BAUAW NEWSLETTER - TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2009

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Donate to Courage to Resist

A message from Army Spc. Agustín Aguayo,
Iraq War veteran and war resister

Since the day I surrendered to military custody after refusing to return to Iraq, Courage to Resist has been there for me and my family as a constant fountain of support. This support has come in many forms, from a friendly call, to organizing a campaign to cover my legal expenses and basic needs. I believe only an organization with altruistic motives that truly cares would have done this. As someone who has felt the enormous relief of having a strong support group behind me, it is a privilege now as a member of Courage to Resist to help others as I have been helped.

http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/21/26/

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Wake Up, Freak Out - then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.
http://www.wakeupfreakout.org/film/tipping.html

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NEXT MARCH 21 COALITION PLANNING MEETING:
SUNDAY, MARCH 1, 2:00 P.M.
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO (UPSTAIRS)
474 VALENCIA STREET (NEAR 16TH STREET)
SAN FRANCISCO

Check out the new MARCH 21 Coalition Website
(An extensive endorsement list is posted here):

http://www.pephost.org/site/PageServer?pagename=M21_homepage

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A March 21 Labor Rally and contingent to March 21
will be held in the grassy area just South of Market
Street in Justin Herman Plaza
Saturday, March 21
Rally at 10:30 a.m. // Form contingent to march at 11:45 a.m.
http://uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?id=18479

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ARTICLES IN FULL:

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1) After Losses, a Move to Reclaim Executives’ Pay
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
February 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/business/22pay.html?hp

2) Following Bailout Money To Tax Havens
CBS Evening News: Bailed-Out Banks Are Getting Your Money - And Using Tax Havens To Avoid Coughing Up The Dough Themselves
by Sharyl Attkisson
WASHINGTON, Feb. 23, 2009
[Check out the video of the news story at this sight.]
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/02/23/eveningnews/main4822689.shtml?tag=topStories;secondStory#

3) Terror Convictions Overturned in France
By STEVEN ERLANGER
February 25, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/world/europe/25france.html?hp

4) From a Carrier, Another View of America’s Air War in Afghanistan
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
February 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/world/asia/24carrier.html?ref=world

5) Pennsylvania: Boy Faces Adult Charges
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Mid-Atlantic
February 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/us/24brfs-BOYFACESADUL_BRF.html?ref=us

6) The 3 R’s? A Fourth Is Crucial, Too: Recess
By TARA PARKER-POPE
February 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/health/24well.html?ref=education

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1) After Losses, a Move to Reclaim Executives’ Pay
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
February 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/business/22pay.html?hp

SHOULD executives get to keep lavish pay packages when the profits that generated their compensation go up in smoke?

As the financial crisis deepens, what might have been a philosophical question is now the topic of the day. With losses mounting at the nation’s largest financial institutions, years of earnings have been erased, investors have lost billions, thousands of employees have been let go, and taxpayers have been tapped to rescue the financial system. But executives who helped set the problems in motion, or ignored them as they mounted, are still doing fine. Humbled, perhaps, but well paid for their anguish.

Executives at seven major financial institutions that have collapsed, were sold at distressed prices or are in deep to the taxpayer received $464 million in performance pay since 2005, according to an analysis performed for The New York Times. Almost half of that consisted of cash compensation.

Yet these firms have reported losses of $107 billion since 2007, a result of their own missteps and the ensuing economic downturn. And $740 billion in stock market value has been lost since these companies’ shares peaked in 2007, just before the housing bubble burst.

Against that landscape, a growing chorus is demanding that executive compensation snared shortly before problems emerged be given back.

“There is a line that separates fair compensation from stealing from shareholders,” said Frederick E. Rowe, a money manager in Dallas and a founder of Investors for Director Accountability, a nonprofit group. “When managements ignore that line or can’t see it, then hell, yes, they should be required to give the money back.”

Corporate boards that awarded lush executive pay packages almost always justified them by saying they encouraged superior performance and were directly tied to benchmarks like profitability.

But now, with a public backlash against excessive pay and taxpayer lifelines extended to crippled companies, the idea of recouping compensation, known as “clawback,” is gaining traction.

Currently there is no legal mechanism for forcing the regurgitation of past pay, so such efforts would need to be bolstered by new legislation. Clawbacks also promise to be a hot-button issue at shareholder meetings in coming months.

Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who heads the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has called for recovery of executive pay at companies that collapse. He posed this question to financial executives testifying before Congress last March: “When companies fail to perform, should they give millions of dollars to their senior executives?”

The seven troubled companies whose executives received almost $500 million in performance pay since 2005 are the American International Group, Bear Stearns, Citigroup, Countrywide Financial, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Washington Mutual. Equilar, a compensation research firm, conducted the analysis of executive pay and earnings at these and other companies for The Times.

Analysts say that 2005 is a useful milestone because dubious lending started sweeping across the nation that year, and toxic assets began piling up at banks and other firms.

MANY of the chief executives who oversaw troubled financial institutions have exited the scene. And several of the companies that Equilar studied are no longer independent. Merrill, Countrywide, Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual have been absorbed by competitors, while Lehman collapsed.

Trying to get out in front of the compensation backlash, some executives are refusing bonuses and limiting their salaries. Vikram S. Pandit, Citigroup’s C.E.O., recently said he would take a salary of $1 and would receive no bonuses until his troubled bank turned a profit. He has not received any performance pay since he took over the top job at Citigroup late in 2007.

The seven companies highlighted in the Equilar study are not the only financial firms that turned in woeful results recently. Even companies that have managed to generate profits — Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America are three examples — have received taxpayer aid. Executives at these companies, too, face shareholders angered by battered stock prices.

Because the Equilar study uses only profitability as a basis for comparison among firms, it offers a relatively conservative look at how much pay might have been unfairly awarded.

For example, the analysis of the seven companies — among the most damaged on Wall Street — doesn’t take into account the pay of executives who left the scene after overseeing corporate practices that eventually caused their companies to careen off the rails.

Sanford I. Weill, for example, Citigroup’s chief architect, received $205 million in performance pay in the four years before he handed over the reins to Charles O. Prince in 2003.

Analysts contend that Mr. Weill’s failure to effectively manage and knit together the financial behemoth he created in 1998 led directly to Citigroup’s woes today. A spokesman for Mr. Weill said that Citigroup was profitable and financially healthy when he ran it. He noted that Mr. Weill has dropped a consulting arrangement with the bank, as well as use of its corporate aircraft, because of Citigroup’s woes.

Matching compensation to actual, long-term profitability at other firms is revealing.

Consider Merrill, which Bank of America bought in a distress sale arranged last fall. Losses reported by Merrill as a result of the credit crisis totaled $35.8 billion in 2007 and 2008, enough to wipe out 11 years of earnings previously reported by the company. The losses dwarf those reported by any of the other companies that Equilar analyzed.

For the 11-year period from 1997 to 2008, Merrill’s board gave its chief executives more than $240 million in performance-based compensation. The company had three chief executives during these years: David H. Komansky, who left in 2002, was followed by E. Stanley O’Neal. Mr. O’Neal was ousted in 2008 and replaced by John A. Thain, who was dismissed last month.

Mr. O’Neal’s total pay for the six years he ran Merrill totaled $157.7 million. He declined to comment.

To be sure, executive compensation at the companies in the Equilar study was almost always a blend of stock and cash, and the downturn has hammered the wealth of executives who kept their shares. But analysts say that even if stock awards were removed from the mix, executives still received windfalls.

“This is really in our view a giant fraudulent conveyance, where money was paid out to executives at firms that were fatally undercapitalized,” said Daniel Pedrotty, director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. office of investment. “We are arguing for a recovery of money that was used by people who treated these companies as a giant A.T.M. machine.”

John D. Finnegan, the chief executive of the Chubb Corporation, has been the head of Merrill’s compensation committee since 2007. Last March, when renewed outrage over pay packages for bankers emerged, he appeared before Congress. Lawmakers had questions about the $161 million that Merrill gave to Mr. O’Neal when he left the firm.

The essence of Mr. Finnegan’s testimony was that Mr. O’Neal earned the money. “Over 80 percent of the amount consists of company stock he received as part of his annual bonuses for 2006 and prior years,” Mr. Finnegan said. “Those bonuses were paid because of the company’s and Mr. O’Neal’s strong performance during those earlier periods.”

Now that performance has turned to dust. Mr. Finnegan declined to comment.

Many investors say the whole pay-for-performance model is a mirage because consultants are too willing to make clients happy by making sure they are handsomely compensated — often regardless of performance.

John England, head of the financial services compensation practice at Towers Perrin, was the consultant on Merrill’s pay practices. He or his firm also devised pay packages for Angelo R. Mozilo, the former chief of Countrywide, and for Kerry K. Killinger, the former chief at Washington Mutual.

Mr. England declined to be interviewed. A spokesman for Towers Perrin said that it did not comment on specific clients but that the firm was confident about its practices and that its expertise had “resulted in the delivery of valuable, sound and objective executive compensation advice.”

Yet Mr. England’s white-collar clients also oversaw one of the greatest demolitions of financial value in history.

Countrywide generated losses of $3.9 billion in 2007 and early 2008, before it was absorbed by Bank of America last July. Those losses erased the company’s entire earnings in 2006 and half of its profit for the previous year. But Mr. Mozilo received $82.4 million in performance pay between 2005 and 2008, roughly half in cash, according to Equilar.

Mr. Mozilo could not be reached for comment.

Washington Mutual, overseen by Mr. Killinger until federal authorities forced its sale last year to JPMorgan Chase, is another case. Its mortgage-related losses of $8 billion in 2007 and 2008 wipe out all of its earnings in 2006 and 2005 and three months’ worth of profits generated in 2004.

Mr. Killinger received $38.2 million in performance pay between 2005 and 2008, Equilar said; of that amount, just $7.6 million was paid in cash, the rest in stock. A spokesman for Mr. Killinger said he would not comment.

Bear Stearns, which collapsed last March under the weight of soured mortgage holdings before it could record major losses, awarded its chief, James E. Cayne, $58.5 million in performance pay from 2005 through 2007. Some $30 million of that was cash, and the rest was stock. Mr. Cayne could not be reached for comment.

EVEN as shareholder ire over burgeoning pay packages has risen, recoveries of compensation are rare.

“I think you can count on two hands the number of voluntary or involuntary returns of compensation by executives,” said Paul Hodgson, senior research associate at the Corporate Library, a corporate governance research firm. “More companies are introducing clawback provisions, but instituting the provisions and actually clawing back the pay are two different things.”

In the past, clawbacks were typically considered only in cases of fraud or accounting irregularities. Now shareholders want clawbacks if compensation ultimately encouraged dangerously risky behavior and was based on profits that later evaporated.

The initiative is directed almost exclusively at companies’ most senior management, not at lower-level employees who earned relatively modest sums.

Neil M. Barofsky, the special inspector general for one of the federal bailout efforts, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, is examining compensation given to top managers at banks that received money under the program. And as the annual shareholder meeting season approaches, executive pay is expected to be an even more contentious issue, analysts say.

“Poorly structured pay packages encouraged the get-rich-quick mentality and overly risky behavior that helped bring financial markets to their knees and wiped out profits at so many companies,” said Amy Borrus, deputy director at the Council of Institutional Investors. “And yet many of these C.E.O.’s have pocketed enormous compensation.” Brian Foley, an independent compensation consultant in White Plains, said clawbacks shouldn’t be the only goal of irate shareholders. He said boards should also recover performance-based contributions to executives’ pensions, because those payments were also tied to profits that may have proved fleeting.

“If these guys accumulated money during years when the earnings actually was not earned,” he asked, “why shouldn’t the pensions be clawed back as well?”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated Representative Henry A. Waxman's committee position. He heads the House Energy and Commerce Committee, not the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

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2) Following Bailout Money To Tax Havens
CBS Evening News: Bailed-Out Banks Are Getting Your Money - And Using Tax Havens To Avoid Coughing Up The Dough Themselves
by Sharyl Attkisson
WASHINGTON, Feb. 23, 2009
[Check out the video of the news story at this sight.]
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/02/23/eveningnews/main4822689.shtml?tag=topStories;secondStory#

(CBS) They're exotic and faraway places known to tourists for coral reefs and sandy beaches.

But to the business world they’re known as tax havens, with strict bank secrecy and privacy laws, where U.S. companies can pay fewer taxes and help wealthy customers avoid taxes, too. From the Caribbean and Europe - to Panama. CBS News Investigative Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reports.

And guess who's turned up in a new government report about tax havens?

Eleven giant recipients of your bailout tax dollars - American Express, AIG, Bank of America, Citigroup, General Motors, GMAC, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo. Together they've collected more than $227 billion.

Even as they benefit from tax money, they operate hundreds of subsidiaries in places widely known for helping people evade taxes.

Although proponents say most business in tax havens is perfectly legal and legitimate, it's estimated that tax havens cost U.S. taxpayers $100 billion a year in lost revenue.

The stakes are so high that one tax haven insider was put under witness protection after he exposed hundreds of tax dodgers, and testified to Congress about his job.

One favorite among the bailout companies is the Cayman Islands. There's no income tax, no corporate tax and no capital gains tax.

Goldman Sachs has 15 subsidiaries there. Bank of America: 59. Citigroup: 90.

But Morgan Stanley beats them all with at least 158 subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands - seven times the number of hotels.

When asked about how hard it is for the U.S. government to "get at" what is going on in some of these tax havens, Dean Zerbe, a former congressional tax investigator, said “it's incredibly hard.”

Zerbe believes the Treasury Department should demand that bailed-out banks cough up details of their offshore interests.

“Here we are sending taxpayers' monies to you. Tell us, banks, what you're doing to ensure that you are not helping folks avoid taxes coming the other way,” Zerbe said.

None of the bailout companies we contacted would talk about their subsidiaries in tax havens, except insurance giant AIG which told us their operations do not "exist solely for tax benefit."

So the next time you're reminded the U.S. economy is in shambles, remember - there are places where business is still booming.

Places where some bailed out companies are getting your tax dollars, and may be helping others pay less.

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3) Terror Convictions Overturned in France
By STEVEN ERLANGER
February 25, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/world/europe/25france.html?hp

PARIS — A French appeals court on Tuesday overturned terrorist conspiracy convictions for five former inmates of the Guantánamo Bay prison camp who had been tried and convicted in 2007, after they were returned to France.

The court ruled that information gathered by French intelligence officials in interrogations at Guantánamo Bay violated French rules for permissible evidence, and that there was no other proof of wrongdoing.

None of the men, who were originally captured in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002, is currently in jail, having been given time off for time already served.

But the ruling is likely to be seen as a precedent for similar cases, as well as inject more uncertainty into the sensitive process of repatriating inmates being released from Guantánamo Bay, which President Obama has vowed to shut down. Various European countries have expressed willingness in principle to take some of the inmates, depending on their potential for dangerous behavior and whether the United States also accepts some. Some European countries prefer that the European Union come up with a unified position, so Washington cannot play one country against another while trying to negotiate placements.

The case is also interesting because it involves Mourad Benchellali, now 26, a member of a family with numerous other connections to jihadist violence. His older brother, Menad, was arrested in 2002 on suspicion of planning to bomb Russian targets, including the Russian embassy in Paris, as a response to the Chechen war. He was convicted in 2006 and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Their father, Chellali Benchellali, a Muslim cleric from a suburb of Lyon, was arrested in connection with the plot to avenge Russia’s crackdown in Muslim Chechnya. He had previously gone to Bosnia to help Muslims in the Bosnian civil war. He was given an 18-month suspended sentence; his wife, Hafsa, was given a two-year suspended sentence and another son, Hafed, was sentenced to four years in prison.

Mourad, who was at Guantánamo, wrote an Op-Ed piece for The New York Times in June 2006, in which he said that in 2001, when he was 19, “I made the mistake of listening to my older brother and going to Afghanistan in what I though was a dream vacation.” His brother’s friends, he wrote, sent him to an Al Qaeda training camp. He spent two and a half years in Guantánamo as an “enemy combatant” and said he could not “describe in just a few lines the suffering and the torture.”

He and other French detainees were returned to France in 2004 and 2005 following pressure from the French president then, Jacques Chirac, who promised that “justice will be done.” They were immediately arrested; their trial produced the 2007 conviction — on charges of criminal association with a terrorist enterprise — that was overturned on Tuesday. During the trial, the men said that they had spent time in Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan but had never used their new combat skills.

In addition to Mr. Benchellali, the others cleared were Brahim Yadel, 37; Nizar Sassi, 27; Khaled Ben Mustapha, 35; and Redouane Khalid, 39. None of them was in court to hear the judges uphold their appeal.

The court found, according to lawyers for the men, that the French DST counterintelligence service could not serve both as an espionage agency and a judicial police service. Paul-Albert Iwens, the lawyer for Mr. Khalid, told Reuters news agency that the court refused “to let it be said that a police agency could question people detained on foreign territory in conditions that go against international conventions.”

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4) From a Carrier, Another View of America’s Air War in Afghanistan
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
February 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/world/asia/24carrier.html?ref=world

ABOARD U.S.S. THEODORE ROOSEVELT, on the Arabian Sea — Every day from the deck of this nuclear-powered aircraft carrier off the coast of Pakistan, two dozen combat planes are catapulted into the sky for the 500-mile trip to southern Afghanistan. There the pilots circle Taliban strongholds like an airborne 911 service and zoom in when American and British troops, spread thin and often panicked, call in airstrikes.

The Navy has been back in these waters providing more air power since August, in large part because the ground reinforcements that commanders have been pleading for have not yet come. From 15,000 feet up, the pilots protect supply lines under increasing attack, fly reconnaissance missions to find what they call “bad guys” over the next hill, and go “kinetic” with bombs that kill three, four or five Taliban fighters at a time. They can always tell when troops who call in airstrikes are under direct fire.

“They’re trying to talk to you at the same time that they’re running and being shot at, so obviously there’s a lot of urgency in their voices,” said Capt. Kevin J. Kovacich, the Roosevelt’s air wing commander.

Captain Kovacich and many of his pilots last dropped bombs in Afghanistan in March 2002, when the American military seemed to have dealt a near fatal blow to the Taliban. Now the United States military is experiencing the limitations of air power in a seven-year war, in which an increasing American reliance on airstrikes against insurgents has kindled growing fury over the civilian casualties that have come with them.

“Those insurgents are wily,” said Cmdr. Fredrick R. Luchtman, the commanding officer of a Roosevelt squadron of F/A-18C Hornets, who also flew missions over Afghanistan in early 2002. “They will meld themselves within the population. They will fire from areas that they know that if we put a bomb there, it’s going to look bad.”

The pilots do not need to be told that civilian deaths soared last year in Afghanistan, the majority from Taliban attacks, but others from airstrikes called in by American and British troops under fire. President Hamid Karzai has so angrily condemned the strikes that in December he was invited to visit the Roosevelt, so that officers could try to persuade him that they took care where they aimed their bombs.

As Vice Adm. William E. Gortney, the commander of United States naval forces in the region, put it: “We don’t drop when we’re unsure.”

The visit, by the Navy’s account at least, went well. Mr. Karzai watched jets take off from the flight deck and was briefed on how the pilots try to minimize “collateral damage.” Afterward, he sent the ship one of his trademark karakul hats and a Christmas card. But for the pilots, tensions remain.

“If it was positively identified as hostile in Iraq, you took it out,” said Commander Luchtman, who also flew missions over Baghdad in 2003. “Here, just because it’s positively identified as hostile, you’ve still got to mitigate the other things around.”

To support ground troops in Afghanistan, the United States flew more than 19,000 combat missions in the country in 2008 — more than ever before, surpassing even the number in Iraq over the same period. But over all, American pilots dropped slightly fewer bombs and other munitions, perhaps as a result of more restrictive rules imposed in September after an uproar about civilian casualties.

“To win the insurgency, we’re not going to bomb our way out of this,” said Col. Harry A. Foster, the chief of the strategy division of the Combined Air and Space Operations Center in Southwest Asia, the command headquarters for the air wars over Iraq and Afghanistan. To that end, pilots on the Roosevelt often engage in a “show of force” — flying as low as 1,000 feet and making a lot of noise to scare the Taliban — and say they drop bombs as a last resort.

The Navy says the pilots on the Roosevelt fly about 30 percent of combat missions over Afghanistan; the majority of the flights are handled by the Air Force from bases in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the region. The Navy was called in last summer when attacks on American and NATO supply lines were on the rise and military commanders decided they needed to get the trucks off the roads and use more air transport.

The pilots fly many other missions for reconnaissance, using sensors to take pictures from the air of, for example, how many Taliban fighters are on the other side of a wall, or how many might be ahead of a NATO convoy. The pictures go directly to the laptops of troops on the ground. “So if there are three warm bodies in that compound, we will know that there are three warm bodies in that compound,” Commander Luchtman said.

The Roosevelt arrived to relieve another carrier in mid-October and will remain in the region until late March. The carrier was last here in October 2001. Although Captain Kovacich and Commander Luchtman were here around the same time, they flew from different ships.

The Roosevelt pilots say they did not expect to be back, but they make no judgments, at least none they are willing to share, on the need for their return, or on whether what they do is making a difference in the overall conflict.

On Wednesday in Washington, Gen. David D. McKiernan, the top American commander in Afghanistan, said the war was “at best stalemated” in the very region in which the pilots operate. Most of the 17,000 additional American troops that President Obama ordered to Afghanistan last week will be used in the area.

What the pilots do say is that flying six-hour round-trip missions six days a week, they are doing what they have been asked: providing air support to troops in remote areas. “All I know,” said Cmdr. Richard McGrath, a pilot and executive officer of one of the Roosevelt squadrons, “is that we dropped the bomb where it was supposed to go, when it was supposed to go.”

Elisabeth Bumiller reported from the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt this month and updated this article with information from Washington.

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5) Pennsylvania: Boy Faces Adult Charges
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Mid-Atlantic
February 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/us/24brfs-BOYFACESADUL_BRF.html?ref=us

A prosecutor said he had no choice but to file adult charges against an 11-year-old boy accused of killing his father’s pregnant girlfriend, even though the child’s age raises questions about where and how to jail him. District Attorney John Bongivengo of Lawrence County said state law prohibited him from filing criminal homicide charges against the boy in juvenile court. Therefore, Mr. Bongivengo said, he had to charge the boy with homicide as an adult or with a lesser charge. But he said he expected the boy’s lawyer to ask a judge to move the case to juvenile court. Because the boy is charged as an adult, he must remain in the county jail, where he is separated from about 300 adult inmates. He is being kept out of a normal cellblock and in a 10-by-8-foot cell in the booking area.

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6) The 3 R’s? A Fourth Is Crucial, Too: Recess
By TARA PARKER-POPE
February 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/health/24well.html?ref=education

The best way to improve children’s performance in the classroom may be to take them out of it.

New research suggests that play and down time may be as important to a child’s academic experience as reading, science and math, and that regular recess, fitness or nature time can influence behavior, concentration and even grades.

A study published this month in the journal Pediatrics studied the links between recess and classroom behavior among about 11,000 children age 8 and 9. Those who had more than 15 minutes of recess a day showed better behavior in class than those who had little or none. Although disadvantaged children were more likely to be denied recess, the association between better behavior and recess time held up even after researchers controlled for a number of variables, including sex, ethnicity, public or private school and class size.

The lead researcher, Dr. Romina M. Barros, a pediatrician and an assistant clinical professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said the findings were important because many schools did not view recess as essential to education.

“Sometimes you need data published for people at the educational level to start believing it has an impact,” she said. “We should understand that kids need that break because the brain needs that break.”

And many children are not getting that break. In the Pediatrics study, 30 percent were found to have little or no daily recess. Another report, from a children’s advocacy group, found that 40 percent of schools surveyed had cut back at least one daily recess period.

Also, teachers often punish children by taking away recess privileges. That strikes Dr. Barros as illogical. “Recess should be part of the curriculum,” she said. “You don’t punish a kid by having them miss math class, so kids shouldn’t be punished by not getting recess.”

Last month, Harvard researchers reported in The Journal of School Health that the more physical fitness tests children passed, the better they did on academic tests. The study, of 1,800 middle school students, suggests that children can benefit academically from physical activity during gym class and recess.

A small study of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder last year found that walks outdoors appeared to improve scores on tests of attention and concentration. Notably, children who took walks in natural settings did better than those who walked in urban areas, according to the report, published online in August in The Journal of Attention Disorders. The researchers found that a dose of nature worked as well as a dose of medication to improve concentration, or even better.

Andrea Faber Taylor, a child environment and behavior researcher at the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory at the University of Illinois, says other research suggests that all children, not just those with attention problems, can benefit from spending time in nature during the school day. In another study of children who live in public housing, girls who had access to green courtyards scored better on concentration tests than those who did not.

The reason may be that the brain uses two forms of attention. “Directed” attention allows us to concentrate on work, reading and tests, while “involuntary” attention takes over when we’re distracted by things like running water, crying babies, a beautiful view or a pet that crawls onto our lap.

Directed attention is a limited resource. Long hours in front of a computer or studying for a test can leave us feeling fatigued. But spending time in natural settings appears to activate involuntary attention, giving the brain’s directed attention time to rest.

“It’s pretty clear that all human beings experience attentional fatigue,” Dr. Faber Taylor said. “Our attention has to be restored from that fatigue, and there is a growing body of research evidence that nature is one way that seems particularly effective at doing it.”

Playtime and nature time are important not only for learning but also for health and development.

Young rats denied opportunities for rough-and-tumble play develop numerous social problems in adulthood. They fail to recognize social cues and the nuances of rat hierarchy; they aren’t able to mate. By the same token, people who play as children “learn to handle life in a much more resilient and vital way,” said Dr. Stuart Brown, the author of the new book “Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination and Invigorates the Soul” (Avery).

Dr. Brown, a psychiatrist in Carmel Valley, Calif., has collected more than 6,000 “play histories” from human subjects. The founder of the National Institute for Play, he works with educators and legislators to promote the importance of preserving playtime in schools. He calls play “a fundamental biological process.” “From my viewpoint, it’s a major public health issue,” he said. “Teachers feel like they’re under huge pressures to get academic excellence to the exclusion of having much fun in the classroom. But playful learning leads to better academic success than the skills-and-drills approach.”

Join the discussion at nytimes.com/well.

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