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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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4/26/2009 SF Speak-out and Video With UE Chicago Republic Workers And Screening
Sunday April 26, 2006 2:00 PM
ILWU Local 34
2nd St and Embarcadero on the left side of AT&T Park
The UE Republic workers of Chicago who occupied their factory to demand their pay and compensation as a result of their factories closure will be speaking and screening a labor film of their occupation on Sunday April 26, 2009 at 2:00 PM in San Francisco at ILWU Local 34 next to AT&T at 2nd St & Embarcadero St. in San Francisco.
The meeting which is being hosted by ILWU Local 34 and also sponsored by Laborfest.net, UPWA.info, Transport Workers Solidarity Committee and other unions and organizations will be the first eye witness report of this important event which electrified the US labor movement. As a result of protests throughout the country including San Francisco at the Bank Of America, the workers won their demands. Bay area workers who are in struggle will also speak at this forum.
To endorse, support or to get more information about this labor solidarity event contact
(415)282-1908 or lvpsf@labornet.org
YouTube - Angry Laid-off Workers Occupy Factory in Chicago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNIQ1-ghsPs
http://www.ueunion.org/uerepublic.html
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Bail Out Working People -- NOT the Banks!
Join us on May 9 in San Francisco for a
TEACH-IN & MASS MOBILIZATION PLANNING MEETING
Without joining together for our common interests, we don't have the strength to change our government's priorities. We must begin to build a massive movement that will have the power to impact government policy and give people genuine hope for a better future.
Help organize a mass mobilization and ongoing action campaign around the following demands:
- No layoffs. Massive job-creation program.
- Tax the rich -- don't bail out the banks.
- Pass the Employee Free Choice Act.
- Single-payer healthcare for all.
- Affordable housing for all. Tenants' rights. Moratorium on foreclosures & evictions.
- Funding for jobs and for social services & infrastructure, not for war.
- Stop the ICE raids and deportations. Legalization for all!
Speakers:
- Art Pulaski, Secretary-Treasurer, California Federation of Labor;
- N'tanya Lee, Executive Director, Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth;
- Mark Dudzic, National Organizer, Labor for Single Payer Healthcare Campaign (Washington, D.C.);
- Rosie Martinez, SEIU Local 721 (Los Angeles);
- Steve Williams, Executive Director, POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights);
- Conny Ford, Vice President, San Francisco Labor Council;
- Clarence Thomas, ILWU Local 10;
- Jack Rasmus, Professor of economics St. Mary's College and Santa Clara Univ.;
- Alan Benjamin, Executive Committee, San Francisco Labor Council and Workers Emergency Recovery Campaign;
- Student representative, City College of San Francisco, Mission Campus.
ALSO:
Extended remarks from Bay Area labor and community leaders -- and ample time for dialogue among teach-in participants.
AND:
Spoken Word performance by YOUNG PLAYAZ
SATURDAY, MAY 9, 2009 - 1 to 5 p.m.
(registration begins at 12:30 p.m.)
Plumbers Hall,
1621 Market St. @ Franklin St.
San Francisco
Initiated by the San Francisco Labor Council, South Bay Labor Council, and Workers Emergency Recovery Campaign
(list of dozens of teach-in endorsers in formation)
Donations will be requested at door to defray cost of renting the hall, printing leaflets and posters, and copying teach-in packets for all participants. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.
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Call for May 9 Teach-In:
Bail Out Working People, NOT the Banks!
The severity of the economic crisis we are currently facing is predicted to rival the magnitude of the Great Depression. Some say it could be even worse. Over 6 million jobs have already been eliminated since the current recession began. Millions of working people have lost their homes to foreclosures and evictions, and many more homes are in or near default, while housing remains unaffordable to millions of people. The ranks of those without health insurance continue to grow. But even these statistics fail to reflect the growing insecurity and stress of working people across the country as we wonder when we, too, might be next.
Meanwhile, the federal government has showered billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars on financial institutions in the form of bailouts. In other words, working people, who are bearing the brunt of the crisis, are being required to shoulder an additional burden. Our tax dollars are being funneled to the very financial institutions and wealthy investors whose reckless gambling in pursuit of unbridled profit was responsible for driving the economy over the cliff. They have refused to say what they've done with trillions. Worse still, to emphasize their contempt for public opinion, these priests of high finance have spent some of the bailout money on huge bonuses, office decorations and the purchase of more CEO jets.
In response to this unprecedented crisis, many organizations have emerged that are addressing specific issues. Some are fighting foreclosures. Others are fighting for a single-payer healthcare system that would guarantee health coverage for everyone. Still others are pressing for the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, which, if passed, will greatly facilitate the ability to form unions.
Although our problems take many forms, most of them stem from a single source. During the past three decades, the inequality in wealth has surged to historic proportions not seen since the 1920s. The hourly wage of working people has actually declined, forcing many additional family members into the workforce just to make ends meet. Aggressive campaigns by employers have created additional barriers to unionizing, resulting in a sharp decline in the percentage of unionized workers. Without unions, workers have not had the means to struggle successfully for higher wages, healthcare coverage, pensions and other benefits.
Given these conditions, can there be any wonder that we have a housing crisis and a healthcare crisis? And during this same period, the taxes on corporations and on the rich in general have dramatically declined, thereby accelerating the accumulation of unprecedented wealth, on the one hand, and the decline of tax dollars for public infrastructure and services, on the other.
In order to have any chance of altering these trends, given the magnitude of the crisis we confront and the forces we're up against, we need to come together, unite all our separate organizations and mount a collective struggle around our common concerns. Without joining together for our common interests, we don't have the strength to change our government's priorities. Only in this way can we begin to build a massive movement that will have the power to impact government policy and give people genuine hope for a better future.
We working people constitute the vast majority of the population. We need to ensure that our society operates in the interests of the majority. But we can only succeed if we stand together in solidarity with each other's demands and struggles.
The goal of the May 9 teach-in is to inspire other teach-ins. It is aimed at organizing massive Solidarity DAYS OF ACTION in support of our common demands. By bringing huge numbers of people together in common actions, people will realize through their own experience that they do not stand alone, and they will gain the confidence that by uniting we can begin to exercise real power.
- Join us and help build a movement.
- Together we can prevail.
- An Injury to One Is an Injury to All!
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ATTEND THE JULY 10 NATIONAL ASSEMBLY CONFERENCE IN PITTSBURGH!
REGISTER FOR THE CONFERENCE and DOWNLOAD PRINTABLE BROCHURE (8.5 X 14) at:
https://natassembly.org/Home_Page.html
In the aftermath of the March 21 and April 3-4 demonstrations, a number of critical questions must be addressed by the antiwar movement: What next for the movement? Where do we go from here? How can we broaden the movement and win new forces to our cause? How can we help ensure that our next demonstrations are larger than the ones organized in March and April and that the ones organized after those will be even larger?
We who are supporters of the National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations believe these questions can best be answered by convening a national antiwar conference open to all peace activists who will have the opportunity to share their ideas and proposals, be part of a broad ranging discussion and debate, and help make decisions based on one person, one vote.
Such a conference will be held at La Roche College in Pittsburgh on July 10-12, 2009.
The National Assembly was established nearly a year ago at a national conference attended by over 400 people, including top leaders of the antiwar movement as well as activists from many states. One of the main decisions that conference made was to do everything possible to unite the movement in urgently needed visible street actions.
Now we look to the July conference, which will provide a forum for dealing with crucial issues as Washington escalates its wars, occupations, bombing attacks, sanctions, threats and illegal interventions in the Middle East and elsewhere. We need your ideas, your input and your presence to help make this conference a success. Please join us in Pittsburgh on July 10-12. Bring all the troops home now!
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EMERGENCY UPDATE: Bad news for Troy Davis
ANOTHER INNOCENT MAN ON DEATH ROW
Amnesty International USA
alerts@takeaction.amnestyusa.org
Dear Readers,
It's not the end of the road for Troy Davis, but the news is not good.
Yesterday, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Troy Davis' bid for a new trial. In a 2-1 vote, the court cited technical reasons to reject Davis' petition for a hearing.
But all hope is not lost. Troy has 30 days to file another petition with the US Supreme Court.
Troy and his lawyers are doing everything they can to fight this decision from the inside. It is up to us to turn up the pressure on the outside. Even if you've taken action before, keep flooding Governor Perdue's office with emails demanding justice for Troy. And pass the action on to everyone you know. There is power in numbers and when you stand behind Troy Davis, you make the fight for justice even stronger!
We can't thank you enough.
In solidarity,
Sue, Brian, Jessie, and the rest of the Death Penalty Campaign team
P.S. Save the date - National Day of Solidarity for Troy Davis coming in May. We'll be in touch soon to let you know how you can support Troy in your own community!
To send a message to Governor Perdue:
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/index.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&template=x.ascx&action=12168
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Please spread the message where ever you will be during the next weeks!
Thank you so much,
Annette in Heidelberg - Germany
German Network Against the Death Penalty and to Free Mumia
Dear co-strugglers for Mumia,
this is our call for action - sign the online-petition to the Justices of the US Supreme Court.
We launched it at the beginning of March in Germany and Austria - and it is growing fast now.
It was already signed by Noam Chomsky, Frances Goldin, Robert Meeropol, Harold Wilson, Colin Firth, Anthony Arnove, Marc Taylor, Julia Wright, Pam Africa, Veronica Jones and so many others.
The updated letter with the 3500th signature was sent to the Justices this Easter Monday, April 13.
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/supreme/petition.html
Support Mumia in this most dangerous state of his life.
Please spread it as far as you can! Post it, send it around, use all your powerful means of creating news and attention.
German Network Against the Death Penalty and to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
www.inprisonmywholelife.com
www.mumia-hoerbuch.de
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Unreasonable Search
Editorial
April 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/opinion/20mon1.html
2) Erin Go Broke
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
April 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/opinion/20krugman.html
3) 420: Thoughts on Pot vs. Alcohol from a Former Police Chief
By Norm Stamper
Retired Seattle police chief, member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
Posted April 20, 2009 | 11:01 AM (EST)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/norm-stamper/420-thoughts-on-pot-vs-al_b_188627.html
4) Waterboarding Used 266 Times on 2 Suspects
By SCOTT SHANE
April 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/world/20detain.html?hp
5) Marijuana Advocates Point to Signs of Change
By JESSE McKINLEY
April 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/us/20marijuana.html?ref=us
6) Reliving the Sean Bell Case by Renaming a Street
By ANNE BARNARD
April 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/nyregion/20bell.html?ref=nyregion
7) Exxon Mobil Tops Wal-Mart to Lead a Poorer Fortune 500
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/business/20fortune.html?ref=business
8) Confidence Games and Ponzi Schemes
By Lynn Henderson
March/April 2009
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/
9) Save the Life of Kevin Cooper!
By Carole Seligman
March/April 2009
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/marapr_09/marapr_09_25.html
10) Ritual of Death
By Kevin Cooper
March/April 2009
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/marapr_09/marapr_09_26.html
11) Innocence Makes No Difference
By Kevin Cooper
March/April 2009
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/marapr_09/marapr_09_27.html
12) Democracy and Worker's Power
By Bonnie Weinstein
March/April 2009
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/marapr_09/marapr_09_07.html
13) An Effort to Save Flint, Mich., by Shrinking It
By DAVID STREITFELD
April 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/business/22flint.html?hp
14) Britain's Debt Deepens; Its Outlook Grows Gloomier
By JULIA WERDIGIER
April 23, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/business/global/23pound.html?hp
15) For Housing Crisis, the End Probably Isn't Near
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Economic Scene
April 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/business/economy/22leonhardt.html?hp
16) French Police Round Up Migrants
By CAROLINE BROTHERS
April 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/world/europe/22iht-france.html?ref=world
17) Supreme Court Cuts Back Officers' Searches of Vehicles
By ADAM LIPTAK
April 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/us/22scotus.html?ref=us
18) Large Urban-Suburban Gap Seen in Graduation Rates
By SAM DILLON
April 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/education/22dropout.html?ref=education
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1) Unreasonable Search
Editorial
April 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/opinion/20mon1.html
The Supreme Court has long struggled to balance the privacy rights of students against schools' need to keep campuses safe. On Tuesday, the court hears arguments in a suit brought on behalf of a 13-year-old girl who was strip-searched based on a fellow student's false report that she had possessed ibuprofen pain-relief pills.
The invasion of privacy was extreme and the security rationale weak. The court should rule, as a lower appellate court did, that the search was unconstitutional.
Savana Redding was an honors student at a middle school in Safford, Ariz., with a clean discipline record. A friend of Savana's, who was found in possession of pain relievers, told school authorities that Savana had given her 400-milligram ibuprofen pills, a prescription-level dose of the pain reliever in over-the-counter Advil and Motrin, used to treat headaches and menstrual cramps.
Based on this information, a male assistant principal had Savana taken out of class and strip-searched by two female employees. Savana was told to pull her bra in a way that exposed her breasts, and to pull out her underwear to expose her pelvic area. Savana, who was too scared to refuse, later called the search "the most humiliating experience" in her life. No drugs were found.
Savana's mother sued the school district, charging that her daughter's Fourth Amendment rights had been violated.
The Supreme Court has held that to satisfy the Fourth Amendment, a search of a student by school officials must be reasonable at the start. The search of Savana was not. It was based entirely on the self-serving statement of a student who was trying to deflect blame from herself. The school did not corroborate the tip before acting and the student who gave it did not say that Savana currently had ibuprofen, or that she was hiding it in a place where a strip search would be needed to find it.
The Supreme Court has also said that a search of a student must be reasonable in scope, taking into account the circumstances.
Again, the search of Savana fell short. As the San Francisco-based United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit observed, it is "common sense" that telling a 13-year-old girl to disrobe to partially reveal her breasts and pelvis because she might possess ibuprofen - "an infraction that poses imminent danger to no one" - was unreasonable. The school could, the court pointed out, simply have kept Savana in the principal's office until a parent arrived.
With many communities today worried about keeping drugs and other contraband out of schools, the Supreme Court may be tempted to focus on schools' need to enforce their rules. The court may also be reluctant to hold schools liable for damages for improper searches, given how tight budgets are right now.
These are important concerns, but so - as the founders made clear in the Fourth Amendment - is the right of every American to be free from unreasonable searches. The strip-search of Savana was unnecessary, humiliating and clearly unreasonable.
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2) Erin Go Broke
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
April 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/opinion/20krugman.html
"What," asked my interlocutor, "is the worst-case outlook for the world economy?" It wasn't until the next day that I came up with the right answer: America could turn Irish.
What's so bad about that? Well, the Irish government now predicts that this year G.D.P. will fall more than 10 percent from its peak, crossing the line that is sometimes used to distinguish between a recession and a depression.
But there's more to it than that: to satisfy nervous lenders, Ireland is being forced to raise taxes and slash government spending in the face of an economic slump - policies that will further deepen the slump.
And it's that closing off of policy options that I'm afraid might happen to the rest of us. The slogan "Erin go bragh," usually translated as "Ireland forever," is traditionally used as a declaration of Irish identity. But it could also, I fear, be read as a prediction for the world economy.
How did Ireland get into its current bind? By being just like us, only more so. Like its near-namesake Iceland, Ireland jumped with both feet into the brave new world of unsupervised global markets. Last year the Heritage Foundation declared Ireland the third freest economy in the world, behind only Hong Kong and Singapore.
One part of the Irish economy that became especially free was the banking sector, which used its freedom to finance a monstrous housing bubble. Ireland became in effect a cool, snake-free version of coastal Florida.
Then the bubble burst. The collapse of construction sent the economy into a tailspin, while plunging home prices left many people owing more than their houses were worth. The result, as in the United States, has been a rising tide of defaults and heavy losses for the banks.
And the troubles of the banks are largely responsible for putting the Irish government in a policy straitjacket.
On the eve of the crisis Ireland seemed to be in good shape, fiscally speaking, with a balanced budget and a low level of public debt. But the government's revenue - which had become strongly dependent on the housing boom - collapsed along with the bubble.
Even more important, the Irish government found itself having to take responsibility for the mistakes of private bankers. Last September Ireland moved to shore up confidence in its banks by offering a government guarantee on their liabilities - thereby putting taxpayers on the hook for potential losses of more than twice the country's G.D.P., equivalent to $30 trillion for the United States.
The combination of deficits and exposure to bank losses raised doubts about Ireland's long-run solvency, reflected in a rising risk premium on Irish debt and warnings about possible downgrades from ratings agencies.
Hence the harsh new policies. Earlier this month the Irish government simultaneously announced a plan to purchase many of the banks' bad assets - putting taxpayers even further on the hook - while raising taxes and cutting spending, to reassure lenders.
Is Ireland's government doing the right thing? As I read the debate among Irish experts, there's widespread criticism of the bank plan, with many of the country's leading economists calling for temporary nationalization instead. (Ireland has already nationalized one major bank.) The arguments of these Irish economists are very similar to those of a number of American economists, myself included, about how to deal with our own banking mess.
But there isn't much disagreement about the need for fiscal austerity. As far as responding to the recession goes, Ireland appears to be really, truly without options, other than to hope for an export-led recovery if and when the rest of the world bounces back.
So what does all this say about those of us who aren't Irish?
For now, the United States isn't confined by an Irish-type fiscal straitjacket: the financial markets still consider U.S. government debt safer than anything else.
But we can't assume that this will always be true. Unfortunately, we didn't save for a rainy day: thanks to tax cuts and the war in Iraq, America came out of the "Bush boom" with a higher ratio of government debt to G.D.P. than it had going in. And if we push that ratio another 30 or 40 points higher - not out of the question if economic policy is mishandled over the next few years - we might start facing our own problems with the bond market.
Not to put too fine a point on it, that's one reason I'm so concerned about the Obama administration's bank plan. If, as some of us fear, taxpayer funds end up providing windfalls to financial operators instead of fixing what needs to be fixed, we might not have the money to go back and do it right.
And the lesson of Ireland is that you really, really don't want to put yourself in a position where you have to punish your economy in order to save your banks.
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3) 420: Thoughts on Pot vs. Alcohol from a Former Police Chief
By Norm Stamper
Retired Seattle police chief, member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
Posted April 20, 2009 | 11:01 AM (EST)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/norm-stamper/420-thoughts-on-pot-vs-al_b_188627.html
As 5:00 p.m. rolls around my interior clock starts chiming. I'll have an ice-cold, bone-dry martini, thank you. Jalapeno olives and a twist. If the occasion calls for it (temperatures in the twenties, a hot political debate on the tube) I may substitute two fingers of Kentucky sour mash. Four-twenty? Doesn't resonate. But with April 20 approaching and Waldos of the world gearing up to celebrate their favorite day of the year, it's not a bad time to consider, yet again, the pluses and minuses of alcohol vs. cannabis.
First, a disclaimer: I am a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, but I don't officially represent the organization in this forum. That said, I can't very well check my affiliation, or beliefs, at the keyboard when I sit down to blog for HuffPost. We at LEAP are current and former cops and other criminal justice practitioners who have witnessed firsthand the futility and manifold injustices of the drug war. Our professional experiences have led us to conclude that the more dangerous an illicit substance--from crack to krank--the greater the justification for its legalization, regulation, and control. It is the prohibition of drugs that leads inexorably to high rates of death, disease, crime, and addiction.
Back to booze vs. pot. How do the effects of these two drugs stack up against specific health and public safety factors?
Alcohol-related traffic accidents claim approximately 14,000 lives each year, down significantly from 20 or 30 years ago (attributed to improved education and enforcement). Figures for THC-related traffic fatalities are elusive, especially since alcohol is almost always present in the blood as well, and since the numbers of "marijuana-only" traffic fatalities are so small. But evidence from studies, including laboratory simulations, feeds the stereotype that those under the influence of canniboids tend to (1) be more aware of their impaired psychomotor skills, and (2) drive well below the speed limit. Those under the influence of alcohol are much more likely to be clueless or defiant about their condition, and to speed up and drive recklessly.
Hundreds of alcohol overdose deaths occur annually. There has never been a single recorded marijuana OD fatality.
According to the American Public Health Association, excessive alcohol consumption is the third leading cause of death in this country. APHA pegs the negative economic impact of extreme drinking at $150 billion a year.
There have been no documented cases of lung cancer in a marijuana-only smoker, nor has pot been scientifically linked to any type of cancer. (Don't trust an advocate's take on this? Try the fair and balanced coverage over at Fox.) Alcohol abuse contributes to a multitude of long-term negative health consequences, notably cirrhosis of the liver and a variety of cancers.
While a small quantity, taken daily, is being touted for its salutary health effects, alcohol is one of the worst drugs one can take for pain management, marijuana one of the best.
Alcohol contributes to acts of violence; marijuana reduces aggression. In approximately three million cases of reported violent crimes last year, the offender had been drinking. This is particularly true in cases of domestic violence, sexual assault, and date rape. Marijuana use, in and of itself, is absent from both crime reports and the scientific literature. There is simply no link to be made.
Over the past four years I've asked police officers throughout the U.S. (and in Canada) two questions. When's the last time you had to fight someone under the influence of marijuana? (I'm talking marijuana only, not pot plus a six-pack or a fifth of tequila.) My colleagues pause, they reflect. Their eyes widen as they realize that in their five or fifteen or thirty years on the job they have never had to fight a marijuana user. I then ask: When's the last time you had to fight a drunk? They look at their watches.
All of which begs the question. If one of these two drugs is implicated in dire health effects, high mortality rates, and physical violence--and the other is not--what are we to make of our nation's marijuana laws? Or alcohol laws, for that matter.
Anybody out there want to launch a campaign for the re-prohibition of alcohol? Didn't think so. The answer, of course, is responsible drinking. Marijuana smokers, for their part, have already shown (apart from that little matter known as the law) greater responsibility in their choice of drugs than those of us who choose alcohol.
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4) Waterboarding Used 266 Times on 2 Suspects
By SCOTT SHANE
April 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/world/20detain.html?hp
C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda, far more than had been previously reported.
The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum. Abu Zubaydah has been described as a Qaeda operative.
A former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.
The 2005 memo also says that the C.I.A. used waterboarding 183 times in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The New York Times reported in 2007 that Mr. Mohammed had been barraged more than 100 times with harsh interrogation methods, causing C.I.A. officers to worry that they might have crossed legal limits and to halt his questioning. But the precise number and the exact nature of the interrogation method was not previously known.
The release of the numbers is likely to become part of the debate about the morality and efficacy of interrogation methods that the Justice Department under the Bush administration declared legal even though the United States had historically treated them as torture.
President Obama plans to visit C.I.A. headquarters Monday and make public remarks to employees, as well as meet privately with officials, an agency spokesman said Sunday night. It will be his first visit to the agency, whose use of harsh interrogation methods he often condemned during the presidential campaign and whose secret prisons he ordered closed on the second full day of his presidency.
C.I.A. officials had opposed the release of the interrogation memo, dated May 30, 2005, which was one of four secret legal memos on interrogation that Mr. Obama ordered to be released last Thursday.
Mr. Obama said C.I.A. officers who had used waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods with the approval of the Justice Department would not be prosecuted. He has repeatedly suggested that he opposes Congressional proposals for a "truth commission" to examine Bush administration counterterrorism programs, including interrogation and warrantless eavesdropping.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has begun a yearlong, closed-door investigation of the C.I.A. interrogation program, in part to assess claims of Bush administration officials that brutal treatment, including slamming prisoners into walls, shackling them in standing positions for days and confining them in small boxes, was necessary to get information.
The fact that waterboarding was repeated so many times may raise questions about its effectiveness, as well as about assertions by Bush administration officials that their methods were used under strict guidelines.
A footnote to another 2005 Justice Department memo released Thursday said waterboarding was used both more frequently and with a greater volume of water than the C.I.A. rules permitted.
The new information on the number of waterboarding episodes came out over the weekend when a number of bloggers, including Marcy Wheeler of the blog emptywheel, discovered it in the May 30, 2005, memo.
The sentences in the memo containing that information appear to have been redacted from some copies but are visible in others. Initial news reports about the memos in The New York Times and other publications did not include the numbers.
Michael V. Hayden, director of the C.I.A. for the last two years of the Bush administration, would not comment when asked on the program "Fox News Sunday" if Mr. Mohammed had been waterboarded 183 times. He said he believed that that information was still classified.
A C.I.A. spokesman, reached Sunday night, also would not comment on the new information.
Mr. Hayden said he had opposed the release of the memos, even though President Obama has said the techniques will never be used again, because they would tell Al Qaeda "the outer limits that any American would ever go in terms of interrogating an Al Qaeda terrorist."
He also disputed an article in The New York Times on Saturday that said Abu Zubaydah had revealed nothing new after being waterboarded, saying that he believed that after unspecified "techniques" were used, Abu Zubaydah revealed information that led to the capture of another terrorist suspect, Ramzi Binalshibh.
The Times article, based on information from former intelligence officers who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Abu Zubaydah had revealed a great deal of information before harsh methods were used and after his captors stripped him of clothes, kept him in a cold cell and kept him awake at night. The article said interrogators at the secret prison in Thailand believed he had given up all the information he had, but officials at headquarters ordered them to use waterboarding.
He revealed no new information after being waterboarded, the article said, a conclusion that appears to be supported by a footnote to a 2005 Justice Department memo saying the use of the harshest methods appeared to have been "unnecessary" in his case.
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5) Marijuana Advocates Point to Signs of Change
By JESSE McKINLEY
April 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/us/20marijuana.html?ref=us
SAN FRANCISCO - On Monday, somewhere in New York City, 420 people will gather for High Times magazine's annual beauty pageant, a secretly located and sold-out event that its sponsor says will "turn the Big Apple into the Baked Apple and help us usher in a new era of marijuana freedom in America."
They will not be the only ones partaking: April 20 has long been an unofficial day of celebration for marijuana fans, an occasion for campus smoke-outs, concerts and cannabis festivals. But some advocates of legal marijuana say this year's "high holiday" carries extra significance as they sense increasing momentum toward acceptance of the drug, either as medicine or entertainment.
"It is the biggest moment yet," said Ethan Nadelmann, the founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance in Washington, who cited several national polls showing growing support for legalization. "There's a sense that the notion of legalizing marijuana is starting to cross the fringes into mainstream debate."
For Mr. Nadelmann and others like him, the signs of change are everywhere, from the nation's statehouses - where more than a dozen legislatures have taken up measures to allow some medical use of marijuana or some easing of penalties for recreational use - to its swimming pools, where an admission of marijuana use by the Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps was largely forgiven with a shrug.
Long stigmatized as political poison, the marijuana movement has found new allies in prominent politicians, including Representatives Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Ron Paul, Republican of Texas, who co-wrote a bill last year to decrease federal penalties for possession and to give medical users new protections.
The bill failed, but with the recession prompting bulging budget deficits, some legislators in California and Massachusetts have gone further, suggesting that the drug could be legalized and taxed, a concept that has intrigued even such ideologically opposed pundits as Glenn Beck of Fox News and Jack Cafferty of CNN.
"Look, I'm a libertarian," Mr. Beck said on his Feb. 26 program. "You want to legalize marijuana, you want to legalize drugs - that's fine."
All of which has longtime proponents of the drug feeling oddly optimistic and even overexposed.
"We've been on national cable news more in the first three months than we typically are in an entire year," said Bruce Mirken, the director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project, a reform group based in Washington. "And any time you've got Glenn Beck and Barney Frank agreeing on something, it's either a sign that change is impending or that the end times are here."
Beneficiaries of the moment include Norml, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, which advocates legalization, and other groups like it. Norml says that its Web traffic and donations (sometimes in $4.20 increments) have surged, and that it will begin a television advertising campaign on Monday, which concludes with a plea, and an homage, to President Obama.
"Legalization," the advertisement says, "yes we can!"
That seems unlikely anytime soon. In a visit last week to Mexico, where drug violence has claimed thousands of lives and threatened to spill across the border, Mr. Obama said the United States must work to curb demand for drugs.
Still, pro-marijuana groups have applauded recent remarks by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who suggested that federal law enforcement resources would not be used to pursue legitimate medical marijuana users and outlets in California and a dozen other states that allow medical use of the drug. Court battles are also percolating. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard arguments last Tuesday in San Francisco in a 2007 lawsuit challenging the government's official skepticism about medical uses of the drug.
But Allen F. St. Pierre, the executive director of Norml, said he had cautioned supporters that any legal changes that might occur would probably be incremental.
"The balancing act this year is trying to get our most active, most vocal supporters to be more realistic in their expectations in what the Obama administration is going to do," Mr. St. Pierre said.
For fans of the drug, perhaps the biggest indicator of changing attitudes is how widespread the observance of April 20 has become, including its use in marketing campaigns for stoner-movie openings (like last year's "Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantánamo Bay") and as a peg for marijuana-related television programming (like the G4 network's prime-time double bill Monday of "Super High Me" and "Half Baked").
Events tied to April 20 have "reached the tipping point in the last few years after being a completely underground phenomenon for a long time," said Steven Hager, the creative director and former editor of High Times. "And I think that's symptomatic of the fact that people's perception of marijuana is reaching a tipping point."
Mr. Hager said the significance of April 20 dates to a ritual begun in the early 1970s in which a group of Northern California teenagers smoked marijuana every day at 4:20 p.m. Word of the ritual spread and expanded to a yearly event in various places. Soon, marijuana aficionados were using "420" as a code for smoking and using it as a sign-off on fliers for concerts where the drug would be plentiful.
In recent years, the April 20 events have become so widespread that several colleges have urged students to just say no. At the University of Colorado, Boulder, where thousands of students regularly use the day to light up in the quad, administrators sent an e-mail message this month pleading with students not to "participate in unlawful activity that debases the reputation of your university and degree."
A similar warning was sent to students at the University of California, Santa Cruz - home of the Grateful Dead archives - which banned overnight guests at residence halls leading up to April 20.
None of which, of course, is expected to discourage the dozens of parties - large and small - planned for Monday, including the top-secret crowning of Ms. High Times.
In San Francisco, meanwhile, where a city supervisor, Ross Mirkarimi, suggested last week that the city should consider getting into the medical marijuana business as a provider, big crowds are expected to turn out at places like Hippie Hill, a drum-happy glade in Golden Gate Park.
A cloud of pungent smoke is also expected to be thick at concerts like one planned at the Fillmore rock club, where the outspoken pro-marijuana hip-hop group Cypress Hill is expected to take the stage at 4:20 p.m.
"You can see twice the amount of smoke as you do at a regular show," said B-Real, a rapper in the group. "And it's a great fragrance."
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6) Reliving the Sean Bell Case by Renaming a Street
By ANNE BARNARD
April 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/nyregion/20bell.html?ref=nyregion
New York politicians love to rename streets, and the battles that ensue range from the explosive to the mundane.
The City Council's vote in 2007 to reject renaming a street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, after the black activist Sonny Carson came closer to dividing the Council along racial lines than any issue that members could recall. On the other hand, when Rose Feiss, the founder of a lampshade factory, was honored in 1987 with an eponymous boulevard in the South Bronx, the main objection was that the change might confuse people looking for the former Walnut Street.
So William G. Bell is prepared for anything as he pushes for a Sean Bell Way in Jamaica, Queens. "I can't get no more disappointed than what I already went through," said Mr. Bell, who is seeking to rename several blocks of Liverpool Street for his son Sean, 23, who was killed there in a barrage of police bullets as he left a nightclub on what would have been his wedding day, Nov. 25, 2006.
Police officers testified that in a chaotic scene outside the club they believed that a friend of Sean Bell's had a gun. No gun was found. When a Queens judge last year acquitted the three detectives involved, the decision spurred protests that led to hundreds of arrests.
But Mr. Bell's campaign has proceeded largely without controversy. Community Board 12, the neighborhood advisory body, approved the proposal on Wednesday, sending it on to the City Council, which will vote on a package of name changes later this year. The Council usually approves proposals backed, like Mr. Bell's is, by the local community board and council member.
Still, street names resonate as symbols of identity. So the prospect of a Sean Bell Way - named for a man whose death renewed anger over police shootings of black men - has unleashed a flood of conflicting emotions.
"A small measure of justice for the Bell family," said Shawn Williams, a crime victims' advocate who has worked with the Bells on community projects, and who cried with them after the community board vote.
"Absurd," countered Michael J. Palladino, the president of the Detectives' Endowment Association, a police union. He noted that Mr. Bell's blood-alcohol content was above the legal limit when his car hit a detective before the shooting.
On Liverpool Street, lined by neat, wood-framed houses and small front yards, a few residents balked at renaming it for the ugliest date in its history. But more relished the idea. "I think it's good - so we can remember what happened," said Esriee Seepersaud, 46, who drives a school bus.
Advocates of the renaming differ on the meaning of the move. Does it simply commemorate a tragedy and comfort a family? Or does it wrest from the city a new admission that the police did wrong?
The Bells' city councilman, Leroy Comrie, said the proposed name change would not be an indictment of the police. "I'm not trying to condemn the police or say that Sean Bell was a saint, but I think that what happened there was a unique tragedy," he said.
But for many of the scores of people who showed up from all over New York to support the Bell family at the community board hearing - some wearing T-shirts that read "I Am Sean Bell" in tall silver letters - the vote repudiated, in a small way, the acquittal of the police officers.
"The police were mostly responsible," said Jamel McClain, 32, one of the members of the Escalade Krown Holdaz, a social club for sport utility vehicle owners, whose members arrived in force. "I feel like I am Sean Bell, because we are all black males."
The proposal passed the community board, 30 to 2, with 5 abstentions.
The board chairwoman, Adjoa Gzifa, said she voted no because many young men die in shootings - including her own son, killed in a robbery in North Carolina.
"We have sewer problems, we have drainage problems, we have foreclosure problems, we have things that we need to be focusing on, and street renamings are not one of them," she said.
She said she had no quarrel with the Bell family, but wanted to maintain a high bar for renaming streets, reserving the honor for those who have made significant contributions to the city.
But the annals of street renamings include both the hefty and the trivial.
And there is precedent for memorializing someone more for the manner of his death than for the grandeur of his achievements: Earlier this month, the Council approved naming a street in Bushwick, Brooklyn, for Jose O. Sucuzhañay, an Ecuadorean immigrant beaten to death there last year.
Last month, part of 53rd Street in Manhattan was temporarily named U2 Way in honor of the band's appearance on "The Late Show With David Letterman." The actor Jerry Orbach got a corner in Midtown - not without a fight - but a proposed Big Pun Street in the Bronx for the rap MC Big Punisher was rejected over some of his lyrics.
Last week, a corner in Murray Hill in Manhattan was named for Jan Karski, a Polish diplomat who was the first person to bring news of the Holocaust to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Police officers and others who die in the line of duty are often honored. Two corners at Sullivan and Bleecker Streets in Greenwich Village were recently named for two police auxiliary officers, Eugene Marshalik and Nicholas T. Pekearo, killed nearby in 2007 as they chased a gunman.
Sometimes, opposition comes when it is least expected: Eric N. Gioia, a Queens councilman, encountered fierce community opposition to renaming a street for an advocate for Irish immigrants who died while serving in Iraq.
One critic worried that if streets were renamed for everyone who died in Iraq, street signs would look like totem poles, Mr. Gioia recalled. The proposal ultimately passed.
The Council battled over Sonny Carson, who once described himself as "antiwhite." Only one white council member, Tony Avella, voted for the name change. Councilman Charles Barron recalled it as "the most racially divisive vote" he had seen in eight years on the Council.
At least navigational confusion is no longer an issue. Nowadays, in a gesture of mercy toward postal workers, the original street name stays, along with the new one.
But in 1903, a city councilman told The New York Times that a proposal to rename the Bowery - local merchants thought the name had unsavory connotations - had gone nowhere because soldiers and sailors would get lost looking for the famous party zone.
"The efficiency of the Army and Navy will be impaired," the councilman lamented. "Change the flag of the country, but don't change the name of the Bowery."
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7) Exxon Mobil Tops Wal-Mart to Lead a Poorer Fortune 500
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/business/20fortune.html?ref=business
Exxon Mobil unseated Wal-Mart Stores in the 2009 Fortune 500 list, during what the magazine called the worst year ever for the country's largest publicly traded companies.
Fortune's list, released Sunday, ranked companies by their revenue in 2008. Exxon, which is based in Irving, Tex., took in $442.85 billion in revenue last year, up almost 19 percent from 2007. The company also had the biggest annual profit, earning $45.2 billion.
Wal-Mart had held the top spot for six of the last seven years but fell to No. 2 this year. Still, the retail giant's 2008 revenue climbed 7 percent to $405.6 billion, as the battered economy sent more consumers searching for bargains. The company, which is based in Bentonville, Ark., had $13.4 billion in annual profit, an increase of about 5 percent.
But overall earnings for the companies on the list plunged 85 percent to $98.9 billion from $645 billion in 2007. It was the biggest one-year decline in the 55-year history of the Fortune 500 list.
Energy companies continued to dominate many of the top positions, as last summer's skyrocketing oil and gas prices more than compensated for their plunge in the fall. Chevron held on to third place with $263.16 billion in revenue, up 25 percent. ConocoPhillips climbed one place to fourth, with $230.76 billion in revenue. General Electric, the diverse conglomerate whose troubled financial arm has been weighing on recent results, rose one notch to fifth.
General Motors fell two spots to sixth, as revenue fell 18 percent and losses totaled $30.86 billion in the imploding car market. Ford Motor followed, with $146.28 billion in revenue.
Among the hardest hit in 2008 were financial services companies, Fortune said. Banks, securities firms and insurers took cumulative losses of $213.4 billion, accounting for almost 70 percent of the total dollar decline from the peak year of 2006, the magazine said.
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8) Confidence Games and Ponzi Schemes
By Lynn Henderson
March/April 2009
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/
The United States economy continues its plunge into the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, dragging in its wake the entire world's financial system. What is the cause of this now world-wide economic catastrophe? Without a clear understanding of its root causes we will not be able to find a way out. Rather the crisis itself will be used to inflict even greater damage on its chief victims, working people here and around the world.
The explanation initially floated by the economists, the Wall Street financial experts, Democratic and Republican politicians and the entire news media was-excesses of the deregulation movement. The lack of government regulation and oversight allowed for greedy and irresponsible actions in the major financial institutions of the country. This led to the proliferation of new risky, exotic financial instruments especially in the home mortgage sector of the economy.
These new instruments lacking "transparency" were too complicated for the market to accurately evaluate. The usually efficient, unerring, invisible hand of the free market, they explained, was unable to perform its normal functions and the economy fell into the financial crisis.
This explanation of the financial melt down had certain attractive features. It admitted to no intrinsic or systemic flaws within free market capitalism itself. Corrective action could be taken by punishing and holding to account those who had engaged in greedy, irresponsible actions and future crises would be avoided by the introduction of new government regulation and oversight. This, they also explained, would of course have to be "responsible" regulation, so as not to curb the creative, dynamic, entrepreneurial genius of free market capitalism.
But lately this explanation has been quietly set aside. For one, the idea that greed-driven, irresponsible capitalists had even an indirect role in the financial collapse cut a little too close to the bone.
But an even more important consideration required abandoning this initial explanation. It politically conflicted with the chosen bipartisan solution to the crisis-massive government bailouts of banks, brokerage firms, insurance companies and all other financial institutions "too big to fail." Rather than being "held to account" they were to be rewarded with the largest government subsidies in history. And the more deeply and directly they were involved in greed-driven, reckless economic behavior, the larger their bailout.
And who are the principle designers and administrators of these bailout packages? Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. under the Bush administration and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, now under the Obama administration, both major architects of deregulation. Both were prominent promoters of the "new risky, exotic financial instruments" said to be at the heart of the financial collapse.
The reaction was a firestorm of anger and opposition from the U.S. population. They understand quite clearly that these bailouts and the ones to come are not for free, but will channel wealth out of the pockets of the vast majority into the coffers of the financial elite. A new explanation of the crisis more compatible with selling the bailout scam to the American middle class/working class had to be fashioned.
The source of the crisis was not predatory, reckless economic actions. The new root cause was a "crisis of confidence"-especially loss of confidence in our financial institutions, which creates fear, panic and uncertainty, paralyzing normal economic activity. And confidence in these institutions can only be restored by the application of massive government bailouts.
This is the line now being repeated at every level in the government and mass media. David Brooks, a regular Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times writes in his February 13th column: "The crisis was labeled an economic crisis, but it was really a psychological crisis. It was caused by a mood of fear and uncertainty, which led consumers to not spend, bankers to not lend and entrepreneurs to not risk."
Thomas L. Friedman, another regular New York Times Op-Ed columnist, wrote as far back as November 16: "If you are going to fight a global financial panic like this, you have to go at it with overwhelming force-an overwhelming stimulus that gets people shopping again and an overwhelming recapitalization of the banking system that gets it lending again.... Yes, that may mean rescuing some bankers who don't deserve rescuing.... No it's not fair. But fairness is not on the menu anymore."
The "crisis of confidence" line is not new or original. It was used by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his first inaugural address in 1933 during the Great Depression: "Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself-nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." A catchy speech line, but purposely devoid of any insight into the causes of the Great Depression or our present economic crisis.
The "crisis of confidence" scenario magically shifts the source of the problem away from economic and political actions to the realm of psychological aberration. It is certainly true that there is a growing mood of fear, uncertainty, panic and loss of confidence. But these are not the causes of the economic collapse; they are responses to it-and not irrational responses.
If you are a laid off worker in manufacturing with little prospect of re-employment, in a society that is shedding manufacturing jobs at an ever accelerating rate, it is not unreasonable for you to be afraid.
If you are a student about to graduate with little or no hope of finding a job, feelings of uncertainty are certainly justified.
If you are a white collar worker with a mortgage now larger than any possible amount you could sell your home for and fellow employees all around you are being laid off at an accelerating rate, a growing sense of panic is understandable.
And there is certainly a growing lack of confidence, especially among the ruling political and financial elite. The financial collapse caught them completely flat-footed. They have little idea as to what caused it or how to stop it. The crisis has shaken them to the core, creating a growing sense of panic and demoralization.
The real source of the economic crisis is insufficient consumer purchasing power to keep the U.S. economy on track. Economists calculate that approximately 80 percent of the economy is driven by consumer spending.
For some 50 years now the American working class, or the media's preferred euphemism, the American middle class, has been the target of an intense class war in which real wages and income have been relentlessly reduced. According to the most recent U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, real wages adjusted for inflation, from 1970 to the present have fallen more than 12 percent.
This has been a one-sided class war with little effective resistance, especially from a hopelessly bureaucratized and conservatized trade union movement, which, in addition, has slavishly tied itself to one of the principle instruments of this class war, the Democratic Party.
But there is an obvious contradiction here. If real wages have been falling over the last 40 years, how has the economy, at least until recently, continued to expand and profits continue to grow?
This was accomplished by a number of strategies designed to offset the effect of falling real wages on consumer spending. The first of these was the simple expedient of drastically increasing the total number of hours worked. Overtime was increased, leisure time was decreased. The single wage earner family was largely eliminated. No longer did one partner work while the other, usually the female, took on the demanding job of running the home and caring for the children.
More family members were put to work, working longer hours at more full and part time jobs. This is why political and economic apologists for this policy no longer wish to measure individual wage rates over time but rather "household income." But lately even this deceptive measure has succumbed to the pressures of this one-sided class war. Fed officials recently estimated that the median family was 3.2 percent poorer as of October 2008 than it was at the end of 2004.
The number of extra hours an individual can work is limited, as is the number of additional family members that can be put to work. New additional steps had to be taken to offset the effect falling wages had on consumer spending and the economy.
The next move was a massive expansion of consumer debt. The credit card industry was born. It was not so long ago that credit cards were mostly limited to business executives who did a lot of traveling. New federal legislation repealed all state usury laws and the nation was flooded with credit cards carrying 20 percent-plus interest rates, a return previously only available to Mafia loan operations. The average American family now holds seven of these cards. The banks issuing these cards made record profits and consumer debt soared to record levels. But it did mask the effects of falling real wages and produced a significant if temporary boost in consumer spending.
Paralleling the encouragement of ever more consumer debt was an even more risky policy, the massive and continuous expansion of government debt. These record deficit budgets of necessity fueled inflation and one way these inflationary pressures expressed themselves was an artificial rise in the dollar value of houses.
As credit cards maxed out and the size of consumer credit card debt became unsupportable, a final and particularly dangerous financial gimmick was floated. Consumers were encouraged, and driven by necessity, to take cash equity out of their inflated house value. Second mortgages, third mortgages, home equity loans, became the last desperate hope for keeping their heads above water-for meeting expenses and paying down credit card debt that was killing them with 20 percent-plus interest rates.
New homebuyers were lured into predatory sub-prime and adjustable rate mortgages with the assurance that housing prices would continue to rise indefinitely, allowing them to refinance and even cash out increased equity in the foreseeable future. And again this artificially propped up consumer spending.
When the housing bubble burst, it triggered not just a crisis in the mortgage market but the collapse of a financial house of cards that had been building for decades. A house of cards built on the idea that you could on one hand relentlessly drive wages down and on the other hand maintain consumer spending by driving people into ever deeper debt.
Household debt hit a record 133 percent of disposable personable income by the end of 2007. This represented an enormous leap from average debt loads of 90 percent just a decade earlier. Debt levels that even then were considered dangerously high.
Lately we've heard much about "Ponzi" schemes-Bernie Madoff, Robert Allen Stanford and many others, and no doubt many more to come. These types of operations are always a part of the so-called capitalist free market. During an acute financial crisis they become more exposed and publicly visible, especially if some of their victims are among the very wealthy. There is an old Wall Street saying, "When the tide goes out, you see who has been swimming without a bathing suit."
But people like Bernie Madoff even with his 50-billion dollar "Ponzi" scheme are small potatoes compared to what has been going on in the broader economy. In reality the entire U.S. economy over the last 40 years has operated as little more than a gigantic "Ponzi" scheme. Increase profits by relentlessly driving real wages down-maintain consumer spending by a continuous expansion of debt. Like all "Ponzi" schemes it was destined to eventually collapse.
How does the ruling elite intend to face this crisis? Their public strategy has two parts. One, save the principle financial institution of U.S. capitalism with a series of ever-more massive bailouts. Two, reverse the shrinking economy and stem soaring unemployment with a stimulus plan. This strategy has no chance of success.
For the capitalists, this crisis is now a crisis of excessive debt, which reached 355 percent of American gross domestic product. It cannot be solved with more debt.
President Obama claims his stimulus plan will save or create four million jobs in two years. In the last four months of 2008 alone, employment fell by 1.9 million and continues to escalate. Do the math.
But there is another non-public strategy. Use the crisis itself to dramatically intensify the class war against America's middle class/working class. Use it to "reform" so-called entitlements. Cut Social Security, Medicare and other hard won social gains. Use the crisis to drive real wages even lower.
The Obama administration like Bush before it, demands that the UAW, in order to save the American auto industry, must reduce wage levels to those of nonunion workers. Obama has already made "entitlement reform" a key goal of his administration. Obama will end up as Field Marshal of this intensified class war no matter what his present intentions may be. As head of the Democratic Party he can do no other.
Winston Churchill, then Prime Minister of Britain during WWII famously said in a speech in 1942, "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire." Despite his considerable political and oratorical skills, Churchill ended up presiding over the liquidation of the British Empire. Events drove him, he did not drive events. Obama finds himself in a similar historical situation today.
This class war can no longer remain a one-sided class war. The American middle class/working class will have to resist; they will have no choice. This will not be easy. They will have to abandon many dangerous illusions, not the least of which, the Obama cult and the progressive nature of the Democratic Party. They will have to forge new political and organizational institutions capable of fighting back.
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9) Save the Life of Kevin Cooper!
By Carole Seligman
March/April 2009
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/marapr_09/marapr_09_25.html
"I guess the bottom line is this-we all have to make real-life decisions at one time or another in our lives. I decided to live-and not die just because I was sentenced to die."
This statement by San Quentin inmate, Kevin Cooper-on death row for 25 years-convicted of a crime he didn't do, exemplifies the commitment and spirit of the man. Cooper devotes himself to the struggle for human rights from inside the torture chamber that is San Quentin. And this is really amazing because Cooper's case is a portrait of everything that is wrong about the American "justice" system, from racist police departments, racist prosecutors, corrupt and drug-addicted cops, racist judges, to Draconian laws that (like the cases of Mumia Abu-Jamal and Troy Anthony Davis) keep evidence of actual innocence out of the appeals process, and courts that allow such travesties to continue.
In 1985, Kevin Cooper was convicted of capital murder for the brutal killing of four people, three from one family, in 1983, in San Bernardino, California. He was scheduled to be executed February 10, 2004. The execution was halted at the last minute after Cooper suffered the torture of being readied for lethal injection in San Quentin's death chamber. [See Kevin's essay, "Making a life for myself in this living hell"]. At this time, Kevin is waiting (for over a year) for a decision appealing the ruling of a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld his death sentence. He is appealing for a hearing in front of a larger panel of the court, called an en banc hearing. His last court victory (the stay of execution in February 2004) was granted by such an en banc panel.
The main fact, from the very beginning of this case, that made Cooper's arrest and conviction insane (but, perhaps this word is too kind), was that the child victim, Joshua Ryen, who, with his throat slashed, survived the attack on his family, "stated that there were three assailants, not one, and that they were not African-American. On two different occasions, when Josh saw a photograph of Mr. Cooper's face on television, he expressly and affirmatively stated that Mr. Cooper was not the person that committed the crimes." [Quote from Kevin Cooper's Petition for Writ of Habeus Corpus and Request for Stay of Execution, February 6, 2004].
And this witness statement is only one of many, many pieces of evidence of Cooper's innocence, which no jury has heard. Kevin Cooper was near, not at, the wrong place at the wrong time; and that seems to be the entire substance of the prosecution's case, which was based entirely on circumstantial evidence, all of which has been disproved by Kevin and his attorneys, the legal firm of Orrick, Herrington, & Sutcliffe. Most of the evidence that points to Kevin Cooper's innocence was known to the prosecution, but not the defense, at the time of Kevin's trial.
In 1983 Kevin Cooper was a prisoner, serving time in San Bernardino Men's Prison for a non-violent crime committed in his youth. He walked out of prison, through a hole in the fence, and hid in an empty home near the Ryen home where the brutal murders took place. The fact that he was Black in a white neighborhood, and a prisoner, must have played a role in turning the sole attention of the police to Kevin Cooper, despite so much evidence that multiple non-black people were the killers, including sightings of three men in the Ryen's stolen car after the murders took place.
The jury never heard Cooper's evidence
The jury never learned what the prosecution knew: that a pair of bloody coveralls, belonging to one of the men seen in the Ryen's stolen car after the murder (a man who had previously served prison time for murder!), was turned in to the police by the former girlfriend of the owner of the coveralls. They never learned that the coveralls were destroyed by a deputy sheriff with the permission of a supervisory officer!
The jury never learned about a critical piece of evidence that the prosecutors of Kevin Cooper knew. There was a confession from a man, Kenneth Koon, who implicated the wearer and owner of the bloody coveralls and knew the woman who turned them in to the police.
The jury never heard many witnesses testify that on the very night of the Ryen murders they saw three white men, one in bloody clothing, at the Canyon Corral Bar, close to the Ryen home. These witnesses have been corroborated by other witnesses who have come forward since the 2004 stay of execution.
An important piece of evidence, known to the prosecution, but kept from the defense at the trial, was a blue shirt with blood on it found near the crime scene. Nor did they hear from a witness from the bar that one of the three men was wearing a blue shirt.
A critically important piece of evidence was kept from the jury: William Baird, the manager of the San Bernardino County Crime Lab, the person in charge of the "evidence" used by the prosecution to argue Cooper's guilt, had the exact pair of shoes that had made the bloody footprint supposedly found at the crime scene. Actually, the footprint was discovered at the crime lab, not the crime scene. Baird, unbeknownst, to the jury, was a heroin addict subsequently fired from the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department for stealing five pounds of heroin from an evidence locker. That's a lot of heroin!
The jury that convicted Kevin Cooper heard from the prosecution that the tennis shoes, used as evidence to convict him (the bloody footprint), were "solely prison-issued" shoes. They never heard from Midge Carroll, the Warden of Chino prison, who told the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department that these shoes were sold in retail stores and widely available. The prosecutor knew these facts, but illegally kept them from the defense, violating the Brady v. Maryland decision (1963) of the U.S. Supreme Court, which requires prosecutors to turn over evidence to the defense that would be helpful to the defendant. It's called exculpatory evidence.
The Petition for Writ of Habeus Corpus, the appeal, filed by Kevin Cooper's attorneys in 2004 contains statements by several jurors who served on the jury that convicted Cooper in 1985. These statements decry the hiding and destroying of evidence by law enforcement, the lack of testing of evidence, police misconduct, and even call for the state not to carry out the death sentence.
Circuit court judge questions conviction
This is a quotation from the 2006, concurring (but seemingly dissenting) opinion by Circuit Judge Margaret M. McKeown, of the U.S. District Court of Appeals:
"Significant evidence bearing on Cooper's culpability has been lost, destroyed or left un-pursued, including, for example, blood-covered coveralls belonging to a potential suspect who was a convicted murderer, and a bloody t-shirt, discovered alongside the road near the crime scene. The managing criminologist in charge of the evidence used to establish Cooper's guilt at trial was, as it turns out, a heroin addict, and was fired for stealing drugs seized by the police. Countless other alleged problems with the handling and disclosure of evidence and the integrity of the forensic testing and investigation undermine confidence in the evidence."
How is it possible for a judge to write such words and still concur with a decision that allows Kevin Cooper's conviction to stand and the state to execute him? This judge says in her opinion, that the court is constrained by provisions in the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA). As in other capital cases, this legislation (passed during the Clinton Administration,) uses fancy language to allow death sentences to be carried out without full rights to appeal and without the absolute human right to prove innocence!
Recently, this writer has become friends with Kevin Cooper. I have met him and visited with him in San Quentin's death row visiting cages, where prisoner and visitor are locked in dog-kennel-size cages for the visit. Our conversations are wide ranging and I have learned a lot from him. Kevin is a dedicated fighter for human rights. He is interested in many things, and reads widely, with a special focus on Black history. During our conversation in February, he gave his opinion that the struggles going on around the world are linked as struggles for human rights. The desire for human rights, the struggle for those rights, is, he said, what everyone, world wide, has in common; that the struggle to abolish the death penalty, to end the prison-industrial complex, to end war, to end racism, to support women's dignity and rights-all of these are rooted in our common need for human rights. I agree with his view that the world's oppressed people have much more in common than the differences between them.
Like Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Troy Anthony Davis, Kevin Cooper is interested in justice for all, not just for himself. Although, like Mumia and Troy, the struggle for justice in Kevin's case has extended over many years. Kevin has grown from a youth to a grown man incarcerated on death row, behind bars. In a system that incarcerates the innocent, and even sanctions their execution, that tortures them, even prepping them for executions some of which have been stopped at the last minute (like these three cases); Kevin's hold on his sanity seems miraculous to me. Not only is Kevin Cooper sane, intelligent and generous; he makes a genuine contribution to the struggle for human rights under the worst possible conditions.
Readers of Socialist Viewpoint are urged to support Kevin's struggle for justice. Information about Kevin's case, Kevin's essays, and how to make donations to his defense can be found at www.savekevincooper.org and the Campaign to End the Death Penalty at P.O. Box 25730, Chicago, IL 60625, www.nodeathpenalty.org
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10) Ritual of Death
By Kevin Cooper
March/April 2009
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/marapr_09/marapr_09_26.html
On Monday February 9, 2004 shortly after 6:15 P.M., Rev. Jessie Jackson said a prayer for me and my visitors inside the visiting room here at San Quentin Prison. Then he and my personal Pastor and friends were told to leave, which they did.
I was then escorted to the rear of the visiting area and taken to a hallway which contained holding cells. I was then placed in the holding cell where I had the handcuffs removed, and was then told to get undressed, which I did. I was strip searched, and given a brand new set of prison issued clothing and told to put them on.
I was handcuffed after I got dressed and was removed from that cell where I was handed over to another squad of officers. I was surrounded by about six officers and escorted to the death chamber waiting room. When I was in the visiting room the prison officials told me that the 9th circuit court of appeals had granted me a stay of execution, but until they heard from the United States Supreme Court about whether or not my stay would stay in place this prison was going to proceed as if I had no stay in place.
When I arrived outside the death chamber waiting room door it was opened and I was told to go inside, which I did. I was then told to place my back on the wall while being surrounded by a new squad of officers. These were the officers of the execution squad. There were about eight of them. The leader of the squad got real close to me and asked me "was there going to be any trouble when they took the handcuffs off of me?" I looked him in his eyes and told him "no" and he removed the handcuffs.
I was again told to take off all my clothes, which I did and I was again stripped-searched. This time they used a flashlight to light up both my mouth and butt as they searched me! This room that I was now in was very, very cold, the temperature had to be in the lower 50s. I stood barefoot on that cold floor surrounded by those officers while my body was completely searched. Then I was given another new set of clothing, only these were the ones that I was to be executed in.
I was then placed in another cell; only this new one was half the size as a regular cell. It had only a toilet, a mattress and pillow in it. I stood there in the cold waiting for my Pastor to come pray with me, and for me. All the time not knowing what the United States Supreme Court was going to do.
About a half hour later my Pastor arrived, and she was placed in a cell next to mine. It was to my right-hand side, but on an angle, and it was hard to see her through the cell bars, but I managed. I was asked once again did I want a last meal, I said no.
I was asked did I want water, I said no. The warden came in and asked me did I have a final statement, I said no. My arms were once again checked so they could make sure that they could find my veins, and officers were passing by with armfuls of alcohol pads/swabs and other assorted items for my murder, and their execution!
My Pastor did a great job in keeping me focused and somewhere in the middle of one of her scriptures the phone rang. It was my attorney calling to let me know she was with me in spirit, and as soon as she heard something from the U.S. Supreme Court she would call and let me know.
I entered the death chamber waiting room around 6:35 P.M. and around 8:15 P.M. the phone rang again and it was once again my attorney. She told me that she heard from the court and that they refused to hear the state's petition. They denied the state, and upheld my stay!!!
Even before I told my Pastor the news, I told those officers that I meant them no disrespect in what I was about to say to them, but they weren't going to do their job tonight! I then told my pastor, and she and I prayed! I came within three hours and 45 minutes of being murdered by the state of California.
I am now recovering from the manmade ritual of death that I had to experience. I will never be the same again! I am only getting stronger and more determined to do my part in shutting down the U.S. Government's pride and joy, "their capital punishment system!"
In Struggle
From Death Row,
Kevin Cooper
-Reprinted from www.savekevincooper.com
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11) Innocence Makes No Difference
By Kevin Cooper
March/April 2009
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/marapr_09/marapr_09_27.html
I, Kevin Cooper, reside on death row at California's San Quentin State Prison, convicted for murders I did not commit. I have come to realize a very real truth: When it comes to dealing with the government, including the state and federal court system, innocence makes no difference. Finality does.
The only thing that seems to make a difference is winning at any cost. Innocence in and of itself has never stopped this government from murdering people, imprisoning people, executing people, or in the case of war, dropping bombs on people. Innocent people.
The only true measuring stick that we have is this country's history of dealing with innocent people when it comes to certain governmental policies.
The people who make up the government of the United States-who claim to be better than the people who they murder, execute, imprison, and bomb-have one agenda: winning, and winning by any means necessary. Most of them have prejudices of all kinds-racism, classism, homophobia, sexism, and all the rest that self-righteous human beings have but won't admit to.
The fact is, this country was founded on killing innocent people-our native peoples and the Mexicans who owned California. It was built on enslaving and killing innocent peoples, the Africans and their descendants, and other poor people who were forced to work as indentured servants and sharecroppers.
During every war that this country has waged, innocent people have been affected, either by being killed or by being scapegoated, as were the Japanese Americans interned in World War II.
The criminal justice system has this same mindset, and has often worked hand in hand with other government departments in imposing the will of the old boys network.
The United States Supreme Court stated in its 1993 U.S. Supreme Court Herrera decision, in which Chief Justice Renquist ruled, that, "In criminal cases the state trial is the paramount event for determining the defendant's guilt or innocence." Federal courts do not sit to correct errors of fact, but to ensure that individuals are not imprisoned in violation of the U.S. constitution. So, if an innocent person imprisoned or on death row facing an execution can't prove a violation of his or her U.S. constitutional rights, that person will stay imprisoned or be executed.
This should tell everyone that innocence makes no difference when it comes to the U.S. government or the criminal justice system. And, this mindset is not just used on or against human beings; it also includes Mother Earth herself.
From the birds and the air in which they fly, to the animals, plants, insects, trees and the ground which they live or grow out of, this mind set of destroying innocent life comes into play. The water and all life that lives in the water is also included in this, because these people honestly believe that they own all of these things, and have the god-given right to rule over them, or destroy them.
Since a certain group of people have built a system maintained by the killing of innocent peoples and animals, no one today can be surprised that innocence makes no difference to that select group who make and enforce the laws in this country.
In the ghettos and poor communities of this country, the police very often shoot and kill innocent people, and get away with it. The military knows for a fact that they will kill innocent people in their military campaigns, yet that doesn't stop them, and they get away with it. This government has laid the foundation for killing innocent people throughout its history.
During this one-sided war in Afghanistan, when innocent people are proved to have been bombed and killed, government representatives say, "We regret the loss of innocent life, but this is a consequence of war." It does not have to be this way, but it is, and it will stay this way as long as innocence makes no difference.
The sanctions that this country placed on Iraq do not affect its leaders, especially Sadam Hussein, and the government knows this. The only people who are truly affected are the innocent ones, mainly children. They are dying from hunger, lack of medical care, and every other preventable ailment inflicted upon them. Yet this government doesn't care because innocence makes no difference, whether it's foreign or domestic.
Whenever you have a system that knowingly and willingly puts innocent human being's lives at risk, one must question this system and the people who run this system. Those involved in this death penalty system know that innocent people have been executed. The system is controlled by humans, and humans make mistakes. Yet this is not enough to stop this system as a whole.
Institutional racism is a very real and proven fact of life in America, yet the people within these institutions refuse to acknowledge this truth. In fact, it honestly appears that they don't give a damn. They do care about their own agenda, which in the majority of cases doesn't include us poor people and people of color. It most often excludes us, and to this degree they want to exclude us from living.
Sometimes, in order to do this, they have to break or ignore their own laws, while at the same time make new laws, which they use to enforce their will. Some of us pay a price for this. Our innocence makes no difference.
In struggle from death row,
Kevin Cooper
-Reprinted from www.savekevincooper.com
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12) Democracy and Worker's Power
By Bonnie Weinstein
March/April 2009
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/marapr_09/marapr_09_07.html
Every right won by workers anywhere in the world has been won by the active participation in the struggle by the ranks of workers themselves. From strikes to revolutions, victory depends upon the day-to-day involvement of the workers themselves in carrying out the fight. The most recent example of this took place in December of 2008, when Republic Windows and Doors workers won back pay and benefits owed to them by sitting-in and occupying the factory until their demands were met.
Not only did they win their immediate demands, but they have won their jobs back. Just recently, Republic Windows and Doors was sold to a California company, Serious Materials, for $1.45 million. The new company officials promised United Electrical Workers Local 1110, the union that represented the Republic workers, that they would rehire all the laid-off workers at their former rate of pay!
There is no doubt that the massive popular support and solidarity the Republic workers were able to muster for their just cause led to this unexpected victory. Their decision to occupy their factory won them that popular support.
It was no accident that the sit-in was the workers chosen action. It's a tried and true tactic of the workers movement and has lead to many victories in the past. And, it's important to note, that the success of such actions have always depended upon the popular support of other workers for their cause.
Solidarity among workers-the conscious understanding that an injury to one, is an injury to all-is a very powerful unifying force for working people, even though tremendous legal barriers to real solidarity exists.
Carrying out job actions, such as strikes, in solidarity with the rights of other workers, like the Republic workers, is illegal under U.S. law.
The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947
U.S. capitalist labor laws struck a deadly blow to workers' democracy by ending the right of workers to withhold their labor in support of the rights of workers on other jobs and in other industries. If this were a democratic country, the majority would have the right to carry out its will.
The Taft-Hartley Act of 19471-an extension of the Labor-Management Relations Act-defined the actions labor can take in the event of disagreements with the bosses, and the actions that can be taken by the bosses during their disputes with labor.
The Act bans jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts and "common situs" picketing (picketing by a labor union of an entire construction project as a result of a grievance held against a single subcontractor on the project.) These are the most crucial, solidarity tools in the historic arsenal of the workers' movement. They are essential to effectively fight for and win their demands. Being able to carry out those actions in unity with others is what enables workers to muster large enough numbers to defend themselves and their class against the bosses' assault on their wages, benefits and working conditions.
The theory, based on the real-life-experience of working people is that, if an employer on one job can get away with something, employers on other jobs will do the same thing. And, conversely, what workers win on one job will make it easier for workers to win on other jobs.
The ability of working people to take action in support of other workers under attack is essential to saving our jobs and living conditions! And that's why the capitalists do what they can to outlaw it.
Workers strength and power lies in the numbers they can muster in their own defense
The ruling capitalists make up about one percent of the population and are far outnumbered by working people. The ongoing goal of the capitalist class is to weaken solidarity among workers, which leads to the further weakening of the ability of workers to fight for their rights-such as the basic right to strike in support of fellow workers whose living standards or working conditions may currently be under attack.
The Taft-Hartley Act also gave the government the power to issue injunctions to end legal strikes if those strikes posed "hazards to the American people." These "hazards" are determined, not by the workers, or the American people in general, but by the bosses and their bought and paid-for government representatives. These injunctions were recently used against New York transit workers in December of 2005 and before that, against the ILWU port workers in December of 2002.
And, to make sure that labor leaders would themselves be further disarmed, the Act required union leaders to sign statements swearing they were not communists. This basically entitled the bosses to dictate who could (or could not) be the labor representatives; while at the same time, the same Taft-Hartley Act gave the bosses the right to fire supervisors with union sympathies.
The Taft-Hartley Act, written by the bosses themselves and passed by their bi-partisan, paid representatives in the House and the Senate, serve to ensure that the majority (a united working class) can't act in unity and solidarity with each other, i.e., demonstrate their power as the majority in a purely democratic expression of unity with one another, such as in a general strike, without breaking the law. It is divide and conquer written into the laws of the land-the capitalist laws.
Working people must not accept any laws that make working class unity, solidarity, and majority will illegal. Workers must take back our fundamental democratic right to strike!
Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA)
Working people in the U.S. are severely handicapped by the low numbers now represented by labor unions and the dismal state of those unions as fighters for the rights of their members. And now workers are faced with soaring unemployment.
But that does not weaken the resolve of the capitalist class to destroy any remaining power workers can muster in their own defense without breaking the law.
We now have the prospect of the "Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA)"-H.R. 8002-passed by the House in 2007. While Obama has vowed to sign the bill, it has not passed the Senate yet. It amends the National Labor Relations Act to establish, "...an efficient system to enable employees to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to provide for mandatory injunctions for unfair labor practices during organizing efforts, and for other purposes."
The honey
Basically, EFCA guarantees that whenever a majority of workers files a petition or fills out cards to be represented by a union; and if the Board (National Labor Relations Board) confirms that a majority of the employees has, indeed, signed valid authorizations to be part of that union, and they are not already represented by another union; then the union becomes the bargaining representative for those workers. No secret-ballot election is necessary.
If all these provisions are met, the NLRB must certify the labor organization as the worker's representative.
This is a step forward since it does make it easier to establish union representation thereby diminishing the ability of the bosses to pressure workers who want to join the union.
Secret-ballot union elections invite management threats to pro-union workers and frequently result in intimidation tactics such as firing workers involved in union activity.
And now, the poison
EFCA also states that whenever a union is established under the new guidelines, both the boss and the union must participate in collective bargaining for the purpose of establishing an initial agreement.
They have ten days after receiving a written request to commence to bargain collectively and must make every reasonable effort to conclude and sign a collective bargaining agreement.
If after a 90-day period, beginning on the date on which bargaining begins, the parties have failed to reach an agreement, either party may notify the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service [FMCS] (an agency of United States Government that handles arbitration and mediation of labor disputes and contract negotiations), of the dispute and request mediation. Whenever such a request is received, FMCS must promptly communicate with both parties and attempt to bring them to agreement.
However, if after the expiration of another 30-day period (beginning on the date on which the request for mediation is made to FMCS; and after the 90-day period in which they first failed to come to agreement), the FMCS is still not able to bring the parties to agreement by conciliation, the FMCS must refer the dispute to an arbitration board that they establish in accordance with their own regulations and settle the dispute. And, under EFCA, this decision is binding for two years.
In effect, what EFCA does, is give workers a false sense of security by, on the one hand, making it easier for them to form labor unions, while at the same time taking away the basic right to strike in case workers can't reach an agreement with the employer. Instead, workers must accept the decision of government-binding arbitration.
It effectively takes away the democratic right of workers to withhold their labor in solidarity with one another even at a specific jobsite -let alone general strikes across industry already prohibited by Taft-Hartley. It's as simple as that.
What's democracy got to do with it?
Of course working people support the part of EFCA that makes it easier to form unions but should oppose the prohibition of the right to strike when the employer refuses to reach an agreement with the majority of workers on the job. We can't leave it up to the government since this is a government of, by and for the bosses.
These laws are not only anti-labor; they're anti-democratic in the most profound sense, since they prevent working people, who are the majority, from acting in unity and solidarity with one another. True democracy for the majority of the people-working people and their allies-is at the very heart of universal human freedom and equality.
At the most basic level, democracy is the right of the majority to act on their own behalf -to carry out the wishes and desires of that majority. This kind of democracy is scarce-if it even exists in the world today. But it is humanity's most basic human right and it's working people's most powerful tool.
Clearly, American democracy-any capitalist system-is not democratic. The majority does not get to decide on issues like more schools vs. more war; or more money to the sick and the poor vs. more money to the banks; or whether workers should get raises and better benefits; or whether they have the right to keep their job or not, any more than they have the right to dictate how much bonus money the CEOs pay themselves.
Working people get no choice in these matters. Workers get to choose which capitalist boss will rule them. That's capitalist democracy!
There's very little democracy in the unions; none in school except for the election of class president or some such; and certainly there's no democracy on the job. The boss rules.
And on the rare occasion where we do get a popular vote on a particular issue, like the various antiwar propositions that have been on ballots across America (which have passed by a strong majority,) they are not binding, but simple statements of opinion of the majority of voters.
They are important because they are an expression of the wishes of the majority of working people, and, they have moral power because of it; but the politicians don't have to listen to or abide by those sentiments. We working people have the right to express our wishes but not to carry them out! And that is not democracy.
The road to freedom is a democratic one
The right of the majority to rule must be raised at every level of our society. From the right of parents and teachers to determine how best to teach children-and get the resources to do so; for the right of all to have access to free and accessible healthcare, housing, jobs; for the right of the majority to use tax dollars for the things the overwhelming majority of human beings need; instead of war and the preservation of a system of slavery based upon the rule of a tiny minority over the overwhelming majority of working people.
At every opportunity we must reject the choice of voting for some capitalist candidate who is supposed to "represent" the supporters' interests and instead, demand that we vote on the issues!
Let's vote on whether to send another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan; or whether to use drones to bomb Pakistan; or whether to send billions of dollars of financial aid and weapons such as white phosphorous to Israel to use against the Palestinian people; or whether to give trillions of dollars to the banks while spending much less for everything else.
An article by Ali Mir, entitled, "Notes on a Meltdown, and a View of the Other Side," that appeared in Samar magazine November 10, 2008 illustrates the vast sums of money involved in the bailout of the banks as opposed to the "stimulus" package for everyone else:3
"...so I tried to figure out what a trillion was. I knew it had 12 zeros after the 1, that it was a thousand billion or a million-million, but I couldn't for the life of me understand what a trillion dollars might look like. So I imagined a magic machine that spits out a $10 bill every second, all day and all night long. Nice thought. In the first minute in my fantasy world, I would have $600. In the first hour, $36,000. In the first 24-hour day, $864,000. So far, so good. But as I kept up the calculation, and as the enormity of the numbers dawned on me, I began to dismay. I realized that after one year of this enterprise, I'd have a mere $315 million or so. It would take me three years to get close to a billion. I'd need to collect for more than 3,170 years to walk away from my machine with a trillion dollars. If I had been a contemporary of Jesus Christ, I still wouldn't be two-thirds of the way there!"
We must demand the right to make decisions about where this money should go for ourselves, as working people-the people who collectively contribute the most to society as a whole-potentially the most powerful class in the world, the majority. Much more powerful than the capitalist class, if, and only if, workers are allowed to carry out the will of their own majority.
The majority must take control of the economy. All corporate books must be opened for review so we can see clearly where every penny of profit has gone. All profits should be taxed one hundred percent and used to fulfill the needs of the majority whose blood and sweat created that wealth.
One of the most troubling aspects of the economic crisis today is the loss of jobs. Job creation should be under the democratic control of the majority of workers themselves.
The production of goods should be based upon need. Once the production levels are adjusted to meet those needs, if there are still workers without jobs, hours should be cut back with no reduction in pay until all those without jobs have them-and at the same rate of pay. We must do away with two and three-tier contracts that condemn the next generation of workers to poverty.
All safe, mechanical or other upgrades that increase production rates should also be reflected in fewer working hours for all-again, with no reduction in pay. Automation and reduction of menial and repetitive labor under these conditions is a goal to look forward to for all working people. The long-term goal being to create more educational, creative and leisure time for all.
Consequences for pollution and war
Democratic, on-the-job worker's councils should be set up to oversee the end of pollution of the environment, in the workplace and society at-large.
If a corporation, through accident, negligence or on purpose, causes economic, physical or material harm to humans, wildlife or the environment, the cost of reparations should be one hundred percent the responsibility of the corporation and must come out of their profits and not out of the pockets of the workers.
Since war is the most polluting of all capitalist endeavors, all resources used for the development, manufacture, production, or experimentation; or any actions relating to the war machine must stop immediately; and all those resources be used to fulfill the needs of the people, the lack of which are the basic causes of war in the first place. Our goal as a worldwide, democratic majority of workers should be to rid the world of war and all weapons.
All the funds used to bail out the banks should be turned over to bail out working people because we have the right, as the majority that creates that wealth with our labor, to determine where that money should go!
These are just some of the things we working people, as a majority, should be able to do.
Working people must implement our basic democratic rights by uniting together to demand them as our inalienable rights! This includes the right to withhold our labor until the demands of the majority are met! Now that's democracy!
Where do we stand now and what do we do?
The ruling classes throughout history have divided working people from one another.
Domination through slavery, brutalization and forced obedience has produced the capitalist rulers of today. They seem to have unlimited resources to bring death and destruction with impunity. As long as working people can be singled out, scapegoated and divided from one another anything goes for the U.S. dominated, world capitalist ruling elite.
The latest division of the world is along the "Axis of Evil" as outlined by the last president and reinforced and supported by the new president. These peoples are marked as terrorists and are fair game for U.S. ruling class lethal military action. In fact, anyone, anywhere can be labeled a terrorist and can be "taken out."
In our inner cities this same philosophy is at work. The police routinely target the poor-even shoot them in the back and then claim they were "gangsters" or "drug dealers." They execute them in the streets, and in front of cameras. This is what happened to young and unarmed Oscar Grant this past New Years Day, 2009; and to countless others that go unnoticed because they weren't caught on camera.
Working people must join together and demand that these attacks stop. We must demand that the government act on behalf of the wishes of the majority by immediately bringing to justice all those BART police who were present and aided in the blatant murder of Oscar Grant-and all who have carried out state-sponsored atrocities and executions against the innocent and unarmed, including not just the entire police force, but the capitalist warmongers themselves responsible for the murder of millions.
Working people must act in our own behalf and take the power that is rightfully ours
But for working people to be effective in carrying out our will as a majority, we must organize ourselves democratically into our own organizations independent of the capitalist-minority ruling class.
We must organize ourselves democratically and in our own defense on our jobs, in our communities, in our schools and in our own organizations especially. Only in that way will we, as a majority, be able to gain the power through our unity to win our rights.
With real democracy on our side, and with unity and solidarity, these rights are ours for the taking!
Most importantly, to be effective, the masses of working people have to be involved in the decision-making process itself from the ground up, not from the top down. This means we must take democratic control of all aspects of our lives.
This means that the rank and file of the unions must make democratic decisions about their contracts and not leave these things up to the union bureaucracy or up to anti-labor laws; or up to conniving politicians; but we must demand the power to carry out our own will.
And this must include the right to run a factory in such a way as to produce the best product, under the best working conditions and under workers' democratic majority rule. Ultimately it means the right of the majority to rationally and safely produce goods and services to satisfy the needs and wants of all and not for the private profit of the tiny few.
Majority rule is our power. But it only works if all workers have the right to discuss and vote on the issues that concern us and then, carry out our own free will as a democratically and independently organized, self-constituted majority.
We workers have been estranged from true democracy and must learn to grasp its power for our own.
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft-Hartley
2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_Free_Choice_Act
3 http://www.samarmagazine.org/archive/article.php?id=269
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13) An Effort to Save Flint, Mich., by Shrinking It
By DAVID STREITFELD
April 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/business/22flint.html?hp
FLINT, Mich. - Dozens of proposals have been floated over the years to slow this city's endless decline. Now another idea is gaining support: speed it up.
Instead of waiting for houses to become abandoned and then pulling them down, local leaders are talking about demolishing entire blocks and even whole neighborhoods.
The population would be condensed into a few viable areas. So would stores and services. A city built to manufacture cars would be returned in large measure to the forest primeval.
"Decline in Flint is like gravity, a fact of life," said Dan Kildee, the Genesee County treasurer and chief spokesman for the movement to shrink Flint. "We need to control it instead of letting it control us."
The recession in Flint, as in many old-line manufacturing cities, is quickly making a bad situation worse. Firefighters and police officers are being laid off as the city struggles with a $15 million budget deficit. Many public schools are likely to be closed.
"A lot of people remember the past, when we were a successful city that others looked to as a model, and they hope. But you can't base government policy on hope," said Jim Ananich, president of the Flint City Council. "We have to do something drastic."
In searching for a way out, Flint is becoming a model for a different era.
Planned shrinkage became a workable concept in Michigan a few years ago, when the state changed its laws regarding properties foreclosed for delinquent taxes. Before, these buildings and land tended to become mired in legal limbo, contributing to blight. Now they quickly become the domain of county land banks, giving communities a powerful tool for change.
Indianapolis and Little Rock, Ark., have recently set up land banks, and other cities are in the process of doing so. "Shrinkage is moving from an idea to a fact," said Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective Program at the University of California, Berkeley. "There's finally the insight that some cities just don't have a choice."
While the shrinkage debate has been simmering in Flint for several years, it suddenly gained prominence last month with a blunt comment by the acting mayor, Michael K. Brown, who talked at a Rotary Club lunch about "shutting down quadrants of the city."
Nothing will happen immediately, but Flint has begun updating its master plan, a complicated task last done in 1965. Then it was a prosperous city of 200,000 looking to grow to 350,000. It now has 110,000 people, about a third of whom live in poverty.
Flint has about 75 neighborhoods spread out over 34 square miles. It will be a delicate process to decide which to favor, Mr. Kildee acknowledged from the driver's seat of his Grand Cherokee.
He will play a crucial role in those decisions. In addition to being the treasurer of Genesee County, whose largest city by far is Flint, Mr. Kildee is chief executive of the local land bank. In the last year, the county has acquired through tax foreclosure about 900 houses in the city, some of them in healthy neighborhoods.
A block adjacent to downtown has the potential for renewal; it would make sense to fill in the vacant lots there, since it is a few steps from a University of Michigan campus.
A short distance away, the scene is more problematic. Only a few houses remain on the street; the sidewalk is so tattered it barely exists. "When was the last time someone walked on that?" Mr. Kildee said. "Most rural communities don't have sidewalks."
But what about the people who do live here and might want their sidewalk fixed rather than removed?
"Not everyone's going to win," he said. "But now, everyone's losing."
On many streets, the weekly garbage pickup finds only one bag of trash. If those stops could be eliminated, Mr. Kildee said, the city could save $100,000 a year - one of many savings that shrinkage could bring.
Mr. Kildee was born in Flint in 1958. The house he lived in as a child has just been foreclosed on by the county, so he stopped to look. It is a little blue house with white trim, sad and derelict. So are two houses across the street.
"If it's going to look abandoned, let it be clean and green," he said. "Create the new Flint forest - something people will choose to live near, rather than something that symbolizes failure."
Watching suspiciously from next door is Charlotte Kelly. Her house breaks the pattern: it is immaculate, all polished wood and fresh paint. When Ms. Kelly, a city worker, moved to the street in 2002, all the houses were occupied and the neighborhood seemed viable.
These days, crime is brazen: two men recently stripped the siding off Mr. Kildee's old house, "laughing like they were going to a picnic," Ms. Kelly said. Down the street are many more abandoned houses, as well as a huge hand-painted sign that proclaims, "No prostitution zone."
"It saddens my heart," she said. "I was born in Flint in 1955. I've seen it in the glory days, and every year it gets worse."
Mr. Kildee makes his pitch. Would she be interested in moving if the city offered her an equivalent or better house in a more stable and safer neighborhood?
Despite her pride in her home, the calculation takes Ms. Kelly about a second. "Yes," she said, "I would be willing."
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14) Britain's Debt Deepens; Its Outlook Grows Gloomier
By JULIA WERDIGIER
April 23, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/business/global/23pound.html?hp
LONDON - Britain's public debt is to reach £175 billion, or $255 billion, this year, the highest level since World War II, making it more difficult for the government to pull the country out of the recession ahead of a general election next year.
Britain's chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, on Wednesday conceded to a gloomier outlook for the country's economy and its debt levels for this year than he did five months ago. In his annual budget speech to Parliament, he said Britain would have to borrow £57 billion more this year than predicted earlier and the economy would shrink 3.5 percent this year instead of the 1.25 percent that he forecast in November.
To reduce the deficit, which would be the highest of any nation among the Group of 20, which comprises G-7 members and major emerging economies, Mr. Darling proposed to increase income tax for the highest earners to an unprecedented 50 percent from 40 percent and pledged to clamp down on tax loopholes. But he balked at announcing any further tax increases or spending reductions.
"The slow pace of the improvements of borrowing is extremely disappointing and worrying," said Philip Shaw, an economist at Investec in London. "The government is obviously reluctant to do the dirty work ahead of the election. A few measures to hit high income earners won't do it."
Britain's net borrowing is expected to reach 11.9 percent of gross domestic product in 2010 and finances would only balance by 2016. The dismal outlook and rising debt pushed the pound lower against all major currencies on Wednesday and government bonds dropped.
Mr. Darling said Wednesday's budget, which included a promise to offer anyone who is long-term unemployed and younger than 25 years either a job or a training opportunity and more tax breaks for pensioners, "will take Britain through the most serious economic downturn in 60 years."
The government wants to avoid mistakes made during the 1980s downturn when a lack of investment turned a recession into a depression and left a generation "on the scrapheap," he said.
"There are no quick fixes, there is no overnight solution" but because of the measures taken already and Britain's "diverse, flexible and resilient" economy, the country would recover, Mr. Darling said. He stuck to his earlier prediction that the economy would start to grow again toward the end of this year and said that lower prices and a pick up in demand would allow growth of 1.25 percent next year, which some economists criticized as too optimistic.
Latest unemployment statistics painted a gloomier picture on Wednesday when figures showed that the number of people out of work rose by 73,700 to 1.46 million last month, the highest since 1997.
With fewer people paying income tax and revenue from corporate tax dropping as well, Britain's government is finding it difficult to spend its way out of the recession. Mr. Darling announced a range of investment plans, mainly in renewable energy projects such as wind farms and biotechnology, but some economists said their relatively small scope only illustrated that the government is struggling to find the money to pay for them.
David Cameron, leader of the opposition Conservative Party, called Wednesday's budget a "missed opportunity" and criticized Mr. Darling for "saving everything on tax cuts after the election."
"Everyone can see the utter mess this government made of Britain's economy," Mr. Cameron told Parliament. "Our children will be in poverty for decades. Britain can't afford another five years of Labor."
He also criticized Mr. Darling's earlier forecasts for being intentionally too optimistic, saying "we now know that what he told us was a complete fiction. No one will ever believe anything they ever say about spending cuts ever again."
The government's plan to increase income tax for those earning at least 150,000 pounds attracted criticism from the British Chambers of Commerce and other business groups, which said it would serve as a disincentive for top talent to move to the country and harm London's status as a world financial center.
"If the government was serious about the U.K. remaining a global player they would not be throwing away such an important advantage for a relatively small return," David Frost, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce said.
Other measures announced Wednesday, included the introduction of a car scrapping scheme, similar to that in Germany, to assist Britain's ailing auto industry.
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15) For Housing Crisis, the End Probably Isn't Near
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Economic Scene
April 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/business/economy/22leonhardt.html?hp
The closest thing to a real estate crystal ball in the last few years has been the house auctions that are regularly held around the country.
In 2006 and early 2007, the official housing statistics were still showing that house prices were holding up. But that was largely because so many sellers were refusing to sell. The auctions, made up mostly of foreclosed homes, showed the truth: house values were starting to plummet in many places.
So a few weeks ago, I decided to go to an auction at a hotel ballroom in Washington - and to study the results of several others elsewhere - with an eye to figuring out whether prices may now be close to bottoming out.
That's clearly a huge economic question. Last week, JPMorgan's chief financial officer told Eric Dash of The New York Times that JPMorgan, and presumably other banks, would be under pressure "until home prices stabilize and unemployment peaks." As long as home prices are falling, foreclosures are likely to keep rising and the toxic assets polluting bank balance sheets are likely to stay toxic.
There are reasons, though, to think that prices may be on the verge of stabilizing. Relative to fundamentals, like household incomes and rents, houses nationwide now appear to be overvalued by only about 5 percent. You can make an argument that the end of the housing crash is near.
But that's not what I found at the auctions.
"This is a perfect storm of opportunity," Bob Michaelis, goateed with a shaved head, told the 300 or so people who had come to downtown Washington for the auction.
Mr. Michaelis, the auction manager, spoke from a lectern on stage, and his goal seemed to be to persuade people that they might never see a buyers' market as good as this one. Prices have plunged, and interest rates, he said, are at "generational lows." (The National Association of Realtors has been running a radio commercial this spring making a similar case.)
"Look around to your left and your right, and you'll see someone who sees an opportunity just like you do," Mr. Michaelis said. "We're approaching the bottom of the market, I think. We're approaching the bottom of the market, if we're not there already."
He then told the audience that, in the last 100 years, house prices have recovered from every downturn and gone on to reach record highs. Oh, and Wells Fargo and Countrywide were standing by, ready to offer financing to qualified auction buyers.
If nothing else, this sales pitch certainly had chutzpah. It combined the old bubble-era notion that house prices always rise over time (ignoring the fact that incomes, stock values and the price of bread do, too) with the new postcrash idea that houses must be a bargain because they're a lot cheaper than they used to be. Even Countrywide, which was taken over by Bank of America after so many of its subprime mortgages went bad, is still part of the housing pitch.
Yet as soon as the auction began, it was clear that the pitch wasn't working.
The winning bid on the first home auctioned off, a two-bedroom townhouse in Virginia Beach, was $115,000. Just last July, it sold for $182,000, according to property records. A four-bedroom brick house with a two-car garage in Upper Marlboro, Md., went for $375,000. Last year, it sold for $563,000.
Throughout the evening, such low-ball prices continued to win the bidding. At one point, the auctioneer, Wayne Wheat, interrupted his sing-song auction call to cheerfully ask, "Where are my investors?"
The tables that had been set up around the edges of the ballroom, reserved for people planning to buy multiple houses, were mostly empty. Many audience members, like the man in a camouflage baseball cap just in front of me, were attending their first auction.
On Sunday, my colleague Carmen Gentile went to a larger auction, in Miami, to see if my experience had been unusual. It wasn't. The homes there also sold for just a fraction of what they would have even a year ago. The rate of decline in Miami hasn't even slowed noticeably in recent months, according to data kept by Real Estate Disposition Corporation, known as R.E.D.C., which runs the auctions.
A recently transplanted New Yorker named Michael Houtkin won the bidding on a one-bedroom condominium on the outskirts of Boca Raton, a few blocks from three golf courses, for the incredible price of $30,000. "Things were almost being given away," he said later.
As is often the case at these auctions, the seller of the condo - Fannie Mae - retained the right to refuse the winning bid and keep the property. But Mr. Houtkin told me he was optimistic his bid would be accepted. An R.E.D.C. employee suggested to him that $30,000 wasn't much below the minimum price that Fannie Mae had hoped to receive.
How could that be? Because Fannie Mae, like many banks, is inundated with foreclosed properties. In recent weeks, banks have begun accelerating foreclosures again, after having held off while waiting to find out which homeowners would be eligible for the Obama administration's assistance program.
The glut of foreclosed homes creates a self-reinforcing cycle. Falling prices lead to more foreclosures. Foreclosures lead to an excess supply of homes for sale. The excess supply then leads to further price declines. Jan Hatzius, the chief economist at Goldman Sachs, says that the "massive amount of excess supply" means that home prices nationwide will probably fall an additional 15 percent.
This estimate hides a lot of variation, too. In Miami, Goldman forecasts, prices could drop an additional 33 percent, which is pretty amazing since they've already fallen 50 percent from their 2006 peak.
Nor is excess supply the only reason prices still have a way to fall. Nationwide, homes may not be overvalued by much. But in some cities, including New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago and Miami, they remain very expensive.
So while Mr. Hatzius and his Goldman colleagues are somewhat more pessimistic than most forecasters, but the difference isn't enormous.
I'll confess that this bearish picture isn't exactly what I had hoped to find. A year ago, as part of a move from New York to Washington, my wife and I bought our first house.
We did so fully expecting prices to continue falling (though perhaps not as much as they ultimately will, given the severity of the financial crisis). But we decided they had fallen enough for us to take the plunge. We preferred buying before the bottom of the market instead of renting and having to move again in a year or two.
Still, when I wrote about that decision last spring, I argued that anyone who didn't have to probably should not buy yet. Prices still had a way to fall.
They don't have as far to fall today, but the great real estate crash is not over, either. So if you are part of the 30 percent of American households who rent and you're trying to decide when to buy, relax.
The market is still coming your way.
E-mail: Leonhardt@nytimes.com
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16) French Police Round Up Migrants
By CAROLINE BROTHERS
April 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/world/europe/22iht-france.html?ref=world
PARIS - The French police conducted early morning raids at four locations on the outskirts of Calais on Tuesday, arresting nearly 200 migrants just two days before the immigration minister, Eric Besson, will visit the port city that Britain has long considered a springboard for irregular immigration.
The largest of the raids involved 225 riot police and targeted shelters in a thicket of thorn bushes known as "the jungle," where 150 migrants, mostly Afghans, were detained, according to Catherine Mandet, a spokeswoman for the prefecture in the regional capital, Arras. Forty-four others were picked up in operations at a highway toll barrier, at the Transmarck parking zone beside the port and at the Saint-Hilaire-Cottes truck stop, where smugglers try to cram migrants into the backs of freight trucks.
In addition to Afghans, the police picked up Pakistanis, Iraqis and Iranians in the court-ordered operation, which involved 500 police officers and officials, Ms. Mandet said. She said those arrested had been taken to Boulogne, Calais and Lille, where they can be kept in custody for questioning for up to 48 hours. She said there had been no instances of violence.
The operation came a day after Italy agreed to take in 142 African migrants rescued by a Turkish freighter in the Mediterranean and at a time when Britain and France are trying to crack down on irregular immigration. The issue is expected to be discussed when leaders of the two countries meet next month.
Jean-Pierre Leclerc, head of the volunteer organization Salam, which provides aid to migrants, said by phone from Calais that riot police had closed off the area and moved in at 7.30 a.m. "This is not the first time," he said. "The state is trying to tackle the problem."
It was the biggest raid since November, when the French police rounded up 57 Afghans in Calais in the hope of placing them on a deportation flight jointly with Britain.
Mr. Besson said in Paris on Tuesday that the raids were meant to snare the smugglers and were not aimed at migrants. "To say or suggest that smugglers and traffickers rule in Calais is unacceptable, and from that point of view, the state had to show its determination," Reuters quoted Mr. Besson as saying.
On most weeknights, smugglers usher groups of migrants, who pay €300 to €700, or about $340 to $900, apiece, onto freight trucks headed by ferry for Britain. Many are discovered by their heartbeats or carbon dioxide detectors as the trucks move through customs controls.
Britain, which has little tolerance for illegal immigration, has long sought France's help on the issue. The U.K. Border Agency has set up controls in French ports, the two countries have tried to organize joint deportation flights, and Britain was vocal in encouraging France to shut Sangatte, a Red Cross migrant shelter, in late 2002.
About 800 migrants were camped out around Calais before the raids, according to Mr. Leclerc.
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17) Supreme Court Cuts Back Officers' Searches of Vehicles
By ADAM LIPTAK
April 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/us/22scotus.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Tuesday significantly cut back the ability of the police to search the cars of people they arrest.
Police officers have for a generation understood themselves to be free to search vehicles based on nothing more than the fact that they had just arrested an occupant. That principle, Justice John Paul Stevens acknowledged in his majority opinion, "has been widely taught in police academies" and "law enforcement officers have relied on the rule in conducting vehicle searches during the past 28 years."
The majority replaced that bright-line rule with a more nuanced one, and law enforcement officials greeted it with dismay. "It's just terrible," William J. Johnson, the executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, said of the decision. "It's certainly going to result in less drug and weapons cases being made."
In a dissent, four justices said the majority had effectively overruled an important and straightforward Fourth Amendment precedent established by the court in a 1981 decision, New York v. Belton.
Justice Stevens denied that. The precedent of Belton had often been applied too broadly, he said. Vehicle searches should be allowed only in two situations, he wrote: when the person being arrested is close enough to the car to reach in, possibly to grab a weapon or tamper with evidence; or when the arresting officer reasonably believes that the car contains evidence pertinent to the very crime that prompted the arrest.
In the case decided Tuesday, Rodney J. Gant, an Arizona man, was arrested on an outstanding warrant for driving with a suspended license. He was handcuffed in the back of a patrol car while his car was searched.
The police found cocaine and a gun, and Mr. Gant was convicted on drug charges and sentenced to three years. The Arizona Supreme Court ruled that the search of Mr. Gant's car had violated the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches and suppressed the evidence against him. The United States Supreme Court affirmed that decision on Tuesday.
Justice Stevens, joined by the unusual alliance of Justices Antonin Scalia, David H. Souter, Clarence Thomas and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, said the court had agreed to hear the case because the conventional view of the Belton decision had been widely criticized. "The chorus that has called for us to revisit Belton," Justice Stevens wrote, "includes courts, scholars and members of this court who have questioned that decision's clarity and fidelity to Fourth Amendment principles."
Police officers and lower courts, Justice Stevens wrote, had failed to take adequate account of the two rationales that animated Belton: protecting the safety of arresting officers and safeguarding evidence of crimes. Those rationales only make sense, he said, "when the arrestee is unsecured and within reaching distance" of the car.
At the same time, the majority announced a new justification for a search in connection with an arrest, one drawing on a 2004 concurrence questioning Belton from Justice Scalia. Searches of vehicles are permissible, Justice Stevens said, "when it is reasonable to believe evidence relevant to the crime of arrest might be found in the vehicle."
As a practical matter, that means many arrests for traffic offenses will not by themselves allow police officers to search vehicles. Arrests for other kinds of crimes, though, may well supply a basis for a search.
The decision, Arizona v. Gant, No. 07-542, was the last to be issued from among the cases the court heard in its October sitting, and it was marked by an uneasy compromise that probably explains the delay.
Justice Scalia said he would have overruled Belton outright and substituted a rule that allowed searches of vehicles in connection with arrests only where the search seeks evidence of the crime for which the arrest was made or another one for which there is probable cause. He added that he joined the majority opinion to avoid a 4-1-4 decision "that leaves the governing rule uncertain."
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., joined in full by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and for the most part by Justice Stephen G. Breyer, said the broad Belton rule was sensible and easy to apply.
On the other hand, the new rule allowing searches for evidence of the crime that prompted the arrest, Justice Alito said, "is virtually certain to confuse law enforcement officers and judges for some time to come."
And the part of the majority opinion allowing searches only when the person arrested can reach the car "may endanger arresting officers," Justice Alito wrote.
Mr. Johnson of the police association explained the problem. "The case creates a temptation," he said, "for police to leave the occupant of a vehicle unsecured in the belief that they are now operating within the Fourth Amendment in terms of being able to search the vehicle."
Though Justice Stevens did not concede that Tuesday's decision overruled Belton, he did say that fidelity to precedent was no reason to allow constitutional violations to continue.
"Countless individuals guilty of nothing more serious that a traffic violation," he wrote, "have had their constitutional right to the security of their private effects violated" by the broad rule struck down on Tuesday.
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18) Large Urban-Suburban Gap Seen in Graduation Rates
By SAM DILLON
April 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/education/22dropout.html?ref=education
It is no surprise that more students drop out of high school in big cities than elsewhere. Now, however, a nationwide study shows the magnitude of the gap: the average high school graduation rate in the nation's 50 largest cities was 53 percent, compared with 71 percent in the suburbs.
But that urban-suburban gap, which in part is due to hundreds of failing city schools that some researchers call dropout factories, was far wider in some areas.
In Cleveland, for instance, where the gap was largest, only 38 percent of high school freshmen graduated within four years, compared with 80 percent in the Cleveland suburbs, the report said. In Baltimore, which has the nation's second-largest gap, 41 percent of students graduate from city schools, compared with 81 percent in the suburbs.
New York also had a large gap, with 54 percent of freshmen graduating within four years from schools in the city, compared with 83 percent from suburban high schools.
The report, titled Closing the Graduation Gap, was commissioned by the America's Promise Alliance, a nonprofit group that works to reduce the nation's dropout rate. The alliance is headed by Alma Powell and her husband, Colin L. Powell, the former secretary of state.
The graduation rates cited in the report were for the class of 2005, the most recent year for which Department of Education data were available, said Christopher B. Swanson, director of the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, the Maryland-based group that produced the study. The report builds on research begun in a previous study released a year ago.
Some big city school districts that have worked to improve their graduation rates have made significant progress since the middle of the last decade, Dr. Swanson said. Philadelphia public schools, for instance, raised the graduation rate to 62 percent in 2005 from 39 percent in 1995, the report said.
As a whole, the nation's graduation rate improved by a few percentage points over the same decade, to 71 percent from 66 percent, the study said.
But Marguerite Kondracke, the executive director of the alliance, said the pace of progress remained disappointing.
"We don't have time as a nation for incremental change," Ms. Kondracke said. "Just over half the students in our big cities are graduating from high school, and that's unacceptable."
For decades, high school graduation rates were routinely overstated in official statistics, with the Department of Education putting the nation's rate above 80 percent and some states reporting rates above 90 percent. Behind the false data were a host of faulty reporting methods, including labeling dropouts who obtained G.E.D. certificates as graduates.
The No Child Left Behind law signed in 2002 did little to improve the problem, allowing states to use dozens of different reporting methods. New Mexico, for example, was allowed to define its rate as the percentage of enrolled 12th graders who received a diploma, a method that grossly undercounted dropouts by ignoring all students who left school before 12th grade.
In 2005, the Department of Education joined a trend toward standardization by publishing an official federal estimate of state graduation rates, and governors agreed to adopt a uniform calculation method. In one of her last official acts last year, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings ordered states to calculate their graduation rates using the formula the governors had agreed upon by 2013.
Several provisions of the economic stimulus law signed in February may help improve graduation rates, including one that requires states to ensure that all schools, city or suburban, rich or poor, have equal access to qualified teachers, Ms. Kondracke said.
"This urban-suburban graduation gap has developed partly because teacher quality is not the same from classroom to classroom," she said. "So improving teacher quality is crucial to raising graduation rates in these inner-city schools."
The study found that the Indianapolis public schools had the lowest graduation rate of any large American city in 2005, with only 30 percent of freshmen graduating on time. Several large Western cities, in contrast, had graduation rates that exceeded the national average. The Mesa Unified District in Arizona had the highest graduation rate of any large city, with 77 out of every 100 freshmen there graduating four years later, the study found.
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