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PROTEST THE ISRAELI GROUND INVASION OF GAZA!!!!
NATIONAL DAY OF EMERGENCY MASS ACTION
SATURDAY, JANUARY 10, 11:00 A.M., CIVIC CENTER
(Activist meeting: Tuesday, January 6, 7:00 P.M., 2489 Mission Street, SF)
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Stop the Bombing and Blockade of Gaza!
End all U.S. Aid to Israel!
Bring the Troops Home Now from Iraq and Afghanistan!
A Statement Issued by the National Assembly to
End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations
Join with the National Assembly and other coalitions, networks and organizations on March 21, 2009 for a national mass March on the Pentagon in D.C. (and actions in San Francisco, Los Angeles and other cities) to demand:
Stop the Wars Against Iraq and Afghanistan! —Bring the Troops Home Now!
End U.S. Support for the Occupation of Palestine!
No to U.S. Wars Against Iran and Pakistan!
Money for Jobs, Health Care, Housing, Pensions, and Education—Not for Wars and Corporate Bailouts!
For further information contact:
National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations
natassembly.org, natassembly@aol.com, 216-736-4704
As of January 3, the Israeli bombing and invasion of Gaza has killed over 450 Palestinians—the largest number of people killed by Israel in such a short time in decades. 1,600 more have been wounded, an overwhelming number of whom are civilians—women, children and the elderly. The massing of soldiers and tanks along the Gaza border suggests that additional horrors are contemplated.
The ruination of Gaza has been long in the making. Over 75 percent of Gaza’s inhabitants are refugees from land that became Israel. They have been denied the internationally recognized right to return to their homes and are now denied the elementary right to flee relentless bombing and a threatened invasion. These are the families who had developed the agriculture and economy of Palestine under the rule of foreign empires for generations. Ripped from their land, they were crowded into what is now the most densely populated 360 square kilometers in the world.
Their homes have been bulldozed, their crops and livelihoods destroyed, food and fuel severely restricted, their borders closed, their water pilfered by settlers, their fishing restricted.
In 2006, the Palestinians of Gaza conducted a democratic election and chose Hamas as the governing party. They have desperately reached out to obtain basic food, medical supplies and the essentials for survival that have been denied them. It is for these “crimes” that the Palestinians of Gaza are being punished—for choosing their own leaders, seeking freedom, and refusing to be driven from their homeland.
The people of Gaza have seen their elected officials imprisoned. They have been put on a starvation diet and placed in darkness by an internationally-enforced blockade. They are subjected to nighttime sonic booms that shatter windows and cause miscarriages, and suffer recurring aerial bombardments that have decimated their infrastructure.
The Hamas government’s signing and enforcement of the June 2008 truce with Israel led to no relief from this relentless siege. On November 4, Israeli strikes killed dozens of Palestinians. Isolated shelling attacks from Gaza, which resulted in few, if any, Israeli casualties, have been used as a pretext by Israel to launch genocidal attacks, which have been denounced by people around the world. Israeli Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, now says this will be a “war to the bitter end.”
The Israeli government claims that Gaza is no longer “occupied” since “settlers” were withdrawn a few years ago. This is a boldface lie used to abdicate legal and moral responsibility for the welfare of an occupied people and to demonstrate that Gazans cannot govern themselves and live peacefully with their neighbors. A land that is completely surrounded and controlled, lacking the very basics of survival, is even more cruelly “occupied” than before. This describes a prison, not a sovereign territory.
The horrors experienced in Gaza are closely linked to the murderous U.S. wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which aim to control the resources in the Middle East. The systematic torture of Gaza, many call genocide, is a crime against all people of this planet. No one can be free while others are oppressed. It is time for the people of the world to unite and say, “No to the U.S.-Backed Israeli War in Gaza!” and “No to the U.S. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan!”
The atrocities carried out against Gaza are made possible by $3 billion in yearly U.S. aid to Israel, the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, with $30 billion more to be allocated over the next ten years. Israel has the fourth largest military in the world.
Hundreds of billions of our tax dollars go yearly for the U.S. war machine—for the most modern weapons of mass destruction, mainly profiting U.S. contractors and weapons makers.”
We demand that Congress and the current president of the United States end all support for Israel’s war, invasion and occupation of Palestine. We join with people all across the world in demanding that Israel initiate an immediate cease fire and withdraw all military forces from Gaza. We call upon president-elect Barack Obama to denounce the present atrocities committed against the people of Gaza. We call upon the people of the U.S. and the international community to declare solidarity and to offer all assistance to the besieged Palestinians.
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Send a letter to Bush and Congress: End U.S. Aid to Israel!
The humanitarian crisis facing the Palestinian people in Gaza has reached an especially grave level. The deprivation of food and water is the deliberate purpose of the U.S.-backed Israeli government's decision to close border crossings into Gaza.
All crossings for goods coming into the Gaza Strip, home to 1.5 million Palestinians, are closed. The Palestinians are completed blockaded. A United Nations report issued today states that the blockade and siege of Gaza, which began 18 months ago after the democratic election of the Hamas government, has now resulted in a 49% unemployment rate for the citizens of Gaza. Gaza City residents are without electricity for up to 16 hours a day and half the city's residents receive water only once a week for a few hours. The UN report added that 80% of Palestinians living in Gaza are obliged to drink polluted water.
The United National Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has been forced to suspend food distribution for both emergency and regular programs. The Agency has run out of flour and has now suspended food deliveries to 750,000 Palestinians in Gaza.
The Israeli Occupation Forces have escalated their military attacks on the people in Gaza. Civilians have been killed and Palestinian houses and other civilian premises have been targeted for destruction. This is a deliberate policy to starve and strangle a whole people by depriving them of food, water, fuel and medical supplies.
The U.S. government is bankrolling the Israeli government and its criminal actions. Israel receives $15 million dollars a day and is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid in the world. The U.S. Military Industrial Complex and the leadership of both the Republican and Democratic parties support Israel because they view the Israeli government as a extension of U.S. power in the Middle East. The Palestinian people deserve the support and solidarity of people around the world. They deserve our support not only in the face of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, but in their struggle for self-determination including the right to return to their homes from which they were evicted by the forces of colonial occupation.
Join with people around the country and around the world who are demanding an end to U.S. aid to Israel. This is an urgent situation and we must all act now. You can send a letter with our easy click and send system demanding an end to U.S. aid to Israel. Without U.S. aid, the Israeli siege and blockade of Gaza could not be continued. Click this link now to send a letter to the State Department and elected officials in Congress.
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=233
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U.S. resisters' solidarity with Israeli "shministim" refusers
Courage to Resist
Statement signed by over two dozen U.S. military war resisters. Reprinted by AlterNet, Democracy Now, The Progressive, Common Dreams, Indymedia, and Daily Kos.
We are U.S. military servicemembers and veterans who have refused or are currently refusing to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We stand in solidarity with the Israeli Shministim (Hebrew for "12th graders") who are also resisting military service. About 100 Israeli high school students have signed an open letter declaring their refusal to serve in the Israeli army and their opposition to "Israeli occupation and oppression policy in the occupied territories and the territories of Israel." In Israel, military service is mandatory for all graduating high school seniors, and resisters face the possibility of years in prison.
Read more at:
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/
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For a United Antiwar Movement
Dear all,
At its recent National Assembly, United for Peace and Justice voted not to endorse the March 21 March on the Pentagon. Conference delegates had to choose between the March 21 action already planned and endorsed by hundreds of organizations across the country and their own, April 4, March on Wall Street. They could not vote to support both.
We feel it is important for the movement to support both actions! And we especially feel that we can not let another year of "Shock and Awe" go by without demonstrating massively on March 21, and standing solidly behind the demands:
--End the Wars on Iraq and Afghanistan Now!
--Bring all U.S. Troops and Contractors Home NOW!
--End All U.S. Aid to Israel Now!
--End All U.S. Intervention Worldwide!
--Fund Peoples' Needs Not Militarism and Bank Bailouts!
--End the war threats and economic sanctions against Iran!
--End the illegal U.S. program of detention and torture!
We feel the connection between the financial crisis and the tremendous costs of maintaining the U.S. war budget--larger than all the world's war budgets put together--has never been clearer! And our opposition to it should be massive, peaceful, independently and democratically organized and, most importantly, united in solidarity!
All Out March 21 and April 4! Money for human needs not for endless war. Together we do have the power!
In solidarity,
Bay Area United Against War
bauaw.org
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March on the Pentagon! March 21, 2009
The National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations is joining with other coalitions, organizations, and networks in a united MARCH 21 NATIONAL COALITION to organize the broadest mobilization of people across the United States to take part in a March on the Pentagon on the sixth year of the military invasion and occupation of the Iraq War: Saturday, March 21.
Demonstrations will also be held on that date in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities across the U.S.
These actions will remind the nation that all U.S. military forces must be brought home from Afghanistan and Iraq, and that the U.S. antiwar movement - marching behind a banner demanding "Out Now!' - will intensify its struggle to make it happen.
The actions are needed to assure the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries threatened by Washington's expansionist policies that tens of millions of people in this country support their right to settle their own destinies without U.S. interventions, occupations and murderous wars. International law recognizes - and we demand - that the U.S. respect the right to self-determination. We reject any notion that the U.S. is the world's self-appointed cop.
The March 21 united mass actions are also needed at this time of economic meltdown to demand jobs for all; a moratorium on foreclosures; rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure; guaranteed, quality health care for all; an end to the ICE raids and deportations; and funding for sorely needed social programs. So long as trillions of dollars continue to be spent on wars, occupations, and bailouts to the banks and corporate elite, the domestic needs of the people of the U.S. can never be met.
The So-called Status of Forces Agreement
As for Iraq, the so-called "Status of Forces Agreement" offers proof positive that far from ending the U.S. occupation, the plan is to extend it indefinitely. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops and mercenary soldiers will be maintained to carry out a number of stated missions, but in reality their aim is to carry out the one mission that is not stated: Ensure the U.S. subjugation of Iraq to exploit its oil resources and dominate the Middle East.
Any doubt about Washington's intentions should be dispelled by the statement by Gen. Raymond Odierno who said on December 13, 2008 that U.S. forces would remain indefinitely in dozens of bases in Iraq cities, despite the language in the Status of Forces Agreement that appears to require a withdrawal from urban areas by next summer. (Wall Street Journal 12/15/08)
As for Afghanistan, it is not the "good war" claimed by the Obama administration and the power structure, which plans to increase the number of U.S. troops in that country by 20,000. Afghanistan will prove to be another U.S. Vietnam. The Soviet Union's intervention in Afghanistan resulted in a million Afghanis being killed, along with 15,000 Soviet troops. The U.S. war will only result in a continuation of the slaughter that has been the hallmark of all previous occupations by foreign powers.
The daily U.S. bombing and killing of Afghanis attending weddings, classes, funerals, or simply trying to survive shows how cruel and deadly this war is. It is directed against the same forces that the U.S. armed, financed, and helped bring to power.
Why is the U.S. at war against Afghanistan? To gain control of a pipeline across that country. (See the 1998 statement submitted to Congress by the Union Oil Company of California, which later merged with Chevron, stressing the need to build a natural gas pipeline across Afghanistan. And note Dick Cheney's 1998 statement made when he was chief executive of a major oil services company: "I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian," which led the Guardian newspaper to remark "But the oil and gas there is worthless until it is moved. The only route that would make both political and economic sense is through Afghanistan.")
The March 21 demonstration will also highlight the dangers of expanding Washington's two wars to Iran and Pakistan. It will also condemn U.S. support for the continued occupation of Palestine.
The National Assembly
From its inception, the National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations has called for united antiwar demonstrations this spring. We urge the entire movement to unite now around March 21. We will do everything possible to make this unity a reality.
Think of the civil rights, union, anti-Vietnam War, women's liberation and gay rights movements. They would not have achieved victories without having built truly massive movements that were able to organize repeated and powerful independent mobilizations in the streets.
Why the demonstration in Washington? Because it is the seat of power, where foreign and domestic policies are decided, where money for war is allocated, and bailouts of the banking industry and corporate rich are given away.
Join us in mobilizing the largest possible outpouring of antiwar opposition built by a united movement on March 21. Let's march and continue to march until all U.S. forces come home, U.S. bases are dismantled, and the sovereign people of the world have the right to control their own resources and determine their own futures.
To endorse the March 21 March on the Pentagon, please click here.
http://natassembly.org/Continuation.html#March21
To send a contribution to support the National Assembly's work, please click here.
http://natassembly.org/donate.html
For more information, please visit the National Assembly's website at www.natassembly.org or write natassembly@aol.com or call 216-736-4704.
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MARCH 21 NATIONAL COALITION FOR A MARCH ON THE PENTAGON
ON THE SIXTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE IRAQ WAR
SATURDAY, MARCH 21, DC, SF, LA AND SEATTLE
The ANSWER Coalition is joining with other coalitions, organizations, and networks in a March 21 National Coalition to bring people from all walks of life and from all cities across the United States to take part in a March on the Pentagon on the sixth anniversary of the Iraq war: Saturday, March 21.
The Iraqi journalist Muntather Al-Zaidi spoke for millions of Iraqis and outraged people everywhere when he threw his shoes at George Bush during Bush's publicity stunt "victory lap" in Baghdad yesterday. As he threw his shoes, Muntather said, "This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog! This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!"
Tragically, the criminal occupation of Iraq will not be over even by the sixth anniversary of the start of the war in March 2009. People around the world will be marching together on the sixth anniversary in the strongest possible solidarity with the people of Iraq demanding an end to the occupation of their country.
Marking the sixth anniversary of the criminal invasion of Iraq, on March 21, 2009, thousands will March on the Pentagon to say, "Bring the Troops Home NOW!" We will also demand "End Colonial Occupation in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Everywhere" and "Fund Peoples' Needs Not Militarism and Bank Bailouts." We will insist on an end to the war threats and economic sanctions against Iran. We will say no to the illegal U.S. program of detention and torture.
To endorse the March 21 March on the Pentagon, click here. To sign up to be a Transportation Organizing Center, click here.
http://answer.pephost.org/site/Survey?SURVEY_ID=4580&ACTION_REQUIRED=URI_ACTION_USER_REQUESTS
While millions of families are losing their homes, jobs and healthcare, the real military budget next year will top one trillion dollars--that's $1,000,000,000,000. If used to meet people's needs, that amount could create 10 million new jobs at $60,000 per year, provide healthcare for everyone who does not have it now, rebuild New Orleans, and repair much of the damage done in Iraq and Afghanistan. The cost for the occupation of Iraq alone is $400 million each day, or about $12 billion each month.
The war in Iraq has killed, wounded or displaced nearly one third of Iraq's 26 million people. Thousands of U.S. soldiers have been killed, and hundreds of thousands more have suffered severe physical and psychological wounds. The U.S. leaders who have initiated and conducted this criminal war should be tried and jailed for war crimes.
The idea that the U.S. is in the process of ending the criminal occupation of Iraq is a myth. Washington and its dependent Iraqi government signed a "Status of Forces" agreement, supposedly calling for the U.S. military to leave Iraqi cities by July 1, 2009, and all of Iraq by 2012. But even this outrageous extension of an illegal occupation is just one more piece of deception, as was soon made clear by top U.S. and Iraqi officials.
The ink was hardly dry on the agreement when, on December 12, official Iraq government spokesman Ali al Dabbagh dismissed the idea that U.S. troops would leave by 2012: "We do understand that the Iraqi military is not going to get built out in the three years. We do need many more years. It might be 10 years."
The next day, General Raymond Odierno, commander of "coalition (U.S.) forces" in Iraq, stated that thousands of U.S. troops could remain inside Iraqi cities after July 1, 2009, as part of "training and mentoring teams."
Government propaganda aside, the reality remains that only the people can end the war and occupation in Iraq. To sign up to be a Transportation Organizing Center, click here.
http://answer.pephost.org/site/Survey?SURVEY_ID=4680&ACTION_REQUIRED=URI_ACTION_USER_REQUESTS
The war in Afghanistan is expanding. The incoming administration and Congressional leaders have promised to send in more troops.
Federal bailouts and loan guarantees for the biggest banks and investors, many of whom have also made billions in profits from militarism, are already up to an astounding $7.2 trillion this year. None of that money is earmarked for keeping millions of foreclosed and evicted families in their homes.
Coming just two months after the inauguration of the next president, the March 21, 2009, March on the Pentagon will be a critical opportunity to let the new administration in Washington hear the voice of the people demanding an immediate end to war and occupation, and demanding economic justice. Joint actions will take place on the West Coat in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle.
Sincerely,
Brian Becker
National Coordinator of the ANSWER Coalition
P.S. You can make a difference. Please continue to support the ANSWER Coalition's crucial anti-war work by making your end-of-the-year tax-deductible donation online using our secure server by clicking here, where you can also find information on how to donate by check.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.answercoalition.org/
info@internationalanswer.org
National Office in Washington DC: 202-544-3389
New York City: 212-694-8720
Los Angeles: 213-251-1025
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
Chicago: 773-463-0311
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UNITE TO PROTEST THE SIXTH YEAR OF U.S. WAR AND OCCUPATION IN IRAQ!
U.S. OUT OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN NOW!
MONEY FOR HUMAN NEEDS NOT WAR!
MARCH 21, 2009
SIGN ON TO THE UNITY CALL!
The National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations:
Call for Unity
We hope that you and your organization agree that unified national March actions are sorely needed in these times of military and economic crises. We ask that you:
1. Sign the Open Letter to the U.S. Antiwar Movement.
2. Urge all local and national organizations and coalitions to join in building the mobilizations in D.C. in March and the mass actions on March 21.
3. Support the formation of a broad, united, ad hoc national coalition to bring massive forces out on March 21, 2009.
You can sign the Open Letter by writing natassembly@aol.com [if you are a group or individual. (Individual endorsers please include something about yourselves.)] or through the National Assembly website at www.natassembly.org [if you are a group endorsement only]. For more information, please email us at the above address or call 216-736-4704. We greatly appreciate all donations to help in our unity efforts. Checks should be made payable to National Assembly and mailed to P.O. Box 21008 , Cleveland , OH 44121 .
In peace and solidarity,
Greg Coleridge, Coordinator, Northeast Ohio Anti-War Coalition (NOAC); Economic Justice and Empowerment Program Director, Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee (AFSC); Member, Administrative Body, National Assembly
Marilyn Levin, Coordinating Committee, Greater Boston United for Justice with Peace; New England United; Member, Administrative Body, National Assembly
On behalf of the National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY STATEMENT URGING UNITY OF THE
ANTIWAR MOVEMENT FOR THE MARCH 2009 ACTIONS
For more information please contact:
natassembly@aol.com or call 216-736-4704
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Bring the Anti-War Movement to Inauguration Day in D.C.
January 20, 2009: Join thousands to demand "Bring the troops home now!"
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.answercoalition.org/
info@internationalanswer.org
National Office in Washington DC: 202-544-3389
New York City: 212-694-8720
Los Angeles: 213-251-1025
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
Chicago: 773-463-0311
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Leaning on Jail, City of Immigrants Fills Cells With Its Own
By NINA BERNSTEIN
December 27, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/us/27detain.html?hp
2) Afghanistan: Protests Over Raid
By ADAM B. ELLICK
World Briefing | Asia
December 27, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/world/asia/27briefs-PROTESTSOVER_BRF.html?ref=world
3) No Sweets When Striking the Cookie Factory
By MARC SANTORA
Kingsbridge Journal
December 27, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/nyregion/27metjournal.html?ref=nyregion
4) "No Comment" on Gaza's Dead
Obama and the "Special Relationship"
By JOSHUA FRANK
December 29, 2008
http://www.counterpunch.com/frank12292008.html
5) Gaza Toll Hits 300 in 3rd Day of Israel Strikes
By TAGHREED EL-KHODARY and ISABEL KERSHNER
December 30, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/world/middleeast/30mideast.html?hp
6) Fifty Herbert Hoovers
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
December 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/opinion/29krugman.html
7) Obama Defers to Bush, for Now, on Gaza Crisis
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and HELENE COOPER
December 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/washington/29diplo.html
8) Israel Reminds Foes That It Has Teeth
[This is utterly disgusting...bw]
By ETHAN BRONNER
News Analysis
December 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/world/middleeast/29assess.html?ref=world
9) Sen. Webb’s Call for Prison Reform
Editorial
January 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/opinion/01thu3.html?hp
10) In Dense Gaza, Civilians Suffer
By TAGHREED EL-KHODARY
January 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/world/middleeast/01gaza.html?hp
11) In the Cold
Editorial
January 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/opinion/01thu1.html?hp
12) The Spoils
Battle in a Poor Land for Riches Beneath the Soil
By LYDIA POLGREEN
December 15, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/15/world/africa/15niger.html
13) Error Seen in E.P.A. Report on Contaminant
By FELICITY BARRINGER
January 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/washington/01epa.html?ref=us
14) Iraq to Open More Oil Fields to Bidding
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and ABEER MOHAMMED
January 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/world/middleeast/01iraq.html?ref=business
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1) Leaning on Jail, City of Immigrants Fills Cells With Its Own
By NINA BERNSTEIN
December 27, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/us/27detain.html?hp
CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. — Few in this threadbare little mill town gave much thought to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, the maximum-security jail beside the public ball fields at the edge of town. Even when it expanded and added barbed wire, Wyatt was just the backdrop for Little League games, its name stitched on the caps of the team it sponsored.
Then people began to disappear: the leader of a prayer group at St. Matthew’s Roman Catholic Church; the father of a second grader at the public charter school; a woman who mopped floors in a Providence courthouse.
After days of searching, their families found them locked up inside Wyatt — only blocks from home, but in a separate world.
In this mostly Latino city, hardly anyone had realized that in addition to detaining the accused drug dealers and mobsters everyone heard about, the jail held hundreds of people charged with no crime — people caught in the nation’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Fewer still knew that Wyatt was a portal into an expanding network of other jails, bigger and more remote, all propelling detainees toward deportation with little chance to protest.
If anything, the people of Central Falls saw Wyatt as the economic engine that city fathers had promised, a steady source of jobs and federal money to pay for services like police and fire protection. Even that, it turns out, was an illusion.
Wyatt offers a rare look into the fastest-growing, least-examined type of incarceration in America, an industry that detains half a million people a year, up from a few thousand just 15 years ago. The system operates without the rules that protect criminal suspects, and has grown up with little oversight, often in the backyards of communities desperate for any source of money and work.
Last spring, The New York Times set out to examine this small city of 19,000 and its big detention center as a microcosm of the nation’s new relationship with immigration detention, which is now sweeping up not just recent border-jumpers and convicted felons but foreign-born residents with strong ties to places like Central Falls. Wyatt, nationally accredited, clean and modern, seemed like one of the better jails in the system, a patchwork of county lockups, private prisons and federal detention centers where government investigations and the news media have recently documented substandard, sometimes lethal, conditions.
But last summer, a detainee died in Wyatt’s custody. Immigration authorities investigating the death removed all immigration detainees this month — along with the $101.76 a day the federal government paid the jail for each one. In Central Falls, where many families have members without papers, a state campaign against illegal immigrants spread fear that also took a toll: People went into hiding and businesses lost Latino customers in droves. Slowly, the city awoke to its role in the detention system, and to the pitfalls of the bargain it had struck.
In a sinking economy, immigration detention is a rare growth industry. Congress has doubled annual spending on it in the last four years, to $2.4 billion approved in October as part of $5.9 billion allotted for immigration enforcement through next September — even more than the Bush administration had requested.
Seeking a slice of that bounty, communities like Farmville, Va., and Pahrump, Nev., are signing up with developers of new detention centers. Jails from New England to New Mexico have already made the crackdown pay off — for the private companies that dominate the industry, for some investors and, at least in theory, for places like Central Falls, a city so strapped that the state pays for its schools.
Here, a specially created municipal corporation built the jail in the early 1990s to hold federal inmates, and last year more than doubled its size. As the City Council president, William Benson Jr., put it, “The more inmates they have, the more money we get.”
Yet in a community whose 1.3 square miles are said to be too small for secrets — “If you sneeze on Washington Street, someone on Pine Street says, ‘Gesundheit,’ ” Mr. Benson said — city officials, overwhelmingly non-Latino, seemed uninformed about who those inmates were. “Nobody knows exactly who’s down there,” he said. “I hear some are Arab terrorists.”
The mystery is in some ways understandable. Though immigration detainees made up one-third of the daily population and a majority of the 4,200 men and women who moved through Wyatt’s 722 beds in a year, most were from other states, and those from Rhode Island did not remain long: Immigration and Customs Enforcement typically transferred them within a week.
Some were legal immigrants who had served time for serious crimes. But increasingly they were the kind of people who in the past would not have been arrested — people without papers, similar to some of the people who play, cheer and live in Wyatt’s shadow. Sometimes the same people.
Anthony Ventetuolo Jr., one of Wyatt’s developers and now the jail’s chief executive, said that who the inmates were made no difference to the jail, which was run like a business, under strict standards. “I’m not interested in getting involved in the politics of immigration,” he said. “All we do is detain people that our clients tell us to detain.”
Swallowed by the System
Over 10 years, Maynor Canté, 26, hardly glanced at the jail he passed as he hurried between home, two jobs and St. Matthew’s Church, where he led a prayer group.
He was 15 when he left Guatemala in 1997, sneaking across the Mexican border to join seven older siblings, legal residents who had spent years scraping new lives out of the industrial ruins of Rhode Island’s Blackstone Valley. Caught in Texas, the teenager was quickly let go pending a hearing, like so many arrested under the “catch and release” policy that prevailed while the nation’s boom times demanded cheap immigrant labor. When he failed to show up in court, a deportation order was issued.
A decade later, Mr. Canté spoke near-fluent English, and had spent thousands of dollars trying to legalize his status. Mornings, he cleaned a factory for $8 an hour. Evenings, he worked at his nephew’s new clothing shop on Dexter Street, one of several Latino businesses that had revived a bleak stretch of vacant storefronts.
Then, early one morning in October 2007 when he headed out the door for his cleaning job, five immigration agents hustled him into a van. That night, as frightened relatives tried to find him, he was delivered to Wyatt in chains.
Inside, a plaque declares that the detention center’s mission is “to protect the public from people who pose a threat to society.” One corridor, waxed to an immaculate shine, leads to a darkened control room where correction officers watch a dozen video monitors fed by 200 cameras. A guard can scan an entire unit housing 72 detainees in two- to four-man cells; zooming in on a card game, he can see that one player is holding hearts.
The jail was built for inmates awaiting trial on federal charges — drug possession, child pornography, political corruption. But to help pay off $106 million borrowed for its recent expansion and refinancing, Wyatt was now counting on prisoners like Mr. Canté: administrative detainees not charged with a crime, but held while the government tries to deport them.
Now he found himself slated for deportation without a hearing — or even any way to make a phone call.
“I was scared,” he said, recalling how he prayed the rosary and stared out the tiny window of his cell to watch a freight train pass at 6 a.m.
Outside, his sister Emma, 33, was distraught. Since their mother’s death in 2006, she had felt more responsible for protecting Mr. Canté, a big-shouldered man who was still her little brother. “Three days passed and we didn’t know where he was,” she said.
On the fourth day, after calls to many jails, a high school friend located Mr. Canté, and members of his prayer circle flocked to Wyatt. His priest, the Rev. Otoniel J. Gomez, had never visited the jail in the eight years since he was sent to Central Falls from Colombia. He spoke to his weeping parishioner through a thick plexiglass barrier.
“I thought, ‘This is like a horror movie, talking with a criminal,’ ” he said.
Yet the priest soon realized that Mr. Canté was lucky. “Most of these people didn’t have any relatives or friends near them,” Father Gomez said, “not even a lawyer.”
The official list of free legal help was largely a dead end. Wyatt’s expensive inmate telephone service was often useless, because it took days to set up an account, and it could not be used to call cellphones. Desperate, other detainees passed Mr. Canté phone numbers on scraps of paper, begging him to ask his visitors to call and tell where they were.
Out of Sight, Out of Reach
Plucked from communities from Maine to New York, some had already been transferred through several jails; many would soon be moved again, as the federal immigration agency improvised to make space for detainees from new roundups.
“It’s like having a room with five bathtubs and water coming in and out of each one to maintain an equilibrium,” explained Todd Thurlow, acting deputy director of the Boston field office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which contracts for about 1,000 beds in dozens of jails across New England.
Wyatt had a reputation as one of the most professionally run. But for newcomers without help, it could be rough.
One complaint, echoed by former jail employees, was that detainees in pain from illness or injury often went without adequate treatment. Other detainees spoke of going hungry, like Edgar Bocce, 25, a Guatemalan cleaner who said two muscular inmates took away his first dinner tray — rice, beans and spaghetti — while guards did nothing. Spartan meals could be supplemented with food from the jail’s commissary, but only if relatives sent money, or detainees stayed long enough to earn some; on the cleaning crew that kept the jail so spotless, starting pay was 40 cents a day.
Though officials said detainees were housed according to their history of violence, only one unit was dedicated to immigration detainees, and the rest were mixed in with criminal suspects and convicts.
Perhaps the greatest frustration, inmates said, was their inability to make sense of what was happening to them.
“Why am I here in jail?” asked one, a Central Falls mechanic who had been seized at immigration headquarters in Providence when he went to check why his green card application was taking so long. Wyatt guards had no answers. “They tell me, ‘Sorry, guys, but we’re not Immigration.’ ”
Mr. Canté’s sisters borrowed money and hired him a lawyer. But a day after the lawyer’s first visit, their brother was gone — transferred to a Boston jail. That week, he was shackled and bused with 60 other men to detention in York, Pa., then put on a government plane with 300 chained immigrants.
He ended up one of 2,000 detainees packed into a windowless tent city that had sprung up only a year earlier in Raymondville, Tex. — the nation’s largest immigration prison camp, run for profit and still growing.
For weeks after his lawyer reopened his case for a hearing in Boston, she could not locate him. He was on the verge of deportation by the time she managed to persuade the government to fly him back from Texas, two days before last Christmas.
Mr. Canté finally appeared before an immigration judge on Jan. 2, after three months in the detention maze. Because his case fell under the more lenient laws in force before 1997, he not only was released on bond, but allowed to work until his immigration hearing in December 2009. He is now trying to pay back thousands of dollars in loans and legal fees.
A Market for Inmates
Mr. Canté, whose time in detention cost federal taxpayers about $10,000, was part of what many call an “immigrant gold rush” that turned the private prison industry from bust to boom.
Across the country, starting in Texas in the 1980s, prison companies built jail cells on speculation as they rushed to cash in on the war on drugs. They overbuilt; abuse scandals and escapes soured many states on private prisons, and by the late 1990s, as competition for inmates increased, the companies’ stock was suffering.
Yet given the lure of easy financing and big fees for constructing deals, developers of prison space did not hold back on growth. Instead, big companies like the Corrections Corporation of America, the GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut) and the Cornell Companies added more beds and lobbied harder at the source of the most lucrative inmates, the federal government.
The payoff came after 9/11 in an accelerating stream of new detainees: foreigners swept up by the nation’s rising furor over illegal immigration.
Central Falls was similar, in its poverty, to more remote communities that had hitched their hopes to jails. Set in the river valley where America’s industrial revolution was born, its textile mills had hired large immigrant families — French Canadians and Poles, followed by Syrians and Portuguese — and squeezed them into triple-decker tenements. Even after the work moved away, the mills’ cheap housing continued to draw immigrants, mostly from Latin America.
The city was nearly bankrupt in 1990 when developers made a proposition: Build a profit-making jail for two or three hundred nonviolent federal detainees, and guarantee a steady stream of money and jobs for Central Falls.
But the deal that emerged, like many elsewhere, proved better at paying private investors than generating public revenue. The municipal corporation borrowed $30 million through a state bond issue to build Wyatt, and hired the Cornell company to run it. Six years later, the municipal body borrowed $38 million to refinance, buying back most of the bonds at a premium that gave the original bondholders a lump-sum return of 28.5 percent on their investment in addition to 9 percent annual interest.
And from its opening party in November 1993, Wyatt ran into the same problem as its competitors: finding enough inmates. For a time it imported murderers and rapists by the busload from North Carolina’s crowded prisons. When city residents objected, they learned that Central Falls had no control over who was housed at Wyatt and would get no money unless it was full.
At best, Wyatt paid Central Falls $2 to $3 a day for each detainee — less than $400,000 in the good years — to offset its use of city services. At times when the flow of inmates faltered, payments slowed to a trickle. Yet, following the strange logic of prison growth, Cornell and Wyatt officials were soon pushing to refinance yet again and expand.
Thomas Lazieh, the mayor who had championed the deal that built Wyatt, defended it as the best the city could get. His successor, Lee Matthews, took a darker view and sued to stop the expansion. “The city was sold a bill of goods,” he said.
Wyatt doubled in size anyway, with the backing of the current mayor, Charles D. Moreau. Convinced that it could wrest more revenue from the jail as immigration enforcement boomed, the municipal corporation took full control in August 2007. The budget it approved late that year included $6,000 a month for a Washington lobbyist to seek more detainees at higher rates.
A Recession, and Raids
By then, as in many parts of the country, people in Rhode Island were looking at Latino immigrants as prime suspects in a dismal economy. A polarizing immigration debate had converged with a huge state budget deficit and high unemployment. As this year began, resentment flared.
The catalyst was an ordinary New Year’s feature in The Providence Journal about the first baby born in Rhode Island in 2008. Mother and newborn were still in the hospital when federal agents, spurred by the publicity, raided their apartment in Providence and took away the father on immigration violations. Afterward, the police said, the mother discovered that a roommate from Guatemala had hanged himself behind his locked bedroom door, apparently during the raid.
The baby’s father, initially held in secret at Wyatt, was eventually deported. A Guatemalan landscaper with two misdemeanor convictions, he had been ordered to leave the country in August 2007, but stayed, his lawyer said, because his fiancée, a United States citizen, was pregnant with their second child.
To some, the case illustrated how illegal immigrants, who make up less than 4 percent of Rhode Island’s population, drained public services.
“Rhode Island taxpayers are the real victims!” declared Alice Losasso of West Warwick, in a letter to The Journal. “I’m tired of paying for interpreters so that immigrants can take their driver’s test in whatever language they speak. I’m tired of finding that their girlfriends and children are on welfare.”
Her words echoed a major theme of the governor, Donald L. Carcieri, a Republican. In March, he issued an executive order directing the State Police to help federal authorities round up illegal immigrants, saying that they depressed wages and strained services.
Public approval for that order reached 75 percent in one poll after an illegal immigrant from Guatemala was charged with carjacking and raping a woman outside a mall. He had been arrested twice before by the Providence police, and already had an outstanding order of deportation. The governor appeared on the Bill O’Reilly program to accuse the Providence mayor of sheltering criminals.
In Central Falls, the crackdown sowed panic. At the public charter school two blocks from Wyatt, parents, already afraid to be photographed at school events, were now reluctant to drive to meetings, said Sarah Friedman, a founder of the school.
An 8-year-old girl, one of the school’s high-scoring students, stopped speaking in class when her father disappeared into detention, the girl’s mother said. Without his income, mother and daughter, United States citizens, were almost evicted from their apartment.
At Central Falls High School, some students stopped coming to class because their families had gone into hiding, said Margie Cruz, a school-home liaison: “The child was born here, the child is legal. But the family has to hide because the father will be deported.
“I’ve seen students stopped for a traffic violation and the whole family got deported,” she added. “Children that were here for years. I watched them grow up.”
One longtime Little League mother said she used to worry that child molesters could be watching from the jail windows. Now, she said, she worried that her sister’s children would end up inside — the niece who had just graduated from high school with no path to legal status; the nephew who had been taught that local Quakers hid fugitive slaves, and asked his aunt to hide him if his parents were detained.
They were part of a generation of Central Falls teenagers born abroad who were coming of age as outlaws in their own town. Some had already lost relatives, like the 14-year-old whose older brother had made a left turn on red and ended up in a detention odyssey that led to deportation.
“My mother’s afraid the same thing that happened to my brother could happen to me, because I play soccer, I’m out there,” he said.
A few blocks from Wyatt, Police Chief Joseph P. Moran III praised the jail as “a great neighbor — it keeps things under control.” But he went on to tell about the difficulty of investigating the killing of a Dominican cabdriver, because witnesses had not come forward for fear of deportation. He talked of the blurring line between police work and immigration enforcement.
One domestic violence call by a husband illustrated the new reality. After a routine computer check, both he and his wife were taken into police custody, and her 8-month-old baby was handed to a friend. The man had an outstanding bench warrant; his wife had a deportation warrant issued by immigration authorities — something not included in the police database a few years ago.
“We work hand in hand with ICE,” Chief Moran said. At the same time, he added: “I have friends from Honduras, Ecuador. My kids went to school here. It makes it very, very difficult.”
Profit and Loss
For defenders of the jail, the bottom line has always been the bottom line: Wyatt’s growth meant more federal money for the city.
“They’re going to detain them somewhere,” said the manager of Mr. Williams True Styles Barbershop, on the struggling Dexter Street commercial strip. “It’s a billion-dollar business. Unless we’re going to free them, what difference does it make?”
But at least in Central Falls, the incarceration economy was not delivering on its promise.
In late June, Mayor Moreau, a big man with a florid face and a police siren in his car, offered up a budget that laid off firefighters — and told angry city employees to get used to it.
“We’re at the end of the financial rope for Central Falls,” he told the City Council, citing more than 200 boarded-up homes, foreclosures at the rate of 25 a week, and cuts in state and federal aid that required a 4 percent property tax increase and an 8 percent spending cut in the new $17.4 million budget.
Outside, past the defunct factory where Hasbro once made G. I. Joe, beyond the rusty hulk of the downsized Sylvania plant, the summer twilight gleamed on Wyatt’s new facade.
What had happened to the windfall of money and jobs it had offered?
The jail’s annual revenue had almost doubled in a year, to $21 million, mainly from increasing immigration detention. But the city budget projected revenue of only $525,000 from Wyatt, which is exempt from taxes.
That was not even enough to cover its share of city services, according to an estimate by the city’s finance department. It was certainly nothing like the $2 million a year that Mr. Benson, the City Council president, had mentioned to a reporter in April. The mayor, he said, predicted the city would get that much in profits formerly reaped by the Cornell Companies, now that the local board had taken over. Neither the mayor nor the board members, unpaid mayoral appointees, would talk about Wyatt.
As for jobs, only 10 of about 200 Wyatt employees lived in Central Falls. The jail’s board was even declining to make the $1,500 donations to local groups it once supported, like a scholarship fund and youth football.
Mr. Ventetuolo, the Wyatt chief executive, would not say how much had been saved by dispensing with Cornell’s for-profit services, maintaining that it had all gone toward keeping prices low for the federal government. Wyatt was still in transition, he said, striving to fill new beds to meet soaring payments to bondholders, now up to $8.4 million yearly from $2.7 million under the terms of the latest refinancing.
Yet Mr. Ventetuolo’s consulting company had won a raise, to $230,000 from $156,000. And as the number of detainees increased, so did revenue from surcharges on their collect calls to relatives, under a contract with Global Tel Link that gave Wyatt a cut of about $564,000 a year. That arrangement had survived a state ban on phone surcharges at prisons, thanks to lobbying that gave Wyatt a loophole.
Other large fees went to lawyers and financiers, as Mr. Matthews, the former mayor, pointed out. “There just happens to be a lot of money made by folks other than the people of the City of Central Falls,” he said.
Out in the Open
City officials in Central Falls — mostly descendants of earlier immigrants — were mindful that they presided over a community at least 60 percent Latino, where fear of the immigration crackdown was widespread.
At the same time, the city had built its hopes for economic stability on a jail that was helping to make that crackdown possible. The combination created a local immigration politics that sometimes verged on denial.
But last summer, Wyatt itself was suddenly caught in the glare of the state’s crackdown.
On the evening of July 15, a dozen State Police officers and 50 immigration agents swept into six courthouses across the state. They arrested 31 cleaners on suspicion of immigration violations, people paid $7.40 an hour to vacuum floors and scrub toilets in Rhode Island’s halls of justice. All worked for two large state contractors, one owned by the brother of a state legislator allied with Governor Carcieri.
In the uproar that followed, experiences that had been private in cases like Mr. Canté’s were put on public display: the difficulty of locating those in custody; the distress of relatives, many of them legal residents or citizens; the absence of basic legal protections familiar to anyone who watches “Law & Order.” Advocates eventually located most of the cleaners. Four were at Wyatt, including a 29-year-old single mother detained in its new women’s unit.
Two days after the raids, as city officials raised the Colombian flag over City Hall to honor that nation’s Independence Day, Mayor Moreau criticized the roundup, and chided Governor Carcieri for spending law enforcement resources on it.
“We have better things to do,” he said, “than chasing the lady that cleans the attorney general’s office.”
A reporter asked how he squared that criticism with Wyatt’s role in holding illegal immigrants, including the cleaning woman locked up there.
“One has nothing to do with the other,” he retorted. “It has nothing to do with the City of Central Falls.”
Soon, a case that drew national attention made that distinction harder to maintain.
On Aug. 6, Hiu Lui Ng, 34, a Chinese computer engineer from New York who had overstayed a visa, died in Wyatt’s custody after a year in various detention centers and months in pain.
The Times reported a week later that despite his repeated pleas for help, his fractured spine and extensive cancer had gone undiagnosed until shortly before his death. Officials at Wyatt, where he spent his last month, said he had received plenty of medical attention, and immigration authorities started an internal investigation. But local pastors and Latino advocacy groups gathered outside Wyatt on Aug. 15 to demand an independent inquiry.
A guard who watched the demonstration, who asked that his name not be published for fear of losing his job, voiced the ambivalence toward Wyatt that seems to shape the attitudes of many in Central Falls.
He spoke with sympathy of “good, hard-working people” detained there, and with distaste of the rookie guards — a result of low pay and high turnover — “who talk to people with no respect, like they’re dogs.”
But he added: “Immigration and all that, that has nothing to do with us. We’re just the prison.”
Even in the Latino population, the new awareness of Wyatt stirred little resistance.
“If the Spanish were all registered to vote they could take the city in one election,” observed Councilman Benson. “A lot of them don’t vote because they don’t trust the government, and a lot of them are illegal, so they can’t.”
In contrast, Mr. Canté, who finally had proper papers, said he felt like part of Central Falls for the first time.
“In all these years I’ve been here illegally, everywhere I went, everything I used to do, I used to feel like a reject,” he said. “Now I feel like I’ve been accepted for the community. I don’t feel afraid anymore. I feel, like, free.”
Just how closely Central Falls was entwined in the business of locking up people like Mr. Canté became more obvious this month, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, citing their continuing investigation into Mr. Ng’s death, abruptly removed all immigration detainees from Wyatt, scattering them to other jails in New England, Texas and Louisiana.
With Wyatt’s solvency, if not its survival, uncertain, the mayor lobbied the state’s Congressional delegation to get back a share of the growing market in immigration detainees. Meanwhile, jail officials hunted for deals like the one they narrowly lost last spring, to house 80 Vermont inmates judged criminally insane for crimes like murder and rape.
Mr. Lazieh, the former mayor who first championed Wyatt, called the government’s immigration policies immoral, arguing that “the system has gone overboard — we’ve turned to criminalizing all immigrants.”
But he had no regrets about his city’s part. “If it’s not in Central Falls,” he said, “then this facility would be someplace else.”
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2) Afghanistan: Protests Over Raid
By ADAM B. ELLICK
World Briefing | Asia
December 27, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/world/asia/27briefs-PROTESTSOVER_BRF.html?ref=world
For the second time in a little over a week, a deadly United States military raid on an Afghan house has incited protests and produced conflicting reports over who was killed. The Americans said they killed 11 armed Taliban militants, part of a bomb-making cell in the Maiwand District west of Kandahar, on Thursday. The Americans said they found dozens of land mines, grenades and bomb-making materials. But local government leaders said eight militants and four civilians were killed. Outraged Afghans protested by blocking the highway between Kandahar and Herat with burning tires.
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3) No Sweets When Striking the Cookie Factory
By MARC SANTORA
Kingsbridge Journal
December 27, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/nyregion/27metjournal.html?ref=nyregion
There were no Christmas cookies for Alonso Gomez this year. Instead, he was back outside the cookie factory where he has worked for 20 years, striking with 134 of his colleagues.
Mr. Gomez has been going to the same corner every day for more than four months, protesting what he said were efforts by the owners of the Stella D’Oro Biscuit Factory to cut wages, pensions and holiday and vacation time.
This week, under the rumbling of the elevated No. 1 train at 238th Street and Broadway, they repeated the refrain they have been chanting since they walked out on Aug. 13: “No contract, no cookies.”
On bitterly cold days, the workers dance or take turns warming up in an idling car. For the holidays, they sang Christmas songs and hanged a wreath on a fence on the sidewalk.
As replacement workers came and went on Tuesday, about a dozen strikers shouted “Scab!”
Behind them, the green, white and red company flag flew above the factory, at 184 West 237th Street in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx.
Well before the Magnolia Bakery drew crowds of high-heeled young women to Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, Stella D’Oro cookies were a significant part of New York baking.
The company was born in 1932 when Joseph Kresivich, a native of Trieste, Italy, began using Italian baking methods to make cookies, biscuits, biscotti and breadsticks.
For years, the company was family owned, as was a restaurant next door, which eventually closed.
In 1992, Nabisco acquired the company, and in 2000, Nabisco was bought by Kraft.
While Italian baking inspired the cookies, the brand also has a devoted following among Jews because its Swiss fudge cookies are made without milk or butter, making them an acceptable dessert for those who follow Jewish dietary guidelines.
When Kraft moved to change the recipe to use a milk-infused chocolate in 2002, sales suffered, and the company quickly returned to the original recipe.
The problem for the workers began in 2006 when Kraft sold Stella D’Oro to a private investing firm, Brynwood Partners.
The workers, members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers International Union, say there has been no effort to negotiate in good faith. They accuse Brynwood of having a plan to force them out of their jobs, noting that replacement workers were lined up before they even went on strike.
“Never before Brynwood’s ownership has the local and its membership been attacked in this way,” they contend in fliers.
“The financiers and speculators have brought the American economy to its knees,” they wrote. “The financiers at Brynwood Partners are trying to bring 135 workers to their knees, hiring scabs to do their work. The Stella D’Oro workers are taking a stand against the wrecking of our economy.”
The management at the factory did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Hendrik J. Hartong Jr., who is listed as the head of Brynwood Partners on the company’s Web site, also did not respond to requests for a comment.
“They want us to put our money into a 401(k),” said Mr. Gomez, 54, the shop steward. Having already lost $30,000 in his 401(k) because of the stock market decline, he said he would not have time to work to regain the losses.
“I have no choice,” he said. “I get old.”
Another striker, Anabel Garita, 26, said she usually worked on the packing table, grabbing cookies as they passed and packing them in boxes. She was making $18 an hour, but she said the company wanted to cut her wages.
“I work the night shift, so I can go to school,” she said, adding that the company’s new rules would make it impossible for her to study for her G.E.D.
The workers say they are determined to stay on strike until the dispute is resolved.
In the meantime, Mr. Gomez said, they will continue to stand outside the factory from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., six days a week.
As Christmas Eve drew near, passing drivers honked and shouted encouragement. People stopped by and offered words of support and warm coffee.
“This place was like a home for many of these people,” Mr. Gomez said of the workers and their supporters. “But investors only care about their money. They don’t care about families.”
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4) Gaza Toll Hits 300 in 3rd Day of Israel Strikes
By TAGHREED EL-KHODARY and ISABEL KERSHNER
December 30, 2008
GAZA — In a third straight day of deadly air strikes against the emblems and institutions of Hamas on Monday, Israeli warplanes pounded targets in Gaza including the Interior Ministry while the Israeli Army declared areas around the beleaguered enclave a “closed military zone.”
The attacks brought the death toll in Gaza to more than 300, according to Palestinian medical officials.
Israel says that its onslaught — its most ferocious against Palestinians in decades — is designed to prevent Palestinians from attacking towns in southern Israel with missiles. But a rocket fired from Gaza killed a man and wounded seven in the Israeli town of Ashkelon on Monday, the Israeli Army said. Three Israelis were also stabbed by a Palestinian in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, the army said.
The air strikes followed bombing late Sunday that hit the Islamic University in Gaza, a Hamas stronghold, and the Interior Ministry, according to Hamas. Footage recorded from Israeli warplanes showed bombs striking the entrances to tunnels allegedly used to smuggle weapons into Gaza from Egypt.
The Hamas-owned television station Al Aqsa was also hit, as was a mosque that the Israeli military said was being used as a terrorist base. Speaking in Parliament, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that the attack in Gaza would be “widened and deepened as is necessary” and referred to its operations as part of Israel’s long-term struggle against Israel’s Islamist enemies, the newspaper Haaretz reported on its Web site.
The Bush administration placed the responsibility for ending the violence on Hamas.
“In order for the violence to stop, Hamas must stop firing rockets into Israel and agree to respect a sustainable and durable cease-fire,” a White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe, told reporters in Texas. “Hamas has once again shown its true colors as a terrorist organization.”The United Nations Relief and Works Agency said more than 50 of those killed by Israeli strikes were civilians, Reuters reported. The agency based its assessment on visits by agency officials to hospitals and medical centers.
In a statement on Monday, the Israeli Army said some areas around Gaza had been declared a “closed military zone,” a move which some analysts depicted as a potential precursor to a ground offensive. The military said the declaration meant that civilians, including journalists, could be denied access to an area up to two miles from Gaza.
On Sunday, Israeli troops and tanks massed along the Gaza border and the government said it had called up reserves for a possible ground operation.
A military spokeswoman, Maj. Avital Leibovich, said the closed zone around Gaza had mostly to do with concerns of safety. She said the military had information that Hamas may employ either suicide bombers or more powerful missiles from the border area and it wanted to clear the area. She said she was sure journalists would be permitted to return.
“No one is trying to hide anything,” she said.
The continued airstrikes, which Israel said were in retaliation for sustained rocket fire from Gaza into its territory, unleashed a furious reaction across the Arab world, raising fears of greater instability in the region.
Much of the anger was also directed at Egypt, seen by Hamas and some nearby governments as having acceded to Israel’s military action by sealing its border with Gaza and forcing back many Palestinians at gunpoint who were trying to escape the destruction.
Witnesses at the Rafah border crossing described a chaotic scene as young men tried to force their way across into Egypt, amid sporadic exchanges of gunfire between Hamas and Egyptian forces. Egyptian state television reported that one Egyptian border guard was killed by a Hamas gunman. A Palestinian man was killed by an Egyptian guard near Rafah, Reuters reported.
In Gaza, officials said medical services, stretched to the breaking point after 18 months of Israeli sanctions, were on the verge of collapse as they struggled to care for the more than 600 people wounded in two days.
At Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, women wailed as they searched for relatives among bodies that lay strewn on the hospital floor. One doctor said that given the dearth of facilities, not much could be done for the seriously wounded, and that it was “better to be brought in dead.”
The International Committee of the Red Cross appealed on Sunday for urgent humanitarian assistance, including medical supplies, to be allowed to enter Gaza. Israeli officials said that some aid had been allowed in through one of the crossings. Egypt temporarily opened the Rafah crossing on Saturday to allow some of the wounded to be taken to Egyptian hospitals.
Israel made a strong push to justify the attacks, saying it was forced into military action to defend its citizens. At the same time, the supreme religious leader of Iran and the leader of Hezbollah expressed strong support for Hamas.
Across Gaza, families huddled indoors as Israeli jets streaked overhead. Residents said that there were long blackouts and that they had no cooking gas. Some ventured out to receive bread rations at bakeries or to brave the streets to claim their dead at the hospitals. There were few mass funerals; rather, families buried the victims in small ceremonies.
At dusk on Sunday, Israeli fighter jets bombed over 40 tunnels along Gaza’s border with Egypt. The Israeli military said that the tunnels, on the Gaza side of the border, were used for smuggling weapons, explosives and fugitives. Gazans also use many of them to import consumer goods and fuel in order to get around the Israeli-imposed economic blockade.
In the first two days of the operation Israeli jets destroyed at least 30 targets in Gaza, including the main security compound and prison in Gaza City known as the Saraya, metal workshops throughout Gaza that were suspected of manufacturing rockets, and Hamas military posts.
Israel appeared to be settling in for a longer haul. The government on Sunday approved the emergency call-up of thousands of army reservists in preparation for a possible ground operation as Israeli troops, tanks, armored personnel carriers and armored bulldozers massed at the border.
Speaking before the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, said the army “will deepen and broaden its actions as needed” and “will continue to act.” Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel’s goal was not to reoccupy Gaza, which it left unilaterally in 2005, but to “restore normal life and quiet to residents of the south” of Israel.
Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, appeared on American talk shows to press Israel’s case. She said on “Fox News Sunday” that the operation “is needed in order to change the realities on the ground, and to give peace and quiet to the citizens in southern Israel.”
Militants in Gaza fired barrages of rockets and mortar shells the farthest yet into Israel on Sunday. One rocket fell in Gan Yavneh, a village near the major port city of Ashdod, almost 20 miles north of Gaza. Two landed in the coastal city of Ashkelon. Several Israelis were wounded.
Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesman for Hamas, told reporters that Israel had started a “war” but that it would not be able to choose how it would end. He called for revenge in the form of strikes reaching “deep into the Zionist entity using all means,” including suicide attacks.
The hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens now within rocket range have been instructed by the authorities to stay close to protected spaces.
In Lebanon, the leader of the Shiite militant group Hezbollah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, put his fighters on alert, expressing strong support for Hamas and saying that he believed Israel might try to wage a two-front war, as it did in 2006. He called for a mass demonstration in Beirut on Monday. And he, too, denounced Egypt’s leaders. “If you don’t open the borders, you are accomplices in the killing,” he said in a televised speech.
Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, condemned the silence of some Arab countries, which he said had prepared the grounds for the “catastrophe,” an Iranian news agency, ISNA, reported.
“The horrible crime of the Zionist regime in Gaza has once again revealed the bloodthirsty face of this regime from disguise,” he said in a statement. “But worse than this catastrophe is the encouraging silence of some Arab countries who claim to be Muslim,” he said, apparently in a reference to Egypt and Jordan.
Egypt has mediated talks between Israel and the Palestinians and between Hamas and Hamas’s rival, Fatah, leaving it open to criticism that it is too willing to work with Israel. In turn, Egypt and other Western-allied Sunni Arab nations are deeply opposed to Hezbollah and Hamas, which they see as extensions of Iran, their Shiite nemesis.
Across the region, the Israeli strikes were being broadcast in grisly detail almost continually on Arab satellite networks.
In the Syrian capital, Damascus, a large group of protesters marched to Yusuf al Azmeh Square, where they chanted slogans and burned Israeli and American flags.
In Beirut, protesters were bused to a rally outside the United Nations building, holding up Palestinian flags and Hamas banners. Muhammad Mazen Ibrahim, a 25-year-old Palestinian who lives in one of the refugee camps here, choked up when asked about the assault on Gaza.
“There’s an agreement between Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel against Hamas,” he said. “They want to end them; all the countries are in league against Hamas, but God willing, we will win.”
That sentiment is widespread here. Many see Ms. Livni’s visit to Cairo last week as evidence that Egypt, eager to be rid of Hamas, had consented to the airstrikes.
The anger echoes what happened in July 2006, when the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Egypt publicly blamed Hezbollah for starting the conflict with Israel. Popular rage against Israel soon forced the leaders to change their positions.
Hamas, sworn to the destruction of Israel, took control of Gaza when it ousted Fatah last year. An Egyptian-brokered six-month truce between Israel and Hamas, always shaky, began to unravel in early November. It expired 10 days ago.
Taghreed El-Khodary reported from Gaza, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem. Reporting was contributed by Ethan Bronner from Jerusalem, Robert F. Worth and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon, Nazila Fathi from Tehran, Rina Castelnuovo from the Israel-Gaza border, Khaled Abu Aker from Ramallah, West Bank, an employee of The New York Times from Syria and David Stout from Washington.
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4) "No Comment" on Gaza's Dead
Obama and the "Special Relationship"
By JOSHUA FRANK
December 29, 2008
http://www.counterpunch.com/frank12292008.html
As President-Elect Barack Obama vacationed in Hawaii on December 26, stopping off to watch a dolphin show with his family at Sea Life Park, an Israeli air raid besieged the impoverished Gaza Strip, killing at least 285 people and injuring over 800 more.
It was the single deadliest attack on Gaza in over 20 years and Obama's initial reaction on what could be his first real test as president was "no comment". Meanwhile, Israel has readied itself for a land invasion, amassing tanks along the border and calling up 6,500 reserve troops.
On Sunday's Face the Nation, Obama's Senior Adviser David Axelrod explained to guest cost Chip Reid how an Obama administration would handle the situation, even if it turns for the worst.
"Well, certainly, the president-elect recognizes the special relationship between United States and Israel. It's an important bond, an important relationship. He's going to honor it ... And obviously, this situation has become even more complicated in the last couple of days and weeks. As Hamas began its shelling, Israel responded. But it's something that he's committed to."
Reiterating the rationale that Israel's bombing of Gaza was an act of retaliation and not of agression, Axelrod, on behalf of the Obama administration, continued to spread the same misinformation as President Bush: that Hamas was the first to break the ceasefire agreement, which ended over a week ago, and Israel was simply responding judiciously.
Aside from the fact that Israel's response was anything but judicious, the idea that it was Hamas who broke the six-month truce is a complete fabrication.
On the night of the U.S. election, Israel fired missiles on Gaza that were aimed at closing down a tunnel operation they believed Hamas was building in order to kidnap Israeli soldiers. The carnage left in the wake of Israel's bombing of Gaza over the past six weeks has killed dozens of Palestinians.
"The escalation towards war could, and should, have been avoided. It was the State of Israel which broke the truce, in the 'ticking tunnel' raid ...
two months ago,"the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom wrote in a press release. "Since then, the army went on stoking the fires of escalation with calculated raids and killings, whenever the shooting of missiles on Israel decreased."
Over the last seven years only 17 Israeli citizens have been killed by Palestinian rocket fire, which makes it extremely difficult for Israeli politicians, which are in the midst of an election, to argue that their response has been proportionate or defensible in any way.
The asymmetry of the conflict leaves an opening for harsh criticism from the soon-to-be president Barack Obama. He has every right to oppose Israel's belligerence. The international community and the majority of public opinion are on his side. Certainly he knows Israel's disproportionate response has inflicted insurmountable pain on Palestinians as well as what the blockade has done by keeping vital medical and other supplies from reaching Gaza, where hundreds have died as a result of inadequate medical treatment.
While bombs fall on a suffocating Palestinian population and Israeli forces prepare for a ground invasion, Obama is monitoring the situation from afar after a talk with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other Bush administration officials. This isn't leadership; it's a continuation of a policy that has left Palestinians with little recourse, let alone hope for lasting peace.
"The president-elect was in Sderot last July, in southern Israel, a town that's taken the brunt of the Hamas attacks," David Axelrod told Chip Reid on Face the Nation. "And he said then that, when bombs are raining down on your citizens, there is an urge to respond and act and try and put an end to that. So, you know, that's what he said then, and I think that's what he believes."
If Axelrod is correct, and Barack Obama does indeed support the bloodshed inflicted upon innocent Palestinians by the Israeli military, there should be no celebrating during Inauguration Day 2009, only mass protest of a Middle East foreign policy that must change in order to begin a legitimate peace process in the region.
Joshua Frank is co-editor of Dissident Voice and author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush (Common Courage Press, 2005), and along with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of the new book Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland, published by AK Press in June 2008.
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5) Gaza Toll Hits 300 in 3rd Day of Israel Strikes
By TAGHREED EL-KHODARY and ISABEL KERSHNER
December 30, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/world/middleeast/30mideast.html?hp
GAZA — In a third straight day of deadly air strikes against the emblems and institutions of Hamas on Monday, Israeli warplanes pounded targets in Gaza including the Interior Ministry while the Israeli Army declared areas around the beleaguered enclave a “closed military zone.”
The attacks brought the death toll in Gaza to more than 300, according to Palestinian medical officials.
Israel says that its onslaught — its most ferocious against Palestinians in decades — is designed to prevent Palestinians from attacking towns in southern Israel with missiles. But a rocket fired from Gaza killed a man and wounded seven in the Israeli town of Ashkelon on Monday, the Israeli Army said. Three Israelis were also stabbed by a Palestinian in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, the army said.
The air strikes followed bombing late Sunday that hit the Islamic University in Gaza, a Hamas stronghold, and the Interior Ministry, according to Hamas. Footage recorded from Israeli warplanes showed bombs striking the entrances to tunnels allegedly used to smuggle weapons into Gaza from Egypt.
The Hamas-owned television station Al Aqsa was also hit, as was a mosque that the Israeli military said was being used as a terrorist base. Speaking in Parliament, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that the attack in Gaza would be “widened and deepened as is necessary” and referred to its operations as part of Israel’s long-term struggle against Israel’s Islamist enemies, the newspaper Haaretz reported on its Web site.
The Bush administration placed the responsibility for ending the violence on Hamas.
“In order for the violence to stop, Hamas must stop firing rockets into Israel and agree to respect a sustainable and durable cease-fire,” a White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe, told reporters in Texas. “Hamas has once again shown its true colors as a terrorist organization.”The United Nations Relief and Works Agency said more than 50 of those killed by Israeli strikes were civilians, Reuters reported. The agency based its assessment on visits by agency officials to hospitals and medical centers.
In a statement on Monday, the Israeli Army said some areas around Gaza had been declared a “closed military zone,” a move which some analysts depicted as a potential precursor to a ground offensive. The military said the declaration meant that civilians, including journalists, could be denied access to an area up to two miles from Gaza.
On Sunday, Israeli troops and tanks massed along the Gaza border and the government said it had called up reserves for a possible ground operation.
A military spokeswoman, Maj. Avital Leibovich, said the closed zone around Gaza had mostly to do with concerns of safety. She said the military had information that Hamas may employ either suicide bombers or more powerful missiles from the border area and it wanted to clear the area. She said she was sure journalists would be permitted to return.
“No one is trying to hide anything,” she said.
The continued airstrikes, which Israel said were in retaliation for sustained rocket fire from Gaza into its territory, unleashed a furious reaction across the Arab world, raising fears of greater instability in the region.
Much of the anger was also directed at Egypt, seen by Hamas and some nearby governments as having acceded to Israel’s military action by sealing its border with Gaza and forcing back many Palestinians at gunpoint who were trying to escape the destruction.
Witnesses at the Rafah border crossing described a chaotic scene as young men tried to force their way across into Egypt, amid sporadic exchanges of gunfire between Hamas and Egyptian forces. Egyptian state television reported that one Egyptian border guard was killed by a Hamas gunman. A Palestinian man was killed by an Egyptian guard near Rafah, Reuters reported.
In Gaza, officials said medical services, stretched to the breaking point after 18 months of Israeli sanctions, were on the verge of collapse as they struggled to care for the more than 600 people wounded in two days.
At Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, women wailed as they searched for relatives among bodies that lay strewn on the hospital floor. One doctor said that given the dearth of facilities, not much could be done for the seriously wounded, and that it was “better to be brought in dead.”
The International Committee of the Red Cross appealed on Sunday for urgent humanitarian assistance, including medical supplies, to be allowed to enter Gaza. Israeli officials said that some aid had been allowed in through one of the crossings. Egypt temporarily opened the Rafah crossing on Saturday to allow some of the wounded to be taken to Egyptian hospitals.
Israel made a strong push to justify the attacks, saying it was forced into military action to defend its citizens. At the same time, the supreme religious leader of Iran and the leader of Hezbollah expressed strong support for Hamas.
Across Gaza, families huddled indoors as Israeli jets streaked overhead. Residents said that there were long blackouts and that they had no cooking gas. Some ventured out to receive bread rations at bakeries or to brave the streets to claim their dead at the hospitals. There were few mass funerals; rather, families buried the victims in small ceremonies.
At dusk on Sunday, Israeli fighter jets bombed over 40 tunnels along Gaza’s border with Egypt. The Israeli military said that the tunnels, on the Gaza side of the border, were used for smuggling weapons, explosives and fugitives. Gazans also use many of them to import consumer goods and fuel in order to get around the Israeli-imposed economic blockade.
In the first two days of the operation Israeli jets destroyed at least 30 targets in Gaza, including the main security compound and prison in Gaza City known as the Saraya, metal workshops throughout Gaza that were suspected of manufacturing rockets, and Hamas military posts.
Israel appeared to be settling in for a longer haul. The government on Sunday approved the emergency call-up of thousands of army reservists in preparation for a possible ground operation as Israeli troops, tanks, armored personnel carriers and armored bulldozers massed at the border.
Speaking before the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, said the army “will deepen and broaden its actions as needed” and “will continue to act.” Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel’s goal was not to reoccupy Gaza, which it left unilaterally in 2005, but to “restore normal life and quiet to residents of the south” of Israel.
Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, appeared on American talk shows to press Israel’s case. She said on “Fox News Sunday” that the operation “is needed in order to change the realities on the ground, and to give peace and quiet to the citizens in southern Israel.”
Militants in Gaza fired barrages of rockets and mortar shells the farthest yet into Israel on Sunday. One rocket fell in Gan Yavneh, a village near the major port city of Ashdod, almost 20 miles north of Gaza. Two landed in the coastal city of Ashkelon. Several Israelis were wounded.
Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesman for Hamas, told reporters that Israel had started a “war” but that it would not be able to choose how it would end. He called for revenge in the form of strikes reaching “deep into the Zionist entity using all means,” including suicide attacks.
The hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens now within rocket range have been instructed by the authorities to stay close to protected spaces.
In Lebanon, the leader of the Shiite militant group Hezbollah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, put his fighters on alert, expressing strong support for Hamas and saying that he believed Israel might try to wage a two-front war, as it did in 2006. He called for a mass demonstration in Beirut on Monday. And he, too, denounced Egypt’s leaders. “If you don’t open the borders, you are accomplices in the killing,” he said in a televised speech.
Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, condemned the silence of some Arab countries, which he said had prepared the grounds for the “catastrophe,” an Iranian news agency, ISNA, reported.
“The horrible crime of the Zionist regime in Gaza has once again revealed the bloodthirsty face of this regime from disguise,” he said in a statement. “But worse than this catastrophe is the encouraging silence of some Arab countries who claim to be Muslim,” he said, apparently in a reference to Egypt and Jordan.
Egypt has mediated talks between Israel and the Palestinians and between Hamas and Hamas’s rival, Fatah, leaving it open to criticism that it is too willing to work with Israel. In turn, Egypt and other Western-allied Sunni Arab nations are deeply opposed to Hezbollah and Hamas, which they see as extensions of Iran, their Shiite nemesis.
Across the region, the Israeli strikes were being broadcast in grisly detail almost continually on Arab satellite networks.
In the Syrian capital, Damascus, a large group of protesters marched to Yusuf al Azmeh Square, where they chanted slogans and burned Israeli and American flags.
In Beirut, protesters were bused to a rally outside the United Nations building, holding up Palestinian flags and Hamas banners. Muhammad Mazen Ibrahim, a 25-year-old Palestinian who lives in one of the refugee camps here, choked up when asked about the assault on Gaza.
“There’s an agreement between Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel against Hamas,” he said. “They want to end them; all the countries are in league against Hamas, but God willing, we will win.”
That sentiment is widespread here. Many see Ms. Livni’s visit to Cairo last week as evidence that Egypt, eager to be rid of Hamas, had consented to the airstrikes.
The anger echoes what happened in July 2006, when the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Egypt publicly blamed Hezbollah for starting the conflict with Israel. Popular rage against Israel soon forced the leaders to change their positions.
Hamas, sworn to the destruction of Israel, took control of Gaza when it ousted Fatah last year. An Egyptian-brokered six-month truce between Israel and Hamas, always shaky, began to unravel in early November. It expired 10 days ago.
Taghreed El-Khodary reported from Gaza, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem. Reporting was contributed by Ethan Bronner from Jerusalem, Robert F. Worth and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon, Nazila Fathi from Tehran, Rina Castelnuovo from the Israel-Gaza border, Khaled Abu Aker from Ramallah, West Bank, an employee of The New York Times from Syria and David Stout from Washington.
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6) Fifty Herbert Hoovers
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
December 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/opinion/29krugman.html
No modern American president would repeat the fiscal mistake of 1932, in which the federal government tried to balance its budget in the face of a severe recession. The Obama administration will put deficit concerns on hold while it fights the economic crisis.
But even as Washington tries to rescue the economy, the nation will be reeling from the actions of 50 Herbert Hoovers — state governors who are slashing spending in a time of recession, often at the expense both of their most vulnerable constituents and of the nation’s economic future.
These state-level cutbacks range from small acts of cruelty to giant acts of panic — from cuts in South Carolina’s juvenile justice program, which will force young offenders out of group homes and into prison, to the decision by a committee that manages California state spending to halt all construction outlays for six months.
Now, state governors aren’t stupid (not all of them, anyway). They’re cutting back because they have to — because they’re caught in a fiscal trap. But let’s step back for a moment and contemplate just how crazy it is, from a national point of view, to be cutting public services and public investment right now.
Think about it: is America — not state governments, but the nation as a whole — less able to afford help to troubled teens, medical care for families, or repairs to decaying roads and bridges than it was one or two years ago? Of course not. Our capacity hasn’t been diminished; our workers haven’t lost their skills; our technological know-how is intact. Why can’t we keep doing good things?
It’s true that the economy is currently shrinking. But that’s the result of a slump in private spending. It makes no sense to add to the problem by cutting public spending, too.
In fact, the true cost of government programs, especially public investment, is much lower now than in more prosperous times. When the economy is booming, public investment competes with the private sector for scarce resources — for skilled construction workers, for capital. But right now many of the workers employed on infrastructure projects would otherwise be unemployed, and the money borrowed to pay for these projects would otherwise sit idle.
And shredding the social safety net at a moment when many more Americans need help isn’t just cruel. It adds to the sense of insecurity that is one important factor driving the economy down.
So why are we doing this to ourselves?
The answer, of course, is that state and local government revenues are plunging along with the economy — and unlike the federal government, lower-level governments can’t borrow their way through the crisis. Partly that’s because these governments, unlike the feds, are subject to balanced-budget rules. But even if they weren’t, running temporary deficits would be difficult. Investors, driven by fear, are refusing to buy anything except federal debt, and those states that can borrow at all are being forced to pay punitive interest rates.
Are governors responsible for their own predicament? To some extent. Arnold Schwarzenegger, in particular, deserves some jeers. He became governor in the first place because voters were outraged over his predecessor’s budget problems, but he did nothing to secure the state’s fiscal future — and he now faces a projected budget deficit bigger than the one that did in Gray Davis.
But even the best-run states are in deep trouble. Anyway, we shouldn’t punish our fellow citizens and our economy to spite a few local politicians.
What can be done? Ted Strickland, the governor of Ohio, is pushing for federal aid to the states on three fronts: help for the neediest, in the form of funding for food stamps and Medicaid; federal funding of state- and local-level infrastructure projects; and federal aid to education. That sounds right — and if the numbers Mr. Strickland proposes are huge, so is the crisis.
And once the crisis is behind us, we should rethink the way we pay for key public services.
As a nation, we don’t believe that our fellow citizens should go without essential health care. Why, then, does a large share of funding for Medicaid come from state governments, which are forced to cut the program precisely when it’s needed most?
An educated population is a national resource. Why, then, is basic education mainly paid for by local governments, which are forced to neglect the next generation every time the economy hits a rough patch?
And why should investments in infrastructure, which will serve the nation for decades, be at the mercy of short-run fluctuations in local budgets?
That’s for later. The priority right now is to fight off the attack of the 50 Herbert Hoovers, and make sure that the fiscal problems of the states don’t make the economic crisis even worse.
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7) Obama Defers to Bush, for Now, on Gaza Crisis
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and HELENE COOPER
December 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/washington/29diplo.html
WASHINGTON — When President-elect Barack Obama went to Israel in July — to the very town, in fact, whose repeated shelling culminated in this weekend’s new fighting in Gaza — he all but endorsed the punishing Israeli attacks now unfolding.
“If somebody was sending rockets into my house, where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that,” he told reporters in Sderot, a small city on the edge of Gaza that has been hit repeatedly by rocket fire. “And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.”
Now, Mr. Obama’s presidency will begin facing the consequences of just such a counterattack, one of Israel’s deadliest against Palestinians in decades, presenting him with yet another foreign crisis to deal with the moment he steps into the White House on Jan. 20, even as he and his advisers have struggled mightily to focus on the country’s economic problems.
Since his election, Mr. Obama has said little specific about his foreign policy — in contrast to more expansive remarks about the economy. He and his advisers have deferred questions — critics could say, ducked them — by saying that until Jan. 20, only President Bush would speak for the nation as president and commander in chief. “The fact is that there is only one president at a time,” David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, reiterating a phrase that has become a mantra of the transition. “And that president now is George Bush.”
Mr. Obama, vacationing in Hawaii, talked to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Saturday. “But the Bush administration has to speak for America now,” Mr. Axelrod said. “And it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to opine on these matters.” As the fighting in Gaza shows, however, events in the world do not necessarily wait for Inauguration Day in the United States.
Even before the conflict flared again, India and Pakistan announced troop movements that have raised fears of a military confrontation following the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. North Korea scuttled a final agreement on verifying its nuclear dismantlement earlier this month, while Iran continues to stall the international effort to stop its nuclear programs. And there are still two American wars churning in Iraq and Afghanistan. All demand his immediate attention.
Mr. Obama’s election has raised expectations, among allies and enemies alike, that new American policies are forthcoming, putting more pressure on him to signal more quickly what he intends to do. In the case of Israel and the Palestinians, Mr. Obama has not suggested he has any better ideas than President Bush had to resolve the existential conflict between the Israelis and Hamas, the Palestinian group that controls Gaza.
“What this does is present the incoming administration with the urgency of a crisis without the capacity to do much about it,” said Aaron David Miller, a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington and author of “The Much Too Promised Land,” a history of the Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts. “That’s the worst outcome of what’s happening right now.”
The renewed fighting — and the international condemnation of the scope of Israel’s response — has dashed already limited hopes for quick progress on the peace process that Mr. Bush began in Annapolis, Md., in November 2007. The omission of Hamas from any talks between the Israelis and President Mahmoud Abbas, who controls only the West Bank, had always been a landmine that risked blowing up a difficult and delicate peace process, but so have Israel’s own internal political divisions.
Mr. Obama might have little to gain from setting out an ambitious agenda for an issue as intractable as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But the conflict in Gaza, like the building tensions between India and Pakistan, suggests that he may have no choice. “You can ignore it, you can put it on the back burner, but it will always come up to bite you,” said Ghaith al-Omari, a former Palestinian peace negotiator.
For Mr. Obama, the conundrum is particularly intense since he won election in part on promises of restoring America’s image around the world. He will assume office with high expectations, particularly among Muslims around the world, that he will make an effort at dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Early on as a candidate, Mr. Obama suggested that he did not necessarily oppose negotiations with groups like Hamas, though he spent much of the campaign retreating from that position under fire from critics.
By the time he arrived in Israel in July, he suggested he would not even consider talks without a fundamental shift in Hamas and its behavior, effectively moving his policy much closer to President Bush’s. “In terms of negotiations with Hamas, it is very hard to negotiate with a group that is not representative of a nation-state, does not recognize your right to exist, has consistently used terror as a weapon, and is deeply influenced by other countries,” he said then.
Mr. Obama received an intelligence briefing on Sunday and planned to talk late on Sunday to his nominee for secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and his choice as national security adviser, James L. Jones, according to a spokeswoman, Brooke Anderson.
One option would be for an Obama administration to respond much more harshly to Israel’s policies, from settlements to strikes like those this weekend, as many in the Arab world and beyond have long urged. On Sunday, though, Mr. Axelrod said the president-elect stood by the remarks he made in the summer and, when asked, noted the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel.
Otherwise, Mr. Obama could try to pressure surrogates to lean on Hamas, including Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza. He can try to build international pressure on Hamas to stop the rocket attacks into Israel. He can try to nurture a peace between Israel and Mr. Abbas on the West Bank, hoping that somehow it spreads to Hamas. All have been tried, and all have failed to avoid new fighting.
“The reality is, what options do we have?” Mr. Miller said.
Jackie Calmes contributed reporting from Honolulu.
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8) Israel Reminds Foes That It Has Teeth
[This is utterly disgusting...bw]
By ETHAN BRONNER
News Analysis
December 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/world/middleeast/29assess.html?ref=world
JERUSALEM — Israel’s military operation in Gaza is aimed primarily at forcing Hamas to end its rocket barrages and military buildup. But it has another goal as well: to expunge the ghost of its flawed 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon and re-establish Israeli deterrence.
On the second day of the offensive, which has already killed hundreds and is devastating Hamas’s resources, Israeli commanders on Sunday were lining up tanks and troops at the border. But they were also insisting that they did not intend to reoccupy the coastal strip of 1.5 million Palestinians or to overthrow the Hamas government there.
This is because whatever might replace Hamas — anarchy, for example — could in fact be worse for Israel’s security. So the goal, as stated by a senior military official, is “to stop the firing against our civilians in the south and shape a different and new security situation there.”
This means another peace treaty with Hamas, but one that has more specific terms than the one that ended 10 days ago. Such a concrete goal, however, should not obscure the fact that Israel has a larger concern — it worries that its enemies are less afraid of it than they once were, or should be. Israeli leaders are calculating that a display of power in Gaza could fix that.
“In the cabinet room today there was an energy, a feeling that after so long of showing restraint we had finally acted,” said Mark Regev, spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, speaking of the weekly government meeting that he attended.
Mark Heller, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, said that that energy reflected the deep feeling among average Israelis that the country had to regain its deterrent capacity.
“There has been a nagging sense of uncertainty in the last couple years of whether anyone is really afraid of Israel anymore,” he said. “The concern is that in the past — perhaps a mythical past — people didn’t mess with Israel because they were afraid of the consequences. Now the region is filled with provocative rhetoric about Israel the paper tiger. This operation is an attempt to re-establish the perception that if you provoke or attack you are going to pay a disproportionate price.”
Numerous commentators on Sunday, both in Israel and in the Arab world, noted that the shadow of the 2006 Lebanon war was hanging over the attack on Gaza. Then, Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Islamist group, was lobbing deadly rockets into Israel with apparent impunity and had captured an Israeli soldier in a crossborder raid.
Israel invaded southern Lebanon and for 34 days carried out air, sea and land assaults before a truce was negotiated. But Hezbollah, by successfully shooting thousands of rockets into Israel while under attack and sounding defiant to the end, won a great deal of credit among Arabs across the region and used its prestige to grab a decisive role in the Lebanese government.
The risk to Israel in Gaza seems of a parallel nature — that if the operation fails or leaves Hamas in the position of scrappy survivor or even somehow perceived victor, it could then dominate Palestinian politics over the more conciliatory and pro-Western Fatah movement for years to come. Since Hamas, like Hezbollah, is committed to Israel’s destruction, that could pose a formidable strategic challenge.
And despite unwavering expressions of support for Israel from President-elect Barack Obama during his campaign, Israel is also gambling that its aggressive military posture will not alienate the new administration.
There are internal complications as well. At Sunday’s government meeting, Mr. Olmert portrayed the Lebanon war, which he led, not as a failure but as something of a model for the current operation, since the northern border has been completely quiet ever since. But most Israelis disagree.
Israel began that war vowing to decimate Hezbollah without fully realizing the extent of its military infrastructure, underground bunkers and rocket arsenals. And while many in Lebanon and overseas considered Israel’s military activities to be excessive, in Israel the opposite conclusion was reached — that it had been too restrained, too careful about distinguishing between Hezbollah and the state of Lebanon.
“We were not decisive enough, and that will not happen again,” a senior military officer said in reference to that war, speaking on condition of anonymity, some weeks ago. He added, “I have flown over Gaza thousands of times and we know how to hit something within two meters.”
The current operation started only after preparation and intelligence work, military commanders said, leading to a true surprise attack on Saturday and the instant deaths of scores of Hamas men. The Israeli military had mapped out Hamas bases, training camps and missile storehouses and systematically hit them simultaneously in an Israeli version of “shock and awe,” the sudden delivery of overwhelming force.
It was Ehud Barak, the defense minister, who directed the preparations, and politically it is Mr. Barak who stands to gain or lose most. As chairman of the Labor Party, he is running for prime minister in the February elections and polls show him to be a distant third to the Likud leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Kadima leader, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.
But if Hamas is driven to a kind of cease-fire and towns in Israel’s south no longer live in fear of constant rocket fire, he will certainly be seen as the kind of leader this country needs. If, on the other hand, the operation takes a disastrous turn or leads to a regional conflagration, his political future seems bleak and he will have given Hamas the kind of prestige it has long sought.
Ron Ben-Yishai, a veteran military correspondent who writes for Yediot Aharonot, said that Mr. Barak had phoned him shortly after the 2006 Lebanon war and said it had been an enormous error. Israel should have waited and prepared before reacting to Hezbollah, choosing its moment and circumstances, he said.
And that, Mr. Ben-Yishai said, is what Mr. Barak did, not only behind the scenes but through a subtle public disinformation campaign. On Friday night, after having decided to launch the operation, he appeared on a satirical television program. An attack seemed at least several days away and Hamas, which had been holding its breath, relaxed. The next day, the Jewish Sabbath and the first day of the Arab workweek, Israel struck.
There is palpable satisfaction at the moment in the Israeli government and the military because the operation so far is seen as a success. Few have focused on the fact that at this stage in the 2006 Lebanon war, there was the same satisfaction — before things turned disastrous.
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9) Sen. Webb’s Call for Prison Reform
Editorial
January 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/opinion/01thu3.html?hp
This country puts too many people behind bars for too long. Most elected officials, afraid of being tarred as soft on crime, ignore these problems. Sen. Jim Webb, a Democrat of Virginia, is now courageously stepping into the void, calling for a national commission to re-assess criminal justice policy. Other members of Congress should show the same courage and rally to the cause.
The United States has the world’s highest reported incarceration rate. Although it has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, it has almost one-quarter of the world’s prisoners. And for the first time in history, more than 1 in 100 American adults are behind bars.
Many inmates are serving long sentences for nonviolent crimes, including minor drug offenses. It also is extraordinarily expensive. Billions of dollars now being spent on prisons each year could be used in far more socially productive ways.
Senator Webb — a former Marine and secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration — is in many ways an unlikely person to champion criminal justice reform. But his background makes him an especially effective advocate for a cause that has often been associated with liberals and academics.
In his two years in the Senate, Mr. Webb has held hearings on the cost of mass incarceration and on the criminal justice system’s response to the problems of illegal drugs. He also has called attention to the challenges of prisoner re-entry and of the need to provide released inmates, who have paid their debts to society, more help getting jobs and resuming productive lives.
Mr. Webb says he intends to introduce legislation to create a national commission to investigate these issues. With Barack Obama in the White House, and strong Democratic majorities in Congress, the political climate should be more favorable than it has been in years. And the economic downturn should make both federal and state lawmakers receptive to the idea of reforming a prison system that is as wasteful as it is inhumane.
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10) In Dense Gaza, Civilians Suffer
By TAGHREED EL-KHODARY
January 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/world/middleeast/01gaza.html?hp
GAZA — A dentist stood at the bed of a doctor, his good friend Ehab Madhoun, 32, who had just died, his shrapnel-pitted body wrapped in a white shroud.
The day before, Dr. Madhoun, a general practitioner, was in an ambulance responding to an Israeli strike at the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza. Another missile hit the ambulance. The driver, Muhammad Abu Hasira, died instantly. Dr. Madhoun lingered for a day, dying of his wounds on Wednesday in the intensive care unit of Shifa Hospital, where hundreds of people have been brought since Israel began its heaviest assault on Gaza in three decades.
The dentist cried.
“He was just doing his work,” said the dentist, who would not give his name. “He’s a doctor, and I can’t understand why Israel would hit an ambulance. They can tell from the cameras it’s an ambulance.”
It has always been this way, over years of conflict here, that civilians are killed in the densely populated Gaza Strip when Israel stages military operations it says are essential for its security. But five days of Israeli airstrikes have surpassed past operations in scale and intensity; the long-distance bombardment of the Hamas-controlled territory has, however well aimed at those suspected of being militants, splintered families and shattered homes in one of the most densely populated places on Earth.
Among the total dead — between 320 and 390, according to the United Nations — Palestinian medical officials say that 38 were children and 25 were women. The United Nations agency that helps Palestinian refugees said 25 percent of those killed had been civilians. Israel said it knew of 40 civilian deaths but that it was still checking.
Israeli officials are coming under increasing pressure to ease conditions for civilians, with tight supplies of electricity, water, food and medicine worsening shortages in an area already largely sealed off from the outside world. While Israel on Wednesday refused a 48-hour cease-fire suggested by the French to allow critical supplies into Gaza, it has been sensitive enough to the ever-louder complaints to say it will do all it can to allow in supplies.
On the issue of civilian casualties, Israeli officials maintain that they do not take aim at civilians and do everything possible — like using precision-guidance systems, up-to-the minute intelligence, leaflets and phone calls to targeted areas — to avoid hitting them.
They say killing and wounding civilians only undermines their primary mission: to stop Hamas from firing rockets into civilian areas of Israel.
“I haven’t seen too many tears shed in Paris, London or Berlin over the fact that we have hit Hamas targets,” said Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert. “So we have many reasons, both moral and political, for doing the utmost to make sure that our strikes are as surgical as possible.”
Further complicating matters is that fact that Gaza is the size of Detroit, with one and a half times as many people. The military and government facilities of Hamas are intertwined with buildings where Gaza’s civilian population lives and works. Israelis say Hamas fires rockets at Israel from civilian neighborhoods.
The United States military has also faced much criticism for killing civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite what officials say is the utmost precaution against doing so.
In Gaza, human rights groups say that the new scale of Israel’s operation puts the area’s civilians, even those accustomed to conflict, under particular stress. Some of the wounded are afraid to seek treatment at the already overwhelmed hospitals, fearful of heading into a rocket attack while driving through streets of pummeled buildings and concrete shards.
Large, multigenerational families huddle in their houses, hoarding the shrinking supplies of water, food and gasoline. Despite the cold, many have kept their windows open to prevent them from shattering when bombs explode nearby. Shops are closed except for grocery stores, bakeries and pharmacies.
“Conditions for parents and children in Gaza are dangerous and frightening,” Maxwell Gaylard, United Nations humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian territories, said in a statement.
“It is absolutely crucial that there is an end to the fighting,” he said. “Without it, more civilians will continue to be killed. Without the violence stopping, it is extremely difficult to get food to people who need it, we cannot assess where the most urgent needs are.”
In the debate over civilian casualties, there is no clear understanding of what constitutes a military target. Palestinians argue that because Hamas is also the government in Gaza, many of the police officers who have been killed were civil servants, not hard-core militants. Israel disagrees, asserting also that a university chemistry laboratory, which it claims was used for making rockets, was a fair target in an attack this week, even if it could not show conclusively that those inside the laboratory at the time where engaged in making weapons.
The ambiguity was evident at the intensive care ward in Shifa Hospital, where Dr. Madhoun’s body lay. There were 11 patients. One was a pharmacist, Rawya Awad, 32, who had a shrapnel wound to the head. Several were police officers. It was impossible to know the identities of many of the others.
But there were several children in another intensive care unit on Tuesday. Among them was Ismael Hamdan, 8, who had severe brain damage as well as two broken legs, according to a doctor there. Earlier that day, two of his sisters, Lama, 5, and Hayya, 12, were killed.
“I prepared them breakfast that day in the garden,” said their mother, Ayda, 36. “They had the tea, bread and thyme. Lama wanted a second pita, but we all teased her saying, ‘Keep it for lunch.’ She told us, ‘Don’t worry, God will provide us with bread.’
“She made all of us laugh,” the mother said. “I cleaned after them and collected the garbage. Ismael volunteered to dump the garbage, but Hayya and Lama joined him. The garbage can is in front of the house, a five-minute walk away. All of a sudden I heard the news from a neighbor, and I ran barefoot to the hospital. A relative collected the bodies of Lama and Hayya on a donkey cart.
“The neighbors ran trying to save Ismael, who was the only one breathing,” she said. “They say my kids flew 40 meters before hitting the ground.”
Ismael died Wednesday night.
At Kamal Edwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza, Mahmoud al-Sheik, 11, was recovering from wounds he received two days before — he thinks from a rocket fired by an Israeli warplane. Even at his age, he is aware of how fighters and civilians are mixed together in Gaza, saying that the bomb was aimed at the house of his neighbor, Salim Zaqout, whom he identified as a member of Hamas.
“But Zaqout and his family evacuated the house a few days ago,” Mahmoud said. “Can’t Israel see all these houses that are adjacent to Zaqout’s? Now Zaqout’s house is completely destroyed, but so are other houses that have nothing to do with Hamas.
“I have a big hole in my left hand. The doctor told me I’m fine. He filled the hole,” Mahmoud said, “but it’s hurting. It feels like fire inside it.”
Marc Santora contributed reporting from the United Nations.
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11) In the Cold
Editorial
January 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/opinion/01thu1.html?hp
This winter day begins a new year of the mortgage crisis. Nothing is certain about the miseries ahead except that they are growing. It is, for example, a freezing morning on Long Island — a national symbol of the single-family suburb. Its two counties, Nassau and Suffolk, boast well-run governments, an educated work force and a long history of stability and affluence. Comfort and consumption are the twin strands of their DNA. But the struggle there is acute.
In Nassau County, New York State’s richest one, the foreclosure whirlwind hit hard. Shelters are filling up and food pantries are emptying. More than 500 people sought emergency housing from the county in a recent December week. Most were families with children.
Connie Lassandro, Nassau’s director of housing and homeless services, said the need had risen 30 percent to 40 percent over 2007, as the face of poverty changed. More overburdened homeowners and the elderly are coming forward now — often bewildered and ashamed.
Private outreach organizations, too, are buried under an avalanche of need. Alric Kennedy, director of community resources for the Long Island Council of Churches, said the council used to be able to help some clients with a month’s rent or mortgage but the money ran out last October. It referred people to other agencies until those funds dried up, too. More people than ever are coming to its emergency food centers — 40 to 60 on a typical day in Freeport, in Nassau; 100 or more seek help in Riverhead, in eastern Suffolk. They are desperate for food, diapers, cooking oil and baby formula.
These are not the chronic homeless. “Our donors are now our clients,” Mr. Kennedy said. “People who gave us food are now asking us to help them.”
As people lose not only homes but also jobs, pain is cascading to the bottom rungs of the economy. The Workplace Project, a longstanding defender of immigrant workers’ rights in Hempstead, has seen an alarming rise in reports of unpaid wages, said Nadia Marin-Molina, its executive director. Contractors are cutting costs by missing payrolls and are counting on an undocumented work force not to complain.
Domestic workers are seeing wages cut in half, Ms. Marin-Molina said, as their bosses tell them to come back to clean house every other week.
When the undocumented lose their jobs and homes, there is no government agency they can turn to. Some of that need is being met by charitable organizations. The Huntington Interfaith Homeless Initiative is a network of church volunteers who give homeless men, mostly Latino immigrants, an alternative to sleeping — and freezing — in the woods. In cold months, they take them into church halls and basements, offering meals, winter coats and hot showers. They do this into the spring. But this economic chill won’t be gone by then.
Nassau County’s comptroller announced this week that sales taxes — a mainstay of county revenue — could fall for the first time in nearly 20 years, which would blow a $24 million hole in the 2008 budget. Other local governments and nonprofits are looking to the federal government for help and for billions that might refill empty coffers and loosen tightened belts. But there are no assurances that the aid will be enough — only uncertainty in a place that has been shaken to the core.
“I’ve been doing this for over 30 years, and I’ve never seen it like this,” Ms. Lassandro of Nassau County said. “Nobody’s exempt from it.”
Ms. Marin-Molina was astounded by the turnout for The Workplace Project’s annual Christmas party. “An incredible number of people came,” she said. “At least a hundred.” Most were men who needed help and were grateful to go home after a hot meal with donated sweatshirts, hats and gloves.
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12) The Spoils
Battle in a Poor Land for Riches Beneath the Soil
By LYDIA POLGREEN
December 15, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/15/world/africa/15niger.html
AIR MOUNTAINS, Niger — Until last year, the only trigger Amoumoun Halil had pulled was the one on his livestock-vaccination gun. This spring, a battered Kalashnikov rifle rested uneasily on his shoulder. When he donned his stiff fatigues, his lopsided gait and smiling eyes stood out among his hard-faced guerrilla brethren.
Mr. Halil, a 40-year-old veterinary engineer, was a reluctant soldier in a rebellion that had broken out over an improbable — and as yet unrealized — bonanza in one of the world’s poorest countries.
A battle is unfolding on the stark mountains and scalloped dunes of northern Niger between a band of Tuareg nomads, who claim the riches beneath their homeland are being taken by a government that gives them little in return, and an army that calls the fighters drug traffickers and bandits.
It is a new front of an old war to control the vast wealth locked beneath African soil. Niger’s northern desert caps one of the world’s largest deposits of uranium, and demand for it has surged as global warming has increased interest in nuclear power. Growing economies like China and India are scouring the globe for the crumbly ore known as yellowcake. A French mining company is building the world’s largest uranium mine in northern Niger, and a Chinese state company is building another mine nearby.
Uranium could infuse Niger with enough cash to catapult it out of the kind of poverty that causes one in five Niger children to die before turning 5.
Or it could end in a calamitous war that leaves Niger more destitute than ever. Mineral wealth has fueled conflict across Africa for decades, a series of bloody, smash-and-grab rebellions that shattered nations. The misery wrought has left many Africans to conclude that mineral wealth is a curse.
Here in the Sahara, the uranium boom has given new life to longstanding grievances over land and power. For years, the Tuareg have struggled against a government they largely disdained. But this new rebellion has shed the parochial complaints of an ethnic minority, claiming instead that the government is squandering the entire country’s resources through corruption and waste. Armed with a slick Web site and articulate spokesmen in Europe and the United States, the movement has gotten sympathy from Westerners drawn to the mysterious Tuareg and their arguments for justice.
It has also pulled in a wide variety of fighters — not only illiterate herdsmen but also college students, aid workers, even former pacifists like Mr. Halil.
“This uranium belongs to our people; it is on our land,” Mr. Halil said. “We cannot allow ourselves to be robbed of our birthright.”
Useful or Useless
When Mr. Halil was in high school, an old French map hung in his classroom. The verdant crescent along the southern border was labeled “useful Niger.” The vast, dun-colored swath across the north that he called home was labeled “useless Niger.”
It was a profound lesson, in politics as well as geography. The agricultural belt along the south had all the power. The herders of the north were irrelevant.
It had not always been so. The Tuareg have plied the barren peaks here for centuries, ruling over the caravan routes that crossed the Sahara with the riches of Africa — from salt to slaves. With their camels and swords, they enriched themselves through tribute and plunder.
By the time Mr. Halil was born, that era was long gone. As a boy he dreamed of having a huge herd of camels, as his father had before the great droughts of the 1970s wiped out the herd. After excelling in school, Mr. Halil went to college in Benin, but he failed to get the Niger government to give him a scholarship to veterinary school abroad.
“My family had no connections,” he said. “Unless you have a friend in government, your chances of getting a scholarship are zero.”
Instead, he started a union of herders to try to get those notoriously individualistic people to band together for their common interests.
In his travels, Mr. Halil began to notice the stream of geologists from France, China, Canada and Australia scouring ever deeper into Tuareg grazing lands. Little seas of flags, used to mark potential mining areas, sprang up everywhere, he said.
“I asked myself, ‘What do we Tuareg get out of this?’ ” he said. “We just get poorer and poorer.”
An Insurgency Begins
Mr. Halil’s efforts were part of a wave of civic activism that has swept over Africa in the past 15 years as the continent has become more democratic. Many of the new elected governments are deeply flawed, but because of a more youthful, urban population in touch with new technology, their citizens are often better informed and less willing to tolerate the corruption that has squandered so much of Africa’s potential.
In February 2007, a group of armed Tuaregs mounted an audacious attack on a military base in the Air Mountains. A new insurgency was born. They called themselves the Niger Movement for Justice and unfurled a set of demands: that corruption be curbed and the wealth generated by each region benefit its people.
Far from useless, as Mr. Halil’s high school map had said, Tuareg lands produce the uranium that accounts for 70 percent of the country’s export earnings. But almost none of those earnings returned to those who lost access to grazing land and suffered the environmental consequences of mining, the rebels argued.
To fight the rebellion, the government has effectively isolated the north, devastating its economy. International human rights investigators have also documented serious misdeeds on both sides. The rebels use antivehicle land mines that have killed soldiers and civilians, while the army has been accused of extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detentions and looting of livestock. In all, hundreds of people have been killed, and thousands have been pushed from their land.
Despite the violence, mining and exploration continues largely unabated, but the rebels contend that corrupt officials siphon off much of that wealth. The country’s prime minister was forced to step aside after being accused of embezzling $237,000, and last summer he was indicted.
“This wealth needs to be used to help the people, not the politicians,” said Aghali Alambo, president of the rebel movement. “Otherwise it is just plunder.”
The government argues that Niger is a democracy, if an imperfect one, with peaceful means of redressing grievances.
Officials dismiss the men fighting in the north as bandits and traffickers who have moved drugs, untaxed cigarettes, gasoline and even human cargo across the vast Sahara for decades. Some rebels admit to trafficking, especially of cheap gasoline smuggled from Algeria, to support the rebellion.
“Niger is a democratic country that is ruled by laws,” said Mohamed Ben Omar, Niger’s minister of information. “If someone has a grievance, let him form a political party and bring it to the ballot.”
Poor Amid Riches
The Tuareg have been fighting here for centuries. The warriors cover their faces with long, blue scarves that stain their skin.
After France lost its grip on most of its Saharan colonies in 1960, the Tuareg found themselves a small minority divided among new nations created by arbitrary borders that meant little to them. Worse, droughts reduced them to penury.
But the parched land on which they lived was valuable. A French nuclear company, Areva, was scooping hundreds of tons of uranium from northern Niger every year. Unlike southern farmers, who owned their land, nomads could use pastureland but had no title to it.
The hardships of global warming and desertification, which eats away grazing land, further impoverished the Tuareg, forcing many to abandon herding. Yet as its fertility degraded, their land became increasingly sought after as the global price of uranium rose steadily. This paradox would prove explosive.
Mr. Halil sat out the last Tuareg uprising, which began in 1990 and ended with a peace agreement in 1995. Back then, he was idealistic, hoping to avoid violence. But he knew his people’s history well.
“Tuareg are fighters,” he said. “It is our nature.”
In June 2007, an army vehicle exploded after driving over a land mine planted by the rebels. Villagers say that the army then slaughtered three elderly men; the army says no one was killed. But the story of the slaughtered elders spread swiftly among the Tuareg.
For Mr. Halil, it was a sign that nonviolence was foolish.
“If they were going to kill old, defenseless men, how could we even talk about negotiation?” he said. “Fighting was the only way to defend our communities and our way of life.”
After months of indecision, Mr. Halil sent his 2-year-old daughter and his pregnant wife to stay with her parents. He set off for the Air Mountains.
An Oath With Exceptions
Once there, Mr. Halil found a growing army. He learned to use a weapon and march in formation, but he was more useful in jobs closer to his former vocations — healer and organizer.
Wounded fighters sought him out under his tree in the camp. He treated infections and counseled men on splinting broken bones. Fighters started calling him the doctor.
“I felt that I was useful,” Mr. Halil said.
Each new recruit must swear a three-part oath on the Koran: never betray the movement; never attack civilians or take their property; serve all of Niger’s people, not just one tribe or clan.
But the oath has exceptions, and stealing from outsiders is not only tolerated but encouraged. Armed men stole a new, white Toyota truck from Unicef’s offices in April. The same vehicle turned up at a rebel base a few days later, its Unicef emblem scratched off. The rebels drove it to Mali to try to sell it.
Such slips made Mr. Halil uneasy.
“I was not born to be a soldier,” he said.
The fighters spend little time actually fighting. Mostly, they drive around on patrols, take shelter under the meager shade of thorny acacia trees and prepare Tuareg tea, a potent brew poured into small glasses.
At such moments, Mr. Halil ached for home. He thought of his newborn son, whom he had never seen. He wondered if he had made the right choice, leaving his family and taking up the way of the gun.
“Sometimes I have doubts,” he said, stoking the embers of a campfire.
In late June, Mr. Halil was on a mission when the thwacking sound of helicopter rotors suddenly broke the desert silence, he said. There had long been rumors that the government had acquired attack helicopters, a power that would fundamentally change the conflict.
In the firefight, 17 rebels were killed. Mr. Halil managed to get away and fled to Algeria, leaving the rebellion and taking up his studies once again. He hoped, at last, to become a real veterinarian.
“I won’t abandon the struggle, but I will continue by other means,” he said.
The fighters left behind, in bases deep in the mountains, vow that they are there to stay.
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13) Error Seen in E.P.A. Report on Contaminant
By FELICITY BARRINGER
January 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/washington/01epa.html?ref=us
The Environmental Protection Agency failed to follow its own guidelines and made a basic error in evaluating how a toxic contaminant in rocket fuel harms human health, according to a report by the agency’s inspector general.
The contaminant, perchlorate, has been found in significant levels in drinking water in at least 400 locations; scientific studies indicate that perchlorate blocks the necessary accumulation of iodide in human thyroid glands. Iodide insufficiencies in pregnant women are “associated with permanent mental deficits in the children,” the E.P.A. said.
Perchlorate can occur naturally, but high concentrations have been found near military installations where it was used in testing rockets and missiles.
The new report, issued late Tuesday, said the E.P.A. should not have looked at perchlorate individually, but should have followed its own guidance and examined the cumulative impact of perchlorate, other substances in the environment that inhibit the uptake of iodide by the thyroid and potentially inadequate supplies of iodide in American diets.
While the report criticized the agency’s analytical approach, it did not quarrel with two controversial regulatory actions involving perchlorate: one decision to set a safe dosage level four times greater than California’s, and a second not to require cleanup of perchlorate contamination.
In October, the E.P.A. announced that after “extensive review of scientific data related to the health effects of exposure to perchlorate from drinking water and other sources,” a rule setting nationwide maximum limits for the chemical in drinking water was unnecessary as it would do little to reduce risks to human health.
The inspector general’s report said “the single chemical approach and remedy underestimates the complexity of the public health issue.”
“The actual occurrence of an adverse outcome,” it continued, “is determined” by at least three other factors.
The E.P.A. has not completed its proposal on whether to set drinking water standards for perchlorate. Lisa P. Jackson, President-elect Barack Obama’s choice to be the agency’s administrator, will most likely decide what course to take on the issue.
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14) Iraq to Open More Oil Fields to Bidding
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and ABEER MOHAMMED
January 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/world/middleeast/01iraq.html?ref=business
BAGHDAD — Iraq announced on Wednesday that it would begin a second round of bids to license international oil companies to develop 11 oil and gas fields or groups of fields.
Iraq’s oil minister, Hussain al-Shahristani, said at a news conference that he hoped that these fields could be producing 2 to 2.5 million barrels of oil a day in three or four years. The goal, he said, is to produce 6 million barrels a day in four or five years, up from the current 2.4 million.
The oil and gas fields are distributed around the country and include some that lie near the border or are shared with neighboring countries like Iran and Kuwait.
The first round of bids, announced last summer, is scheduled to be concluded in the middle of 2009. It will be for the development of six major oil fields and two gas fields.
The same 35 foreign companies that qualified to take part in the first round are involved in this one, said Ahmed al-Shammar, a deputy minister, but it is possible that more companies could be added.
Mr. Shahristani said he hoped the contracts in the second round would be signed by the end of 2009. He also said the ministry was planning to announce more licensing auctions in the future.
The ministry has come under criticism for the slow pace of Iraq’s oil production. Although the country sits on one of the largest proven oil reserves in the world, roughly 115 billion barrels, security and infrastructure problems have left them largely untapped.
Iraq is producing far below its capacity, Mr. Shahristani acknowledged at the news conference, but he said opening these fields for development was meant to address that.
“There are about 78 oil and gas fields in Iraq, but only 15 of them are under operation,” he said.
Plunging oil prices around the world have hurt Iraq’s revenues as well; Iraq’s oil is being sold for around $38 a barrel, a ministry official said, down nearly 70 percent from its high for 2008.
One of the other main events of Wednesday was to be the start of the trial of Muntader al-Zaidi, the Iraqi reporter who was arrested for throwing his shoes at President Bush during a news conference two and a half weeks ago.
But Abdulsattar al-Berikdar, a spokesman for the Supreme Judicial Council, said the trial had been postponed because Mr. Zaidi’s lawyer had filed an appeal.
In a phone interview, Dheyaa Saadi, the lawyer, said the appeal’s purpose was to reduce the charge against Mr. Zaidi so that the case could be taken outside the jurisdiction of the Central Criminal Court of Iraq, which specializes in terrorism and other serious cases. A higher court will rule on the appeal.
Though recent statistics report that there were fewer civilian deaths in Iraq in 2008 than in any other year since the 2003 invasion, violence continues to buffet the volatile provinces of Nineveh and Diyala.
Two bombs exploded Wednesday in Mosul, the capital of Nineveh, killing 4 and wounding 20, a local security official said. The target of the first was a police patrol, and the second exploded shortly afterward, as bystanders gathered.
A candidate for the coming provincial elections was killed by unidentified gunmen on a major street in Mosul, a police official said. One policeman died in a gunfight with the attackers as they escaped.
The candidate, Mowaffaq al-Hamdani, was a Sunni Arab. The elections in Nineveh are seen as crucial for the Sunnis. Many of them boycotted the last election, leaving a provincial council dominated by a Kurdish bloc.
A car bomb exploded near a public market in Sinjar, a town in Nineveh near the Syrian border, killing 3 and wounding 35. The Kurds maintain a tight control of Sinjar, which they view as belonging to Kurdistan, a situation that has raised tensions with Sunni Arabs who live in the volatile, poverty-stricken towns to the south.
In Diyala, a bomb, its target an army patrol, exploded near Khanaqin, another area that has been involved in a tense standoff between Kurds and Arabs. Two were killed in the attack, including an officer, and two others were wounded, a security official said.
Mohammed Hussein and Riyadh Mohammed contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Diyala and Nineveh Provinces.
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