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EMERGENCY -- THIS JUST IN!
U.S. Supreme Court Rejects Mumia's Appeal
Hear Mumia's Response at:
http://www.prisonradio.org/audio/mumia/2009MAJ/04Apr09/InterviewMAJ4-6-09.aif
Please contact the White House to protest this unjust ruling: 202/456-1111
http://www.whitehouse.gov/ CONTACT/
BY JEFF MACKLER
The U.S. Supreme Court refused on April 6 Mumia Abu-Jamal's appeal (writ of certiorari) for a new trial based on the racist exclusion of 14 Blacks from the jury panel in his 1982 frame-up murder trial. The decision left in place Mumia's conviction and turned a blind eye to its own ruling in the famous Batson v. Kentucky case and related decisions that nullify murder convictions where Blacks are systematically excluded from juries without cause. The court ruled without comment.
Even worse, the court left open the possibility that it might consider Pennsylvania prosecutors' cross appeal to re-instate the death penalty without granting Mumia a new sentencing hearing. A previous ruling had voided the jury's imposition of the death penalty on the grounds that "hanging" Judge Albert Sabo had improperly instructed the jury regarding mitigating circumstances sufficient to impose a sentence of life imprisonment without parole as opposed to execution by lethal injection. Should the court later rule in favor of the prosecution, an order for Mumia's execution by lethal injection could be signed by the Pennsylvania's governor and Mumia could be executed in approximately 90 days.
Meanwhile Mumia's attorney, Robert R. Bryan, told this writer,"We have lost a battle but not the war." Bryan plans to file another petition before the Supreme Court for a re-hearing on a critical issue related to the death penalty, thus keeping Mumia's legal options alive, at least for the time being.
Jamal, an award-winning and innocent journalist and author, has been on Pennsylvania's death row for 27 years. He has won broad international support for his struggle for a new trial and freedom. Organizations ranging from Amnesty International and the European Parliament to the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Presidents of France and South Africa and civil and human rights organizations around the world have repeatedly challenged the racist and anti-democratic aspects surrounding his conviction.
Massive and repeated protests organized by groups including the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal (215-476-8812) and The Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal (510-268-9429) have played a key role in the ongoing fight for Mumia's freedom. They are presently planning joint campaigns with several groups that require the solidarity of all.
Urgent!
Send your contributions payable to: Send your contributions payable to:
Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 10328
Oakland, CA 94610-0328
Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
Post Office Box 16222, Oakland, California 94610
International Concerned Family & Friends of MAJ
P.O. Box 19709
Philadelphia, PA 19143
Phone - 215-476-8812/ Fax - 215-476-6180
E-mail - icffmaj@aol.com
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC)
P.O. Box 16, College Station
New York, New York 10030
(Send checks and money orders (payable to Free Mumia Coalition, NYC/IFCO) to us at our fiscal sponsor, IFCO:
IFCO
402 West 145th Street
New York, NY 10031)
Send our brotha some LOVE and LIGHT at:
Mumia Abu-Jamal
AM 8335
SCI-Greene
175 Progress Drive
Waynesburg, PA 15370
Supreme Court lets Mumia Abu-Jamal's conviction stand
By Bill Mears
CNN Supreme Court Producer
April 6, 2009
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/04/06/mumia.supreme.court/
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Supreme Court has let stand the conviction of former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was sent to death row for gunning down a Philadelphia police officer 28 years ago.
He contends blacks were unfairly excluded from the jury, and has been an outspoken activist from behind bars.
The justices made their announcement Monday.
A separate appeal over whether Abu-Jamal deserves a new sentencing hearing has not been taken up by the high court.
Prosecutors are appealing a federal appeals court ruling in Abu-Jamal's favor last year on the sentencing issue. The case has attracted international attention amid charges of prosecutorial misconduct and the inmate's outspoken personality.
Abu-Jamal, a former radio reporter and cab driver has been a divisive figure, with many prominent supporters arguing that racism pervaded his trial. Others countered Abu-Jamal is using his skin color to escape responsibility for his actions. They say he has divided the community for years with his provocative writing and activism.
He was convicted for the December 9, 1981, murder of Officer Daniel Faulkner, 25, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Faulkner had pulled over Abu-Jamal's brother in a late-night traffic stop. Witnesses said Abu-Jamal, who was nearby, ran over and shot the policeman in the back and in the head.
Abu-Jamal, once known as Wesley Cook, was also wounded in the encounter and later confessed to the killing, according to other witnesses testimony.
Abu-Jamal is black and the police officer was white.
Incarcerated for nearly three decades, Abu-Jamal has been an active critic of the criminal justice system.
On a Web site created by friends to promote the release this month of his new book, the prisoner-turned-author writes about his fight. "This is the story of law learned, not in the ivory towers of multi-billion dollar endowed universities but in the bowels of the slave-ship, in the hidden, dank dungeons of America."
His chief defense attorney, Robert Bryan, had urged the justices to grant a new criminal trial, but the high court offered no explanation for its refusal to intervene.
"The central issue in this case is racism in jury selection," Bryan wrote to supporters last month. Ten whites and two blacks made up the original jury panel that sentenced Abu-Jamal to death.
A three-judge panel of the 3rd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals a year ago kept the murder conviction in place, but ordered a new capital sentencing hearing. That court ultimately concluded the jury was improperly instructed on how to weigh "mitigating factors" offered by the defense that might have kept Abu-Jamal off death row.
Pennsylvania law at the time said jurors did not have to unanimously agree on a mitigating circumstance, such as the fact that Abu-Jamal had no prior criminal record.
Months before that ruling, oral arguments on the issue were contentious. Faulkner's widow and Abu-Jamal's brother attended, and demonstrations on both sides were held outside the courtroom in downtown Philadelphia.
Many prominent groups and individuals, including singer Harry Belafonte, the NAACP and the European Parliament, are cited on his Web site as supporters. Prosecutors have insisted Abu-Jamal pay the price for his crimes, and have aggressively resisted efforts to take him of death row for Faulkner's murder.
"This assassination has been made a circus by those people in the world and this city who believe falsely that Mumia Abu-Jamal is some kind of a folk hero," said Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham last year, when the federal appeals court upheld the conviction. "He is nothing short of an assassin."
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Sat. April 11 - 11:00 am
Corporate Bail-Out Protest
On the sidewalk in front of the Federal Reserve Bank
101 Market St., San Francisco
near Embarcadero BART Station
Bail out the people, not the CEO's!
Peacefully protest the greed that resulted in 12 million unemployed and foreclosures up 81%.
We want our economy restored for the public.
Sign up at:
http://www.anewwayforward.org/demonstrations/
There will be protests in over 40 other cities nationwide at the same time.
Organized via A New Way Forward.
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Saturday, April 11, 2:00 p.m.
Letter of Invitation to the April 11 Teach-In Organizing Meeting
OPEIU Local 3
1050 South Van Ness #201 (upstairs) -- between 21st St. & 22nd St.
- Money for jobs and social services, not for war
- Tax the rich/progressive taxation
- Single payer healthcare for all
- Pass the Employee Free Choice Act
- Immediate moratorium on foreclosures and evictions
- No more bailouts for Wall Street -- bail out working people
- Stop the ICE raids and deportations
Dear Bay Area Sisters and Brothers:
On behalf of the San Francisco Labor Council, the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council, and the Workers Emergency Recovery Campaign (WERC), we would like to invite you to a meeting to plan a teach-in to be held on May 9th in San Francisco on the economic crisis and the need for a worker-community recovery plan.
The teach-in organizing meeting will be held Saturday, April 11 at 2 p.m. at the office of OPEIU Local 3 in the Mission District of San Francisco. The address is 1050 South Van Ness #201 (upstairs) -- between 21st St. & 22nd St.
The May 9 teach-in is framed by the set of demands approved by San Francisco Labor Council delegates in mid-January and by the Workers Emergency Recovery Campaign. They are as follows:
- Money for jobs and social services, not for war
- Tax the rich/progressive taxation
- Single payer healthcare for all
- Pass the Employee Free Choice Act
- Immediate moratorium on foreclosures and evictions
- No more bailouts for Wall Street -- bail out working people
- Stop the ICE raids and deportations
These demands were recently endorsed by the California Federation of Teachers at their convention. They are widely supported by labor and community organizations across the country.
It is our desire that the teach-in provide a forum that will reflect the needs and concerns of all of those being negatively impacted by the crisis. To this end, the planning meeting is being convened as a space for us to come together, share ideas, and begin to forge a common action program for moving forward. Within the overall framework of developing a progressive response to the crisis, and the conviction that any stimulus and bailout must serve working people, not Wall Street, our intention is for the agenda for May 9th to be decided through a process of open discussion and identification of common points of concern.
We hope to come out of May 9th with a set of agreed actions, including a mass mobilization, and the establishment of joint labor-community committees to build an ongoing and pro-active response to the crisis.
It is imperative that we unite in this moment of deepening crisis. We sincerely hope you can join us to plan for the May 9th event -- which will be held at the Plumbers Hall in San Francisco: 1621 Market St. @ Franklin St. from 1 to 5 p.m.
Please let us know ASAP if you can attend the April 11 teach-in organizing meeting. We are asking folks to please RSVP by replying to
In solidarity,
Alan Benjamin, Conny Ford, Fred Hirsch, Bill Leumer, Denis Mosgofian and Tim Paulson
On behalf of the Teach-in Planning Committee
Initial List of invited groups, individuals, and organizations:
All Bay Area Labor Councils and their affiliated unions, all unions affiliated with San Francisco Labor Council, and all Council community-based allies that have partnered with the SF Labor Council in joint political campaigns.
Also:
Council of Community Housing Organizations
Community Housing Partnership
Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center
Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation
Chinatown Community Development Corporation
South of Market Community Action Network
St. Peter's Housing Committee
Mission Economic Development Agenda
La Raza Centro Legal
San Francisco Day Laborers
Dolores Street Community Services
Chinese Progressive Association
POWER
San Francisco Tenants Union
Housing Rights Committee
Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth
San Francisco Child Care Providers Association
Harvey Milk Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Democratic Club
Bernal Heights Democratic Club
PODER
ACORN
San Francisco Organizing Project
Women of Color Resource Center
East Bay Housing Organizations
Just Cause
Representatives from the offices of Supervisors Avalos, Daly, Mar, Campos,
Mirkarimi, and Chiu
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Celebrate the release of the new book by Mumia Abu-Jamal:
"Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners vs. the USA"
Friday, April 24th (Mumia's birthday!), 6:30 P.M.
Humanist Hall
411 - 28th Street, Oakland
$25.00 donation or what you can afford.
Featuring:
Angely Y. Davis
Mistah F.A.B.
Lynne Stewart
Tory Serra
Avotcja
Kiilu Nyasha
JR Minister of Information POCC
Ed Mead
Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia
Molotov Mouths
Prison Radio, 415-648-4505
www.prisonradio.org
www.mumia.org
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) The Words Have Changed, but Have the Policies?
"So if not a war on terror, what then? 'Overseas contingency operations.'
And terrorist attacks themselves? 'Man-caused disasters.'"
By PETER BAKER
On the White House
April 3, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/us/politics/02web-baker.html?ref=us
2) Finding Hope Online, and Hoping a Job Follows
By PETER S. GOODMAN
April 3, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/business/03jobless.html?ref=business
3) Patient Money
Getting a Health Policy When You're Already Sick
By WALECIA KONRAD
April 4, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/04/health/04patient.html?ref=health
4) Israel on Trial
By GEORGE BISHARAT
Op-Ed Contributor
April 4, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/04/opinion/04bisharat.html
5) Financial Industry Paid Millions to Obama Aide
By JEFF ZELENY
April 4, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/04/us/politics/04disclose.html?hp
6) Ward Churchill Redux
April 5, 2009, 10:00 pm
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/ward-churchill-redux/
7) The Recession's Impact: Closing The Clinic
60 Minutes: Bad Economy Leaves Cancer Patients Without Health Insurance In Dire Straits
April 5, 2009
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/04/03/60minutes/main4917055.shtml
8) Pentagon Budget to Reflect New Priorities
By ELISABETH BUMILLER and CHRISTOPHER DREW
April 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/us/politics/07defense.html?hp
9) In America, Labor Has an Unusually Long Fuse
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
April 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/weekinreview/05greenhouse.html?ref=world
10) As Courts Face Cuts, States Squeeze Defendants
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
April 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/us/07collection.html?ref=us
11) Homeowners' Hard Times Are Good for the Foreclosure Business
By ERIC LIPTON
April 6, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/us/06convene.html?ref=us
12) Obama's Top Auto Industry Troubleshooter
By LOUISE STORY
April 6, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/business/06rattner.html?adxnnl=1&ref=us&adxnnlx=1239051863-spb/zHdcg4TDYRMuab0qEg
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1) One Oath Leads to Another
By KIRK SEMPLE
April 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/nyregion/02recruits.html?ref=nyregion
Stephen Chi was born in Norway to Chinese immigrant parents, grew up in Sweden, received undergraduate and graduate degrees at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan, mastered five languages and now works as an information technology consultant in New York City.
But for all the experiences his peripatetic life has given him, it has also left him with a profound sense of rootlessness. So he recently applied to enlist in the United States Army.
"I don't feel like I belong anywhere," Mr. Chi, 30, said on Wednesday. "I wanted to become part of something bigger."
Until last month, Mr. Chi's application would have been rejected outright because only American citizens and permanent residents - immigrants who carry green cards - were permitted to enlist in the American military. But under a new program that began Feb. 23 and is intended to increase the number of highly skilled soldiers, the American military is now allowing some temporary immigrants to enlist.
In a public ceremony in Times Square on Wednesday, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, swore in 16 of those new recruits, including Mr. Chi. The others hailed from Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Korea and Sweden.
They gathered outside the recruiting station on the traffic island where Broadway and Seventh Avenue converge, pulled drab olive Army T-shirts over their civilian tops and, shivering against the cold, followed General Casey in a vow of allegiance to the military and to the United States.
"Our diversity only strengthens us," General Casey said in an interview with reporters after the ceremony.
The new program, known as Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest, is intended to address shortages among soldiers with medical expertise and foreign language skills. It will be limited to 1,000 enlistees in the first year, most of whom will enter the Army, though the American military command plans to expand it to include other branches and thousands more recruits every year.
It is open to foreigners who have lived legally in the United States for at least two years on temporary visas, including high-skilled employment visas and student visas. Illegal immigrants will continue to be barred from enlisting.
As an enticement, the government is offering an expedited path to citizenship and will waive naturalization fees.
Of 4,833 applicants so far, 52 people have enlisted, including Wednesday's group, while 445 have been disqualified, military officials said.
Of the 52 new enlistees, 11 have master's degrees, 31 have bachelor's degrees and 4 have associate's degrees or the equivalent, officials said. The remaining six are high school graduates.
At least 24 of the soldiers speak Korean, 11 speak Hindi, 9 speak a Chinese dialect, 3 speak Russian, 3 speak Arabic and one speaks Urdu.
The naturalization process for most foreigners on temporary visas can often take more than a decade. But people in the new program will be able to become citizens within six months, officials said. To maintain their citizenship, the enlistees must honorably complete their service, which ranges from two to four years of active duty, plus reserve duty, depending on their specialty.
Many of the new recruits, however, said after the ceremony that while the streamlined citizenship process was very attractive, it had not been the leading factor in their decision.
Indeed, several said they had applied to enlist without even knowing about the new program.
Toniya Mishra, an Indian citizen who holds a master's degree in industrial engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology, said she applied a day before the introduction of the program. She had been laid off from her job at a New Jersey company that makes pharmaceutical software; the firm was cutting staff because of the economic downturn.
Ms. Mishra, 24, said she applied after seeing a job posting on the Internet seeking engineers for the Army, but said she did not expect to receive a call because of her nationality.
Umesh Sharma, 37, who holds a master's degree in international education policy from Harvard, first tried to enlist in 2006 but was rejected because of his Indian citizenship. He reapplied last month when he read about the new program.
Mr. Sharma, who has been working for a private tutoring firm in Virginia, said he was motivated to enlist as a way of helping developing countries in areas like education reform. He enlisted as an infantryman because he wanted "to be on the front lines and associate with the society, face to face.
"If I'm in the Army, I want to be really involved," he added.
Mr. Chi has an additional hurdle to clear: He still has not told his parents that he has joined the Army. "I guess I have to tell them sometime," he said, chuckling uncomfortably at the thought. But he said he did not plan to break the news to them until after he returned from basic training, by which time, he said, he would be on his way in his new career - "and it's too late."
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2) U.S. Jobless Claims Rise Unexpectedly
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 3, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/business/economy/03econ.html?ref=business
WASHINGTON (AP) - The number of people filing new jobless claims rose unexpectedly last week, while those continuing to receive benefits hit a record for the 10th consecutive week.
Both figures showed that the labor market remained weak and was unlikely to recover anytime soon.
The Labor Department said initial claims for unemployment insurance rose to a seasonally adjusted 669,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 657,000. That total is above analysts' expectations and is the highest in more than 26 years, though the work force has grown by about half since then.
The tally of laid-off workers claiming benefits for more than a week rose 161,000 to 5.73 million, setting a record for the 10th week in a row. That also was above analysts' expectations and indicated that unemployed workers were having difficulty finding new jobs.
As a proportion of the work force, the number of people on the jobless benefit rolls is the highest since May 1983.
Employers are eliminating jobs and taking other cost-cutting measures to deal with sharp reductions in consumer and business spending. The current recession, now in its 17th month, is the longest since World War II.
The department is expected to issue on Friday another dismal monthly employment report. Economists forecast that the report will show employers cut 654,000 jobs in March, and that the unemployment rate will increase to 8.5 percent, from 8.1 percent.
Companies cut their payrolls by 651,000 jobs in February, a record third month of job losses above 600,000.
A private survey Wednesday said businesses cut 742,000 jobs in March. Employment at medium-size and small companies fell the sharpest - by a combined 614,000. The rest of the job cuts came from big firms - those with 500 or more workers - according to the report from Automatic Data Processing and Macroeconomic Advisers.
The Obama administration's $787 billion stimulus package, approved by Congress in February, is trying to counter the recession by providing money for public works projects, extending unemployment benefits and helping states avoid budget cuts.
In a second report on Thursday, the Commerce Department said that orders to factories posted an increase in February after six monthly declines, providing another glimmer of hope that the economy's deep plunge might be starting to moderate.
Orders for manufactured products rose by 1.8 percent in February, much better than the 1.1 percent decline that economists had expected.
The rebound may well prove temporary given all the forces that are continuing to batter the economy. But still, analysts said a string of better-than-expected reports in recent days could at least be signaling that the severe slide might be starting to ease slightly.
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3) United States Delivers Massive New Weapons Shipment to Israel, Confirmed by Pentagon, Says Amnesty International
Human Rights Organization Urges President Obama to Halt Further Exports
Amnesty International Press Release
Wednesday, April 1, 2009, for release at 7 p.m. EDT
Contact: Suzanne Trimel, 212-633-4150, strimel@aiusa.org
http://www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?id=ENGUSA20090402002&lang=e
(New York) -- Amnesty International today revealed that the United States has sent a massive new shipment of arms to Israel -- about 14,000 tons worth -- despite evidence that U.S. weapons were misused against civilians in the Gaza attacks. The unloading of the shipment in Israel was confirmed by the Pentagon. The human rights organization called on President Obama to suspend future arms shipments to Israel until there is no longer substantial risk of human rights violations.
Amnesty International said the Wehr Elbe, a German cargo ship, which was chartered and controlled by the U.S Military Sealift Command, docked and unloaded its cargo on March 22 at the Israeli port of Ashdod, about 25 miles north of Gaza.
The Pentagon confirmed the successful unloading of the ship, which left the United States for Israel last December 20, a week before the start of Israel's attacks on Gaza. Reportedly, the ship carried 989 containers of munitions, each of them 20 feet long with a total estimated net weight of 14,000 tons.
"Legally and morally, this U.S. arms shipment should have been halted by the Obama administration given the evidence of war crimes resulting from military equipment and munitions of this kind used by the Israeli forces," said Brian Wood, arms control campaign manager for Amnesty International. "Arms supplies in these circumstances are contrary to provisions in U.S. law."
Amnesty International has issued documented evidence that white phosphorus and other weapons supplied by the United States were used to carry out serious violations of international humanitarian law, including war crimes in Gaza. The human rights organization provided comprehensive details on munitions used in the fighting in a 37-page briefing paper, Fueling Conflict: Foreign Arms Supplies to Israel/Gaza, in February.
Asked about the Wehr Elbe, a Pentagon spokesperson confirmed to Amnesty International that "the unloading of the entire U.S. munitions shipment was successfully completed at Ashdod [Israel] on March 22." The spokesperson said that the shipment was destined for a U.S. pre-positioned ammunition stockpile in Israel.
Under a U.S.-Israel agreement, munitions from this stockpile may be transferred for Israeli use if necessary. A State Department official told Amnesty International that Israel's use of U.S. weapons during the Gaza conflict are under review to see if Israel complied with U.S. law, but a conclusion has not yet been reached.
"There is a great risk that the new munitions may be used by the Israeli military to commit further violations of international law, like the ones committed during the war in Gaza," said Wood. "We are urging all governments to impose an immediate and comprehensive suspension of arms to Israel, and to all Palestinian armed groups, until there is no longer a substantial risk of serious human rights violations."
"The United States government now has ample evidence from the Gaza attacks indicating that the arms it is sending to Israel have been misused to kill and injure men, women and children and to destroy hundreds of millions of dollars of property. It can no longer send weapons to Israel while ignoring these facts," said Curt Goering, senior deputy executive director, Amnesty International USA, who was in the region during the Gaza crisis.
The United States was by far the largest supplier of weapons to Israel between 2004 and 2008. The U.S. government is also due to provide $30 billion in military aid to Israel, despite the blatant misuse of weaponry and munitions in Gaza and Lebanon by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). President Obama, according to published reports, has no plans to cut the billions of dollars in military aid promised to Israel under a new 10-year contract agreed in 2007 by the Bush administration. This new contract is a 25 percent increase, compared to the last contract agreed by the previous U.S. administration.
Amnesty International has documented suspected war crimes committed by the IDF and by Palestinian armed groups in Gaza. On January 15, Amnesty International called on all governments to immediately suspend arms transfers to all parties to the Gaza conflict to prevent further violations being committed using munitions and other military equipment.
Background:
The Wehr Elbe sailed from North Carolina on December 20, after collecting its large cargo of U.S. munitions and was initially bound for the port of Navipe-Astakos on the west coast of Greece. Its transponder signal disappeared on January 12 when the vessel was sailing near Astakos. The ship was unable to dock due to a protest by the Greek Stop the War Coalition. The vessel was then tracked as it passed through the port of Augusta, on the Italian island of Sicily, and then near Gibraltar in mid-February, before reappearing on March 23 en route from Ashdod to the Black Sea port of Odessa where it docked on March 26 in berth 7. Amnesty International is now aware that the vessel docked in Ashdod on March 22 and reportedly offloaded over 300 containers.
Amnesty International first drew attention to this arms ship's voyage on January 15. The ship's charter, authorized by the Bush administration a week before Israel launched its attack on Gaza, was to carry 989 shipping containers of "containerized ammunition and other containerized ammunition supplies" from Sunny Point Military Ocean Terminal, North Carolina, to Ashdod, as listed in the contract. U.S. Military Sealift Command charters for a further two U.S. munitions shipments from Navipe-Astakos (Greece) to Ashdod, which explicitly included white phosphorus munitions, were announced on December 31 during the Gaza conflict and then cancelled on January 9, but a U.S. military spokesperson subsequently confirmed that the Pentagon was still seeking a way to also deliver those munitions.
Section 502B of the Foreign Assistance Act stipulates that "no security assistance may be provided to any country, the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights." However, security assistance may be provided if the president certifies that "extraordinary circumstances" exist. Section 4 of the Arms Export Control Act authorizes the supply of U.S. military equipment and training only for lawful purposes of internal security, "legitimate self-defense," or participation in United Nations peacekeeping operations or other operations consistent with the U.N. Charter. The Leahy Law prohibits the United States from providing most forms of security assistance to any military or police unit when there is "credible evidence" that members of the unit are committing gross human rights violations.
Amnesty International is a Nobel Peace Prize-winning grassroots activist organization with more than 2.2 million supporters, activists and volunteers in more than 150 countries campaigning for human rights worldwide. The organization investigates and exposes abuses, educates and mobilizes the public, and works to protect people wherever justice, freedom, truth and dignity are denied.
Please visit www.amnestyusa.org for more information.
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4) Workers stage sit-in after shock redundancies
By Terri Judd
Thursday, 2 April 2009
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/workers-stage-sitin-after-shock-redundancies-1660003.html
Angry workers were staging sit- ins at three car parts plants yesterday after suddenly being told that they had all lost their jobs
Employees of Visteon UK, which announced yesterday it was closing its plants in Basildon, Enfield and Belfast, refused to leave the factories. Men who had worked for the company for decades, whose fathers and sons had been employed by it, were given a few minutes notice to clear their lockers and leave on Tuesday.
Overnight a fightback at the Belfast plant, in which hundreds of workers staged a sit in, spread to the Essex and North London plants, where yesterday some workers were refusing to leave the building while others were on the roofs or at the gates. "20 Years' Work. Zero Minutes' Notice", read a placard being brandished by one man outside Visteon's Basildon plant, where the furnaces had gone quiet 24 hours earlier.
Frank Jepson, Unite spokesman, described the moment he was forced to call everyone together for a meeting in which the redundancies were announced. He said: "I went to tell three of them. One of them would not move. He had been there for 32 years and just carried on working. He was sheet white and they had to drag him away. He just looked at me and said, 'It is not true, is it?'"
The struggling auto parts manufacturer, which nine years ago was part of Ford, announced it had gone into administration on Tuesday and was axing 600 jobs as it closed the three plants.
At Basildon, where 173 were employed, the men were called off the production line at 1pm and told by administrators KPMG that they had had no alternative but to close the company an hour earlier, saying it had been severely hit by the economic downturn.
"It was like Dragons' Den. The four administrators stood in front of us and told us but wouldn't answer questions. There were security guards everywhere. Then they gave us two leaflets and told us to go," said Graham Thomas, who started work at the plant as a 21-year-old. "I have worked here for 30 years and in five minutes I had lost my job. It was like a bereavement last night. My wife was crying. I was crying."
The Visteon group has a workforce of 33,500 in 27 countries. Yesterday workers at Enfield, where 227 were made redundant, were occupying the site. Sinn Fein MP Gerry Adams MP went to talk to the 210 who lost their livelihoods at Belfast.
Unite officials are due to meet with Ford today to try to find a solution to workers' grievances over redundancy packages. They are threatening to picket Ford showrooms if it is not resolved. Unite joint general secretary Tony Woodley said: "Our manufacturing sector is in crisis. It needs serious strategic and financial help, and it needs it now."
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5) Dead Palestinian babies and bombed mosques - IDF fashion 2009
By Uri Blau
Tags: Israel News, IDF, Gaza
Last update - 22:41 20/03/2009
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1072466.html
The office at the Adiv fabric-printing shop in south Tel Aviv handles a constant stream of customers, many of them soldiers in uniform, who come to order custom clothing featuring their unit's insignia, usually accompanied by a slogan and drawing of their choosing. Elsewhere on the premises, the sketches are turned into plates used for imprinting the ordered items, mainly T-shirts and baseball caps, but also hoodies, fleece jackets and pants. A young Arab man from Jaffa supervises the workers who imprint the words and pictures, and afterward hands over the finished product.
Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children's graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques - these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription "Better use Durex," next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter's T-shirt from the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills." A "graduation" shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, "No matter how it begins, we'll put an end to it."
There are also plenty of shirts with blatant sexual messages. For example, the Lavi battalion produced a shirt featuring a drawing of a soldier next to a young woman with bruises, and the slogan, "Bet you got raped!" A few of the images underscore actions whose existence the army officially denies - such as "confirming the kill" (shooting a bullet into an enemy victim's head from close range, to ensure he is dead), or harming religious sites, or female or child non-combatants.
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In many cases, the content is submitted for approval to one of the unit's commanders. The latter, however, do not always have control over what gets printed, because the artwork is a private initiative of soldiers that they never hear about. Drawings or slogans previously banned in certain units have been approved for distribution elsewhere. For example, shirts declaring, "We won't chill 'til we confirm the kill" were banned in the past (the IDF claims that the practice doesn't exist), yet the Haruv battalion printed some last year.
The slogan "Let every Arab mother know that her son's fate is in my hands!" had previously been banned for use on another infantry unit's shirt. A Givati soldier said this week, however, that at the end of last year, his platoon printed up dozens of shirts, fleece jackets and pants bearing this slogan.
"It has a drawing depicting a soldier as the Angel of Death, next to a gun and an Arab town," he explains. "The text was very powerful. The funniest part was that when our soldier came to get the shirts, the man who printed them was an Arab, and the soldier felt so bad that he told the girl at the counter to bring them to him."
Does the design go to the commanders for approval?
The Givati soldier: "Usually the shirts undergo a selection process by some officer, but in this case, they were approved at the level of platoon sergeant. We ordered shirts for 30 soldiers and they were really into it, and everyone wanted several items and paid NIS 200 on average."
What do you think of the slogan that was printed?
"I didn't like it so much, but most of the soldiers wanted it."
Many controversial shirts have been ordered by graduates of snipers courses, which bring together soldiers from various units. In 2006, soldiers from the "Carmon Team" course for elite-unit marksmen printed a shirt with a drawing of a knife-wielding Palestinian in the crosshairs of a gun sight, and the slogan, "You've got to run fast, run fast, run fast, before it's all over." Below is a drawing of Arab women weeping over a grave and the words: "And afterward they cry, and afterward they cry." [The inscriptions are riffs on a popular song.] Another sniper's shirt also features an Arab man in the crosshairs, and the announcement, "Everything is with the best of intentions."
G., a soldier in an elite unit who has done a snipers course, explained that, "it's a type of bonding process, and also it's well known that anyone who is a sniper is messed up in the head. Our shirts have a lot of double entendres, for example: 'Bad people with good aims.' Every group that finishes a course puts out stuff like that."
When are these shirts worn?
G. "These are shirts for around the house, for jogging, in the army. Not for going out. Sometimes people will ask you what it's about."
Of the shirt depicting a bull's-eye on a pregnant woman, he said: "There are people who think it's not right, and I think so as well, but it doesn't really mean anything. I mean it's not like someone is gonna go and shoot a pregnant woman."
What is the idea behind the shirt from July 2007, which has an image of a child with the slogan "Smaller - harder!"?
"It's a kid, so you've got a little more of a problem, morally, and also the target is smaller."
Do your superiors approve the shirts before printing?
"Yes, although one time they rejected some shirt that was too extreme. I don't remember what was on it."
These shirts also seem pretty extreme. Why draw crosshairs over a child - do you shoot kids?
'We came, we saw'
"As a sniper, you get a lot of extreme situations. You suddenly see a small boy who picks up a weapon and it's up to you to decide whether to shoot. These shirts are half-facetious, bordering on the truth, and they reflect the extreme situations you might encounter. The one who-honest-to-God sees the target with his own eyes - that's the sniper."
Have you encountered a situation like that?
"Fortunately, not involving a kid, but involving a woman - yes. There was someone who wasn't holding a weapon, but she was near a prohibited area and could have posed a threat."
What did you do?
"I didn't take it" (i.e., shoot).
You don't regret that, I imagine.
"No. Whomever I had to shoot, I shot."
A shirt printed up just this week for soldiers of the Lavi battalion, who spent three years in the West Bank, reads: "We came, we saw, we destroyed!" - alongside images of weapons, an angry soldier and a Palestinian village with a ruined mosque in the center.
A shirt printed after Operation Cast Lead in Gaza for Battalion 890 of the Paratroops depicts a King Kong-like soldier in a city under attack. The slogan is unambiguous: "If you believe it can be fixed, then believe it can be destroyed!"
Y., a soldier/yeshiva student, designed the shirt. "You take whoever [in the unit] knows how to draw and then you give it to the commanders before printing," he explained.
What is the soldier holding in his hand?
Y. "A mosque. Before I drew the shirt I had some misgivings, because I wanted it to be like King Kong, but not too monstrous. The one holding the mosque - I wanted him to have a more normal-looking face, so it wouldn't look like an anti-Semitic cartoon. Some of the people who saw it told me, 'Is that what you've got to show for the IDF? That it destroys homes?' I can understand people who look at this from outside and see it that way, but I was in Gaza and they kept emphasizing that the object of the operation was to wreak destruction on the infrastructure, so that the price the Palestinians and the leadership pay will make them realize that it isn't worth it for them to go on shooting. So that's the idea of 'we're coming to destroy' in the drawing."
According to Y., most of these shirts are worn strictly in an army context, not in civilian life. "And within the army people look at it differently," he added. "I don't think I would walk down the street in this shirt, because it would draw fire. Even at my yeshiva I don't think people would like it."
Y. also came up with a design for the shirt his unit printed at the end of basic training. It shows a clenched fist shattering the symbol of the Paratroops Corps.
Where does the fist come from?
"It's reminiscent of [Rabbi Meir] Kahane's symbol. I borrowed it from an emblem for something in Russia, but basically it's supposed to look like Kahane's symbol, the one from 'Kahane Was Right' - it's a sort of joke. Our company commander is kind of gung-ho."
Was the shirt printed?
"Yes. It was a company shirt. We printed about 100 like that."
This past January, the "Night Predators" demolitions platoon from Golani's Battalion 13 ordered a T-shirt showing a Golani devil detonating a charge that destroys a mosque. An inscription above it says, "Only God forgives."
One of the soldiers in the platoon downplays it: "It doesn't mean much, it's just a T-shirt from our platoon. It's not a big deal. A friend of mine drew a picture and we made it into a shirt."
What's the idea behind "Only God forgives"?
The soldier: "It's just a saying."
No one had a problem with the fact that a mosque gets blown up in the picture?
"I don't see what you're getting at. I don't like the way you're going with this. Don't take this somewhere you're not supposed to, as though we hate Arabs."
After Operation Cast Lead, soldiers from that battalion printed a T-shirt depicting a vulture sexually penetrating Hamas' prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, accompanied by a particularly graphic slogan. S., a soldier in the platoon that ordered the shirt, said the idea came from a similar shirt, printed after the Second Lebanon War, that featured Hassan Nasrallah instead of Haniyeh.
"They don't okay things like that at the company level. It's a shirt we put out just for the platoon," S. explained.
What's the problem with this shirt?
S.: "It bothers some people to see these things, from a religious standpoint ..."
How did people who saw it respond?
"We don't have that many Orthodox people in the platoon, so it wasn't a problem. It's just something the guys want to put out. It's more for wearing around the house, and not within the companies, because it bothers people. The Orthodox mainly. The officers tell us it's best not to wear shirts like this on the base."
The sketches printed in recent years at the Adiv factory, one of the largest of its kind in the country, are arranged in drawers according to the names of the units placing the orders: Paratroops, Golani, air force, sharpshooters and so on. Each drawer contains hundreds of drawings, filed by year. Many of the prints are cartoons and slogans relating to life in the unit, or inside jokes that outsiders wouldn't get (and might not care to, either), but a handful reflect particular aggressiveness, violence and vulgarity.
Print-shop manager Haim Yisrael, who has worked there since the early 1980s, said Adiv prints around 1,000 different patterns each month, with soldiers accounting for about half. Yisrael recalled that when he started out, there were hardly any orders from the army.
"The first ones to do it were from the Nahal brigade," he said. "Later on other infantry units started printing up shirts, and nowadays any course with 15 participants prints up shirts."
From time to time, officers complain. "Sometimes the soldiers do things that are inside jokes that only they get, and sometimes they do something foolish that they take to an extreme," Yisrael explained. "There have been a few times when commanding officers called and said, 'How can you print things like that for soldiers?' For example, with shirts that trashed the Arabs too much. I told them it's a private company, and I'm not interested in the content. I can print whatever I like. We're neutral. There have always been some more extreme and some less so. It's just that now more people are making shirts."
Race to be unique
Evyatar Ben-Tzedef, a research associate at the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism and former editor of the IDF publication Maarachot, said the phenomenon of custom-made T-shirts is a product of "the infantry's insane race to be unique. I, for example, had only one shirt that I received after the Yom Kippur War. It said on it, 'The School for Officers,' and that was it. What happened since then is a product of the decision to assign every unit an emblem and a beret. After all, there used to be very few berets: black, red or green. This changed in the 1990s. [The shirts] developed because of the fact that for bonding purposes, each unit created something that was unique to it.
"These days the content on shirts is sometimes deplorable," Ben-Tzedef explained. "It stems from the fact that profanity is very acceptable and normative in Israel, and that there is a lack of respect for human beings and their environment, which includes racism aimed in every direction."
Yossi Kaufman, who moderates the army and defense forum on the Web site Fresh, served in the Armored Corps from 1996 to 1999. "I also drew shirts, and I remember the first one," he said. "It had a small emblem on the front and some inside joke, like, 'When we die, we'll go to heaven, because we've already been through hell.'"
Kaufman has also been exposed to T-shirts of the sort described here. "I know there are shirts like these," he says. "I've heard and also seen a little. These are not shirts that soldiers can wear in civilian life, because they would get stoned, nor at a battalion get-together, because the battalion commander would be pissed off. They wear them on very rare occasions. There's all sorts of black humor stuff, mainly from snipers, such as, 'Don't bother running because you'll die tired' - with a drawing of a Palestinian boy, not a terrorist. There's a Golani or Givati shirt of a soldier raping a girl, and underneath it says, 'No virgins, no terror attacks.' I laughed, but it was pretty awful. When I was asked once to draw things like that, I said it wasn't appropriate."
The IDF Spokesman's Office comments on the phenomenon: "Military regulations do not apply to civilian clothing, including shirts produced at the end of basic training and various courses. The designs are printed at the soldiers' private initiative, and on civilian shirts. The examples raised by Haaretz are not in keeping with the values of the IDF spirit, not representative of IDF life, and are in poor taste. Humor of this kind deserves every condemnation and excoriation. The IDF intends to take action for the immediate eradication of this phenomenon. To this end, it is emphasizing to commanding officers that it is appropriate, among other things, to take discretionary and disciplinary measures against those involved in acts of this sort."
Shlomo Tzipori, a lieutenant colonel in the reserves and a lawyer specializing in martial law, said the army does bring soldiers up on charges for offenses that occur outside the base and during their free time. According to Tzipori, slogans that constitute an "insult to the army or to those in uniform" are grounds for court-martial, on charges of "shameful conduct" or "disciplinary infraction," which are general clauses in judicial martial law.
Sociologist Dr. Orna Sasson-Levy, of Bar-Ilan University, author of "Identities in Uniform: Masculinities and Femininities in the Israeli Military," said that the phenomenon is "part of a radicalization process the entire country is undergoing, and the soldiers are at its forefront. I think that ever since the second intifada there has been a continual shift to the right. The pullout from Gaza and its outcome - the calm that never arrived - led to a further shift rightward.
"This tendency is most strikingly evident among soldiers who encounter various situations in the territories on a daily basis. There is less meticulousness than in the past, and increasing callousness. There is a perception that the Palestinian is not a person, a human being entitled to basic rights, and therefore anything may be done to him."
Could the printing of clothing be viewed also as a means of venting aggression?
Sasson-Levy: "No. I think it strengthens and stimulates aggression and legitimizes it. What disturbs me is that a shirt is something that has permanence. The soldiers later wear it in civilian life; their girlfriends wear it afterward. It is not a statement, but rather something physical that remains, that is out there in the world. Beyond that, I think the link made between sexist views and nationalist views, as in the 'Screw Haniyeh' shirt, is interesting. National chauvinism and gender chauvinism combine and strengthen one another. It establishes a masculinity shaped by violent aggression toward women and Arabs; a masculinity that considers it legitimate to speak in a crude and violent manner toward women and Arabs."
Col. (res.) Ron Levy began his military service in the Sayeret Matkal elite commando force before the Six-Day War. He was the IDF's chief psychologist, and headed the army's mental health department in the 1980s.
Levy: "I'm familiar with things of this sort going back 40, 50 years, and each time they take a different form. Psychologically speaking, this is one of the ways in which soldiers project their anger, frustration and violence. It is a certain expression of things, which I call 'below the belt.'"
Do you think this a good way to vent anger?
Levy: "It's safe. But there are also things here that deviate from the norm, and you could say that whoever is creating these things has reached some level of normality. He gives expression to the fact that what is considered abnormal today might no longer be so tomorrow."
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6) Jury Says Professor Was Wrongly Fired
By KIRK JOHNSON and KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
April 3, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/us/03churchill.html?ref=us
DENVER - A jury found on Thursday that the University of Colorado had wrongfully dismissed a professor who drew national attention for an essay in which he called some victims of the Sept. 11 attacks "little Eichmanns."
But the jury, which deliberated for a day and a half, awarded only $1 in damages to the former professor, Ward L. Churchill, a tenured faculty member at the university's campus in Boulder since 1991 who was chairman of the ethnic studies department.
The jurors found that Mr. Churchill's political views had been a "substantial or motivating" factor in his dismissal, and that the university had not shown that he would have been dismissed anyway.
"This is a great victory for the First Amendment, and for academic freedom," said his lawyer, David A. Lane.
Whether Mr. Churchill, 61, will get his job back, and when, was not resolved. Mr. Churchill's lawyers said they would ask Judge Larry J. Naves of Denver District Court to order reinstatement, in light of the verdict.
A spokesman for the university, Ken McConnellogue, said administrators would oppose the request. Reinstatement, Mr. McConnellogue said, would probably draw a sharp reaction among many faculty members, because a faculty committee was instrumental in his firing.
The verdict by the panel of four women and two men - none of whom wished to be interviewed by reporters, court officials said - seemed unlikely to resolve the larger debate surrounding Mr. Churchill that was engendered by the case. Is Mr. Churchill, as his supporters contend, a torchbearer for the right to hold unpopular political views? Or is he unpatriotic or - as his harshest critics contend - an outright collaborator with the nation's enemies at a time of war?
The jury seemed at least partly undecided on what to think about the man at the center of the fight, whose essay made him a polarizing national figure.
While the panel agreed with the argument that an environment of political intolerance for Mr. Churchill's views was a factor in his firing, Mr. McConnellogue, the university spokesman, contended that its decision to deny him financial damages also sent a message - that Mr. Churchill was not necessarily a figure to be revered, either.
"The jury's award is some vindication," he said.
Mr. Churchill, wearing sunglasses in the hallway outside the courtroom, said the size of the award did not matter. "I didn't ask for money," he said, "I asked for justice."
The case has been seen as a struggle between freedom of speech and academic integrity, and it revived the longstanding debate about whether hate speech deserves protection by the First Amendment.
But the monthlong trial mostly focused on Mr. Churchill's academic work. The jury had to decide whether he had plagiarized and falsified parts of his research, particularly on American Indians, as the university contended in dismissing him. His lawyers described the search for professional misconduct as simply a pretext for a foregone decision to get rid of him.
On Sept. 12, 2001, Mr. Churchill wrote an essay in which he argued that the United States had brought the terrorist attacks on itself. He said that some of those working in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 were not innocent bystanders but "formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire." He described the financial workers as "little Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi who has been called the architect of the Holocaust.
The essay garnered little notice at the time but gradually seeped through the Internet, coming to light in 2005, and then creating an uproar.
In their closing arguments on Wednesday, lawyers for each side urged the jury to focus on the First Amendment.
Mr. Lane, Mr. Churchill's lawyer, said his client had been a spokesman throughout his academic career for disempowered people and causes - a trait, Mr. Lane said, that never made Mr. Churchill popular with people in power. "For 30 years, he's been telling the other side of the story," Mr. Lane said.
What the university did in firing Mr. Churchill, he told the panel, was political payback, a rigged inquiry into his work that was a "charade of fairness."
The university's lawyer, Patrick O'Rourke, asked the jury to think about standards. The pattern of academic misconduct, Mr. O'Rourke said, was not in doubt.
"There's the real university world, and there's Ward Churchill's world," he said. "Ward Churchill's world is a place where there are no standards and no accountability."
Mr. Churchill, he said, was using the Constitution as a smokescreen. "You can't take the First Amendment and use it to justify fraud," he said.
Around 3 p.m. on Thursday, jurors asked the judge questions about damages.
First, they asked whether it was possible to award no damages. A few minutes later, they asked whether, if all but one jury member could agree on a dollar amount, that person could be replaced by another juror. (The answer was no.)
The jury then resumed deliberations for about an hour before returning its verdict in Mr. Churchill's favor.
Kirk Johnson reported from Denver, and Katharine Q. Seelye from New York.
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7) Jobless Rate Hits 8.5% as March Payrolls Fall by 663,000
By PETER S. GOODMAN and JACK HEALY
April 4, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/04/business/economy/04jobs.html?hp
The American economy surrendered another 663,000 jobs in March as the unemployment rate surged to 8.5 percent, its highest level since 1983, the government reported Friday.
The latest snapshot of accelerating decline in the national job market lifted to 5.1 million the number of jobs lost since the recession began in December 2007. More than two million jobs have disappeared over the first three months alone.
The severity and breadth of the job losses - which afflicted nearly every industry outside of education and health care - prompted economists to conclude that an agonizing plunge in employment prospects was still unfolding, with no clear turnaround in sight.
"It's really just about as bad as can be imagined," said Dean Baker, a director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. "There's just no way we're anywhere near a bottom. We'll be really lucky if we stop losing jobs by the end of the year."
The pace of retrenchment has prompted calls among some economists for another wave of government stimulus spending to buttress the $787 billion already in the pipeline.
In January, as the Obama administration crafted plans for the current round of stimulus spending, it assumed the unemployment rate would reach 8.9 percent by the last three months of the year.
"We're clearly looking at a worse downturn than they had been anticipating when they planned the stimulus," Mr. Baker said. "We're going to need some more."
But others - not least, decision-makers inside the Obama administration - deem such talk premature. The jobs report, while dreadful, landed amid tentative signs of improvement in some areas of the economy, with recent snippets of data lifting stock markets and sowing cautious hopes that the beginnings of a recovery might be taking shape.
Auto sales, while still falling, have seen the pace of decline slow. Houses have been selling in much greater numbers in important markets like California and Florida, albeit at substantially reduced prices. Consumer spending, while far from vigorous, appears to have leveled off after plummeting y over the last three months of 2008.
Meanwhile, a surge of government spending is just beginning to work its way through the federal and state bureaucracies, aimed at spurring demand for American goods and services. This spending is expected to support jobs in construction and related industries later this year. The administration is distributing more than $3 billion in aid to states to train laid-off workers for new careers in so-called green industries, like manufacturing solar- and wind-power equipment, and in health care.
"We're attacking this in a very aggressive way," the Labor secretary Hilda L. Solis said Friday in an interview, arguing that it is too early to consider another round of stimulus spending. "We will revisit that once we expend all the money that we have accrued."
Much of the recent indications of potential economic improvement reflect temporary seasonal factors rather than a sustainable trend, argue some economists. Housing construction, for example, has looked more robust in large part because January's construction activity was slowed by bad weather.
The crucial factors assailing the economy remain in force, with tattered banks reluctant to lend, and even healthy households and businesses averse to borrowing and spending in a time of grave uncertainty and fear.
The very perception that millions more will lose jobs and housing prices will fall have turned such outlooks into reality: As businesses scramble to cut costs in the face of gloomy sales prospects, many are shrinking work forces, removing more paychecks from the economy, and further eroding spending power.
"There's a lot of survival job-cutting going on throughout American business," said Stuart G. Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Group in Pittsburgh. "There won't be any job growth at all this year. The economy is far, far from being out of the woods."
Still, Mr. Hoffman is among those inclined to wait for a few more months and hope for improvement before unleashing a new wave of stimulus spending.
The Treasury has recently outlined plans for an expanded bank rescue aimed at lowering borrowing costs for businesses and households, this generating fresh economic activity and jobs.
In London, leaders of the world's major economies left a summit meeting this week with a promise to bolster the finances of the International Monetary Fund by $500 billion, lending support to troubled economies from Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia, perhaps increasing now plunging global trade and thus demand for American-made goods.
"It's a little soon to conclude politically, and I'd argue economically, that we need some more stimulus," Mr. Hoffman said. "You don't just double the dose if the patient doesn't immediately improve."
Friday's report catalogued the myriad ways in way American working people remain under assault. The number of unemployed people increased by 694,000 in March, reaching 13.2 million. Those on unemployment for longer than six months reached 3.2 million.
"Almost everyone's being touched in some way," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com. "It seems like every business in every industry in every corner of the country has a hiring freeze. They're just not in the mood or position to hire. They're not taking resumes. They're not looking for people."
Manufacturing again led the way down, shedding 161,000 jobs in March. Employment in construction declined by 126,000, and has fallen by 1.3 million since it peaked in January 2007. Professional and business services employment fell by 133,000, with more than half the losses in temporary help services - a sign that companies that have already shifted from relying on full-time workers to temporary people are feeling compelled to cut further.
In the suburbs of Atlanta, Meg Fisher, 46, has been looking for work since she lost her job as a legal secretary in the middle of February. Her husband's hours at his pharmacy job were scaled back. All told, their previous annual income of about $79,000 has been sliced to $20,000.
Ms. Fisher is planning to apply for food stamps, while seeking out free-lance work as a seamstress and knitting instructor.
"It's not going to replace my salary," she said. "It's not even going to come close, but it's better than sitting around."
The report reinforced the reality that the pains of the downturn have spread far beyond the jobless. The number of those working part-time because their hours had been cut or they were unable to find a full-time job climbed by 423,000 in March to reach 9 million.
In New Jersey, Henry Perez, 34, and his family are now living in the basement of his sister's house and struggling to find work.
A refugee of sorts from the real estate collapse in Las Vegas, where Mr. Perez once lived and bet big, he has more recently worked in online commerce and as a marketer at an office-furniture company. But after being laid off at the end of last year, he has found nothing, even as he has sharply dropped his expectations, applying for jobs at restaurant chains like Panera Bread and Quizno's.
"We're just sitting here all day long looking for jobs on the computer, frustrated and scared as hell," Mr. Perez said. "I'm looking for anything."
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8) Fannie and Freddie Detail Retention Bonuses
April 3, 2009, 11:11 am
Updated at 12:25 p.m.
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/fannie-and-freddie-detail-retention-bonuses/?hp
Just a few weeks after retention bonuses at American International Group became a national scandal, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage-financing giants that the government rescued last fall, have outlined plans to pay an additional $159 million in bonuses to retain employees in 2009 and 2010, on top of the nearly $51 million already paid out last year.
James B. Lockhart of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, which now oversees the two companies, disclosed the bonus programs in a letter to Sen. Charles Grassley, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee.
In the letter, Mr. Lockhart defended the payouts as a way to "keep key staff without rewarding poor performance." (Download the full letter in PDF form at: http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/fannie-and-freddie-detail-retention-bonuses/?hp )
Lawmakers have harshly criticized some bailed-out companies that later offered bonuses to workers, and the House passed legislation this week that would seek to limit compensation and bonuses at such firms.
Last month, Mr. Grassley called on Fannie and Freddie to justify their bonus retention programs, and demanded they release the names and titles of any employee who received, or was set to receive, a retention bonus of more than $100,000.
Mr. Lockhart did not provide the names in his letter, citing "personal privacy and safety reasons."
A spokesman for Fannie Mae declined to comment on the letter. Representatives for Freddie Mac weren't immediately available for comment.
Fannie and Freddie lost a total of nearly $110 billion in 2008. Last month, the Treasury Department agreed to provide the two companies with up to $200 billion in additional capital, on top of the $200 billion in government funds already pledged to them.
Speaking about Fannie and Freddie on Friday, Sen. Grassley said in a statement provided to DealBook that "it's hard to see any common sense in management decisions that award hundreds of millions in bonuses when their organizations lost more than $100 billion in a year."
"It's an insult that the bonuses were made with an infusion of cash from taxpayers," he said. "Poor performance and at taxpayer expense do a lot of damage to public confidence and support for the economic recovery effort."
Mr. Lockhart, in his letter, defended the bonuses as necessary for protecting the taxpayers' investment.
"Keeping the enterprises operating at full speed was best for the housing markets and best for the economy, which clearly also made it best for the taxpayer," he said. "And that would only be possible if we retained the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac teams."
Part of the retention packages were already paid out in 2008, the letter said. They consisted of $17.3 million to Freddie employees, with 19 employees receiving more than $100,000, and $33.5 million to Fannie employees, with 20 receiving more than $100,000.
The total bonuses at both companies is expected to be about $146 million in 2009, and $13 million in 2010, for a total of about $210 million.
The retention plans cover 4,057 employees at Freddie Mac and 3,545 employees at Fannie Mae, the letter said.
The government seized Fannie and Freddie last fall, to make sure that neither company would collapse because of the plunging values of mortgages that they owned or guaranteed.
- Cyrus Sanati and Peter Edmonston
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9) Iowa Court Voids Gay Marriage Ban
By MONICA DAVEY and LIZ ROBBINS
April 4, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/04/us/04iowa.html?ref=us
DES MOINES - Iowa became the first state in the Midwest to approve same-sex marriage on Friday, after the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously decided that a 1998 law limiting marriage to a man and a woman was unconstitutional.
The decision was the culmination of a four-year legal battle that began with a suit filed on behalf of six same-sex couples in the lower courts.
The Supreme Court said same-sex marriages could begin in Iowa in as soon as 21 days, making Iowa only the third state in the nation, along with Massachusetts and Connecticut, to legalize gay marriage. While the same-sex marriage debate has played out on both coasts, the Midwest - where no states had permitted same-sex marriage - was seen as entirely different. In the past, at least six states in the Midwest were among those around the country that adopted amendments to their state constitutions banning same-sex marriage.
"We have a constitutional duty to ensure equal protection of the law," the Iowa justices wrote in their opinion. "If gay and lesbian people must submit to different treatment without an exceedingly persuasive justification, they are deprived of the benefits of the principle of equal protection upon which the rule of law is founded."
"The concept of equal protection, is deeply rooted in our national and state history, but that history reveals this concept is often expressed far more easily than it is practiced," the court wrote.
Iowa has enforced its constitution in a series of landmark court decisions, including those that struck down slavery (in 1839) and segregation (cases in 1868 and 1873), and upheld women's rights by becoming the first state in the nation to allow a woman to practice law, in 1869.
In a hotel in Des Moines on Friday morning, several of the same-sex couples who were involved in the suit wept, teared up and embraced as they learned about the decision from their lawyers. "I'd like to introduce you to my fiancee," said Kate Varnum, 34, reaching over to Trish Varnum. "Today I am proud to be a lifelong Iowan."
"We are blessed to live in Iowa," she added.
Opponents of same-sex marriage criticized the ruling.
"The decision made by the Iowa Supreme Court today to allow gay marriage in Iowa is disappointing on many levels," State Senator Paul McKinley, the Republican leader, said in a statement on The Des Moines Register's Web site. "I believe marriage should only be between one man and one woman and I am confident the majority of Iowans want traditional marriage to be legally recognized in this state."
He added: "Though the court has made their decision, I believe every Iowan should have a voice on this matter and that is why the Iowa Legislature should immediately act to pass a Constitutional Amendment that protects traditional marriage, keeps it as a sacred bond only between one man and one woman and gives every Iowan a chance to have their say through a vote of the people."
Advocates of same-sex marriage said they did not believe opponents had any immediate way to overturn the decision. A constitutional amendment would require the state legislature to approve a ban on same-sex marriage in two consecutive sessions after which voters would have a chance to weigh in.
Iowa has no residency requirement for getting a marriage license, which some suggest may mean a flurry of people from other states.
Two states - Connecticut and Massachusetts - currently allow same-sex marriages. Several other states on the East coast allow civil unions, lawmakers in Vermont are considering gay marriage, and California allowed it until November's election, when residents rejected the idea in a voter initiative.
A change in Iowa's take on marriage, advocates for gay marriage said before Friday's ruling, would signal a broader shift in public thinking, even in the nation's more conservative middle. Opponents of same-sex marriage, meanwhile, had said any legal decision in support of same-sex marriage in Iowa would certainly trigger a prompt and sharp response among residents and, surely, state lawmakers.
In one part of the decision that focuses on religious opposition to same-sex marriage, the justices seemed to anticipate negative reactions, saying they considered the unspoken reason for the ban on same-sex marriages to be religiously motivated. The justices said marriage was a "civil contract" and should not affect religious doctrine or views.
"The only difference is civil marriage will now take on a new meaning that reflects a more complete understanding of equal protection of the law," the justices wrote.
The legal case here began in 2005, when six same-sex couples filed suit against the county recorder here in Polk County because he would not accept their marriage license applications.
Two years later, a local judge here, Robert B. Hanson, ruled in that case that a state law defining marriage as only between a man and woman was unconstitutional. The ruling, in 2007, set off a flurry of same-sex couples from all over the state, racing for the courthouse in Polk County.
The rush lasted less than a day in August of 2007. Although Judge Hanson had ruled against the state law, he quickly decided to delay any additional granting of licenses, saying that the Iowa Supreme Court should have an opportunity to weigh in first. In the end, about 20 couples applied before the stay was issued. Just one couple, Timothy McQuillan, then 21, and Sean Fritz, 24, managed to obtain their license and also to marry.
Maura Strassberg, a professor of law at Drake University, married her partner in Massachusetts last year, but was overjoyed to learn that her status will be legal in three weeks in Iowa.
After a quick review of the 69-page decision, Ms. Strassberg said she was not surprised with the outcome, but only how it was rendered. "What is really stunning is that it's unanimous," she said. "It's a very bold, confident opinion. It affirms a certain notion of what Iowa is and what Iowa means."
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10) Former California Homeowners Lash Out at Builder
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
April 3, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/us/03homes.html?ref=us
LOS ANGELES - A major home builder that helped fuel the country's building boom is now under attack for what some homeowners and builders say was its role in the bust that followed.
Several former homeowners spoke here on Thursday about their disenchantment with the builder, KB Home, at its annual shareholders' meeting. The speakers said the company had pushed them into high-risk, high-interest loans for homes they could not afford and eventually lost to foreclosure.
During the meeting, a few dozen construction workers, many of whom had their work dry up when the home-building market imploded in Southern California, protested across the street.
"I tried to communicate to the board members to try to do better for people in the future," one of the former homeowners who addressed the board, Santiago Ramos, said after the meeting.
The meeting was closed to reporters. A KB Home spokeswoman, Heather Reeves, said in an e-mail message, "We want every KB homeowner to know that we stand ready to assist them in any way we can to ensure that they are pleased with their purchase."
KB Home is one of the country's largest builders, accounting for 3.1 percent of new home sales in 2007, the latest year for which data is available, according to the National Association of Home Builders. The company had a joint lending venture with Countrywide Financial - Countrywide KB - that issued roughly 70 percent of the loans originated for the builder. The venture ended in 2005, but KB still has lending arrangements with other financial institutions.
The protest on Thursday was the latest effort to draw attention to what critics say was KB's role in the foreclosure crisis.
The Laborers' International Union of North America, which represents construction workers, has filed complaints about the builder with the California attorney general. The union says KB engaged in "deceptive practices" and steered buyers toward its loans to control home prices, pushing interest-only loans to buyers who often did not understand what they were getting into.
A state lawmaker from Southern California, where home values have plummeted and foreclosures have skyrocketed, has introduced a bill that would prohibit builders from lending money to homebuyers.
"Builder-originated loans create an inherent conflict of interest," the lawmaker, Assemblyman V. Manuel Pérez, a Democrat, said in an e-mail message.
No state has such a law, said Sue Johnson, the executive director of the Real Estate Services Providers Council, a trade group.
"It would be disruptive to the home-building industry," Ms. Johnson said, adding that most home builders had loan arrangements with financial institutions.
Timothy Lilienthal, a spokesman for PICO National Network, a religious group that has protested and organized around the foreclosure issue, said the criticism of KB reflected a broader unhappiness with banks.
"People are getting tired of banks, and bank accountability is a major theme we see coming forward," Mr. Lilienthal said. "And KB was the originator of so many bad loans in California."
Mr. Ramos, a construction worker as well as a former KB homeowner, said company officials pushed him to sign an interest-only loan through Countrywide KB for the home he bought for $430,000 in 2005 in Hesperia, Calif., and threatened to sue him when he resisted.
In her e-mail message, Ms. Reeves, the spokeswoman, said the company recognized that "many Americans have been adversely impacted by current economic conditions."
"That is why we are always working to assist buyers in finding the right home for their budget," she said.
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11) The Words Have Changed, but Have the Policies?
"So if not a war on terror, what then? 'Overseas contingency operations.'
And terrorist attacks themselves? 'Man-caused disasters.'"
By PETER BAKER
On the White House
April 3, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/us/politics/02web-baker.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON - When President Obama briefed Congressional leaders at the White House last week on his plans to send more troops to Afghanistan, Senator Harry Reid offered some advice: Whatever you do, he told the president, don't call it a "surge."
Not to worry. Mr. Obama didn't and wouldn't. The exchange, confirmed by people briefed on the discussion, underscored the sensitivity about language in the new era. Mr. Obama and his team are busily scrubbing President George W. Bush's national security lexicon, if not necessarily all of his policies.
They may be sending 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan, much as Mr. Bush did to Iraq, but it is not a "surge." They may still be holding people captured on the battlefield at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, but they are no longer "enemy combatants." They may be carrying the fight to Al Qaeda as their predecessors did, but they are no longer waging a "war on terror."
So if not a war on terror, what then? "Overseas contingency operations."
And terrorist attacks themselves? "Man-caused disasters."
Every White House picks its words carefully, using poll-tested, focus-grouped language to frame issues and ideas to advance its goals. Mr. Bush's team did that assertively. The initial legislation expanding government power after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was the "U.S.A. Patriot Act." The warrantless eavesdropping that became so controversial was rebranded the "Terrorist Surveillance Program." The enemy was, for a time, dubbed "Islamofascism," until that was deemed insensitive to Muslims.
Now Mr. Obama is coming into office determined to sweep all that rhetoric away, even if he is keeping much of the policy that underlies it. Aides argue that they are not trying to spin their priorities through words, only to excise the spin applied relentlessly by the Bush administration. But they are also trying to send a clear and unmistakable message that the old order is gone.
"You have to tell the American public and the world that there's a new sheriff in town without opening up the jail and letting all the prisoners out," said Matt Bennett, vice president of Third Way, a moderate Democratic advocacy group. "The changing of the way they talk is a low-risk way of purging some of the Bush-era stuff without doing any damage."
Indeed, for all the shifting words, Mr. Obama has left the bulk of Mr. Bush's national security architecture intact so far. He has made no move to revise the Patriot Act or the eavesdropping program. He has ordered Guantánamo to be closed in a year but has not turned loose all the prisoners. The troop buildup in Afghanistan resembles the one Mr. Bush ordered in Iraq two years ago.
In cautioning against the "surge" label, Mr. Reid clearly wanted to avoid associating the Obama strategy in Afghanistan with the Bush strategy in Iraq, a strategy that both he and the president opposed at the time. The two have never repudiated their opposition to the Iraq buildup, even though many now credit it with helping to stabilize the country. And any language suggesting parallels between the two approaches could aggravate the party's liberal base, much of which is already suspicious of committing more forces to Afghanistan.
Gordon Johndroe, the last National Security Council spokesman for Mr. Bush, said he detected a great degree of overlap in actual policy between the two presidents that is not masked by different words. "A change in rhetoric is fine as long as they don't lead people to believe the threat from violent extremists is over," Mr. Johndroe said.
Obama advisers said they were not trying to de-emphasize the danger of extremism but to take the politics out of it. Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, used the term "terrorism" during her Senate confirmation testimony, but also referred to it as "man-caused disasters." She later said that it was a deliberate attempt to change the tone.
"That is perhaps only a nuance," she told Der Spiegel, the German newsmagazine, "but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur."
But the risk, in the minds of some critics, is looking like the government no longer takes the dangers of the world seriously. "They seem more interested in the war on the English language than in what might be thought of as more pressing national security matters," said Shannen W. Coffin, who served as counsel to former Vice President Dick Cheney. "An Orwellian euphemism or two will not change the fact that bad people want to kill us and destroy us as a free people."
The White House dismisses such criticism, saying the president is not focused on wordsmithing national policy. "He's far less concerned with" language, Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, told reporters last week, "and much more concerned with steps that he's taken and that we need to take as a country to protect our citizens and to keep our homeland safe. And I think that's what he's focused on."
Still, the degree to which the Obama team seems intent on distancing itself from any language associated with Mr. Bush has drawn ridicule even from the left. On "The Daily Show" on Tuesday night, Jon Stewart vigorously mocked the Obama administration after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said "the administration has stopped using the phrase" war on terror.
Mr. Stewart showed repeated clips of Mr. Obama's budget director, Peter R. Orszag, referring instead to "overseas contingency operations."
"Yeah, that'll catch on like Crystal Pepsi," Mr. Stewart joked.
Summoning one of the most memorable moments of the Bush presidency, Mr. Stewart then showed a mocked up photograph of Mr. Obama in a pilot's flight suit on the deck of an aircraft carrier under a banner proclaiming, "Redefinition Accomplished."
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12) Finding Hope Online, and Hoping a Job Follows
By PETER S. GOODMAN
April 3, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/business/03jobless.html?ref=business
COLUMBIA, S.C. - Nearly a year after he was laid off from his job as a window installer, Raymond Vaughn is still out of work, still scanning job listings on the computer and still sending résumés into a seemingly indifferent void.
But Mr. Vaughn now has another activity, one aimed at breaking free of his chronically meager financial straits: He is studying for a career in medical billing through an online course he found on the Internet.
For several hours each morning, Mr. Vaughn, 43, sits at a desk in the modest rented house he shares with his fiancée, memorizing medical procedures and absorbing detailed drawings of the human anatomy. "Medical terminology is kicking my butt," he says.
He takes quizzes online, making progress toward the diploma that will, the school promises, set him up to work from home, processing bills for insurance companies while earning as much as $50,000 a year. "That sounded all right to me," he says.
He passes the evening hours on a sagging couch, a pack of Newport cigarettes on the coffee table, and the television remote in hand, surveying a world mired in distress. He flips between action movies and news channels, absorbing a discomfiting tableau of cinematic violence and real-life economic deterioration - job cuts, holdups at a local automated teller machine, taxpayer-financed bonuses for disgraced Wall Street chieftains.
He takes note of the reports that South Carolina has the second-highest unemployment rate in the nation - 11 percent in February, behind only Michigan. He seethes as he hears that his state's Republican governor, Mark Sanford, is preparing to reject $700 million in federal aid aimed at generating new jobs, arguing that spending more now will simply add to public debt in the years ahead.
"How can somebody who's never been broke say with any confidence what someone needs who's struggling?" Mr. Vaughn asks disgustedly.
Everywhere, he hears solemn talk of recession, as if the same reality that has defined most of his life has finally caught up with the rest of the nation.
"For me, it's always been a recession," Mr. Vaughn says. "I've always struggled to find work and pay my bills. And now we're hearing recession this, recession that, and I'm like, yeah, now that it's hitting the rich people, it's officially a recession. They've got to give up eating in those fancy restaurants with their $100 chicken dinners, and now they're stuck eating Church's with me."
He still draws a $221-a-week unemployment check, and he still depends on the generosity of his fiancée, whose wages from her job as a secretary at a hospital pay the bills.
"She could cover this place on her own," Mr. Vaughn says. "She could kick my butt out and she'd be fine. It bothers me. That'd be hard for any man."
And yet, more than a year into a punishing economic downturn, and more than four decades into a life whose only consistent thread has been struggle itself, Mr. Vaughn is keenly aware that pride is a commodity he cannot afford.
Nationally, unemployment is at its highest rate in more than a quarter century, a picture that will probably worsen on Friday, when the government releases its snapshot of the labor market for March.
Most economists expect the report will show that more than 650,000 jobs disappeared from the economy last month, bringing total job losses beyond five million since the recession began in December 2007.
Prospects have been especially bleak for African-American men like Mr. Vaughn, who lacks a college degree, and has long earned his living with his hands. Born and raised in Jamaica in Queens, New York, Mr. Vaughn has spent the last 17 years in South Carolina, moving here to escape the often-violent streets of his youth.
Nationally, less than 60 percent of black men 20 years and older were employed in February, the lowest share since the government began tracking such data in 1972, and down from 66 percent a year earlier.
Amiable and prone to wisecracks, Mr. Vaughn joined the recession's victims last May when he was laid off from his job installing and repairing windows and doors, where he had earned $11.50 an hour and health insurance.
In December, he lined up with hundreds of other people at the state fairgrounds, applying for the few listings at a job fair. The most promising possibility was for a position as a technician at an air-conditioning company. It paid $3 an hour less than his last job. He never got that job, and soon the company resorted to layoffs. He says he has applied for more than 50 jobs since, including posts as a welder, an auto mechanic and a painter.
"Anything," he says. "I've been applying for anything."
Back in February, he was granted an interview at a factory that makes industrial adhesives, yet his very need for a job emerged as an impediment to getting one: The company ran a credit check, discovered his checkered history, and turned him down, he says.
"They told me things had looked good until the credit check," he says.
Mr. Vaughn's credit history stands as a crude composite of the national experience. It is sprinkled with deals that went awry, transactions not sufficiently understood, assurances accepted without critical scrutiny and purchases made in anticipation of income that never arrived.
Seven years ago, he bought a mobile home, agreeing to a mortgage that he says was supposed to be $653 a month for the home and the land. When a bill came for an extra $200 a month, he walked away, convinced he had been cheated. Two years ago, he ran up $200 worth of charges on a Visa card that he failed to pay. "It was basically gas and what-not," he says.
In January, an e-mail message landed in his in-box from something called the U.S. Career Institute, based in Colorado, which offered to train him online for "an exciting, professional career" in medical billing. He bought in, enrolling for $69 a month, attracted by the thought of a middle-class paycheck.
Does he know anyone who has pulled this off? "No, but I called and checked it out," he says. "Basically, they said their school is accredited. Their school has weight. It's not like the school is frowned upon."
He discussed it with his fiancée, and she supported the idea, figuring that health care is a growing field.
He says this in the tone of voice of a man whose aspirations have been dashed more than once, now trying to convince himself of the truth of something dubious; a man who has sent out so many job applications and received so few replies, happy to have finally found mail in his in-box painting a promising future that is supposedly waiting for someone just like him.
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13) Patient Money
Getting a Health Policy When You're Already Sick
By WALECIA KONRAD
April 4, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/04/health/04patient.html?ref=health
INSURANCE executives held out hope to the afflicted late last month by announcing their willingness to end a notorious industry practice: charging higher premiums to people with health problems or denying them coverage altogether.
But don't breathe easy just yet. The change, promised at a Senate hearing, would hinge on the condition that Congress in turn require everyone in the land to carry health insurance. And Congress is still at least months away from taking up major health legislation.
So for now, consumers with pre-existing medical conditions must continue the struggle to obtain and keep medical coverage.
"It is arguably the biggest minefield out there when it comes to getting and keeping your health insurance," said Karen Pollitz, project director at the Health Policy Institute at Georgetown University. "Under the current system, the people who need insurance most can't afford or can't get coverage."
Until the system changes, here is basic guidance for people with pre-existing conditions, whether you're currently covered or shopping for insurance.
IF POSSIBLE, KEEP EMPLOYER'S COVERAGE. Under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as Hippa, employers cannot exclude you from a health plan because of a pre-existing condition. They must offer you coverage and pay the same percentage of your premium as they do for healthy employees. The same rule applies to spouses and children if the employer offers family coverage.
Keep in mind, new employees can be denied coverage for treatment related to their pre-existing conditions for up to 12 months. But if you have had continuing coverage from another group plan, the amount of time you held that coverage can be credited to the 12-month exclusion.
More troublesome is if you had a gap in coverage of 63 days or more. In that case, employers can exclude coverage of your health problem for up to 18 months, but then must give you full coverage.
LEARN YOUR STATE'S RULES. Not everyone can get insurance through an employer, of course. And that's when things get tricky.
In reality, most insurers deny individual coverage to sick people. As a safety net, federal law mandates that each state offer at least one nongroup, or individual, option that cannot deny anyone coverage. The details vary from state to state.
To find out what's available where you live, check with your state's insurance department. Contact information for each state can be found at the Web site of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, www.naic.org/state_web_map.htm.
Cost is a big problem with all of these last-gasp policies, said Sandy Praeger, the insurance commissioner for Kansas and chairwoman of the national association's health insurance committee. Because there are no federal laws regulating premiums, they can be prohibitively expensive. "Unfortunately, there aren't many affordable alternatives," Ms. Praeger said.
If you do find yourself turned down by an insurer for a pre-existing condition, you can appeal that decision. With your doctor's help you may be able to convince a carrier that denied you coverage because of, say, high blood pressure, that you now have the condition under control.
SEEK OTHER TYPES OF GROUP COVERAGE. Even as an individual, you may be able to join a group health plan, especially if you run your own business. Your chamber of commerce may offer health coverage for local business owners. And professional and trade associations sometimes offer group insurance to qualified members regardless of their health.
But "be very careful when dealing with associations," Ms. Pollitz warns. "This has been an area riddled with fraud and insolvencies." Check out any potential group carefully with your state insurance department.
You may also want to research group purchasing alliances in your state. In these, small businesses band together to buy group health insurance plans at rates that might otherwise be available only to big employers. Check with your state insurance department on how to join an alliance - or to form a new one.
IF COVERAGE IS TERMINATED If you seek treatment for a health problem under an individual insurance plan, the insurer may look into your medical history for proof that you had the problem before applying for coverage, said Kevin Flynn, president of HealthCare Advocates. His company, in Philadelphia, works with patients who are in dispute with their insurers.
Insurers also may review your application and determine that you omitted important information related to a pre-existing condition, Mr. Flynn said. If the insurer finds evidence of either transgression, it may rescind your policy.
That's what happened last year to Melissa Klettke, a 26-year-old who lives near Portland, Ore. Because her employer's group insurance was expensive, Ms. Klettke shopped for a less expensive individual policy. Finding one online, she applied and was accepted.
About three weeks after getting coverage, Ms. Klettke began having symptoms that her doctor worried could signal multiple sclerosis. Terrified, she started a battery of diagnostic tests including expensive M.R.I.'s and consultations with a specialist.
Amid all this, her insurer wrote to say her coverage was being dropped because she had failed to disclose a trip to the doctor months earlier during which she complained of vertigo. That, the insurance company said, was proof of a prior condition.
"Here I was, scared to death, not knowing what was going on with me, and then I find out I have no insurance," Ms. Klettke said.
The good news is that Ms. Klettke does not have multiple sclerosis. But she has paid about $5,000 out of pocket for tests and doctors' fees. Happily, though, she recently got a new job at a shipping company that offers health insurance, and she is covered under her employer's group plan.
Although Ms. Klettke got nowhere with her appeals to the former insurer, Mr. Flynn urges people who find themselves in her position to push back. Ask your doctor for help in proving to the insurer that the reason you were dropped is not proof of a pre-existing condition.
Mr. Flynn recalls a client who lost his insurance because he had been treated for a canker sore on his tongue six months before he was diagnosed with mouth cancer. "We were successful in reinstating coverage when his doctors made it clear the two things had nothing to do with each other," he said.
Make your appeal in writing first, then follow up by phone, Mr. Flynn advises. If you get the chance to make your case in person, by all means do so, he added. And always file a complaint with, and enlist help from, your state insurance department.
BEWARE OF TEMPORARY POLICIES. Relatively inexpensive policies offering coverage for a limited period, usually six months to a year, have become a popular alternative for people who may be out of work but hope to soon have a job with employer coverage.
But if you get sick or injured while holding one of these policies, Ms. Pollitz said, the insurer will most likely deny you coverage when you try to renew - because now you have a pre-existing condition. If possible, she said, you're better off paying for a longer-term, more comprehensive policy.
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14) Israel on Trial
By GEORGE BISHARAT
Op-Ed Contributor
April 4, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/04/opinion/04bisharat.html
San Francisco
CHILLING testimony by Israeli soldiers substantiates charges that Israel's Gaza Strip assault entailed grave violations of international law. The emergence of a predominantly right-wing, nationalist government in Israel suggests that there may be more violations to come. Hamas's indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli civilians also constituted war crimes, but do not excuse Israel's transgressions. While Israel disputes some of the soldiers' accounts, the evidence suggests that Israel committed the following six offenses:
• Violating its duty to protect the civilian population of the Gaza Strip. Despite Israel's 2005 "disengagement" from Gaza, the territory remains occupied. Israel unleashed military firepower against a people it is legally bound to protect.
• Imposing collective punishment in the form of a blockade, in violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. In June 2007, after Hamas took power in the Gaza Strip, Israel imposed suffocating restrictions on trade and movement. The blockade - an act of war in customary international law - has helped plunge families into poverty, children into malnutrition, and patients denied access to medical treatment into their graves. People in Gaza thus faced Israel's winter onslaught in particularly weakened conditions.
• Deliberately attacking civilian targets. The laws of war permit attacking a civilian object only when it is making an effective contribution to military action and a definite military advantage is gained by its destruction. Yet an Israeli general, Dan Harel, said, "We are hitting not only terrorists and launchers, but also the whole Hamas government and all its wings." An Israeli military spokeswoman, Maj. Avital Leibovich, avowed that "anything affiliated with Hamas is a legitimate target."
Israeli fire destroyed or damaged mosques, hospitals, factories, schools, a key sewage plant, institutions like the parliament, the main ministries, the central prison and police stations, and thousands of houses.
• Willfully killing civilians without military justification. When civilian institutions are struck, civilians - persons who are not members of the armed forces of a warring party, and are not taking direct part in hostilities - are killed.
International law authorizes killings of civilians if the objective of the attack is military, and the means are proportional to the advantage gained. Yet proportionality is irrelevant if the targets of attack were not military to begin with. Gaza government employees - traffic policemen, court clerks, secretaries and others - are not combatants merely because Israel considers Hamas, the governing party, a terrorist organization. Many countries do not regard violence against foreign military occupation as terrorism.
Of 1,434 Palestinians killed in the Gaza invasion, 960 were civilians, including 121 women and 288 children, according to a United Nations special rapporteur, Richard Falk. Israeli military lawyers instructed army commanders that Palestinians who remained in a targeted building after having been warned to leave were "voluntary human shields," and thus combatants. Israeli gunners "knocked on roofs" - that is, fired first at corners of buildings, before hitting more vulnerable points - to "warn" Palestinian residents to flee.
With nearly all exits from the densely populated Gaza Strip blocked by Israel, and chaos reigning within it, this was a particularly cruel flaunting of international law. Willful killings of civilians that are not required by military necessity are grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and are considered war crimes under the Nuremberg principles.
• Deliberately employing disproportionate force. Last year, Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, head of Israel's northern command, speaking on possible future conflicts with neighbors, stated, "We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction." Such a frank admission of illegal intent can constitute evidence in a criminal prosecution.
• Illegal use of weapons, including white phosphorus. Israel was finally forced to admit, after initial denials, that it employed white phosphorous in the Gaza Strip, though Israel defended its use as legal. White phosphorous may be legally used as an obscurant, not as a weapon, as it burns deeply and is extremely difficult to extinguish.
Israeli political and military personnel who planned, ordered or executed these possible offenses should face criminal prosecution. The appointment of Richard Goldstone, the former war crimes prosecutor from South Africa, to head a fact-finding team into possible war crimes by both parties to the Gaza conflict is an important step in the right direction. The stature of international law is diminished when a nation violates it with impunity.
George Bisharat is a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law.
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15) Financial Industry Paid Millions to Obama Aide
By JEFF ZELENY
April 4, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/04/us/politics/04disclose.html?hp
WASHINGTON - Lawrence H. Summers, the top economic adviser to President Obama, earned more than $5 million last year from the hedge fund D. E. Shaw and collected $2.7 million in speaking fees from Wall Street companies that received government bailout money, the White House disclosed Friday in releasing financial information about top officials.
Mr. Summers, the director of the National Economic Council, wields important influence over Mr. Obama's policy decisions for the troubled financial industry, including firms from which he recently received payments.
Last year, he reported making 40 paid appearances, including a $135,000 speech to the investment firm Goldman Sachs, in addition to his earnings from the hedge fund, a sector the administration is trying to regulate.
The White House released hundreds of pages of financial disclosure forms, which are required of all West Wing officials. A White House spokesman, Ben LaBolt, said the compensation was not a conflict for Mr. Summers, adding it was not surprising because he was "widely recognized as one of the country's most distinguished economists."
Mr. Summers's role at the White House includes advising Mr. Obama on whether - and how - to tighten regulation of hedge funds, which engage in highly sophisticated financial trading that many analysts have said contributed to the economic collapse.
Mr. Summers, a former president of Harvard University, was Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. He appeared before large Wall Street companies like Citigroup ($45,000), J. P. Morgan ($67,500) and the now defunct Lehman Brothers ($67,500), according to his disclosure report. He reported being paid $10,000 for a speaking date at Yale and $90,000 to address an organization of Mexican banks.
While Mr. Obama campaigned on a pledge to restrict lobbyists from working in the White House, a step intended to reduce any influence between the administration and corporations, the ban did not apply to former executives like Mr. Summers, who was not a registered lobbyist. In 2006, he became a managing director of D. E. Shaw, a firm that manages about $30 billion in assets, making it one of the biggest hedge funds in the world.
"Dr. Summers was not an adviser to or an employee of the firms that paid him to speak," Mr. LaBolt said.
He added, "Of course, since joining the White House, he has complied with the strictest ethics rules ever required of appointees and will not work on specific matters to which D. E. Shaw is a party for two years."
A review of hundreds of pages of financial disclosure forms on Friday evening offered an extensive portrait of the wealth of top officials in the Obama administration. The forms detail the salaries, bonuses and investments of the president's circle of advisers, many of whom took deep pay cuts from the private sector and sold their companies to work at the White House.
David Axelrod, who was the chief campaign strategist to Mr. Obama and now serves as a senior adviser to the president, reported a salary of $1 million last year from his two consulting firms. Over the next five years, according to his disclosure form, he will get $3 million from the sale of the two firms, which provide media and strategic advice to political clients. He listed assets of about $7 million to $10 million, and reported a long list of Democratic clients and a few corporate concerns, including AT&T and the Exelon Corporation, a nuclear energy company.
The disclosure forms also shed further light on the compensation received by a top Obama aide who previously worked for Citigroup, one of the largest recipients of taxpayer bailout money. The aide, Michael Froman, deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, received more than $7.4 million from the company from January 2008 to when he joined the White House this year.
That money included a year-end bonus of $2.25 million for work in 2008, which Citigroup paid him in January. Such bonuses have prompted political controversy in recent months, including sharp criticism from Mr. Obama, who in January branded them as "shameful."
The White House had previously acknowledged that Mr. Froman received such a year-end bonus and said he had decided to give it to charity, but would not say what it was.
The administration said Friday that Mr. Froman was working on giving the $2.25 million to a combination of charities related to homelessness and cancer, which took the life of his son this year.
The remainder of Mr. Froman's earnings from Citigroup included deferred compensation and bonuses for work performed in prior years, as well as a $2 million payment for waiving his carried-interest stake in several private equity funds.
The White House said Mr. Froman decided to take the buyouts to avoid having to recuse himself from foreign-policy issues related to the funds' investments, like India infrastructure, which means he would be taxed at ordinary income rates on the money.
Millionaires work in a variety of positions across the administration, and they include Desirée Rogers, the White House social secretary. Ms. Rogers, a close Chicago friend of the Obama family, reported income of $2.3 million last year. She earned a salary of $1.8 million from People's Gas & North Shore Gas, along with three other sources of income from serving on insurance company boards.
Thomas E. Donilon, the deputy national security adviser, reported earning $3.9 million as a partner at the Washington law firm O'Melveny & Myers. His disclosure form says major clients included Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Apollo Management, a private equity firm in New York that specializes in distressed assets and corporate restructuring.
Mr. Donilon is also entitled to future pension payments from Fannie Mae, where he worked from 1999 to 2005.
Reporting was contributed by Peter Baker, David Johnston, David D. Kirkpatrick, Eric Lipton and Charlie Savage.
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6) Ward Churchill Redux
April 5, 2009, 10:00 pm
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/ward-churchill-redux/
Last Thursday, a jury in Denver ruled that the termination of
activist-teacher Ward Churchill by the University of Colorado had
been wrongful (a term of art) even though a committee of his faculty
peers had found him guilty of a variety of sins.
The verdict did not surprise me because I had read the committee's
report and found it less an indictment of Churchill than an example
of a perfectly ordinary squabble about research methods and the
handling of evidence. The accusations that fill its pages are the
kind scholars regularly hurl at their polemical opponents. It's part
of the game. But in most cases, after you've trashed the guy's work
in a book or a review, you don't get to fire him. Which is good,
because if the standards for dismissal adopted by the Churchill
committee were generally in force, hardly any of us professors would
have jobs.
At least two reviewers of my 2001 book "How Milton Works" declared
that my reading of "Paradise Lost" rests on an unproven assumption
that Milton repeatedly and designedly punned on the homonyms
"raised" (elevated), "razed" (destroyed) and "rased" (erased). I was
accused of having fabricated these puns out of thin air and of
building on the fabrication an interpretive house of cards that fell
apart at the slightest touch of rationality and evidence.
I use the criticism of my own work as an example because to talk
about the many others who have been accused of incompetence,
ignorance, falsification, plagiarism and worse would be bad form. And
it wouldn't prove anything much except that when academics assess one
another they routinely say things like, "Professor A obviously has
not read the primary sources"; "Professor B draws conclusions the
evidence does not support"; "Professor C engages in fanciful
speculations and then pretends to build a solid case; he's just
making it up"; "Professor D does not acknowledge that he stole his
argument from Professor E who was his teacher (or his student)."
The scholars who are the objects of these strictures do not seem to
suffer much on account of them, in part because they can almost
always point to positive reviews on the other side, in part because
harsh and even scabrous judgments are understood to be more or less
par for the course. And I won't even go into the roster of big-time
historians who in recent years have been charged with (and in some
instances confessed to) plagiarism, distortion and downright lying.
With the exception of one, these academic malfeasants are still
plying their trades, receiving awards and even pontificating on
television.
Why, given these examples of crimes or errors apparently forgiven,
did Ward Churchill lose his job (he may now regain it) when all he
was accused of was playing fast and loose with the facts, fudging his
sources and going from A to D in his arguments without bothering to
stop at B and C? In short, standard stuff.
The answer Churchill's partisans would give (and in the end it may be
the right answer) is "politics." After all, they say, there wouldn't
have been any special investigative committee poring over Churchill's
12 single-author books, many edited collections and 100-plus articles
had he not published an Internet essay on Sept. 12, 2001, saying that
the attacks on the World Trade towers and the Pentagon were instances
of "the chickens coming home to roost" and that those who worked and
died in the towers were willing agents of the United States' "global
empire" and its malign policies and could therefore be thought of as
"little Eichmanns."
These incendiary remarks were not widely broadcast until four years
later, when Bill O'Reilly and other conservative commentators brought
them to the public's attention. The reaction was immediate. Bill
Owens, governor of Colorado, called university president Elizabeth
Hoffman and ordered her to fire Churchill. She replied, "You know I
can't do that." (Not long after, she was forced to resign.)
The reason she couldn't do it is simple. A public employee cannot be
fired for extramural speech of which the government (in this case
Gov. Owens) disapproves. It's unconstitutional. A public employee can
be fired, however, for activities that indicate unfitness for the
position he or she holds; and after flirting with the idea of a
buyout, the university, aware that questions had been raised about
Churchill's scholarship, appointed a committee to review and assess
his work, no doubt in the hope that something appropriately damning
would be found.
It was, or so the committee said. It found inaccuracies in
Churchill's account of the General Allotment Act of 1887, a piece of
legislation generally considered to be a part of an extended effort
to weaken the force of Native American culture. In his discussion of
the act, Churchill described it as a "eugenics code" that uses the
"Indian blood quantum requirement" to achieve its end. But there is
no mention of any "blood quantum" requirement in the text. Indeed,
the act "contained no definition of Indian whatsoever."
But then, after having established what could possibly be classified
as a misrepresentation, the committee turned back in Churchill's
direction, and allowed that while the blood quantum requirement was
not "expressly" stated, there was some force to Churchill's
contention that it is "somehow implied." "In this respect," the
committee continued, there "is more truth to part of Professor
Churchill's claim" than his critics are "prepared to credit."
Still Churchill, the committee went on to say, was factually wrong
when he says of the Act that it introduced "for the first time" the
"federal imposition of racial Indian ancestry" as a device designed
to force assimilation. That happened, the committee reported, 40
years earlier. So that while Churchill gets "the general point
correct," he "gets the historical details wrong." Moreover, when his
errors were pointed out by another researcher in the field, Churchill
simply ceased making the erroneous claims and "offered no public
retraction or correction." The conclusion? "Professor Churchill
deliberately embellished his broad, and otherwise accurate or, at
least reasonable, historic claims regarding the Allotment Act of 1887
with details for which he offered no reliable independent support."
That's it? He didn't verify some details and he didn't denounce
himself? There must be something else and there is. Churchill, the
committee noted, argues that the U.S. army, among others,
"intentionally introduced the smallpox virus to Native American
tribes," and he claims also that circumstantial evidence implicates
John Smith (of Pocahontas fame) in this outrage.
The committee found that with respect to Smith, Churchill "did not
connect the dots in his proposed set of circumstantial evidence." As
for the allegation that that the army spread smallpox by knowingly
distributing infected blankets, the committee found no support in
written records, but notes that Native American oral traditions
rehearse and pass down this story, which has at least one documented
source in British General Jeffrey Amherst's suggestion in 1763 that
infected blankets be given to hostile Indians.
The conclusion? "We do not find academic misconduct with respect to
his general claim that the U.S. Army deliberately spread smallpox."
In addition, the committee acknowledges that "early accounts of what
was said by Indians involved in that situation and certain native
oral traditions provide some basis for [Churchill's] interpretation."
In short, it seems for an instant that Churchill is going to be
declared (relatively) innocent of the most serious charges against
him. But after noting that he cited sources that do not support his
argument and failed to document his assertion that up to 400,000
Indians died in the smallpox epidemic, the committee turned severe
and declared, "We therefore find by a preponderance of the evidence a
pattern of deliberate academic misconduct involving falsification,
fabrication, and serious deviation from accepted practices." On the
evidence of its own account the committee does not seem to have
earned its "therefore."
The question of "accepted practices" is raised again in a
particularly focused form when the committee considers the issue of
Churchill's "ghostwriting." On several occasions Churchill wrote
essays to which others put their names and then, at a later date, he
cited those essays in support of an argument he was making. The
committee decided that a charge of plagiarism could not be sustained
since it is not plagiarism to cite ones own work (even if it bears
another's name). That does not dispose of the issue, however, because
in the committee's view "ghostwriting" is itself a "form of
misconduct" that fails "to comply with established practices" and
deceives readers into thinking that an author has independent
authority for his assertions, when in reality the only authority he
has is his own.
Churchill's response came in two parts. First he pointed out that
university regulations (Colorado's or anyone else's) do not contain
guidelines relating to ghostwriting. There seems, therefore, to be no
"established" practice for him to violate. Second, he challenged the
assertion that a text he wrote cannot be properly cited as
independent support for something he is writing in the present.
He argued (during the committee hearing and in Works and Days, 2009)
that what ghostwriters do in the academy and elsewhere is give voice
to the views and conclusions of others. All the ghostwriter does is
supply the prose; the ideas and contentions belong to the third
party, who, if she did not agree to "own" the sentiments, would
decline to affix her name to them. Thus when the ghostwriter
subsequently cites to the text of which he has been merely the
midwife, he is citing not to himself but to the person to whose ideas
he gave expression. "It follows that ghostwriters are under no
obligation . . . to attribute authorship to themselves when quoting/
citing material they've ghostwritten."
Well, that's a little tricky, but it is an argument, and one that
committee members, no doubt, would have a response to. But all that
means is that there would be another round of the academic back-and-
forth one finds in innumerable, books, essays, symposiums, panel
discussions - all of which are routinely marked by accusations of
shoddy practices and distortions of evidence, but none of which is
marked by the demand that the person on the other side of the
question from you be fired and drummed out of the academy.
There is, as I think I've shown, a disconnect in the report between
its often nuanced considerations of the questions raised in and by
Churchill's work, and the conclusion, announced in a parody of a
judicial verdict, that he has committed crimes worthy of dismissal,
if not of flogging. It is almost as if the committee members were
going along happily doing what they usually do in their academic work
- considering , parsing and evaluating arguments - and then suddenly
remembering that they were there for another purpose to which they
hastily turn. Oh, yes, we're supposed to judge him; let's say he's
guilty.
I can easily imagine the entire affair being made into a teaching aid
- a casebook containing Churchill's "little Eichmanns" essay, the
responses to it by politicians, columnists and fellow academics,
assessments of Churchill's other writings by friends and foes, the
investigative committee's report, responses to the report (one group
of academics led by Eric Cheyfitz, a chaired professor at Cornell,
has formally charged the committee itself with research misconduct),
the trial record, the verdict, reactions to the verdict, etc.
You could teach a whole course - probably more than one - from such a
compilation and one of the questions raised in such a course would be
the question I have been asking: How did a garden-variety academic
quarrel about sources,evidence and documentation complete with a lot
of huffing and puffing by everyone get elevated first into a review
of the entire life of a tenured academic and then into a court case
when that academic was terminated. How and why did it get that far?
I said earlier that the answer Churchill partisans would give is
"politics." It is also the answer the jury gave. It was the jury's
task to determine whether Churchill's dismissal would have occurred
independently of the adverse political response to his
constitutionally protected statements. In the ordinary academic
course of things would his writings have been subject to the extended
and minute scrutiny that led to the committee's recommendations? Had
the governor not called Hoffman, had state representatives not
appeared on TV to call for Churchill's head, had commentators all
over the country not vilified Churchill for his 9/11 views, would any
of this have happened.? The answer seems obvious to me and it has now
been given authoritative form in the jury's verdict.
Let me add (I hope it would be unnecessary) that nothing I have said
should be taken either as a judgment (positive or negative) on
Churchill's work or as a questioning of the committee's motives. I am
not competent to judge Churchill's writings and I express no view of
them. And I have no doubts at all about the integrity of the
committee members. They just got caught up in a circus that should
have never come to town.
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7) The Recession's Impact: Closing The Clinic
60 Minutes: Bad Economy Leaves Cancer Patients Without Health Insurance In Dire Straits
April 5, 2009
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/04/03/60minutes/main4917055.shtml
In the economic crisis, public hospitals are needed now more than ever. If you're down on your luck without insurance, the county hospital can be your last resort.
Recently thousands of letters went out across Las Vegas telling cancer patients that the only public hospital in the state was closing its outpatient clinic for chemotherapy.
It's the next thing in the recession - communities cutting back on services like schools or cops or public hospitals because tax revenues have fallen with the economy.
One of the charity patients who got that letter in Las Vegas is Helen Sharp, who didn't realize how a crash on Wall Street might threaten her life.
"I don't want to die. I shouldn't have to die. This is a county hospital. This is for people that, like me, many people have lost their insurance, have not any other resources. I mean I was a responsible person. I bought my house. I put money away. I raised my two children. And now I have nothing. You know my house isn't worth anything. I have no money. And I said 'What do I do, but what do all these other people do after me?' 'And they said we don't know,'" Sharp told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley.
Sharp, 63, has been fighting lymphoma since July. She's not working because of her illness and has no insurance. Last year, she received charity care at the county hospital, University Medical Center. She was one of 2,000 patients who got the letter.
"Dear patient, we regret to inform you that the Nevada Cancer Institute will no longer provide contract oncology services at University Medical Center," Sharp read.
Since December 31, there has been no chemotherapy for new outpatients.
Asked what reading this letter meant to her, Sharp told Pelley, "A death sentence."
University Medical Center is the safety net for two million people; Las Vegas bets its life on it. UMC is a teaching hospital, the only fully equipped trauma center, the only burn unit, the only transplant unit, and the primary source of charity care in a city that has fallen on the hardest times it has ever seen.
"Obviously, our gaming and tourism is tanking. The construction industry has been decimated. And all of those things cause big, gaping holes in the state budget. The hardest-hit area for us was the Medicaid budget," Kathy Silver, the hospital's CEO, explained.
Silver had signed that letter patients received.
Literally overnight, UMC's budget was cut by $21 million. "And we were already scheduled or budgeted to lose $51 million. And so, when you layered on $21 million on top of that, that brought our loss, or anticipated loss, to $72 million," Silver told Pelley.
The $21 million was cut by the legislature when tax revenues went bust. Nevada is number one in foreclosures; unemployment is over 10 percent, double what it was last year and climbing.
Silver told 60 Minutes she had to defend her unique services like the trauma center, so she chose to sacrifice services that are duplicated at private hospitals, even though patients may not be able to afford them.
Asked what services she had closed, Silver said, "We no longer provide prenatal services. We closed the outpatient oncology program. We cancelled a contract for outpatient dialysis. We closed the dedicated high risk obstetrical unit that we had. And we stopped doing outpatient mammography."
60 Minutes was there in February when the women's cancer clinic closed.
"When the hospital first informed you that the outpatient oncology clinic was closing, what did you think?" Pelley asked Dr. Nick Spiritos, who treats ovarian and uterine cancers.
"How can you do this to cancer patients? They're dying. If we don't provide them care, their outcome is guaranteed. They're going to die," he replied.
Pelley spoke to several of those patients. Roy Scales, a laid off security guard with lung cancer, went to the hospital and got the news in person.
"I walked in, the lady looked down and said 'Well, I don't see anything down here for you.' Then she looked in the computer and she said, 'Oh, you were supposed to have an oncology today but it's been canceled. Our oncology department is closed,'" Scales remembered.
"They turned you away at the door," Pelley remarked.
"They turned me away at the door without telling me anything," Scales said.
Asked what he was thinking when he walked out of the hospital, Scales told Pelley, "I mean where am I going to find help? I mean, I'm messing with a disease that will kill you. And for every day that I don't get medical input, I mean, this advances on my body."
Cancer is advancing on Livia Ralphs, who was recently laid off from her job selling cosmetics.
"It goes from here to here," she explained, pointing out a bulge on the left side of her neck. "You probably see it sticking out."
"So, in terms of the cancerous growth in your neck, the doctors believe it's treatable. But you don't have a way to treat it?" Pelley asked.
"I have no funds. I have no insurance. Nothing," Ralphs replied.
Patients who got the letter, like Helen Sharp, were sent a list of private chemotherapy centers, which leaves them in essence begging for care.
"One drug is almost $50,000. Who can afford that? There's nobody that can afford that unless you're a billionaire," she told Pelley.
Some of the patients 60 Minutes met are gravely ill. But all future patients are affected, including those with early, highly treatable cancers who would benefit the most.
"Well, I'm sad. Because I know that there is room to serve patients and yet, financially, we can't afford to," UMC's CEO Kathy Silver told Pelley, as she showed him her closed chemotherapy unit, which had treated 40 patients a day for 20 years.
"You have the facility...to save lives. You have people outside the hospital who need to have their lives saved. And you just can't put two and two together?" Pelley asked.
"The financial situation that we find ourselves in caused us to make some decisions that I think all of us, to a person would rather not have made," Silver said.
There are two medical assistance programs for the very poor, like the folks who line up at a Las Vegas building before dawn to apply for state services: there's Medicaid and Clark County medical assistance.
"So if you're poor enough, you're okay?" Pelley asked Silver.
"If you're poor enough you're fine because those patients are being taken care of," she replied.
"If you're rich enough you're obviously fine. So who is falling through the cracks here?" Pelley asked.
"The patients who don't qualify for a social services type of program," Silver said.
"What we're talking about here are people who are making $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 a year and have lost their jobs and therefore lost their insurance?" Pelley asked.
"That's correct," Silver replied.
"The middle class," Pelley remarked.
"That's correct," Silver said.
Yolanda Coleman is 45 years old and a single mother. Her breast cancer has entered her bones. 60 Minutes found her at home, bedridden, with a broken hip. It's hard to know how much she could benefit from chemo. But when Pelley met her, she was receiving almost no care at all.
"A few months ago there wouldn't have been any question about whether you could have your next round of chemotherapy. UMC would have been available and you could've gone there," Pelley said.
"Yes," Coleman replied.
Asked what it means to her that this program is gone, Coleman told Pelley, "It's devastating. It's devastating."
She worked her whole life as a maid in hotels and as a truck driver, which earned her better money to support her 9-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter.
"As we sit here at this moment you don't know whether there will be another round of chemo for you?" Pelley asked.
"I don't know. It's just so uncertain right now I really don't know. I just trying to live it day by day and trying to keep my spirits up and you know trying to get well so I can take of the two...I got in there, I gotta take care of them," she replied.
She had three rounds of chemotherapy under her insurance plan. Then, she became too sick to work, and lost her insurance - exactly the situation UMC used to take care of.
"You know Yolanda, I think most people watching this interview think to themselves that if they get cancer and they don't have health insurance that somebody's going to take care of them," Pelley remarked.
"No, no, there's nobody to take care of you," she said.
When Pelley asked Kathy Silver if what is happening in her Las Vegas hospital is unique or whether this kind of thing is happening all over the country, she told Pelley, "I think this is happening to some degree, probably, every public hospital across the country. I think it's happening to us to a greater degree because we are we're sort of the epicenter of what's happening. We're a demonstration project, if you would, of all the things that can go wrong at once."
Nick Spiritos, the doctor from the closed women's clinic, has not been able to leave his patients behind. "We've taken care of these ladies for years. They've been our family. You're not gonna push them out in hard times," he told Pelley.
He took a storeroom in his private office and spent $100,000 turning it into a chemo clinic for ovarian and uterine cancers.
"And you told them they can come here to your clinic and receive free medical care?" Pelley asked.
"Correct," Spiritos replied. "We've asked those who can pay, pay. If they can pay $5 a month, they pay $5 a month. If they can pay $20 a month. We're asking them to do what they can. And those who can do nothing, that's our job to take care of them."
Spiritos expects 10 percent of his patients won't be able to pay, so he and his partners will cover them. They've put collection boxes out at convenient stores around town. Other private clinics are also providing free care. And charities, including the Susan G. Komen Foundation, are stretching to help the desperate.
But these are emergency measures.
(CBS) After a month of uncertainty, Helen Sharp was treated at UMC. With the outpatient clinic closed, the hospital admitted her as an inpatient. It says it made an exception because her heart disease and diabetes are life threatening complications.
But Livia Ralphs is still searching for care. "I'm going to die if I don't get treated. That's the bottom line here."
Yolanda Coleman remains untreated. After 60 Minutes' visit, a medical supply company took away her hospital-style bed and her wheelchair.
"You never know what God has for you down the road," she told Pelley. "But, I know he has more for me than just to leave my children because I can't have medical insurance."
Roy Scales has been calling the private doctors from the list University Medical Center sent with its letter. He has been searching for someone who will accept payment from the county's medical assistance for the poor program, which he calls insurance. It has been five months since he was diagnosed.
He told Pelley he called at least 25 doctors and oncology practices trying to find care.
Asked what they told him, Scales said, "'What about that insurance? Well, we don't accept that insurance.'"
"What are you going to do if you can't find a doctor to take care of you?" Pelley asked.
"Die peacefully," Scales said.
Roy Scales is now in hospice after finally consulting with a doctor. Yolanda Coleman, the bedridden mother of two, had her insurance reinstated after 60 Minutes called the insurance company to ask why she had been dropped.
The Nevada state legislature is now considering a proposal to cut millions of dollars more from the budget of University Medical Center.
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8) Pentagon Budget to Reflect New Priorities
By ELISABETH BUMILLER and CHRISTOPHER DREW
April 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/us/politics/07defense.html?hp
WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is expected to announce a far-reaching overhaul of the Pentagon's budget on Monday, including likely cuts in missile defense programs, in the Army's expensive Future Combat Systems and in Navy shipbuilding.
The decisions represent the first broad rethinking of American military strategy under the Obama administration, which wants to spend more of its money countering terrorism and insurgencies like those in Iraq and Afghanistan and less on preparations for conventional warfare against large nations like China or Russia.
Even so, Mr. Gates, who is briefing members of Congress on his plans, is expected to request more money for at least some Pentagon programs.
"He'll also be talking a lot about where we're increasing funding for various capabilities that are important to the department and to our national security," said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. "Everybody seems to be focusing on that he's making cuts. He's going to be adding a lot of things to capabilities that we need too."
But the anticipated reductions are far overshadowing any talk of additions, particularly in the defense contracting industry that supplies the expensive weapons programs in the Pentagon's annual $500 billion-plus budget.
Defense experts say that Mr. Gates is likely to cut $1 billion to $2 billion from programs for defenses against missiles, and that Boeing's airborne laser system, which would equip a modified 747 jetliner with a laser to shoot down missiles, might be killed.
The officials also said they expected Mr. Gates to go ahead with plans to buy four more of the Air Force's advanced F-22 fighter jets in a supplemental spending bill that will be forwarded to Congress soon.
But the bigger question was whether he would support earlier plans by the Air Force to buy 20 more in fiscal 2010 and possibly an additional 40 in the following two years.
The advanced fighter, made by Lockheed Martin, was designed in the cold war and has not been used in combat, and critics have viewed it as one of the most prominent symbols of the cost overruns and delays that have plagued military programs.
Mr. Gates is expected to end a Navy program to build a $3 billion stealth destroyer, and there may be a temporary reduction from 11 aircraft carriers in service to 10.
Industry officials also say that they believe Mr. Gates has already decided to overhaul the Army's Future Combat Systems, a $160 billion mix of robotic sensors and new combat vehicles. The vehicles are expected to be scaled back, but the Pentagon will probably move ahead on the sensors, which are meant to protect soldiers by providing them with better intelligence on the battlefield.
Aides said that Mr. Gates, who skipped President Obama's trip to Europe and a NATO summit to work on the Pentagon budget, worked through the weekend on final decisions about the cuts.
"He has made some important strategic decisions with respect to how he is going forward to recommend to the president how we spend the resources of this department," Mr. Whitman said. "That will not include every program. It just can't."
This year Mr. Gates made the unusual decision to publicly announce his proposed reductions in the Pentagon budget before the recommendations are sent to the White House. Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Armed Services Committee, told reporters last week that Mr. Gates, a Republican who has worked for eight presidents of both parties, may have been trying to provide some political cover for Mr. Obama over the cuts.
Christopher Drew contributed reporting.
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9) In America, Labor Has an Unusually Long Fuse
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
April 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/weekinreview/05greenhouse.html?ref=world
The workers and other protesters who gathered en masse at the Group of 20 summit meeting last week in London were continuing a time-honored European tradition of taking their grievances into the streets.
Two weeks earlier, more than a million workers in France demonstrated against layoffs and the government's handling of the economic crisis, and in the last month alone, French workers took their bosses hostage four times in various labor disputes. When General Motors recently announced huge job cuts worldwide, 15,000 workers demonstrated at the company's German headquarters.
But in the United States, where G.M. plans its biggest layoffs, union members have seemed passive in comparison. They may yell at the television news, but that's about all. Unlike their European counterparts, American workers have largely stayed off the streets, even as unemployment soars and companies cut wages and benefits.
The country of Mother Jones, John L. Lewis and Walter Reuther certainly has had a rich and sometimes militant history of labor protest - from the Homestead Steel Works strike against Andrew Carnegie in 1892 to the auto workers' sit-down strikes of the 1930s and the 67-day walkout by 400,000 G.M. workers in 1970.
But in recent decades, American workers have increasingly steered clear of such militancy, for reasons that range from fear of having their jobs shipped overseas to their self-image as full-fledged members of the middle class, with all its trappings and aspirations.
David Kennedy, a Stanford historian and author of "Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945," says that America's individualist streak is a major reason for this reluctance to take to the streets. Citing a 1940 study by the social psychologist Mirra Komarovsky, he said her interviews of the Depression-era unemployed found "the psychological reaction was to feel guilty and ashamed, that they had failed personally."
Taken together, guilt, shame and individualism undercut any impulse to collective action, then as now, Professor Kennedy said. Noting that Americans felt stunned and desperately insecure during the Depression's early years, he wrote: "What struck most observers, and mystified them, was the eerie docility of the American people, their stoic passivity as the Depression grindstone rolled over them."
By the mid-1930s, though, worker protests increased in number and militancy. They were fueled by the then-powerful Communist and Socialist Parties and frustrations over continuing deprivation. Workers also felt that they had President Roosevelt's blessing for collective action because he signed the Wagner Act in 1935, giving workers the right to unionize.
"Remember, at that time, you had Hoovervilles and 25 percent unemployment," said Daniel Bell, a professor emeritus of sociology at Harvard. "Many people felt that capitalism was finished."
General strikes paralyzed San Francisco and Minneapolis, and a six-week sit-down strike at a G.M. plant in Flint, Mich., pressured the company into recognizing the United Automobile Workers. In the decade's ugliest showdown, a 1937 strike against Republic Steel in Chicago, 10 protesters were shot to death. That militancy helped build a powerful labor movement, which represented 35 percent of the nation's workers by the 1950s and helped create the world's largest and richest middle class.
Today, American workers, even those earning $20,000 a year, tend to view themselves as part of an upwardly mobile middle class. In contrast, European workers often still see themselves as proletarians in an enduring class struggle.
And American labor leaders, once up-from-the-street rabble-rousers, now often work hand-in-hand with C.E.O.'s to improve corporate competitiveness to protect jobs and pensions, and try to sideline activists who support a hard line.
"You have a general diminution of union leadership that was focused on defending workers by any means necessary," said Jerry Tucker, a longtime U.A.W. militant. "The message from the union leadership nowadays often is, 'We don't have any choice, we have to go down this concessionary road to see if we can do damage control,' " he said.
In the case of the Detroit automakers, a strike might not only hasten their demise but infuriate many Americans who already view auto workers as overpaid. It might also make Washington less receptive to a bailout.
Labor's aggressiveness has also been sapped by its declining numbers. Unions represent just 7.4 percent of private-sector workers today.
Unions have also grown more cautious as management has become more aggressive. A watershed came in 1981 when the nation's air traffic controllers engaged in an illegal strike. President Reagan quickly fired the 11,500 striking traffic controllers, hired replacements and soon got the airports running. After that confrontation, labor's willingness to strike shrank markedly.
American workers still occasionally vent their anger in protests and strikes. There were demonstrations against the A.I.G. bonuses, for instance, and workers staged a sit-down strike in December when their factory in Chicago was closed. But the numbers tell the story: Last year, American unions engaged in 159 work stoppages, down from 1,352 in 1981, according to the Bureau of National Affairs, a publisher of legal and regulatory news.
Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University, said that while demonstrations remain a vital outlet for the European left, for Americans "the Internet now somehow serves as the main outlet" with angry blogs and mass e-mailing.
Left-leaning workers and unions that might be most prone to stage protests during today's economic crisis are often the ones most enthusiastic about President Obama and his efforts to revive the economy, help unions and enact universal health coverage. Instead of taking to the streets last fall to protest the gathering economic crisis under President Bush, many workers and unions campaigned for Mr. Obama.
Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers, said there were smarter things to do than demonstrating against layoffs - for instance, pushing Congress and the states to make sure the stimulus plan creates the maximum number of jobs in the United States.
"I actually believe that Americans believe in their political system more than workers do in other parts of the world," Mr. Gerard said. He said large labor demonstrations are often warranted in Canada and European countries to pressure parliamentary leaders. Demonstrations are less needed in the United States, he said, because often all that is needed is some expert lobbying in Washington to line up the support of a half-dozen senators.
Professor Kennedy saw another reason that today's young workers and young people were protesting less than in decades past. "This generation," he said, has " found more effective ways to change the world. It's signed up for political campaigns, and it's not waiting for things to get so desperate that they feel forced to take to the streets."
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10) As Courts Face Cuts, States Squeeze Defendants
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
April 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/us/07collection.html?ref=us
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Valerie Gainous paid her debt to society, but almost went to jail because of a debt to Florida's courts.
In 1996, she was convicted of writing bad checks; she paid restitution, performed community service and thought she was finished with the criminal justice system. Earlier this year, however, she received a letter from Collections Court telling her that she was once again facing jail time - this time, for failing to pay $240 in leftover court fees and fines, which she says she cannot afford.
Ms. Gainous has been caught up in her state's exceptionally aggressive system to collect the court fines and fees that keep its judiciary system working. Judges themselves dun citizens who have fallen behind in their payments, but unlike other creditors, they can throw debtors in jail - and they do, by the thousands.
As Florida's budget has tightened with the economic crisis, efforts to step up the collections process have intensified, and court clerks say the pressure is on them to bring in every dollar. "I would say there is an even more dramatic focus on those funds now," said Beth Allman, the spokeswoman for the Florida Association of Court Clerks.
Other states are intrigued by Florida's success, and several, including Michigan and Georgia, have also cracked down on people who owe fines. John Dew, the executive director of the Florida Clerks of Court Operations Corporation, said that when he attends national conferences about fees collection these days, states "are really looking to what we're doing in Florida."
With 44 states looking at budget deficits totaling $90 billion this year, 25 state court systems already have budget shortfalls, said Dan Hall, the vice president of the National Center for State Courts. Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court told the American Bar Association in a recent speech that the state courts were in crisis because of budgetary and other issues.
States facing lower revenue from income and property taxes are taking action that includes court cutbacks and fee increases. Oregon will try to save $3.1 million by closing its courthouses every Friday for four months and cutting the pay of 1,800 court workers by 20 percent. New Hampshire began suspending civil and criminal jury trials in eight counties for a month, starting last December, and postponed filling seven of the state's 59 vacant judgeships.
Massachusetts is looking to cut its court system budget by 7.5 percent, which will almost certainly mean staff cuts. Maine is no longer staffing the metal detector checkpoints at its local courthouses. Utah is looking at imposing an $8 "conviction fee" to pay for its security and metal detectors; civil filing fees in the state will be raised as well. Florida has cut its court payroll by 10 percent, with more cuts expected.
Mr. Hall, of the courts organization, said that when states cut their judicial budgets, they "really cut deep into the fabric of our society" by causing delays of weeks or even months in resolving cases. In Iowa, for example, where the courts are trying to make up for a $3.8 million budget cut, courthouses in every county will close for eight days until June 30, and the travel budgets have been cut for judges who go from county to county to hear cases. This means delays for rural residents who have matters that have to be heard by a district judge, including divorce.
Access to efficient courts is essential to helping people resolve life's crises - foreclosures, debt collection, divorce, child support - said Rebecca Love Kourlis, the executive director of the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System at the University of Denver. "You can't put them on the back burner and say, 'we'll get back to you when we have more money and more staffing.' "
Advocates for the poor have urged other states not to follow Florida's example of squeezing defendants harder to make up for budget cuts. Rebekah Diller, deputy director of the justice program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, said the state's system wasted resources "to get blood from a stone." Judges, she said, should not become "debt collectors in robes," which she called both demeaning to the judges and humiliating for the people who must stand before them.
Rhode Island seems to agree. Faced with statistics showing that arrests for nonpayment cost far more than they bring in, the state passed a law in August granting judges latitude to waive court debts for poor defendants.
Florida, however, has continued to tighten its grip. Since 2004, the Legislature has required courts to substantially support their operating expenses through fees collected by county clerks. Some of the clerks use collection agents, while about a third use the collections courts, state officials said. Here in Leon County alone, 839 people were arrested and jailed in the year ending last September over court debts or failure to appear at collections court, according to a study by the Brennan Center. Other Florida counties have less stringent policies.
Around Leon County, there are some 5,400 outstanding "blue writs" - the civil equivalent of an arrest warrant for failing to appear and pay fees. Some people come in and pay when they receive their summons; others spend a night or more in jail, often having been arrested when the writ pops up during incidents like routine traffic stops.
In part, the numbers are high because it can be expensive to be arrested. Fines and fees for a first offense on third-degree felonies like credit card fraud or possession of cocaine are around $500, said Nancy Daniels, a Florida public defender who works in Tallahassee: $340 in court costs, a $100 prosecution fee and $50 for the public defender application fee. If the defendant cannot pay up front, starting a payment plan costs $25.
Constitutional law forbids jailing people solely over fees and fines that they cannot pay, but Florida officials argue that, technically, they are jailing people because they violated court orders, not because they failed to pay fines. Charles A. Francis, the chief judge of the state's Second Judicial Circuit, said most judges found collections court "the most unpleasant part of the job." The judges try not to jail people over fees, he insisted, but added, "Do you allow the orders of your court to go ignored?"
Few people are truly unable to afford monthly payments, he argued.
Shannon Russell, the supervisor of the Leon County collections department, said: "People come in and say, 'I can't pay this.' My answer is, 'you shouldn't have gotten arrested.' "
Estimates for the amount collected by the county vary; the Brennan study said the program took in $18,365 from those arrested for the 12 months studied, after costs, while the county court system said the overall program brought in $768,000 last year, an amount boosted by the threat of a court process.
When Ms. Gainous appeared at a recent collections court hearing, Judge Nina Ashenafi Richardson spoke compassionately, but nonetheless pressed each of the dozens of people in the courtroom to pay what they could or face arrest.
Ms. Gainous, 39, a single mother of four, said she had been sick and could not even make a $40 down payment on her $240 in fees.
Suddenly, there was a startling moment of grace: Another woman waiting in the courtroom, Latasha Penny, volunteered to pay the $40 for her. Ms. Gainous hugged her and sobbed.
When Ms. Penny's case came up, Judge Richardson reduced her monthly payment on $345 in fines to $30, from $45. "You did a very nice thing earlier," Judge Richardson said with a smile.
Days later, Ms. Gainous was still incredulous, and said that she would pay the $10 a month. "It's still hard," she said. "But I'm going to try to get that in, to keep from going to jail for being poor."
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11) Homeowners' Hard Times Are Good for the Foreclosure Business
By ERIC LIPTON
April 6, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/us/06convene.html?ref=us
PALM DESERT, Calif. - The celebration started early Saturday, with poolside music and drinks, as partygoers passed around business cards and compared notes on successful techniques for evicting residents who try to stay in bank-owned property, a process they call "cash for keys."
One woman in a T-shirt walked around with a hand-written sign that read "Bank Property" affixed prominently to her chest.
Welcome to the spring 2009 Reomac conference, which has attracted nearly 3,000 real estate agents and property managers to this lush desert resort. The crowd brimmed with a gusto that is hard to find in this recessionary era. The hotel bar did more business on Saturday night than it did on New Year's Eve. Small wonder: These are the people cashing in on the boom in foreclosed properties.
R.E.O. is industry lingo for "Real Estate Owned," the term that bankers assign to homes they have taken in a foreclosure. Reomac is the industry group that serves the mortgage default trade, specializing in selling the busted-up American dream.
"Things are going tremendously," said Darren Johnson, an R.E.O. agent from the Detroit area, who has handled about 180 bank property sales in the last year. "It has never been this good."
The conference this year is centered on the "R.E.O. tsunami," referring not to any natural disaster but to the one caused by the flood of as many as 700,000 bank properties now on the market nationwide. There were just 100,000 in 2006.
The tsunami has leveled off a bit in recent months, because of foreclosure moratoriums imposed by major banks and the Obama administration. But the real estate agents here were told not to worry - the flood will continue for several more years, and probably has not peaked yet.
In February, nearly 45 percent of the home sales nationwide were R.E.O. or so-called short sales, in which homeowners, under duress, sell a property for less than their mortgage, according to the National Association of Realtors. The sales have intensified a nationwide decline in home values. R.E.O. homes typically sell at a 20 percent discount.
The convention at the Desert Springs J. W. Marriott formally began on Sunday, with a golf tournament, featuring a "19th hole" bash cosponsored by Coldwell Banker, the giant real estate firm. Other convention-goers were at the resort spa, getting top-priced treatments, like the protein-rich caviar scrub for $185.
"What we have seen so far is just a hint of what is coming down the pike in the next three years," Marty Higgins, a San Francisco real estate broker who specializes in apartment buildings, said as he stepped off his golf cart, smoking a cigar.
For real estate industry service providers, like title insurance companies, the R.E.O. market has become essential if they want to remain in business, which explains why executives like Ron Jones, from a California title company, was walking around offering to send wine to one important Arizona agent.
"Buyers now have tunnel vision," Mr. Jones said. "R.E.O. is all they want."
The convention's biggest party was the so-called Tsunami Club event on Sunday night, at an 18,000-square-foot stone house in Rancho Mirage. In the grand foyer, two young women in leather boots, black bustiers and shorts danced atop platforms to a D.J.'s club music, while waiters in white shirts buzzed around with trays filled with hors d'oeuvres and drinks. Beyond was a row of craps and blackjack tables and a pool surrounded by palm trees, with a view of a desert mountain range.
"Everyone wins but the loser," one man yelled at a blackjack table, when the cards turned against him.
The event also included a selection of hand-rolled cigars, a special Scotch lounge and a patio set aside just for networking.
Educational seminars take place on Monday and Tuesday, where the convention-goers can learn about how a giant wave of foreclosed commercial properties is expected to come in behind the flood of bank-owned homes.
They will also learn how to deal with challenges associated with handling vacant properties, like pools the color of pea soup (the color they turn as algae takes over a pool that has not been maintained), as well as what to do when they find a vacant home with abandoned pets.
One focus of the convention is the recent slowdown in the surge of foreclosed properties on the market. The number, while still enormous, means increasing competition among the R.E.O. specialists for listings, particularly given how many agents are trying to get into the field.
Stephen Christie, a Westlake Village, Calif., broker, said the efforts by the Obama administration to slow down foreclosures made no sense.
"It is screwing it all up," Mr. Christie said, as a waiter at the hotel sushi bar handed him a giant tray of fresh-cut fish. "Those people who are behind on their loans are still going to end up in the same place. It is just a Band-aid."
But Mr. Johnson, the agent from Detroit, said he welcomed the effort if it might help families stay in their homes.
"I don't want to make money off of people's hardship," he said.
Such questions, while important, were not the focus for many of the attendees.
Sherry Waite, who serves an affluent community in southern California near San Diego, is eagerly awaiting the foreclosure of some of her neighborhood's high-priced homes.
"Three dozen R.E.O. listings between $1.8 and $8 million," she said, a pomegranate martini in her hand, as she cited what she soon hopes to be handling. "Hello! Those are big numbers."
Benny Nassiri, who with a partner handles R.E.O. sales in California, Kansas and Louisiana, was sitting poolside Sunday on a chaise longue in a red-white-and-blue bikini, Dior sunglasses and Bebe sandals, sipping a beer and asking her assistant about the party planned that night.
Then a call came in on her cellphone, related to a property she had put on the market just two days ago in Carson, Calif.
"Asking price $360," Ms. Nassiri told the prospective bidder. "Yes, we already have a couple of offers. Are you ready to make one?"
The call complete, she had her aide send an e-mail message to the possible buyer, as she promised him she could help arrange financing. Sales certainly are hot, she said. "There just is not enough inventory," she said, before looking once again poolside.
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12) Obama's Top Auto Industry Troubleshooter
By LOUISE STORY
April 6, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/business/06rattner.html?adxnnl=1&ref=us&adxnnlx=1239051863-spb/zHdcg4TDYRMuab0qEg
After 26 years as one of the most politically connected investment bankers on Wall Street, Steven Rattner finally took a job in Washington - only it is not quite the one friends and business associates thought it would be.
Washington buzzed that Mr. Rattner, a big name in the New York media world who, friends say, aspires to a cabinet post like Treasury secretary, would be named the car czar of the Obama administration. Instead, he is one of 14 people on a committee that is orchestrating the rescue of the giant automakers.
Still, Mr. Rattner, a well-known media banker, is playing a central role as car czar lite, traveling to Detroit to visit plants, meeting with the automakers' bankers, unions and bondholders, and advising the White House on which companies seem salvageable and how. If he succeeds, he may get a chance at a larger job in the administration.
That is a big if. He has to push the car companies to overhaul decades-old practices, persuade his former colleagues on Wall Street to lower their demands on the automakers' debt payments and appeal to union leaders who may be turned off by Mr. Rattner's financial success.
Mr. Rattner said in an interview that he has long been interested in returning to Washington, where he worked as a newspaper reporter 30 years ago, and that he hoped to stay on for some time to work on aspects of the financial crisis.
"In the fall, as the economic crisis intensified, it became clearer and clearer to me that this was a moment of historic importance," Mr. Rattner said, "and if one was ever to have an interest in serving your country in the area of economic policy, this was the moment."
Mr. Rattner has been among the most politically connected people in the banking industry. He and his wife, Maureen White, who together have been referred to by New York magazine as the "D.N.C.'s A.T.M.," have hosted many Democratic fund-raisers at their lavish apartment on Fifth Avenue. They were initially Clinton supporters, but they hosted events for Barack Obama after he sealed the nomination.
Among his friends, it has become a parlor game to guess where Mr. Rattner might be posted next. His current job description as a special counselor in the Treasury Department, according to a White House press release, includes the eventual option of moving on to manage a different aspect of the financial crisis.
Mr. Rattner went to Wall Street in the early 1980s, after his stint as a reporter in Washington, and rose through the ranks at Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley before becoming deputy chief executive at the investment bank Lazard in the 1990s.
In 2000, after a power struggle at Lazard, Mr. Rattner co-founded an investment firm, Quadrangle Capital, specializing in private equity investing focused on communications media. Last year, Quadrangle began managing the personal fortune of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York - a longtime friend of Mr. Rattner's.
Quadrangle's funds have performed well, on average, though the firm has canceled plans to start a third fund because of Mr. Rattner's departure.
Friends of Mr. Rattner say it would be hard to find a better auto industry analyst. Orin Kramer, a hedge fund manager and important Obama fund-raiser, called Mr. Rattner "a superstar."
Paul J. Taubman, head of investment banking at Morgan Stanley, said "he's a very fast study." And Henry Kravis, the private equity financier, said "he's thoughtful, thorough and smart."
A former colleague of Mr. Rattner's pointed to his dealings with Cablevision as an example of his toughness and business savvy. When Quadrangle invested in the cable company in 2002, Mr. Rattner told the Dolan family, which runs the company, that he would not support an expansion into satellite businesses. When the Dolans decided to pursue satellite opportunities, Mr. Rattner did not back down, and Quadrangle sold its position in Cablevision.
One thing that is clear: Mr. Rattner knows how to make money. Not only has he stockpiled a personal fortune, but Quadrangle's two private equity funds have performed well, despite some soured investments.
The first Quadrangle fund returned 15 to 20 percent, according to one investor. The second, which has yet to use all its capital to complete its investment portfolio, is already showing single-digit gains. Quadrangle also ran a hedge fund that lost 25 percent last year, before the firm closed it and returned investors' money.
Mr. Rattner's Wall Street ties slowed the process of his appointment, according to two people briefed on the Obama administration's discussions. The administration worried that Mr. Rattner might have a conflict in dealing with Cerberus Capital Management, the investment firm that controlled Chrysler, because his firm was involved in a difficult transaction with Cerberus, centering on a magazine company that Quadrangle created in 2007.
At that time, Cerberus led a group of investors that lent money to the magazine company. At the end of last year, the magazine company broke its debt agreements. The situation is now being handled without Mr. Rattner, who has resigned from Quadrangle, and Cerberus is taking control of the magazines.
The Obama administration decided not to have an independent car czar, as was proposed in a House bill late last year. Instead, the administration chose to use a task force, giving President Obama the ability to be more directly involved in seeking solutions to the auto industry's problems.
Mr. Rattner said his communications media banking background was an asset, as he could approach auto industry issues with a neutral view and help decide how much taxpayer capital to commit and to whom.
"We're making an investment decision," Mr. Rattner said. "We're not running these auto companies. We are helping them restructure and reposition themselves for the future."
Although Mr. Rattner is friendly with many communications media leaders, he has been wary of the publicity his position has brought and at first resisted requests to be interviewed. He has long had a close friendship with the publisher of The New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jr.
As the most powerful member of the auto task force, Mr. Rattner is trying to jolt the industry into action with firm messages, like the one last week to Chrysler that it was unlikely to survive as an independent company.
Mr. Rattner believes General Motors has a greater chance of survival on its own, though he was the bearer of bad news last month when G.M.'s chairman, Rick Wagoner, was asked to step down.
There is no official head of the auto task force, but people in the auto industry say that Mr. Rattner seems to call the shots, and he is the highest-ranking task force official within Treasury. Most of the force is made up of younger people from Wall Street.
Mr. Rattner is viewed as having an afterlife in some other role at Treasury after this auto plan gets set, which should happen in about six months, according to people briefed on the matter.
Mr. Rattner, it turns out, has pondered the auto question before. In the 1970s, he wrote about the government's rescue of Chrysler as a reporter for The New York Times. This time around, of course, Mr. Rattner does not get to write the article, though he will have great say over how it turns out.
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