s $14 trillion G.D.P.
And while the Federal Reserve in Washington has cut interest rates, in an effort to loosen lenders’ grip on credit, the Bank of England’s interest rate increases last year are trickling through to mortgages at the very time home values are dropping and banks are becoming more reluctant to lend.
Until now, debt has mostly been a good thing for Britain. In the hands of free-spending consumers, it fueled economic growth. The government borrowed heavily in recent years to invest in infrastructure, health and education, creating a virtuous cycle: government spending led to job creation, which led to greater consumer confidence and more spending, which, in turn, stimulated growth.
Economists say Britain’s relationship to debt is complex, but at its core is a phenomenon more akin to recent American history than European trends. As in the United States, a decade-long housing boom and strong economic growth bolstered consumer confidence, creating a perception of wealth almost unknown in countries like Germany and Italy.
“Culturally, maybe also because of the defeat in the war, Germans remain reluctant to borrow and banks are often state-owned, pushing less for profits from lending,” said Alistair Milne, a professor at Cass Business School in London.
Since many younger Britons have never lived through a period of slow growth, few now see the need to hold back on borrowing, not to mention saving.
“The general mantra is spend now, think later,” said Jason Butler, an adviser at Bloomsbury Financial Planning. “It’s easier to get a loan or a credit card these days than to get a savings product.”
The average British adult has 2.8 credit or debit cards, more than any other country in Europe. A growing number are borrowing to pay for vacations, furniture, even plastic surgery. As a result, Britons are spending more than they earn, racking up a household debt-to-income ratio of 1.62 compared with 1.42 in the United States and 1.09 in Germany.
To her parent’s generation, Ms. Hall said, owing money beyond a mortgage was “shameful,” an admission of living beyond one’s means. Debt was also more difficult to get.
That changed in the late 1990s when American lenders, including Citigroup and CapitalOne, pushed into the British market with a panoply of new lending products. Fierce competition among banks meant potential borrowers were suddenly bombarded with advertising and offers for low- or no-interest loans and credit cards.
While Britain’s financial regulators watched the explosion of retail lending from the sidelines, their counterparts in Germany and France were more restrictive. As a result, the British market became the largest and most sophisticated in Europe.
The growth was also fueled by soaring demand for debt on the back of rising real estate prices and relatively low interest rates in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Those who did not own a house rushed to join the homeowners watching their property triple in value.
The trend on the Continent was the opposite. Home prices in most European countries barely moved, mainly because markets were more regulated, there was more housing stock and renting was more popular.
Liz Bingham, head of restructuring at Ernst & Young in London, blames the obsession with homeownership on Britain’s “island mentality”: land is seen as a finite good and a valuable asset.
“The housing boom automatically made people feel richer than they actually were and people went on to use the equity locked up in their property almost as a bank account they can dip into every time they want to buy a new car,” Ms. Bingham said.
As the perception of wealth grew, the social stigma around debt disappeared. Borrowing became such an accepted part of life that today one in five teenagers does not consider being in debt to be a bad thing, a survey by Nationwide Building Society showed.
Debt levels increased further as it became easier to get loans, and retailers, like computer chain PC World, offered both goods and the loans to buy them. Consumers happily accepted, thinking that as long as they were deemed creditworthy, they were not in danger of defaulting.
Andy Davie is a case in point. Even after he had racked up £70,000 in personal debt trying to keep his fruit and vegetable business afloat, credit card issuers kept increasing his credit limits.
“You tend to use credit to pay for credit and as far as the banks are concerned you are fine,” said Mr. Davie, 41.
He was finally forced to declare bankruptcy. Though still painful, the process made the prospect of defaulting slightly less daunting.
“Rather than showing up at court you just fill in an online form and speak to someone on the phone,” said Mark Sands, director of personal insolvency at KPMG in London.
The ease of the bankruptcy process, the availability of debt, the property boom and strong economic growth, lulled consumers into a “false sense of security that is now coming to haunt us,” said James Falla, a debt adviser at London-based Thomas Charles.
“It’s all good as long as the economy is doing well, but if that changes people will really get caught short,” he added.
And things are changing. Growth has already started to slow this year, and the government lowered its 2008 forecast to 1.75 percent to 2.25 percent, after 3.1 percent growth last year.
Home prices are falling, despite a dearth of housing and an influx of wealthy Middle Easteners and Russians, especially in London. Last year, housing foreclosures reached the highest level since 1999 and are expected to rise still further this year.
And more than one million homeowners have adjustable-rate mortgages that are expected to reset in the next 12 months — to significantly higher rates.
The prospect of rising costs has already prompted some consumers to change their spending habits. The camera retailer Jessops and the fashion store French Connection are among retailers feeling the squeeze and reporting lower sales since the end of 2007.
But changing spending habits will not be enough to solve the problem of rising debt levels, said Mr. Butler, the debt adviser. Consumers will also have to learn to save.
According to a survey for the Office of National Statistics, less than half the population saves regularly, and more than 39 percent said they would rather enjoy a good standard of living today than save for retirement. Ms. Hall said she was among that 39 percent. She recently took out new loans, planning to repay her existing debt. But she ended up spending the money on more luxury goods instead.
This year, she published a book about her experiences. She said she did not expect the book’s proceeds to repay her debts, but it may help the growing number of people in similar positions cope with theirs.
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12) Pentagon Urges Delay in U.S. Troop Reductions in Iraq
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
March 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/22/world/middleeast/22policy.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON — Senior military commanders have presented the Bush administration with proposals to put off any plans for further reductions of troops in Iraq at least until the end of summer. At the same time, the proposals would limit new deployments to 12 months, instead of 15 months now, military and administration officials said Friday.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates met for a second day in closed sessions with the Pentagon’s top officers to outline recommendations to be presented to President Bush on Wednesday.
Mr. Bush is to discuss the proposals with the senior commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, in a videoconference on Monday and is expected to make a decision about any additional withdrawals before he leaves on April 1 for a five-day trip to Ukraine, Romania and Croatia, the officials said.
Last September, facing intense pressure from Democrats and even some Republicans in Congress, Mr. Bush announced that he would withdraw five combat brigades and two Marine battalions by July. Those reductions, not yet complete, would effectively return the number of troops in Iraq to roughly 140,000, a level slightly higher than before Mr. Bush ordered the buildup that became known as the “surge.”
Mr. Gates’s spokesman, Geoff Morrell, said four more departing brigades, each with more than 3,000 troops, had yet to leave Iraq, making it difficult to assess the effect on security in Iraq of the reduction of troops ordered last fall. There are now 155,000 American troops in Iraq, down from a peak of 170,000 last fall.
“A pause of some duration is worthwhile to figure out the impact of the rapid withdrawal of the last four surge brigades,” Mr. Morrell said. “So losing those four brigades over the course of four months is going to require some assessment of the impact that has.” He declined to discuss in detail the proposals that Mr. Gates heard in the meetings in recent days.
General Petraeus and other officials have made it clear that they want more time to assess what happens after the withdrawals are completed, leaving 15 combat brigades in Iraq. In his public remarks on Wednesday, the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the war, Mr. Bush strongly suggested that he would not hasten the reductions.
The debate over troop levels in Iraq has caused divisions among senior commanders. Adm. William J. Fallon, the leader of Central Command, which oversees operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, argued publicly for continued withdrawals in Iraq after only a brief pause. That put him at odds with General Petraeus.
Admiral Fallon resigned last week, effective the end of March, saying the perception of differences with Mr. Bush had become a distraction. His resignation prompted accusations that the White House had punished dissenting views about maintaining a large force in Iraq.
A senior administration official said a consensus had formed among senior officers at the Pentagon and in Baghdad about putting off any further discussion of reductions.
One reason for that, the official said, is that it was possible that by July the Army could shorten tours in Iraq by 3 months to 12 months. The extension of tours, which began with the surge last April, has been unpopular among soldiers and officers, and ending them has been one of Mr. Gates’s goals. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss internal policy deliberations ahead of Mr. Bush’s decision.
The prospect of a pause in withdrawals, especially a lengthy one, could reignite antiwar feelings on Capitol Hill, which have diminished in intensity since September, when General Petraeus last testified before Congress. Democrats have lately shifted their focus to the costs of the war, which could resonate in a time of economic turmoil at home.
Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, said it would be a mistake not to continue “a careful but deliberate” reduction in troops. “You’ve got to signal to the Army and the Marine Corps that this treadmill in and out of Iraq is going to stop,” he said in a telephone interview.
Senator Reed, a former Army infantry officer and a member of the Armed Services Committee, also said a long pause would ease pressure on Iraqi leaders to make greater strides toward improving security and governance.
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13) Melting Pace of Glaciers Is Accelerating, Report Says
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
March 18, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/science/earth/18melt.html?ref=science
Most of the world’s mountain glaciers, many of which feed major rivers and water supplies, are shrinking at an accelerating pace as the climate warms, according to a new report.
The report charts changes through 2006. It was issued Monday by the World Glacier Monitoring Service, which is based at the University of Zurich and supported by the United Nations Environment Program.
“The latest figures are part of what appears to be an accelerating trend with no apparent end in sight,” said Wilfried Haeberli, the director of the glacier service.
The study included data from 30 glaciers spread around nine mountainous regions.
Several ice experts not associated with the report said year-to-year changes in the overall mass of ice locked in these moving frozen rivers did not always denote a trend. But they added that the long-term trend was clearly toward a warming world with less mountain ice — and related water troubles, including both floods and shortages, from the Andes to the Himalayas.
The global average temperature dropped from its seasonal norm in recent months, and the Northern Hemisphere has had unusually extensive snow. But many experts have said those developments are almost assuredly a short-term wiggle on the way to more warming and melting from the influence of long-lived greenhouse gases produced mainly by burning fuels and forests.
The big danger ahead, several glacier experts said, is that the loss of glaciers would take away a summertime source of river water, drinking water and hydroelectric power in populous, relatively poor places like South Asia and the cities along the western slope of the Andes.
“Millions of people depend on the runoff from mountain snow and ice in the warm seasons,” said Peter Gleick, who has studied water and climate for two decades and is the president of the Pacific Institute, a private research group in Oakland, Calif. “Climate change is going to make that runoff disappear.”
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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North Carolina: Ministers Say Police Destroyed Records
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | South
Three ministers accused a Greensboro police officer of ordering officers to destroy about 50 boxes of police files related to the fatal shooting of five people at an anti-Ku Klux Klan rally in 1979. The Revs. Cardes Brown, Gregory Headen and Nelson Johnson said an active-duty officer told them he and at least three other officers were told to destroy the records in 2004 or 2005, shortly after a seven-member panel that had been convened to research the shootings requested police files related to them. The ministers did not identify the officer who provided the information. On Nov. 3, 1979, a heavily armed caravan of Klansman and Nazi Party members confronted the rally. Five marchers were killed and 10 were injured. Those charged were later acquitted in state and federal trials. The city and some Klan members were found liable for the deaths in civil litigation.
February 27, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/us/27brfs-MINISTERSSAY_BRF.html?ref=us
Gaza: Israeli Army Clears Itself in 21 Deaths
By ISABEL KERSHNER
World Briefing | Middle East
The army said no legal action would be taken against military officials over an artillery strike in Beit Hanun in 2006 in which an errant shell hit residential buildings and killed 21 Palestinian civilians. An army investigation concluded that the shell was fired based on information that militants were intending to fire rockets from the area, an army statement said. The civilian deaths, it said, were “directly due to a rare and severe failure” in the artillery control system. The army’s military advocate general concluded that there was no need for further investigation.
February 27, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/world/middleeast/27briefs-israelistrike.html?ref=world
World Briefing | Asia
Taiwan: Tons of Fish Wash Up on Beaches
By REUTERS
About 45 tons of fish have washed up dead along 200 miles of beach on the outlying Penghu Islands after an unusual cold snap. News reports said 10 times as many dead fish were still in the water.
February 23, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/23/world/asia/23briefs-TONSOFFISHWA_BRF.html?ref=world
Zimbabwe: Inflation Breaks the Six-Figure Mark
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
World Briefing | Africa
The government’s statistics office said the inflation rate surged to a new record of 100,580 percent in January, up from 66,212 percent in December. Rangarirai Mberi, news editor of the independent Financial Gazette in Harare, said the state of the economy would feature prominently in next month’s presidential and parliamentary elections. “Numbers no longer shock people,” he said. Zimbabweans have learned to live in a hyperinflationary environment, he added, “but the question is, how long can this continue?”
February 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/world/africa/21briefs-INFLATIONBRE_BRF.html?ref=world
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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS AND INFORMATION
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Russell Means Speaking at the Transform Columbus Day Rally
"If voting could do anything it would be illegal!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8Lri1-6aoY
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Stop the Termination or the Cherokee Nation
http://groups.msn.com/BayAreaIndianCalendar/activismissues.msnw?action=get_message&mview=1&ID_Message=5580
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We Didn't Start the Fire
http://yeli.us/Flash/Fire.html
I Can't Take it No More
http://lefti.blogspot.com/2007_11_01_archive.html#9214483115237950361
The Art of Mental Warfare
http://artofmentalwarfare.com/pog/artofmentalwarfarecom-the-warning/
MONEY AS DEBT
http://video. google.com/ videoplay? docid=-905047436 2583451279
http://www.moneyasd ebt.net/
UNCONSTITUTIONAL
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6582099850410121223&pr=goog-sl
IRAQ FOR SALE
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6621486727392146155
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Port of Olympia Anti-Militarization Action Nov. 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOkn2Fg7R8w
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"They have a new gimmick every year. They're going to take one of their boys, black boys, and put him in the cabinet so he can walk around Washington with a cigar. Fire on one end and fool on the other end. And because his immediate personal problem will have been solved he will be the one to tell our people: 'Look how much progress we're making. I'm in Washington, D.C., I can have tea in the White House. I'm your spokesman, I'm your leader.' While our people are still living in Harlem in the slums. Still receiving the worst form of education.
"But how many sitting here right now feel that they could [laughs] truly identify with a struggle that was designed to eliminate the basic causes that create the conditions that exist? Not very many. They can jive, but when it comes to identifying yourself with a struggle that is not endorsed by the power structure, that is not acceptable, that the ground rules are not laid down by the society in which you live, in which you are struggling against, you can't identify with that, you step back.
"It's easy to become a satellite today without even realizing it. This country can seduce God. Yes, it has that seductive power of economic dollarism. You can cut out colonialism, imperialism and all other kind of ism, but it's hard for you to cut that dollarism. When they drop those dollars on you, you'll fold though."
—MALCOLM X, 1965
http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=987
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A little gem:
Michael Moore Faces Off With Stephen Colbert [VIDEO]
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/57492/
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LAPD vs. Immigrants (Video)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/qws/ff/qr?term=lapd&Submit=S&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Search&st=s
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Dr. Julia Hare at the SOBA 2007
http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeo9ewi/proudtobeblack2/
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"We are far from that stage today in our era of the absolute
lie; the complete and totalitarian lie, spread by the
monopolies of press and radio to imprison social
consciousness." December 1936, "In 'Socialist' Norway,"
by Leon Trotsky: “Leon Trotsky in Norway” was transcribed
for the Internet by Per I. Matheson [References from
original translation removed]
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/12/nor.htm
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Wealth Inequality Charts
http://www.faireconomy.org/research/wealth_charts.html
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MALCOLM X: Oxford University Debate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmzaaf-9aHQ
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"There comes a times when silence is betrayal."
--Martin Luther King
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YouTube clip of Che before the UN in 1964
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtATT8GXkWg&mode=related&search
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The Wealthiest Americans Ever
NYT Interactive chart
JULY 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/business/20070715_GILDED_GRAPHIC.html
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New Orleans After the Flood -- A Photo Gallery
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=795
This email was sent to you as a service, by Roland Sheppard.
Visit my website at: http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret
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[For some levity...Hans Groiner plays Monk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51bsCRv6kI0
...bw]
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Which country should we invade next?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3g_zqz3VjY
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My Favorite Mutiny, The Coup
http://www.myspace.com/thecoupmusic
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Michael Moore- The Awful Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeOaTpYl8mE
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Morse v. Frederick Supreme Court arguments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_LsGoDWC0o
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Free Speech 4 Students Rally - Media Montage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfCjfod8yuw
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'My son lived a worthwhile life'
In April 2003, 21-year old Tom Hurndall was shot in the head
in Gaza by an Israeli soldier as he tried to save the lives of three
small children. Nine months later, he died, having never
recovered consciousness. Emine Saner talks to his mother
Jocelyn about her grief, her fight to make the Israeli army
accountable for his death and the book she has written
in his memory.
Monday March 26, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2042968,00.html
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Introducing...................the Apple iRack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-KWYYIY4jQ
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"A War Budget Leaves Every Child Behind."
[A T-shirt worn by some teachers at Roosevelt High School
in L.A. as part of their campaign to rid the school of military
recruiters and JROTC--see Article in Full item number 4, below...bw]
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"200 million children in the world sleep in the streets today.
Not one of them is Cuban."
(A sign in Havana)
Venceremos
View sign at bottom of page at:
http://www.cubasolidarity.net/index.html
[Thanks to Norma Harrison for sending this...bw]
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FIGHTBACK! A Collection of Socialist Essays
By Sylvia Weinstein
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-fightback-intro.html
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[The Scab
"After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad,
and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with
which he made a scab."
"A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul,
a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue.
Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten
principles." "When a scab comes down the street,
men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and
the devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out."
"No man (or woman) has a right to scab so long as there
is a pool of water to drown his carcass in,
or a rope long enough to hang his body with.
Judas was a gentleman compared with a scab.
For betraying his master, he had character enough
to hang himself." A scab has not.
"Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.
Judas sold his Savior for thirty pieces of silver.
Benedict Arnold sold his country for a promise of
a commision in the british army."
The scab sells his birthright, country, his wife,
his children and his fellowmen for an unfulfilled
promise from his employer.
Esau was a traitor to himself; Judas was a traitor
to his God; Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country;
a scab is a traitor to his God, his country,
his family and his class."
Author --- Jack London (1876-1916)...Roland Sheppard
http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret]
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Sand Creek Massacre
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FEATURED AT NATIVE AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL:
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/local/16035305.htm
(scroll down when you get there])
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING
WRITER/FILMMAKER DONALD L. VASICEK REPORT:
http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/sandcreekmassacre.html
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FINALIST IN DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL COMPETITION (VIEW HERE):
http://www.docupyx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=41
VIEW "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FILM MOVIE OF THE WEEK FOR FREE HERE:
http://twymancreative.com/twymanc.html
On November 29, 1864, 700 Colorado troops savagely slaughtered
over 450 Cheyenne children, disabled, elders, and women in the
southeastern Colorado Territory under its protection. This act
became known as the Sand Creek Massacre. This film project
("The Sand Creek Massacre" documentary film project) is an
examination of an open wound in the souls of the Cheyenne
people as told from their perspective. This project chronicles
that horrific 19th century event and its affect on the 21st century
struggle for respectful coexistence between white and native
plains cultures in the United States of America.
Listed below are links on which you can click to get the latest news,
products, and view, free, "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" award-
winning documentary short. In order to create more native
awareness, particularly to save the roots of America's history,
please read the following:
Some people in America are trying to save the world. Bless
them. In the meantime, the roots of America are dying.
What happens to a plant when the roots die? The plant dies
according to my biology teacher in high school. American's
roots are its native people. Many of America's native people
are dying from drug and alcohol abuse, poverty, hunger,
and disease, which was introduced to them by the Caucasian
male. Tribal elders are dying. When they die, their oral
histories go with them. Our native's oral histories are the
essence of the roots of America, what took place before
our ancestors came over to America, what is taking place,
and what will be taking place. It is time we replenish
America's roots with native awareness, else America
continues its decaying, and ultimately, its death.
You can help. The 22-MINUTE SAND CREEK MASSACRE
DOCUMENTARY PRESENTATION/EDUCATIONAL DVD IS
READY FOR PURCHASE! (pass the word about this powerful
educational tool to friends, family, schools, parents, teachers,
and other related people and organizations to contact
me (dvasicek@earthlink.net, 303-903-2103) for information
about how they can purchase the DVD and have me come
to their children's school to show the film and to interact
in a questions and answers discussion about the Sand
Creek Massacre.
Happy Holidays!
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Vasicek,+Don
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
303-903-2103
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FEATURED AT NATIVE AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL:
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/local/16035305.htm
(scroll down when you get there])
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING
WRITER/FILMMAKER DONALD L. VASICEK REPORT:
http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/sandcreekmassacre.html
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FINALIST IN DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL COMPETITION (VIEW HERE):
http://www.docupyx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=41
VIEW "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FILM MOVIE OF THE WEEK FOR FREE HERE:
http://twymancreative.com/twymanc.html
SHOP:
http://www.manataka.org/page633.html
BuyIndies.com
donvasicek.com.Peace Articles at Libraryofpeace.org">
