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U.S. Out Now! From Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and all U.S. bases around the world; End all U.S. Aid to Israel; Get the military out of our schools and our communities; Demand Equal Rights and Justice for ALL!
TAX THE RICH NOT THE POOR! MONEY FOR HUMAN NEEDS NOT WAR!
Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Table of Contents:
A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
C. ARTICLES IN FULL
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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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SF Bay Area Communities Celebrate
Iraq War Resister Robin Long
Released from Military Prison
You are invited to meet this extraordinary American. Army Spc Robin Long travelled to Canada in 2005 to resist deployment to Iraq. In July 2008 Canadian authorities deported him—the first such deportation since the Vietnam War. He has been imprisoned for the last year. Robin will be released on July 9th.
Thursday, July 16 at 6:30 pm, San Francisco
Veterans War Memorial Building, 401 Van Ness Ave, 2nd Floor
Co-sponsored by Courage to Resist, Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans for Peace #69. Endorsed by War Resisters League-West.
Friday, July 17 at 7:00 pm, Kentfield
309 Kent Ave. near the College of Marin
Dessert potluck party. Call 415-461-362 for more info.
These free events are fundraisers for Courage to Resist’s work in support of current Afghanistan GI resisters Travis Bishop and Victor Agosto (Ft. Hood, TX), and Dustin Stevens (Ft. Bragg, NC).
Tuesday, July 21 at 6:00 pm
Mailing & Pizza Party, Oakland
3945 Opal St. (at 40th St.)
Courage to Resist workspace
Help Courage to Resist stuff, stamp and mail our national fundraising newsletter. No licking required! With a brief report back on our July 8th rally at the SF Canadian Consulate that requested, “Dear Canada: Stop the deportation of Kimberly Rivera… and allow U.S. war resisters to stay in Canada.”
Donate to Courage to Resist:
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/21/26/
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KEVIN COOPER: INNOCENT MAN ON DEATH ROW
COMMITTEE TO END THE DEATH PENALTY TEACH IN:
TUESDAY, JULY 21, 7:00 P.M.
900 ALICE STREET, OAKLAND
(Corner of 9th Street and Alice Street
two blocks from Lake Merritt BART Station)
Kevin Cooper is an innocent man on death row. In 2004, he came within hours of execution. Recently, he was denied by the federal courts. But many judges disagreed. One judge began his opposing opinion by saying, "The State of California may be about to execute an innocent man."
Kevin's case is an example of everything that is wrong with the death penalty--it's racist, it targets the poor, it kills innocent people. Join us for a discussion about Kevin Cooper and find out how you can help stop this injustice.
For more information, visit www.savekevincooper.org or contact the Campaign to End the Death Penalty: phone: 510-394-8625; email: california@nodeathpenalty.org
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NATIONAL MARCH FOR EQUALITY
WASHINGTON, D.C. OCTOBER 10-11, 2009
Sign up here and spread the word:
http://www.nationalequalitymarch.com/
On October 10-11, 2009, we will gather in Washington DC from all across
America to let our elected leaders know that *now is the time for full equal
rights for LGBT people.* We will gather. We will march. And we will leave
energized and empowered to do the work that needs to be done in every
community across the nation.
This site will be updated as more information is available. We will organize
grassroots, from the bottom-up, and details will be shared on this website.
Our single demand:
Equal protection in all matters governed by civil law in all 50 states.
Our philosophy:
As members of every race, class, faith, and community, we see the struggle
for LGBT equality as part of a larger movement for peace and social justice.
Our strategy:
Decentralized organizing for this march in every one of the 435
Congressional districts will build a network to continue organizing beyond
October.
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B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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Express your support for parole for
Native American leader and political prisoner
Leonard Peltier!
Hearing scheduled for July 27
Your letter must be received before July 14
Leonard Peltier, Native American leader, Ojibwa-Sioux of Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota, has been unjustly imprisoned for 34 years in U.S. federal prison, a victim of FBI political persecution. His upcoming parole hearing is Monday, July 27. We urge you to write letters of support for Leonard’s parole to the Bureau of Prisons by clicking here.
Act Today! Letters should be received by the BOP before July 14. Add your voice to help free Leonard Peltier!
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=247
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Condemn Honduran Coup and Restore Honduran President Zelaya NOW!
Sign the Emergency Petition!
http://www.iacenter.org/honduraspetition/
To: President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
CC: Vice President Joe Biden, Congressional leaders, U.N. General Assembly President d'Escoto-Brockmann, U.N. Secretary General Ban, and major media representatives including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, and Reuters.
I demand that the Barack Obama administration and the U.S. Congress unequivocally condemn the unconstitutional and anti-democratic military coup in Honduras and insist that the military regime and the newly appointed but illegitimate president of Honduras restore President Zelaya to office, free all the imprisoned popular leaders and remove the curfew. I further demand that the U.S. Ambassador to Honduras be recalled immediately until such time as President Zelaya is restored to office.
Sincerely,
(Your signature will be appended here based on the contact information you enter in the form)
Sign the Petition Online
http://www.iacenter.org/honduraspetition/
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URGENT ACTION ALERT: HAITI ACTION COMMITTEE
PROTEST THE UNITED NATIONS ATTACK ON HAITIAN MOURNERS
AT THE FUNERAL OF FATHER GERARD JEAN-JUSTE.
July 6th was the fourth anniversary of the United Nations deadly
assault on the community of Cite Soleil. Now, four years later, the
same type of UN violence continues. Enough is enough. Far from
“peacekeeping”, the UN occupation of Haiti is terrorizing the popular
movement and the poorest communities in Haiti.
On Wednesday, June 17th, United Nations troops from Brazil opened fire
on mourners in Port-au-Prince who had attended the funeral of Father
Gerard Jean-Juste. One young man was killed in the attack.
Father Jean-Juste was a beloved Haitian priest and human rights
advocate whose whole life was dedicated to the poor. He died on May
27th in Miami after battling leukemia that he had contracted while
being incarcerated in Haiti as a political prisoner, from October –
November, 2004 and then again from July 2005 – January 2006. He was
jailed for his vocal opposition to the 2004 kidnapping/coup d’etat
against the democratically elected government of President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the subsequent violent repression against
supporters of Fanmi Lavalas, the majority party inHaiti.
The Haiti Information Project reported, “UN troops on the scene began
shooting indiscriminately at the crowd killing a young man identified
only as "Junior" from the neighborhood of Solino. Hundreds more
protestors then took the body of the victim to the front of Haiti's
National Palace.”
This is not the first time that UN forces have murdered unarmed
civilians in Haiti. On July 6, 2005, for example, UN troops shot over
20,000 rounds of ammunition in the crowded, poor neighborhood of Cite
Soleil, a stronghold of support for the Lavalas movement, killing
dozens. In the early morning of December 22, 2006, 400 Brazilian-led
UN troops again carried out a massive assault in Cite Soleil in
Port-au-Prince. This operation took the lives of dozens of
Port-au-Prince residents. Similar operations by UN troops have taken
the lives of innocent women, men and children on other occasions, most
notably in February 2007.
This latest killing takes place in the context of the Préval
government’s denying the right of Fanmi Lavalas, the main political
party in Haiti, to participate in recent Senatorial elections. Lavalas
activists who called for an electoral boycott were ordered arrested.
Former President Bill Clinton is now the UN Special Envoy to Haiti.
Please phone or fax Mr. Clinton to protest this latest murder by UN troops. Help
honor the memory of Father Jean-Juste by continuing to demand real democracy
in Haiti.
Phone: 212-348-8882
Fax: 212-348-9245
END THE UN OCCUPATION OF HAITI
JUSTICE FOR THE VICTIMS AND THEIR FAMILIES
RETURN PRESIDENT ARISTIDE
www.haitisolidarity.net
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"RESOLUTION: The Torture Song" By David Ippolito
http://www.thatguitarman.com/MP3/resolution.mp3
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Update on Ward Churchill:
In a stunning and incomprehensible decision, the judge in the Ward Churchill case has ruled that the fired professor will get neither money nor reinstatement. He ruled that since the jury awarded Churchill only a token damage, he could not ignore the jury's presumed wishes (this is false since jury members said after the trial that all but one favored a large money award). And he ruled that since the relationship between the university and Churchill was beyond repair he could not order reinstatement. Plus Churchill did not make a good faith effort to obtain comparable employment since his firing.
See article:
Court Upholds Dismissal of Colorado Professor
By DAN FROSCH
July 8, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/us/08churchill.html?scp=1&sq=Ward%20Churchill%20reinstatement%20decision&st=cse
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Troy Anthony Davis is an African American man who has spent the last 18 years on death row for a murder he did not commit. There is no physical evidence tying him to the crime and seven out of nine witnesses have recanted. New evidence and new testimony have been presented to the Georgia courts, but the justice system refuses to consider this evidence, which would prove Troy Davis' innocence once and for all.
Sign the petition and join the NAACP, Amnesty International USA, and other partners in demanding justice for Troy Davis!
http://www.iamtroy.com/
For Now, High Court Punts on Troy Davis, on Death Row for 18 Years
By Ashby Jones
Wall Street Journal Law Blog
June 30, 2009
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/06/30/for-now-high-court-punts-on-troy-davis-on-death-row-for-18-years/
Take action now:
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&aid=12361&ICID=A0906A01&tr=y&auid=5030305
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Committee To Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 2012
New York, NY 10159-2012
New videos from April 24 Oakland Mumia event
http://abu-jamal-news.com/article?name=jlboak
Donations for Mumia's Legal Defense in the U.S. Our legal effort is the front line of the battle for Mumia's freedom and life. His legal defense needs help. The costs are substantial for our litigation in the U.S. Supreme Court and at the state level. To help, please make your checks payable to the National Lawyers Guild Foundation (indicate "Mumia" on the bottom left). All donations are tax deductible under the Internal Revenue Code, section 501(c)(3), and should be mailed to:
It is outrageous and a violation of human rights that Mumia remains in prison and on death row. His life hangs in the balance. My career has been marked by successfully representing people facing death in murder cases. I will not rest until we win Mumia's case. Justice requires no less.
With best wishes,
Robert R. Bryan
Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal
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IVAW Member Victor Agosto Refuses Deployment to Afghanistan
Sign our Petition in Support of Victor's Resistance Today:
http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5966/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=383
Support Victor by making a donation to his legal defense fund:
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=27370
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Short Video About Al-Awda's Work
The following link is to a short video which provides an overview of Al-Awda's work since the founding of our organization in 2000. This video was first shown on Saturday May 23, 2009 at the fundraising banquet of the 7th Annual Int'l Al-Awda Convention in Anaheim California. It was produced from footage collected over the past nine years.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiAkbB5uC0&eurl
Support Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, depends on your financial support to carry out its work.
To submit your tax-deductible donation to support our work, go to
http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html and follow the simple instructions.
Thank you for your generosity!
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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT!
FLASHPOINTS Interview with Innocent San Quentin Death Row Inmate
Kevin Cooper -- Aired Monday, May 18,2009
http://www.flashpoints.net/#GOOGLE_SEARCH_ENGINE
To learn more about Kevin Cooper go to:
savekevincooper.org
LINKS
San Francisco Chronicle article on the recent ruling:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/13/BAM517J8T3.DTL
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling and dissent:
http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2009/05/11/05-99004o.pdf
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COURAGE TO RESIST!
Support the troops who refuse to fight!
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/
Donate:
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/21/57/
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PETITION IN SUPPORT OF PAROLE OF LEONARD PELTIER
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/parole2008/
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C. ARTICLES IN FULL
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1) Obama's Cap and Trade Carbon Emissions Bill -
A Stealth Scheme to License Pollution and Fraud
by Stephen Lendman
Wednesday July 8, 2009
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2009/07/obamas-cap-and-trade-carbon-emissions.html
http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=844#more-844
2) Decision to dump TVA's spilled coal waste in Alabama community sparks resistance
By Sue Sturgis
Facing South
July 8, 2009
http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/07/decision-to-dump-tvas-spilled-coal-waste-in-alabama-community-sparks-resistance.html
3) The Human Equation
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
July 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/opinion/11herbert.html?_r=1
4) U.S. Inaction Seen After Taliban P.O.W.’s Died
By JAMES RISEN
July 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/world/asia/11afghan.html?hp
5) Budget Cuts Eroding Progress in Juvenile Justice
By PETER S. GOODMAN
July 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/us/11juvenile.html?ref=us
6) A More Narrow Focus for Enforcement Program
By JULIA PRESTON
National Briefing | Immigration
July 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/us/11brfs-AMORENARROWF_BRF.html?ref=us
7) Collect Now, or Later? Timing Your Social Security Benefits
By TARA SIEGEL BERNARD
July 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/your-money/11retire.html?ref=business
8) Off the Charts
On the Unemployment Line, Unable to Move
By FLOYD NORRIS
July 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/business/economy/11charts.html?ref=business
9) A.I.G. Seeks U.S. Support for Bonuses
By ERIC DASH
July 10, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/business/10insure.html?ref=business
10) Army Suicides Trending Upward for 2009
July 10, 2009
military.com
http://www.military .com/news/ article/army- suicides- trending- upward-for- 2009.html
11) Cheney Is Linked to Concealment of C.I.A. Project
By SCOTT SHANE
July 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/us/politics/12intel.html?hp
12) In Michigan, Deficits Defy Years of Cutting
By MONICA DAVEY
July 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/us/12michigan.html?ref=us
13) A Supreme Triumph, Then Into the Shadows
By DAVID STOUT
July 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/us/12gaines.html?ref=us
14) Giving Life, Wearing Shackles and Chains
By JIM DWYER
About New York
July 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/nyregion/12about.html?ref=nyregion
15) The Invisible Hand, Trumped by Darwin?
By ROBERT H. FRANK
Economic View
July 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/business/economy/12view.html?ref=business
16) Questions and Apathy Surround Shootings by Officer in Miami Beach
By DAMIEN CAVE
July 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/us/12miami.html?ref=us
17) Job Losses Show Wider Racial Gap in New York
By PATRICK McGEEHAN and MATHEW R. WARREN
July 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/13/nyregion/13unemployment.html?ref=business
18) GM to Spend $1 Billion In Brazil on New Family Of Cars
By REUTERS
July 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/07/15/business/business-us-gm-brazil.html
19) 2 Police Officers Injured in Indonesian Gold Mine Skirmish
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
"It is in that environment that Freeport, which is based in Phoenix, operates the world’s largest gold mine and employs 20,000 workers. The company, which has enjoyed close ties to the Indonesian government for four decades, including during the late Suharto’s 32-year military dictatorship, has long made a practice of paying the military and the police for protection."
July 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/16/world/asia/16indo.html?ref=world
20) Part-Time Workers Mask Unemployment Woes
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Economic Scene
July 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/business/economy/15leonhardt.html?ref=us
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1) Obama's Cap and Trade Carbon Emissions Bill -
A Stealth Scheme to License Pollution and Fraud
by Stephen Lendman
Wednesday July 8, 2009
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2009/07/obamas-cap-and-trade-carbon-emissions.html
http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=844#more-844
On May 15, HR 2454: American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACESA) was introduced in the House purportedly "To create clean energy jobs, achieve energy independence, reduce global warming pollution and transition to a clean energy economy."
In fact, it's to let corporate polluters reap huge windfall profits by charging consumers more for energy and fuel as well as create a new bubble through carbon trading derivatives speculation. It does nothing to address environmental issues, yet on June 26 the House narrowly passed (229 - 212) and sent it to the Senate to be debated and voted on. More on that below.
On March 31, Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman and Energy and Environment Subcommittee Chairman Edward Markey released a "discussion draft" of the proposed legislation and falsely claimed:
-- it's "a comprehensive approach to America's energy policy that charts a new course towards a clean energy economy;" it will
-- create millions of clean energy jobs....that can't be shipped overseas;
-- put America on the path to energy independence;
-- reduce our dependence on foreign oil;
-- save money by the billions;
-- unleash energy investment by the trillions;
-- cut global warming pollution;
-- strengthen our economy;" and
-- make "America the world leader in new clean energy and energy efficiency technologies."
Strong-arm pressure, threats and bribes got the bill through the House. Forty-four Democrats opposed it. Eight Republicans backed it. Over 1200 pages long, few if any lawmakers read it.
After passage, Chairman Markey said:
"It's been an incredible six months to go from a point where no one believed we could pass this legislation to a point now where we can begin to say that we are going to send President Obama to Copenhagen in December as the leader of the world on climate change."
Speaker Pelosi praised the bill as "transformational legislation which takes us into the future" and added that after passage she took congratulatory calls from Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Al Gore. The former vice-president has long-standing ties to Goldman Sachs (GS), and in 2004 he and David Blood, CEO of GS's asset management division until 2003, co-founded Generation Investment Management LLC, a firm likely to profit greatly from cap and trade schemes.
In a prepared June 25 statement ahead of the House vote, Obama said:
"Right now, the House of Representatives is moving toward a vote of historic proportions on a piece of legislation that will open the door to a new, clean energy economy."
After citing the same false claims as Waxman and Markey, he called the legislation "balanced and sensible" and "urge(d) every member of Congress - Democrats and Republicans - to come together and support" it.
Polluters love it. So does Wall Street and corporate-friendly environmental groups like the Environmental Defense Fund. The opposition, however, includes Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Public Citizen.
In a joint May 13 press release, they were "extremely troubled (about) compromises to the already flawed American Clean Energy & Security Act."
It contains enough loopholes to make its claimed performance standards worthless, one of which prohibits the EPA from using the Clean Air Act to regulate future greenhouse gas emissions. That alone means they'll proliferate beyond what new technology reduces on its own, and only then if it's profitable to do it.
On June 23, Friends of the Earth president Brent Blackwelder said:
"Corporate polluters including Shell and Duke Energy helped write this bill, and the result is that we're left with legislation that fails to come anywhere close to solving the climate crisis. Worse, the bill eliminates preexisting EPA authority to address global warming - that means it's actually a step backward."
A June 25 Greenpeace press release stated:
"As it comes to the floor, the Waxman-Markey bill sets emission reduction targets far lower than science demands, then undermines even those targets with massive offsets. The giveaways and preferences in the bill will actually spur a new generation of nuclear and coal-fired power plants to the detriment of real energy solutions."
On June 27, Public Citizen (PC) called the bill "a new legal right to pollute (that) gives away 85 percent of (its) credits to polluters. (It) will not solve our climate crisis but will enrich already powerful oil, coal and nuclear power companies." PC wants polluters to cut their emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 and pay for credits, not get them free. It also cited the American Wind Energy Association saying that the renewable standard will deliver "effectively zero" new ones.
PC wants consumers protected, not charged a "carbon tax....The bill doesn't, but should, provide money to help homeowners pay for such things as weatherization or to receive rebates for rooftop solar." Its main "consumer protection provision distributes free pollution allowances to electric and natural gas utilities (on the assumption) that the 50 different state utility commissions will redirect all that money back to consumers." In fact, HR 2454 is a thinly-veiled scheme to let companies profit from polluted air, in part financed by a consumer "carbon tax."
Big Coal gets a waiver until 2025. Agribusiness is exempt altogether even though it's responsible for up to one-fourth of greenhouse gas emissions. The nuclear industry will benefit hugely from the free allowances provision. A leaked memo had Exelon, the nation's largest nuclear power company, bragging that it will reap a $1 - $1.5 billion annual windfall.
Overall, carbon trading is a scam, first promoted in the 1980s under Reagan. Clinton made it a key provision of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. He signed it in 1998, but it was never ratified. As of February 2009, 183 nations did both, but independent scientists call it "miserable failure" needing to be scrapped and replaced by a meaningful alternative.
ACESA is about profits, not environmental remediation. Its emissions reduction targets are so weak, they effectively license pollution by creating a new profit center to do it.
The Next Bubble
Wall Street also will reap a huge bonanza through carbon trading derivatives speculation exploiting what Commodity Futures Trading commissioner Bart Chilton believes will be a $2 trillion market - "the biggest of any (commodities) derivatives product in the next five years." Others see a future annual market potential of up to $10 trillion based on these schemes:
-- government-issued cap and trading carbon allowance permits to let polluters emit a designated amount of greenhouse gases; those exceeding the limit can buy rights for more from companies below their limit;
-- carbon offsets that let companies emit excess greenhouse gases provided they invest in projects purportedly cutting them elsewhere, either domestically or abroad; they can also fulfill their obligation by stretching out investments for up to 40 years - far enough ahead to avoid them altogether; and
-- besides trading allowances and offsets, polluters and Wall Street can play the derivatives game, including with futures contracts for a designated number of allowances at an agreed on price for a specified date.
According to Robert Shapiro, former Undersecretary of Commerce in the Clinton administration: "We are on the verge of creating a new trillion dollar market (through) financial assets that will be securitized, derivatized, and speculated by Wall Street like the mortgage-backed securities market" and all others that inflated bubbles that burst. If cap and trade becomes law, this market will explode so Wall Street is pressuring senators to pass it.
According to the Center of Public Integrity (CPI), around "880 total businesses and groups....reported they were seeking to influence climate change policy" as addressed in HR 2454. Representing 770 of them are "an estimated 2340 lobbyists," a 300% increase in the past five years, or more than "four climate lobbyists for every member of Congress."
In 2003, Wall Street employed none on climate issues. CPI says it now has 130 representing the usual players like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and others, and why so is simple - to create a huge new revenue stream to make up for ones lost with perhaps others in the wings, thus far not revealed. Waxman - Markey delivered splendidly, setting the stage for another bubble if HR 2454 becomes law with huge pressure now on senators to assure it.
Warning: Cap and Trade Bubble Ahead
On July 1, Catherine Austin Fitts' Solari.com blog headlined "The Next Really Scary Bubble" in stating:
"If you think the housing and credit bubble diminished your financial security and your community, or the bailouts, or the rising gas prices did as well, hold on to your hat" for what's coming. "Carbon trading is gearing up to make the housing and derivative bubbles look like target practice."
She quoted Rep. Geoff Davis calling it "a scam," Rep. Devin Nunes saying it's a "massive transfer of wealth" from the public to polluters and Wall Street, Rep. James Sensenbrenner stating "Carbon markets can and will be manipulated using the same Wall Street sleights of hand that brought us the financial crisis," and Dennis Kuchinich citing "The best description to date (to) be found in Matt Taibbi's....'The Great American Bubble Machine: From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs (GS) has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression - and they are about to do it again.' "
Taibbi calls GS the "world's most powerful investment bank....a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." It operates by positioning itself "in the middle of (every) speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap."
They control Washington and profit by extracting "vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that (lets it) rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies (it)throws (back as) political patronage."
When inflated bubbles burst "leaving millions of ordinary (people) broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again (inflating new bubbles and) lending us back our own money at interest...." They've been at this since the 1920s and are "preparing to do it again (with) what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet" - a new cap and trade derivatives scam written into HR 2454 with GS positioned to profit most from it. Taibbi calls its market edge a position of "supreme privilege (and) explicit advantage" ahead of all others on the Street.
Contributing $4,452,585 to Democrats in 2008 (around $1 million to Obama) was mere pocket change for what it can reap from scams like cap and trade disguised as an environmental plan. The scheme was devised. GS helped write it. The House passed it and sent it to the Senate. Unless stopped, it will transfer more of our wealth to corporate polluters and Wall Street on top of all they've stolen so far from derivatives fraud and the imploded housing and other bubbles. And Goldman will lead the way finding new ways to do it until there's nothing left to extract.
Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
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2) Decision to dump TVA's spilled coal waste in Alabama community sparks resistance
By Sue Sturgis
Facing South
July 8, 2009
http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/07/decision-to-dump-tvas-spilled-coal-waste-in-alabama-community-sparks-resistance.html
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approved a plan last week to dump 3 millions of tons of coal ash that spilled from a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant in eastern Tennessee in an impoverished, largely African-American community in Alabama -- and the decision is sparking resistance among local officials and residents who don't want the toxic waste.
The district attorney for Perry County, Ala. -- where the privately owned Arrowhead landfill that's getting the ash is located -- said yesterday the federal government's decision to bring the waste to his community was "tragic and shortsighted" and would endanger generations of residents, the Associated Press reports:
Perry County District Attorney Michael Jackson said he would monitor the lengthy disposal process to make sure the landfill operator and the federal utility comply with environmental regulations.
Jackson said he doesn't know if anything can be done to block the shipments, however.
"We're looking at every option, talking to different groups," Jackson said.
The Alabama Department of Environmental Management defends the decision, and some Perry County officials say it will bring millions of dollars in payments and about 50 jobs to the area.
Coal ash contains significant levels of toxic pollutants including arsenic, lead and mercury as well as radioactive elements, but it is still not regulated by the federal government as hazardous waste. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has said her agency plans to release a proposed federal rule for the waste by year's end.
In May, Facing South broke the story that TVA's decision to primarily consider two landfills for dumping the ash -- in Perry County, Ala. and Taylor County, Ga. -- raised environmental justice concerns because of the social vulnerability of the communities targeted.
Georgia's Taylor County is an agricultural area where almost 41% of the population is African-American and more than 24% of residents live in poverty, according to census data. Alabama's Perry County -- part of the historic "Black Belt" -- is 69% African-American with more than 32% of its residents living in poverty, making it one of the state's poorest counties.
TVA reportedly considered moving the coal ash to two communities in eastern Tennessee that are predominantly white and with lower poverty levels, but the company sought regulators' approval only for the Georgia and Alabama sites. TVA's announcement regarding the Alabama landfill's selection said the choice was made after an evaluation process involving more than 30 companies.
In a letter to Facing South following publication of our May report, Peyton T. Hairston Jr., TVA's senior vice president for corporate responsibility and diversity, took issue with the story:
To write that TVA has made decisions on where to transport ash from the Kingston coal spill based on the racial composition of a community is simply wrong.
For the record, the story did not say TVA made its disposal decision because of the community's racial composition. But the effect is the same: TVA -- with EPA's approval -- has chosen to move toxic waste from a predominantly white and relatively well-off community in Tennessee to a poor and majority-black community in Alabama.
Meanwhile, Perry County District Attorney Jackson is not the only Alabamian raising concerns about the dumping decision. The Tuscaloosa News editorialized against the move in a piece titled "Coal ash dump site in Alabama not welcome":
Why is it that the cheapest, politically easiest option for dumping this toxic waste is to put it in a poor, rural county in Alabama's Black Belt?
Local residents are also voicing opposition -- some in creative ways. When TVA held a public meeting last month in Harriman, Tenn. to discuss the ash disposal plans, Perry County resident Betsy Ramaccia showed up wearing a protective suit and breathing mask to denounce the decision as "an environmental injustice and a social injustice," WVLT-TV reports. To view the segment, which was produced before EPA approved the disposal decision, see Jonathan Hiskes' report at Grist.
And residents of Uniontown, the community closest to the Alabama landfill, got an opportunity to speak their piece about the dumping plans via www.ashholes.org, a website created by Project M, a socially responsible design firm that's also behind the innovative PieLab community space in nearby Greensboro, Ala. It features a short video of Uniontown residents, including the man in the still shot above, delivering a simple message to the EPA administrator.
"Lisa Jackson, will you protect us?"
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3) The Human Equation
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
July 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/opinion/11herbert.html?_r=1
Vice President Joe Biden told us this week that the Obama administration “misread how bad the economy was” in the immediate aftermath of the inauguration.
Puh-leeze. Mr. Biden and President Obama won the election because the economy was cratering so badly there were fears we might be entering another depression. No one understood that better than the two of them. Mr. Obama tried to clean up the vice president’s remarks by saying his team hadn’t misread what was happening, but rather “we had incomplete information.”
That doesn’t hold water, either. The president has got the second coming of the best and the brightest working for him down there in Washington (think of Larry Summers as the latter-day Robert McNamara), and they’re crunching numbers every which way they can. They’ve got more than enough data. They understand the theories and the formulas as well as anyone. But they’re not coming up with the right answers because they’re missing the same thing that McNamara and his fellow technocrats were missing back in the 1960s: the human equation.
The crisis staring America in its face and threatening to bring it to its knees is unemployment. Joblessness. Why it is taking so long — seemingly forever — for our government officials to recognize the scope of this crisis and confront it directly is beyond me.
There are now five unemployed workers for every job opening in the U.S. The official unemployment rate is 9.5 percent, but that doesn’t begin to tell the true story of the economic suffering. The roof is caving in on struggling American families that have already seen the value of their homes and retirement accounts put to the torch.
At the present rate, upwards of seven million homes can be expected to fall into foreclosure this year and next. Welfare rolls are rising, according to a survey by The Wall Street Journal. The National Employment Law Project has pointed out that hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers will begin losing their jobless benefits, just about the only thing keeping them above water, by the end of the summer.
Virtually all of the job growth since the start of the 21st century (which was nothing to crow about) has vanished. If you include the men and women who are now working part time but would like to work full time, and those who have become so discouraged that they’ve stopped actively searching for work, you’ll find that 16.5 percent of Americans are jobless or underemployed. Nearly everyone who is fortunate enough to have a job has a spouse or a parent or an in-law or a close friend who is desperate for employment.
Anyone who believes that the Obama stimulus package will turn this jobs crisis around is deluded. It was too small, too weakened by tax cuts and not nearly focused enough on creating jobs. It’s like trying to turn a battleship around with a canoe. Even if it were working perfectly, the stimulus would not come close to stemming the cascade of joblessness unleashed by this megarecession.
I’d like to see the president go on television and, in a dramatic demonstration of real leadership, announce a plan geared toward increasing employment that is both big and visionary — something on the scale of the Manhattan Project, or the interstate highway program or the Apollo spaceflight initiative.
My choice would be a “Rebuild America” campaign that would put men and women to work repairing, maintaining, designing and rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure in the broadest sense — everything from roads and schools and the electrical power grid to innovative environmental initiatives and a sparkling new mass transportation network, including high-speed rail systems.
One of the ways of financing such an effort would be through the creation of a national infrastructure bank, which would provide federal investment capital for approved projects and use that money to leverage additional private investment.
There was a time when Americans could think on such a scale and get it done. We used to be better than any other nation on the planet at getting things done. It would be tragic if the 21st century turns out to be the time when that extraordinary can-do spirit disappears and we’re left with nothing more meaningful and exciting than lusting after tax cuts and trying to pay off credit card debt.
The joblessness the nation is experiencing is crushing any hope of a real economic recovery. With so many Americans maxed out on their credit cards and with the value of their homes deep in the tank, the only money available to spend in most cases is from paychecks. The best and the brightest in Washington may have a theory about how to get the economy booming without dealing with the employment crisis, but I’d like to see that theory work in the real world.
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4) U.S. Inaction Seen After Taliban P.O.W.’s Died
By JAMES RISEN
July 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/world/asia/11afghan.html?hp
WASHINGTON — After a mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Bush administration officials repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the episode, according to government officials and human rights organizations.
American officials had been reluctant to pursue an investigation — sought by officials from the F.B.I., the State Department, the Red Cross and human rights groups — because the warlord, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, was on the payroll of the C.I.A. and his militia worked closely with United States Special Forces in 2001, several officials said. They said the United States also worried about undermining the American-supported government of President Hamid Karzai, in which General Dostum had served as a defense official.
“At the White House, nobody said no to an investigation, but nobody ever said yes, either,” said Pierre Prosper, the former American ambassador for war crimes issues. “The first reaction of everybody there was, ‘Oh, this is a sensitive issue; this is a touchy issue politically.’ ”
It is not clear how — or if — the Obama administration will address the issue. But in recent weeks, State Department officials have quietly tried to thwart General Dostum’s reappointment as military chief of staff to the president, according to several senior officials, and suggested that the administration might not be hostile to an inquiry.
The question of culpability for the prisoner deaths — which may have been the most significant mass killing in Afghanistan after the 2001 American-led invasion — has taken on new urgency since the general, an important ally of Mr. Karzai, was reinstated to his government post last month. He had been suspended last year and living in exile in Turkey after he was accused of threatening a political rival at gunpoint.
“If you bring Dostum back, it will impact the progress of democracy and the trust people have in the government,” Mr. Prosper said. Arguing that the Obama administration should investigate the 2001 killings, he added, “There is always a time and place for justice.”
While President Obama has deepened the United States’ commitment to Afghanistan, sending 21,000 more American troops there to combat the growing Taliban insurgency, his administration has also tried to distance itself from Mr. Karzai, whose government is deeply unpopular and widely viewed as corrupt.
A senior State Department official said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, had told Mr. Karzai of their objections to reinstating General Dostum. The American officials have also pressed his sponsors in Turkey to delay his return to Afghanistan while talks continue with Mr. Karzai over the general’s role, said an official briefed on the matter. Asked about looking into the prisoner deaths, the official said, “We believe that anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated.”
The Back Story
While the deaths have been previously reported, the back story of the frustrated efforts to investigate them has not been fully told. The killings occurred in late November 2001, just days after the American-led invasion forced the ouster of the Taliban government in Kabul. Thousands of Taliban fighters surrendered to General Dostum’s forces, which were part of the American-backed Northern Alliance, in the city of Kunduz. They were then transported to a prison run by the general’s forces near the town of Shibarghan.
Survivors and witnesses told The New York Times and Newsweek in 2002 that over a three-day period, Taliban prisoners were stuffed into closed metal shipping containers and given no food or water; many suffocated while being trucked to the prison. Other prisoners were killed when guards shot into the containers. The bodies were said to have been buried in a mass grave in Dasht-i-Leili, a stretch of desert just outside Shibarghan.
A recently declassified 2002 State Department intelligence report states that one source, whose identity is redacted, concluded that about 1,500 Taliban prisoners died. Estimates from other witnesses or human rights groups range from several hundred to several thousand. The report also says that several Afghan witnesses were later tortured or killed.
In Afghanistan, rival warlords have had a history of eliminating enemy troops by suffocating them in sealed containers. General Dostum, however, has said previously that any such deaths of the Taliban prisoners were unintentional. He has said that only 200 prisoners died and blamed combat wounds and disease for most of the fatalities. The general could not be reached for comment, and a spokesman declined to comment for this article.
While a dozen or so bodies were examined and several were autopsied, a full exhumation was never performed, and human rights groups are concerned that evidence has been destroyed. In 2008, a medical forensics team working with the United Nations discovered excavations that suggested the mass grave had been moved. Satellite photos obtained by The Times show that the site was disturbed even earlier, in 2006.
“Our repeated efforts to protect witnesses, secure evidence and get a full investigation have been met by the U.S. and its allies with buck-passing, delays and obstruction,” said Nathaniel Raymond, a researcher for Physicians for Human Rights, a group based in Boston that discovered the mass grave site in 2002.
Seeking an Investigation
The first calls for an investigation came from his group and the International Committee of the Red Cross. A military commander in the United States-led coalition rejected a request by a Red Cross official for an inquiry in late 2001, according to the official, who, in keeping with his organization’s policy, would speak only on condition of anonymity and declined to identify the commander.
A few months later, Dell Spry, the F.B.I.’s senior representative at the detainee prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, heard accounts of the deaths from agents he supervised there. Separately, 10 or so prisoners brought from Afghanistan reported that they had been “stacked like cordwood” in shipping containers and had to lick the perspiration off one another to survive, Mr. Spry recalled. They told similar accounts of suffocations and shootings, he said. A declassified F.B.I. report, dated January 2003, confirms that the detainees provided such accounts.
Mr. Spry, who is now an F.B.I. consultant, said he did not believe the stories because he knew that Al Qaeda trained members to fabricate tales about mistreatment. Still, the veteran agent said he thought the agency should investigate the reports “so they could be debunked.”
But a senior official at F.B.I. headquarters, whom Mr. Spry declined to identify, told him to drop the matter, saying it was not part of his mission and it would be up to the American military to investigate.
“I was disappointed because I believed that, true or untrue, we had to be in front of this story, because someday it may turn out to be a problem,” Mr. Spry said.
The Pentagon, however, showed little interest in the matter. In 2002, Physicians for Human Rights asked Defense Department officials to open an investigation and provide security for its forensics team to conduct a more thorough examination of the gravesite. “We met with blanket denials from the Pentagon,” recalls Jennifer Leaning, a board member with the group. “They said nothing happened.”
Pentagon spokesmen have said that the United States Central Command conducted an “informal inquiry,” asking Special Forces personnel members who worked with General Dostum if they knew of a mass killing by his forces. When they said they did not, the inquiry went no further.
“I did get the sense that there was little appetite for this matter within parts of D.O.D.,” said Marshall Billingslea, former acting assistant defense secretary for special operations, referring to the Department of Defense.
High-Level Conversation
Another former defense official, who would speak only on condition of anonymity, recalled that the prisoner deaths came up in a conversation with Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense at the time, in early 2003.
“Somebody mentioned Dostum and the story about the containers and the possibility that this was a war crime,” the official said. “And Wolfowitz said we are not going to be going after him for that.”
In an interview, Mr. Wolfowitz said he did not recall the conversation. However, Pentagon documents obtained by Physicians for Human Rights through a Freedom of Information Act request confirm that the issue was debated by Mr. Wolfowitz and other officials.
As evidence mounted about the deaths, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell assigned Mr. Prosper, the United States ambassador at large for war crimes, to look into them in 2002. He met with General Dostum, who denied the allegations, Mr. Prosper recalled. Meanwhile, Karzai government officials told him that they opposed any investigation.
“They made it clear that this was going to cause a problem,” said Mr. Prosper, who left the Bush administration in 2005 and is now a lawyer in Los Angeles. “They would say, ‘We have had decades of war crimes. Where do you start?’ ”
In Washington, Mr. Prosper encountered similar attitudes. In 2002, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, then the White House coordinator for Afghanistan, made it clear that he was concerned about efforts to investigate General Dostum, Mr. Prosper said. “Khalilzad never opposed an investigation,” Mr. Prosper recalled. “But he definitely raised the political implications of it.”
Mr. Khalilzad, who later served as the American ambassador to Afghanistan, did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Prosper said that because of the resistance from American and Afghan officials, his office dropped its inquiry. The State Department mentioned the episode in its annual human rights report for 2002, but took no further action.
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5) Budget Cuts Eroding Progress in Juvenile Justice
By PETER S. GOODMAN
July 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/us/11juvenile.html?ref=us
COLUMBIA, S.C. — Her first night inside the razor wire at the state juvenile prison came as a 14-year-old in the mid-1970s, when she was locked up for running away from home. Her next experience came the following decade, when she began work as a correctional officer.
As Velvet McGowan tells it, care was a word not then in the lexicon of the South Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice. Teenagers were warehoused like problematic inventory, with as many as 80 crammed into spaces built for 40. Social services were meager. Violent outbreaks occurred daily.
Two decades later, Ms. McGowan oversees the girls’ prison, where she focuses on turning around troubled lives. New programs have expanded counseling and education, cutting the repeat offender rate. New facilities have extricated the state from a federal lawsuit brought in response to once appalling conditions.
But what South Carolina built over many years in eradicating its shameful past is being undermined by the deep economic recession. In the last year, the state has cut the financing for its juvenile justice system by one-fifth, forcing 285 layoffs and the closure of several facilities, including five group homes that focused on counseling.
The department has scrapped a program that helped paroled youngsters find jobs, unleashing them into a state with 11.6 percent unemployment. It has canceled state financing for 40 after-school centers for teenagers, where they get help with their homework, receive mentoring and take part in activities during hours when children are most likely to stray into trouble. It has trimmed the ranks of social workers to 20, from 36.
“I’m scared,” said Ms. McGowan, dabbing tears with a tissue. “I don’t want to relive the ’80s through a budget cut.”
Across the country, depleted coffers have prompted state and local officials to pare programs intended as alternatives to the mere incarceration of juvenile lawbreakers.
In Tennessee, state legislators voted last month to close a wilderness activity camp. In Louisiana, a boot camp aimed at deterring young people from crime has been shut down. In California, alternative facilities focused on counseling are threatened from San Jose to Sacramento.
For South Carolina, cuts are particularly unsettling given its history. For a dozen years ending in 2003, a federal judge supervised the department under the settlement of a class-action lawsuit arising from overcrowded prison conditions.
Since then, the system has stopped treating youthful offenders as hardened convicts, instead confronting them as social problems through new programs that attack the underlying causes of juvenile crime — like dysfunctional homes, drug abuse and difficulties in school.
The department’s director, William R. Byars Jr., a former family court justice, has overseen many of the changes. In his days on the bench, he fretted over the condition of the juvenile justice system, regretfully sending children to the prison then known as “Little Vietnam.”
“It was a dangerous place,” Judge Byars said. “Kids were in here with mental deficiencies. You had kids in here for status offenses, for cutting school or running away. They were all mixed together, because our system was not designed to ask, ‘What is the best situation for this child?’ ”
Under Judge Byars’s direction, the department has focused on drastically decreasing the numbers of young people held inside the razor wire at the prison, shipping hundreds out to wilderness camps and group homes. The number held at the prison has dropped to fewer than 400, from more than 1,000 in the mid-1990s, while the number held in alternative settings has increased by a similar magnitude.
The department has set up a network of so-called intensive supervision officers who get to know the youngsters and their families before they are released, and then visit frequently to stay on top of problems.
A recent department review found that only 12 percent of youths monitored by these officers wound up back in the system a year after their release, compared with 21 percent among those lacking intensive guidance.
The success of the reforms has been “truly remarkable,” wrote Karen L. Chinn, a consultant selected by the court to monitor conditions.
But the cuts of the last year “have already begun to unravel the progress,” Ms. Chinn said.
Judge Byars insists his department will not return to warehousing juveniles. If more cuts threaten to return the prison to overcrowded levels, he will release those on misdemeanor offenses to keep numbers down, he said.
For Ms. McGowan, talk of sliding backward is deeply personal. Like many of the 27 girls that fill the prison she now oversees, she slipped into trouble after a family crisis.
She was 14, and her mother had just died — or so she thought. In truth, the dead woman had been her grandmother, her family told her. Her real mother was someone she knew as her sister, a taciturn woman she did not much like.
“The most precious person of my life has been taken away from me,” Ms. McGowan said. “Nobody sat me down and talked to me about that. Nobody thought to ask me what was going on in my heart.”
She repeatedly ran away from home, was caught and sentenced to weekends at the prison. She occupied a hard mattress inside a low, dimly lighted concrete block building. Most of the other girls were, like her, African-American and the product of some sort of unaddressed trauma.
When Ms. McGowan was 22 and working as a restaurant cashier, she heard the juvenile prison was hiring. The children overflowed the facilities, some sleeping on pairs of bunk beds stuffed into rooms no bigger than 8 feet by 12 feet and some on mattresses covering the floors.
At night, she was sometimes alone, hoping no fight would break out, often finding the inmates tattooing one another with smuggled paper clips or lighting cigarettes by pressing them into bare electrical wiring.
“It was horrible,” she said. “It was like just trying to survive. The only thing we were supposed to provide was security, custody and control. Sometimes we’d sneak a talk. You know, ‘How are you doing? What are you feeling?’ It made me angry, like we were all animals.”
Today, all of the officers on Ms. McGowan’s staff are trained in counseling. The girls gather every morning in small groups to discuss their worries or whatever might be on the mind of a teenager waking up in prison.
A special transitional house for girls nearing release is meant to model life outside. In place of the stall showers and toilets found in the dorms, the house has two private bathrooms complete with bathtubs, the tiles painted with colorful fish and butterflies. One girl does the cooking for the day using a menu the girls create together.
Each girl receives $2,000 in virtual money a month and must write checks simulating payments for rent, electricity and food. If she is late, she pays a fine. She can earn money by doing extra chores. If she runs out of money, she loses privileges, like time watching television.
Britney, an 18-year-old in the house, was paying an extra $500 a month to cover the costs of diapers and food for her 7-month-old daughter, who was delivered in prison. Her mother was looking after the baby until Britney’s release.
That moment was less than 24 hours away, and Britney was both exhilarated and apprehensive. In and out of the juvenile justice system since she was 12 — mostly for running away after battles with her mother — she was about to become responsible for her own child.
“I stayed up on my bed last night thinking you all made me feel like you all cared,” Britney told the group one morning.
An intensive supervision officer had already held counseling sessions between Britney and her mother using a videoconference system. She planned to monitor closely how they were getting along. The officer was to take Britney on a tour of community colleges (she had earned a G.E.D. inside the prison), where she hoped to begin a career as a nurse practitioner. Britney was to be enrolled in parenting classes.
“They got everything planned out,” Britney said.
Still, the adults were anxious, cognizant that the end of Britney’s prison life was the beginning of her next incarnation as another jobless teenage single mother.
“Are you nervous about going home?” Ms. McGowan asked her.
“Yeah,” Britney said. “I’m a little nervous about being free, because I’ve been here so long.”
The girls lined up to go to school, a complex of classrooms inside the wire, as a guard administered pat-downs. Ms. McGowan watched Britney submit for a final day.
“This is a child we’ve really got to check in with,” she said. “It’s really crucial that we stay connected.” Yet the finances needed to maintain that connection were slipping. Inside the prison, the attention given to each child was being diluted by staff cuts.
“We don’t want to go back to how it was,” Ms. McGowan said. “We were just so heartless.”
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6) A More Narrow Focus for Enforcement Program
By JULIA PRESTON
National Briefing | Immigration
July 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/us/11brfs-AMORENARROWF_BRF.html?ref=us
The Obama administration will expand a program that extends federal immigration enforcement authority to state and local police, but will focus it more sharply on capturing illegal immigrants who committed serious crimes, homeland security officials said. Officials said they would sign new, uniform agreements with 66 local jurisdictions that already have the program and with 11 new ones, formalizing the priority on pursuing “dangerous criminal aliens” but also specifying the powers granted to police and providing for new oversight by the Department of Homeland Security. Some advocates for immigrants have criticized the program, known as 287(g) after the law that set it up, as creating fear of the police by sweeping up illegal immigrants with no criminal record.
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7) Collect Now, or Later? Timing Your Social Security Benefits
By TARA SIEGEL BERNARD
July 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/your-money/11retire.html?ref=business
Collecting Social Security as soon as you are eligible is a tempting proposition — but experts agree you should try to resist if you can.
The majority of people don’t follow that advice, choosing instead to start benefits early. Why wait to collect what is rightfully yours?
That logic may sound reasonable now. But in reality, the bigger risk is that you will live to a ripe old age. You can claim Social Security any time from age 62 to 70, but the longer you wait, the larger your monthly check. And many people come out ahead if they wait at least until their full retirement age, which is different from the day you stop working for good. For people born 1943 to 1954, full retirement age is 66, and it creeps up for younger people.
What do you stand to lose by taking benefits early? Take those who are set to receive $1,000 a month at their full retirement age. If they sign up for benefits at age 62, they will collect only $750. But if they wait until 70, they will earn extra credit and receive up to $1,320 a month — nearly a third more.
At first glance, it seems that everyone should wait until they are 70. But that is not the case. The answer depends on many factors, including when you stop working, how much you have in savings, whether you are healthy, whether you are married or single and whether your spouse earns more — or less.
It may be impossible for some households to wait because the breadwinner has lost a job or is no longer able to work. And planners agree that it is smarter to collect earlier if it will prevent you from accumulating debt.
But if you can wait, think of the money you aren’t receiving during that period as a payment of sorts for an annuity that will pay a higher, guaranteed stream of income later, if you live a long time (or at least longer than your savings last), financial experts say.
“You can’t buy an inflation-adjusted annuity for anywhere near the cost of delaying Social Security,” said Henry Hebeler, a retired Boeing executive who created AnalyzeNow.com, a Web site that offers retirement advice and calculators.
For people who choose to defer benefits until age 66, it generally takes about 12 more years to collect as much as if you started getting checks at 62. So you break even, so to speak, about age 78, according to Avram Sacks, a Social Security law analyst for CCH, a tax and accounting information service. “If you are in good health, and you expect to live to 78 or longer, then the advantage goes to the person who waits,” he says. “But that’s assuming we’re all prophets and we know what’s going to happen tomorrow, and we don’t all know.”
And that is why financial advisers recommend planning for a long life. Here are some strategies to consider before signing up.
SINGLES Figuring out when to collect is easier when you do not have to worry about how your actions will affect a spouse. It usually pays to wait until your full retirement age if you can support yourself until then. (This obviously does not apply to people who are already in poor health and probably won’t live past 78, give or take a couple of years. People who are still working should also defer.)
Though many experts will tell you to delay as long as you can, waiting from 66 until 70 may not be optimal for some singles. “The reason is that they will have consumed too much of their savings in those extra four years to be able to offset the savings loss with higher Social Security payments within their lifetime,” said Mr. Hebeler, who has also written three books on retirement. “It’s surprising, but that’s what the analysis shows.”
Consider a single person with $200,000 in savings returning 5 percent a year. Instead of taking Social Security at age 62, she withdraws $19,000 annually until she turns 66. Her savings will last until age 94, but she will still have $21,000 a year in Social Security benefits. If she claimed at 62, her savings would run out at age 87 and she would be left with only $16,000 a year in Social Security.
For people with significant savings who expect to live well into their 80s, it may make sense to wait until 70, Mr. Hebeler added.
If you have already started receiving benefits, but wish you had waited, you are allowed to give it all back and start over. But this gets complicated. You will probably have to pay back more than what you actually received each month, since Medicare premiums and income taxes may have been deducted. Married people can do this, too, but some advisers caution against it.
MARRIED COUPLES Planning is more complex for married couples because there are age differences, varying retirement dates and earnings and other factors to consider. In many cases, the higher-earning spouse should delay his or her benefits until age 70, while the lower earner begins to collect at age 62. This ensures that the surviving spouse will end up with the maximum amount of benefits for the rest of his or her life. Even if the higher earner died before age 70, the survivor’s benefits would be bumped up to what the deceased spouse would have gotten, said Lesley J. Brey, a fee-only financial planner in Honolulu.
But once the higher earner hits full retirement age, there is a way for the lower earner to potentially get a bigger check by qualifying for spousal benefits. The higher earner can “file and suspend,” or file for benefits but immediately suspend them — it is perfectly legal and allows the lower-earning spouse to get up to half the higher earner’s benefits, while the higher earner’s benefits continue to accrue.
“This is the way to get the most out of the system without jeopardizing the longevity insurance aspect, which is the most important component,” Ms. Brey said. “You want the last survivor to have the highest possible payment. However, you get cash flow, which reduces the amount you have to withdraw from other sources and you don’t have to guess when anyone is going to die.”
But if the couple can afford it, should the lower earner wait until full retirement age? “It doesn’t matter because the goal is to get the most money for the person who lives the longest,” Ms. Brey said.
Married people with similar earnings may also consider another strategy. Here, one person claims spousal benefits at full retirement age and switches to his or her own, and presumably higher, benefits later, said Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.
To get a more precise idea about how to maximize your benefits, go to the Social Security’s retirement estimator, which uses your actual earnings record in its calculation. (Click on “create scenarios” to how retiring at different ages affects benefits). AnalyzeNow.com offers calculators that will help determine the best time for singles and couples to take Social Security.
If figuring it all out on your own proves too difficult, have a fee-only financial planner run the analysis for you. “It is worth it,” Mr. Hebeler said, “to spend the money.”
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8) Off the Charts
On the Unemployment Line, Unable to Move
By FLOYD NORRIS
July 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/business/economy/11charts.html?ref=business
LONG-TERM unemployment in the United States has risen to its highest level since the Great Depression, as those who have lost jobs have found it difficult to find new ones.
The government reported last week that the overall unemployment rate rose to 9.5 percent of the labor force in June, the highest since 1982, when the rate peaked at 10.8 percent.
The long-term unemployment rate — the proportion of the labor force that has been out of work for at least 15 weeks — climbed to 5.1 percent. Until this year, the post-Depression high for that rate had been 4.2 percent.
June was also the first month since the government began collecting the data in 1948 that more than half of the unemployed people had been out of work for at least 15 weeks.
The proportion of workers without jobs for at least 27 weeks rose to 2.8 percent, which is also the highest since World War II.
The figures reflect an economy where the pace of layoffs and firings has slowed this year, so that fewer people are being added to the unemployment rolls. But the pace of new hiring is now even lower than it was when layoffs were peaking.
A decline in labor mobility may help explain some of the failure of workers to find jobs even after they have been unemployed for months. In previous downturns, some regions remained relatively strong, and attracted workers from other areas. This time, the credit crisis has damaged job prospects almost everywhere, and plunging home prices mean that some who would like to move cannot afford to do so because they owe more than their house is worth.
Another factor is that workers now are less likely to be able to return to their old employers when the economy recovers. At the height of unemployment in 1982, one of every five unemployed workers was on a temporary layoff, with the expectation they would be recalled, sooner or later. Today the comparable figure is 1 of 10.
The average unemployed person now has been out of work for 24.5 weeks, or nearly half a year. That is also the longest period on record, and is a full six weeks longer than the average when total unemployment peaked in 1982.
The final chart shows the number of people who have been unemployed for more than 15 weeks, a figure that is now up to 7.8 million. That figure has more than tripled over the last 24 months, a rate of increase that had not been seen since the severe downturn of the mid-1970s.
There are limited signals that the deterioration in the labor market has slowed. The government estimates that there was a net loss of 1.3 million jobs in this year’s second quarter, compared with a loss of 2 million jobs in the previous quarter.
If that continues, it will be taken as a sign that the economy is stabilizing, and will encourage economists who think the economy will turn up soon. But even if that happens, the challenge will be to find jobs for people who have been out of work the longest. So far, there is no indication that much progress has been made.
Floyd Norris’s blog on finance and economics is at nytimes.com/norris.
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9) A.I.G. Seeks U.S. Support for Bonuses
By ERIC DASH
July 10, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/business/10insure.html?ref=business
Seeking to avoid the public furor that erupted last spring, the American International Group has been quietly seeking approval from the new federal compensation czar to pay a total of $2.4 million dollars in bonuses to dozens of its senior executives.
Officials at the embattled insurance company, which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer money, have sought meetings with Kenneth Feinberg, the pay czar, to review the payments for 40 of its highest ranking employees, according to individuals briefed on the matter.
Mr. Feinberg has been tasked with approving the pay for the 100 highest paid employees, but he also can also weigh in on other matters if a company requests.
A.I.G. executives want to make sure that Mr. Feinberg is comfortable with the company’s compensation program and hoped to work with him to address any shortfalls, according to a person briefed on the situation. The insurance giant does not actually need his permission. But by obtaining Mr. Feinberg’s blessing, the company would also have the political cover to shield it from criticism.
The move also allows the Treasury Department to wash its hands of any problems stemming from any role it had in setting pay.
The payments stem from 2008 bonuses that were retooled last year to keep executives from leaving the troubled company. About $9.6 million in bonuses was allocated to 40 executives, with roughly half of money paid in March and the rest scheduled to be paid out on July 15 and in mid-September so long as the employees met certain requirements. That would be an average payment of roughly $60,000 for each employee in both months.
Christina Pretto, an A.I.G. spokeswoman, declined to comment. Mr. Feinberg could not be reached for comment late last night.
Besides the current bonus payments, A.I.G. executives have also been seeking his guidance in other controversial areas, the individual briefed on the situation said. A.I.G. has sought his advice in determining compensation for employees in its Financial Products unit, whose trading of high-octane derivatives brought the company to its knees. It is also seeking advice on the retention bonus program it put in place last fall.
A.I.G. officials have struggled to balance the need to retain executives and traders who can unwind its trading positions and sell its businesses against the public’s outrage that those employees would be paid bonuses at all. In the spring, lawmakers erupted after learning that A.I.G. planned to pay more than $165 million to executives in that unit, an amount that was reduced when some were pressured to give the money back.
Ever since, the insurance company, which is nearly 80 percent owned by the government, has been treading a fine line. And it is not the only financial company to seek advice.
Since early June, Mr. Feinberg, who oversaw the federal government’s compensation fund for victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks, has been meeting with Citigroup, Bank of America and others that received at least two federal bailouts. Those companies, along with General Motors, Chrysler, and A.I.G., are required to submit detailed packets of information for his review in the next month.
“Companies will need to convince Mr. Feinberg that they have struck the right balance to discourage excessive risk taking,” said Andrew Williams, a Treasury spokesman.
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10) Army Suicides Trending Upward for 2009
July 10, 2009
military.com
http://www.military .com/news/ article/army- suicides- trending- upward-for- 2009.html
The Army yesterday released its monthly report on suicides, reporting
that while there were no confirmed suicides among active-duty troops
for June there are nine deaths still under investigation.
So far this year there have been 88 reported suicides in among
active-duty troops, officials said, of which 54 have been confirmed.
The Army is still looking into the other 34.
Should that number bear out the Army will have surpassed the total
number of active-duty suicides for the same period last year by more
than 20. For the first six months of 2008, officials said in the
report, there were 67 confirmed suicides in the active-duty Army.
Among Reserve troops the trend also may be upwards, based on the
Army's latest figures.
So far this year there have been 16 confirmed suicides in that
component, and 23 other deaths remain under investigation as possible
suicides. Between January and June 2008 there were 29 confirmed
suicides among Reserve troops not on active duty, the Army said.
Testifying in March before the Senate Armed Services Military
Personnel Subcommittee, Army Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli attributed the
spiking suicide rate to continued long deployments.
"We must find ways to relieve some of this stress," Chiarelli, vice
chief of staff of the Army, said in testimony reported by CNN. "I
think it is the cumulative effect of deployments from 12 to 15 months."
Brig. Gen. Colleen McGuire, director of Army Suicide Prevention Task
Force, said in a press release issued yesterday that every Soldier
suicide i"s different and tragic in its own way.
"Our current research and prevention efforts are identifying common
denominators that lead Soldiers to take their own life. It's often a
combination of many factors that overwhelm an individual."
What the Army does know right now is that Soldiers most at risk of
suicide are men in combat-arms specialties between the ages of 18 and
27, according to McGuire. The Army is looking at existing suicide
prevention programs and other "institutional safety nets" to see what
works and what needs to be changed to make them more effective, she said.
The Army is currently wrapping up the second phase of a three-phase
service-wide program intended to reduce suicides. The first and
second phases included interactive training programs and small-unit
leader training. The final part of the program will include sustained
annual suicide prevention training for all troops. The training will
emphasize common causes of suicidal behavior and the critical role
Army leaders, friends, co-workers and families play in maintaining
behavioral health, according to the Army press release.
The Army's most current suicide prevention information may be found
at: http://www.armyg1. army.mil/ hr/suicide/ .
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11) Cheney Is Linked to Concealment of C.I.A. Project
By SCOTT SHANE
July 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/us/politics/12intel.html?hp
The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.
The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.
Mr. Panetta, who ended the program when he first learned of its existence from subordinates on June 23, briefed the two intelligence committees about it in separate closed sessions the next day.
Efforts to reach Mr. Cheney through relatives and associates were unsuccessful.
The question of how completely the C.I.A. informed Congress about sensitive programs has been hotly disputed by Democrats and Republicans since May, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the agency of failing to reveal in 2002 that it was waterboarding a terrorism suspect, a claim Mr. Panetta rejected.
The law requires the president to make sure the intelligence committees “are kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States, including any significant anticipated intelligence activity.” But the language of the statute, the amended National Security Act of 1947, leaves some leeway for judgment, saying such briefings should be done “to the extent consistent with due regard for the protection from unauthorized disclosure of classified information relating to sensitive intelligence sources and methods or other exceptionally sensitive matters.”
In addition, for covert action programs, a particularly secret category in which the role of the United States is hidden, the law says that briefings can be limited to the so-called Gang of Eight, consisting of the Republican and Democratic leaders of both houses of Congress and of their intelligence committees.
The disclosure about Mr. Cheney’s role in the unidentified C.I.A. program comes a day after an inspector general’s report underscored the central role of the former vice president’s office in restricting to a small circle of officials knowledge of the National Security Agency’s program of eavesdropping without warrants, a degree of secrecy that the report concluded had hurt the effectiveness of the counterterrorism surveillance effort.
An intelligence agency spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, declined on Saturday to comment on the report of Mr. Cheney’s role.
“It’s not agency practice to discuss what may or may not have been said in a classified briefing,” Mr. Gimigliano said. “When a C.I.A. unit brought this matter to Director Panetta’s attention, it was with the recommendation that it be shared appropriately with Congress. That was also his view, and he took swift, decisive action to put it into effect.”
Members of Congress have differed on the significance of the program, whose details remained secret and which even some Democrats have said was properly classified. Most of those interviewed, however, have said that it was an important activity that should have been disclosed to the intelligence committees.
Intelligence and Congressional officials have said the unidentified program did not involve the C.I.A. interrogation program and did not involve domestic intelligence activities. They have said the program was started by the counterterrorism center at the C.I.A. shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but never became fully operational, involving planning and some training that took place off and on from 2001 until this year.
In the tense months after Sept. 11, when Bush administration officials believed new Qaeda attacks could occur at any moment, intelligence officials brainstormed about radical countermeasures. It was in that atmosphere that the unidentified program was devised and deliberately concealed from Congress, officials said.
Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House intelligence committee, said last week that he believed Congress would have approved of the program only in the angry and panicky days after 9/11, on 9/12, he said, but not later, after fears and tempers had begun to cool.
One intelligence official, who would speak about the classified program only on condition of anonymity, said there was no resistance inside the C.I.A. to Mr. Panetta’s decision to end the program last month.
“Because this program never went fully operational and hadn’t been briefed as Panetta thought it should have been, his decision to kill it was neither difficult nor controversial,” the official said. “That’s worth remembering amid all the drama.”
Bill Harlow, a spokesman for George J. Tenet, who was the C.I.A. director when the unidentified program began, declined to comment on Saturday, noting that the program remained classified.
In the eight years of his vice presidency, Mr. Cheney was the Bush administration’s most vehement defender of the secrecy of government activities, particularly in the intelligence arena. He went to the Supreme Court to keep secret the advisers to his task force on energy, and won.
A report released on Friday by the inspectors general of five agencies about the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program makes clear that Mr. Cheney’s legal adviser, David S. Addington, had to approve personally every government official who was told about the program. The report said “the exceptionally compartmented nature of the program” frustrated F.B.I. agents who were assigned to follow up on tips it had turned up.
Mr. Addington could not be reached for comment on Saturday.
Questions over the adequacy and the truthfulness of the C.I.A.’s briefings for Congress date to the creation of the intelligence oversight committees in the 1970s after disclosures of agency assassination and mind-control programs and other abuses. But complaints increased in the Bush years, when the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies took the major role in pursuing Al Qaeda.
The use of harsh interrogation methods, including waterboarding, for instance, was first described to a handful of lawmakers for the first time in September 2002. Ms. Pelosi and the C.I.A. have disagreed about what she was told, but in any case, the briefing occurred only after a terrorism suspect, Abu Zubaydah, had been waterboarded 83 times.
Democrats in Congress, who contend that the Bush administration improperly limited Congressional briefings on intelligence, are seeking to change the National Security Act to permit the full intelligence committees to be briefed on more matters. President Obama, however, has threatened to veto the intelligence authorization bill if the changes go too far, and the proposal is now being negotiated by the White House and the intelligence committees.
Representative Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat of Illinois on the House committee, wrote on Friday to the chairman, Representative Silvestre Reyes, a Democrat of Texas, to demand an investigation of the unidentified program and why Congress was not told of it. Aides said Mr. Reyes was reviewing the matter.
“There’s been a history of difficulty in getting the C.I.A. to tell us what they should,” said Representative Adam Smith, a Democrat of Washington. “We will absolutely be held accountable for anything the agency does.”
Mr. Hoekstra, the intelligence committee’s ranking Republican, said he would not judge the agency harshly in the case of the unidentified program, because it was not fully operational. But he said that in general, the agency had not been as forthcoming as the law required.
“We have to pull the information out of them to get what we need,” Mr. Hoekstra said.
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12) In Michigan, Deficits Defy Years of Cutting
By MONICA DAVEY
July 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/us/12michigan.html?ref=us
LANSING, Mich. — Long before California resorted to i.o.u.’s to pay state bills, and before New York’s political insurrection made a mess of this year’s budget planning, and even before the recession pushed dozens of other states into their worst fiscal distress in decades, lawmakers here were cutting.
The cuts started in the 2002 budget year, when some prisoners were ordered to sleep two to a cell. Then came cuts to state colleges in 2003, and orchestras, zoos and operas in 2004. Medical payments for the poor were cut in 2005, followed by cuts to a youth prison in 2006. After that? More cuts — to prisons, crime laboratories, libraries and day care programs.
Last month, 100 state troopers were laid off, and the troopers left behind were told to drive around less to, of course, cut costs.
In all, even before thinking about the coming year’s $1.8 billion shortfall, Michigan’s lawmakers had — through cuts, accounting shifts and tax increases — closed more than $7 billion in budget gaps over the past eight years. While many states have experienced a year of pain or perhaps two during this downturn, Michigan is approaching nearly a decade of budget misery.
“The big difference here,” said Robert L. Emerson, the state budget director, “is that we have very little to fall back on. Michigan has already done a lot of the things that other states are only thinking about doing now. Every reserve fund in the state government has been drained long ago. Our rainy-day fund? There’s $2 million in there. That won’t last you 30 seconds.”
Just to cope with the most recent slipping revenue projections, Michigan is preparing to close eight prisons or prison camps (and despite the political risks, release some inmates as soon as they are eligible for release), as well as drop state support for dental and podiatric care, glasses and hearing aids for poor adults. State grants for doctors who agree to live in rural, underserved places and counseling for teenage parents will likely end, too.
On the revenue side, all sorts of notions have been entertained — Michigan, the new Hollywood? Michigan, the wind turbine state? — even an idea offered in a closed meeting this year by John Engler, the former governor, that Michigan ponder housing detainees from the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, raising perhaps $1 billion. (Mr. Engler, through a spokesman, declined to discuss the matter.)
Most people tie the state’s lasting fiscal woes to the collapsing auto industry, and by some measures, Michigan seems to be marching backward. While much of the country emerged from a downturn that started in 2001, Michigan never really seemed to do the same.
The state has cut 10,000 employees since 2000, leaving it with a staff comparable to the early 1970s. Annual general fund revenues, when adjusted for inflation, have shrunk in all but one of the last nine years. They are expected to be $6.9 billion next year, a level last seen in 1991 (and with the inflation adjustment, more like the 1960s).
Announcements of ever-shrinking revenue estimates have grown so common that some lawmakers complain they have little time to cope with anything else.
“Michigan led the nation’s recession, and we continued to live a lifestyle we couldn’t afford,” said Michael D. Bishop, the Republican majority leader in the State Senate, where his party has sparred with Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm and her fellow Democrats over money and especially tax increases. “It has all come crashing down.”
On paper, the state’s overall spending has remained fairly steady and even increased at times this decade, but budget officials say those figures reflect necessary spending increases for Medicaid and corrections.
And while Michigan’s expected $1.8 billion gap next year hardly compares with California’s $26 billion puzzle, the new cuts here come as lawmakers say they are already well past finding any budget fat and will have to cut to the bone. What is needed, in the words of one lobbyist, is more of a bone-marrow transplant.
“You’ve already done all your good ideas — in ’03 and ’04 and ’05,” said Janet Olszewski, director of the Michigan Department of Community Health, which, among other cuts, expects to stop financing a program that helped doctors pay back student loans if they moved to towns desperately in need of doctors.
The problems have trickled down to cities across the state because of cuts in state revenue sharing of more than $3 billion over eight years, according to the Michigan Municipal League. Those cuts cost some 2,000 local police officers and 2,400 local firefighters their jobs.
“It just keeps going down and down and down,” Charles M. Brunner, the mayor of Bay City, said of the state’s revenue sharing with his city, “and we’ve done nothing but cut, cut, cut.” He said the city expected $4.8 million from the state next year, down from the $6.4 million it got in 2001.
In Brighton, leaders say they are all but shutting down their community center, requiring employees to take one furlough day a month for the next two years and suspending street sweeping. Dana W. Foster, the city manager, said his city could not withstand any more cuts. “The streets right now are looking terrible,” he said.
The proposed prison closings have left the fewer than 2,000 residents of Standish, home for 19 years to a maximum-security prison that may now close, wondering about their future. Hundreds of people from the area work at the prison, and local residents have held rallies and candlelight vigils and have picketed in recent days. “For a small community like this, there’s just no chance of making up for this,” said the Rev. James M. Fitzpatrick, a local priest.
For the moment, Michigan does have one thing going for it — time.
Unlike California and other states still scrambling to solve budget gaps even as their budget year began July 1, Michigan’s budget year begins in October. There is still time to shed the $1.8 billion shortfall, and federal stimulus money is likely to help — although, critics are quick to note, only for the time being.
In one small clue to the breadth of the problem here, Mr. Emerson, the budget director, unhappily finds himself recommending that the state stop paying for a before- and after-school program he sponsored as a legislator more than a decade ago.
Searching for more ideas, Mr. Emerson has assigned a staff member to look for lessons from the past: What were the essential items Michigan could not live without back in 1991, when it last had so few dollars coming in? He is still awaiting the results.
Meanwhile, some outlines of what Michigan may look like in 2011 are emerging, including what Mr. Emerson called another “billion-dollar-plus” deficit.
“The problem,” he said, “is our tomorrow looks no different than today.”
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13) A Supreme Triumph, Then Into the Shadows
By DAVID STOUT
July 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/us/12gaines.html?ref=us
Lloyd Gaines was moody that winter of 1939, acting not at all like a man who had just triumphed in one of the biggest Supreme Court cases in decades. And oddly, even though it was raining and the sidewalks of Chicago were clogged with slush, he felt a need to buy postage stamps one night.
Or so he told a friend just before he left his apartment house on March 19, 1939, never to be seen again. Had he not vanished at 28, Lloyd Gaines might be in the pantheon of civil rights history with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall and other giants whose names will be invoked at the centennial convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which started this weekend in Manhattan.
Instead, Mr. Gaines has been consigned to one of history’s side rooms, his name recalled mainly by legal scholars and relatives, like Tracy Berry, an assistant United States attorney in St. Louis whose grandmother was Mr. Gaines’s sister.
“He was taken away and more than likely killed,” Ms. Berry said when asked to speculate on his fate. She said Mr. Gaines was known in family lore as “a caring, loving brother and son” who would not have chosen to disappear or commit suicide, despite the pressure he was under.
On Dec. 12, 1938, the Supreme Court ruled that the segregated University of Missouri Law School had to admit Lloyd Lionel Gaines, who was qualified except for the color of his skin, if there was no comparable legal education available to him within Missouri — and there was not.
Despite his victory, Mr. Gaines was troubled. He had told relatives and friends he was having trouble finding steady work to earn money for school (apparently one reason he went to Chicago), and he was ambivalent about being in the spotlight.
“As for my publicity relative to the university case, I have found that my race still likes to applaud, shake hands, pat me on the back and say how great and noble is the idea,” he wrote his mother in St. Louis days before disappearing. “How historical and socially important the case but — and there it ends.” He added, “Sometimes I wish I were just a plain, ordinary man whose name no one recognized.”
Born in Mississippi to sharecropper parents in 1911, Lloyd Gaines was 14 when his widowed mother, Callie, took her seven children to St. Louis. Graduating first in his all-black high school class, Mr. Gaines won a $250 scholarship in an essay contest. He enrolled at a teachers’ college but dropped out for want of money. Then he won another modest scholarship, and with help from his brothers and black churches, he entered Lincoln University, a school for blacks in Jefferson City.
Mr. Gaines was president of his senior class, an honors graduate in history and a skilled debater. And he wanted to be a lawyer. There were only 36 black lawyers in Missouri in 1936, and all had been educated elsewhere, according to a 1951 article by Edward T. Clayton, an editor for Ebony whose account is probably the definitive one.
For the 1930s, Missouri’s policy was enlightened: since there was no law school at Lincoln, the state paid the tuitions of blacks from Missouri who went to nearby states to study law. And the Missouri legislature had committed itself to establishing a law school at Lincoln someday, should there ever be enough demand.
But Mr. Gaines said he wanted to go to the University of Missouri’s law school, so in 1936 he sued in state court to gain admission. He lost, but lawyers for the N.A.A.C.P. saw his case as a way to attack the “separate but equal” doctrine laid down by the Supreme Court in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, which was used to justify public school segregation.
Mr. Gaines’s team was headed by Charles Hamilton Houston, chief litigator for the N.A.A.C.P., mentor to Thurgood Marshall and later dean of the Howard University Law School. The case reached the Supreme Court on Nov. 9, 1938. Houston argued that the state had blatantly failed to meet the “separate but equal” standard and that paying out-of-state tuition for black students from Missouri was not good enough. The court ruled 6 to 2 for Mr. Gaines. “The basic consideration here is not as to what sort of opportunities other states provide, or whether they are as good as those in Missouri, but as to what opportunities Missouri itself furnishes to white students and denies to Negroes solely upon the ground of color,” Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote.
Justices James C. McReynolds and Pierce Butler dissented, saying the State of Missouri ought to be able to set its own education policies. (There was one vacancy on the court.)
The ruling in Gaines v. Canada (S. W. Canada was the university registrar) would eventually open the doors of law schools for blacks in a dozen Southern and border states. And it was a steppingstone toward Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 decision that repudiated the “separate but equal” notion in outlawing school segregation.
In 1939, the Missouri legislature tried to skirt the Gaines decision, setting up a supposedly equal, and ultimately short-lived, Lincoln University law school in an old beauty academy. It was only when the N.A.A.C.P. lawyers were preparing a challenge to this move that they realized Mr. Gaines had disappeared.
Mr. Gaines, who earned a master’s degree in economics at the University of Michigan while his case was winding through the courts, had behaved erratically before. In January 1939, he told a St. Louis gathering that he was eager to study law at Missouri — but his mother recalled things differently.
“I remember once I asked him if he was going to that school, and he said, ‘No,’ ” Callie Gaines told Ebony in 1951. “I told him then that I thought it would be too dangerous.” The family never filed a missing-person report, figuring he would turn up when he wanted to, his mother said.
Lloyd Gaines’s nephew George Gaines, a retired Navy captain who lives in San Diego, said recently, “We have never had him declared dead.” But Captain Gaines said he doubted that his uncle would have chosen to drop out of life, or end his life, given the perseverance he displayed.
In the early 1950s, the University of Missouri began admitting black students. Lloyd Gaines is now revered at the university, which awarded him an honorary law degree in 2006. That year, the state bar awarded him a law license, posthumously.
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14) Giving Life, Wearing Shackles and Chains
By JIM DWYER
About New York
July 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/nyregion/12about.html?ref=nyregion
One day last November, the first shudders of childbirth woke Venita Pinckney before dawn. She was well into her ninth month of pregnancy. She was also incarcerated at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a state prison.
Before she left for the hospital, Ms. Pinckney said, a corrections officer wrapped a chain twice around her waist and handcuffed her to it. Then he covered the handcuffs with a locked black box to further limit her range of motion. Finally, her ankles were shackled.
“You can’t walk like a normal human being,” said Ms. Pinckney, 37. “When you’re pregnant, you have a hard time keeping your balance to begin with.”
At least once a week, somewhere in one of New York’s prisons or jails, a pregnant women goes into labor. Nearly all of them, including Ms. Pinckney, are behind bars for drug offenses. Even so, they are often as severely restrained in the final hours of pregnancy as the most nimble and dangerous of criminals. While their bodies heave toward childbirth, they become walking, clanking jail cells.
“I told the officer he’s not supposed to shackle me,” Ms. Pinckney said last week. “He said he was just following procedure.”
From just about every wing of state government, there is agreement that such restraints are needless and risky. The state department of corrections formally limited their use nine years ago.
Yet the practice has persisted, a triumph of prison procedure and custom over the safety, comfort and dignity of the pregnant woman and of the child who is about to be born. “You’ve just got to put your legs up to push,” said Erica Knox, 42, who was brought to Elmhurst Hospital Center from Rikers Island when she went into labor. Her legs were not restrained as she delivered her son.
“But right after I pushed him out, the guard shackled me to the bed rail,” Ms. Knox said. “I had to push the placenta out with the shackles on. That was the worst.”
On May 20, both houses of the Legislature — with broad support from Democrats and Republicans — passed a bill that would bar the shackling of women during labor. It would permit the use of handcuffs in “extraordinary circumstances” to protect the woman or others around her. The bill was sponsored in the Senate by Velmanette Montgomery and in the Assembly by N. Nick Perry, both Brooklyn Democrats. It is now being reviewed by the governor’s office, a spokesman for Gov. David A. Paterson said on Friday.
Last week, Ms. Pinckney and other former prisoners stood outside the governor’s office on Third Avenue in Manhattan, chanting for him to sign the bill.
The new legislation would cover not only state prisons, but jails that serve all 62 counties of New York. Those county jails are not subject to the state’s existing policy that discourages the use of shackles and waist chains on women in labor.
Melissa DeFort, 23, who was in Bedford Hills earlier this year for violating parole in a drug case, said it was absurd to think that heavily pregnant women, dressed in prison scrubs, would try to escape. “What am I going to do, open the door of the car and run out?” Ms. DeFort said. “You have on the greens and heavy boots.”
On one hospital visit, she said, she remained shackled in an examining room while a doctor and nurse pleaded with the guards to unlock her. “They were saying, she’s on the fifth floor of a hospital, she’s seven months pregnant, and you guys are standing out there with guns,” Ms. DeFort said. “Finally, the officers radioed Bedford and asked what they should do, and they were told to do what the doctors asked.”
In 2002, Jeanna M. Graves, early in a three-year term on a drug conviction and pregnant with twins while in Bedford Hills , needed an emergency Caesarean section. Ms. Graves said that in the hospital, she was cuffed to the gurney by the corrections officers. The doctors gave her an epidural anesthetic, which blocks sensation in the abdomen and around the pelvis.
“I was cuffed through the entire C-section,” Ms. Graves said.
Tina Reynolds, 50, gave birth 15 years ago while she was serving time at Bedford Hills, shackled, she said, at an arm and a leg. Now the director of Women on the Rise Telling Herstory, an organization of formerly incarcerated women, Ms. Reynolds helped organized the rally last week with the Women in Prison Project of the Correctional Association of New York.
“All children want to find about the day they were born,” Ms. Reynolds said. “You want it to be an expression of love, not of prohibition and trauma and restraint. The child didn’t do anything.”
E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com
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15) The Invisible Hand, Trumped by Darwin?
By ROBERT H. FRANK
Economic View
July 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/business/economy/12view.html?ref=business
IF asked to identify the intellectual founder of their discipline, most economists today would probably cite Adam Smith. But that will change. Economists’ forecasts generally aren’t worth much, but I’ll offer one that even my youngest colleagues won’t survive to refute: If we posed the same question 100 years from now, most economists would instead cite Charles Darwin.
Darwin, renowned for the theory of evolution, was a naturalist, not an economist, and his view of the competitive struggle was different from Smith’s in subtle but profound ways. Growing evidence suggests that Darwin’s view tracks economic reality much more closely.
Smith is celebrated for his “invisible hand” theory, which holds that when greedy people trade for their own advantage in unfettered private markets, they will often be led, as if by an invisible hand, to produce the greatest good for all. The invisible hand remains a powerful narrative, but after the recent economic wreckage, skepticism about it has grown. My prediction is that it will eventually be supplanted by a version of Darwin’s more general narrative — one that grants the invisible hand its due, but also strips it of the sweeping powers that many now ascribe to it.
Smith’s basic idea was that business owners seeking to lure customers away from rivals have powerful incentives to introduce improved product designs and cost-saving innovations. These moves bolster innovators’ profits in the short term. But rivals respond by adopting the same innovations, and the resulting competition gradually drives down prices and profits. In the end, Smith argued, consumers reap all the gains.
The central theme of Darwin’s narrative was that competition favors traits and behavior according to how they affect the success of individuals, not species or other groups. As in Smith’s account, traits that enhance individual fitness sometimes promote group interests. For example, a mutation for keener eyesight in hawks benefits not only any individual hawk that bears it, but also makes hawks more likely to prosper as a species.
In other cases, however, traits that help individuals are harmful to larger groups. For instance, a mutation for larger antlers served the reproductive interests of an individual male elk, because it helped him prevail in battles with other males for access to mates. But as this mutation spread, it started an arms race that made life more hazardous for male elk over all. The antlers of male elk can now span five feet or more. And despite their utility in battle, they often become a fatal handicap when predators pursue males into dense woods.
In Darwin’s framework, then, Adam Smith’s invisible hand survives as an interesting special case. Competition, to be sure, sometimes guides individual behavior in ways that benefit society as a whole. But not always.
Individual and group interests are almost always in conflict when rewards to individuals depend on relative performance, as in the antlers arms race. In the marketplace, such reward structures are the rule, not the exception. The income of investment managers, for example, depends mainly on the amount of money they manage, which in turn depends largely on their funds’ relative performance.
Relative performance affects many other rewards in contemporary life. For example, it determines which parents can send their children to good public schools. Because such schools are typically in more expensive neighborhoods, parents who want to send their children to them must outbid others for houses in those neighborhoods.
In cases like these, relative incentive structures undermine the invisible hand. To make their funds more attractive to investors, money managers create complex securities that impose serious, if often well-camouflaged, risks on society. But when all managers take such steps, they are mutually offsetting. No one benefits, yet the risk of financial crises rises sharply.
Similarly, to earn extra money for houses in better school districts, parents often work longer hours or accept jobs entailing greater safety risks. Such steps may seem compelling to an individual family, but when all families take them, they serve only to bid up housing prices. As before, only half of all children will attend top-half schools.
It’s the same with athletes who take anabolic steroids. Individual athletes who take them may perform better in absolute terms. But these drugs also entail serious long-term health risks, and when everyone takes them, no one gains an edge.
If male elk could vote to scale back their antlers by half, they would have compelling reasons for doing so, because only relative antler size matters. Of course, they have no means to enact such regulations.
But humans can and do. By calling our attention to the conflict between individual and group interest, Darwin has identified the rationale for much of the regulation we observe in modern societies — including steroid bans in sports, safety and hours regulation in the workplace, product safety standards and the myriad restrictions typically imposed on the financial sector.
Ideas have consequences. The uncritical celebration of the invisible hand by Smith’s disciples has undermined regulatory efforts to reconcile conflicts between individual and collective interests in recent decades, causing considerable harm to us all. If, as Darwin suggested, many important aspects of life are graded on the curve, his insights may help us avoid stumbling down that grim path once again.
The competitive forces that mold business behavior are like the forces of natural selection that molded elk. In each case, we see instances of socially benign conduct. But in neither can we safely presume that individual and social interests coincide.
Robert H. Frank, an economist at Cornell, is a visiting faculty member at the Stern School of Business at New York University.
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16) Questions and Apathy Surround Shootings by Officer in Miami Beach
By DAMIEN CAVE
July 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/us/12miami.html?ref=us
MIAMI BEACH — The grainy video from an outdoor security camera shows Husien Shehada walking through South Beach just after 4 a.m., then stopping and putting his hands in the air. His brother, Samer Shehada, steps beside him — then three gunshots from a police officer off-screen throw Husien Shehada to the sidewalk. “His eyes were still open,” said Samer Shehada, 31. “And when they say you can see the life leaving someone’s eyes, I could see that.”
Four days later, the same officer who shot Husien Shehada, 29 — Adam Tavss, a Miami Beach patrolman who had been on the force for three years — was involved in a second shooting. Calls to 911 suggested that each man was armed, but neither appeared to have a weapon when shot. Both later died.
The Miami Beach Police Department and the state attorney’s office are investigating the shootings. But since the first shooting on June 14, the police and lawyers representing the victims’ families have been battling for sympathy with leaks, exaggerations and omissions, and the public struggles with who to blame, who is covering up — and how much to care.
This is a jaded piece of sand. In the past few months, the ShamWow pitchman, Vince Shlomi, was arrested after a fight with a prostitute, and a wide receiver for the Cleveland Browns, Donte Stallworth, pleaded guilty to drunken driving and killing a pedestrian.
For many South Beach denizens, the shootings are just another odd episode in an impulse capital. “It’s like MTV police,” said Edna Buchanan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter and author of mystery novels set in Miami. “There’s always tension, there’s money, there’s booze and women. It all adds up to trouble eventually.”
The Shehada brothers, American citizens born to Palestinian parents, clearly came looking for fun. They and their girlfriends arrived from Virginia on Thursday, June 11, eager to let loose.
That Saturday, they went to SoBe Live, a hip-hop club where the big draw was Khloe Kardashian, an F-list reality TV star. “We paid $180 for all four of us to get right in,” Samer Shehada said. “We had some beers, and that was it.”
He and his girlfriend left around 1:30 a.m. About 90 minutes later, Samer Shehada, a computer engineer with Lockheed Martin, got involved in an altercation on the street with several men.
Around 3 a.m., a 911 call reported that a man fitting his description — bald, in a white T-shirt and jeans and incorrectly described as “white Hispanic” — had just been beaten up. An arrest report filed after the shooting says the man threw his girlfriend to the ground about two blocks from SoBe and told her, “I’m going to kick you in the face,” at which point two bystanders intervened.
Mr. Shehada was charged with battery, but would not comment on that aspect of the case. His lawyer, John P. Contini, a former prosecutor and author of the true crime book “Danger Road,” said the case was an effort to distract people from the shooting.
And this is where the facts go tabloid with competing claims. The police say that after 3 a.m., the Shehadas and their girlfriends left their hotel room to find the men who had scuffled with Samer Shehada. Mr. Shehada said they went out to get cigarettes.
The police say they received reports that one of the Shehadas had an AK-47 under his T-shirt. Samer Shehada said he and his brother were unarmed.
The AK-47 claim was credible, said Juan Sanchez, a Police Department spokesman, because “we’re used to people carrying things like that on the beach,”
Mr. Contini, the Shehada family lawyer, describes the claim as ridiculous, arguing that there was no reason to believe that a weapon the size of an AK-47 could be hidden.
Both sides, in fact, are spinning. The 911 and dispatch calls released early this month by the police, along with video from a grocery store camera at 3:45 a.m., show that Samer Shehada had hidden something under his shirt. But it looks like a hotel coat hanger, which Mr. Contini later acknowledged it was. And no one in the 911 or dispatch calls claimed to see a gun.
Regardless, it all came to a head on Washington Avenue and 11th Street, across the street from police headquarters and in front of nightclub named Twist.
The two brothers were dressed nearly identically. Officer Tavss, 34, had been working for nearly 14 hours straight, a common occurrence in a department that lost 26 positions last year because of budget cuts.
The video, shot by a camera on the roof of Twist, shows that neither of the Shehada brothers made any sudden movements or did anything threatening before Officer Tavss opened fire.
Jamie Martinez, 23, a waiter at the 11th Street Diner on the corner, said patrons were crying in booths after witnessing the shooting. He said the police officers at the scene, about eight of them, did nothing to treat Husien Shehada before paramedics arrived several minutes later. “They just turned him over,” Mr. Martinez said. “That’s it.”
By that time, Samer Shehada had been put in the back of a cruiser. A witness can be heard in a cellphone video from the scene, distributed by Mr. Contini, saying that the Shehadas “were just walking.”
Four days after the shooting, Officer Tavss returned to duty after a medical evaluation, which officials say is standard practice. A few hours later, he was involved in the second fatal shooting.
The police and witnesses said Lawrence McCoy Jr., 29, stole a taxi and sped away, down the MacArthur Causeway that connects South Beach to Miami, where he crashed into an oncoming car, got out and ran.
Officer Tavss and Sgt. Frank Celestre chased him. Mr. Contini, who represents the McCoy family as well as Samer Shehada, said the officers fired 9 to 11 shots.
At the 11th Street Diner, Mr. Contini tossed photographs of Mr. McCoy’s body onto a table. They showed holes up and down his arms and a wound in his back.
“It’s savagery,” Mr. Contini said. “It’s complete savagery.”
He then called Lawrence McCoy Sr., the man’s father, and passed the telephone to this reporter. Mr. McCoy said the police had told him that they did not find a gun on his son. Mr. McCoy, a 20-year veteran of the Air Force, described the shooting as “excessive force.”
Officer Tavss did not respond to telephone messages left at his home.
Police Department personnel files showed that before last month, neither he nor Sergeant Celestre had ever fired their guns. The last fatal shooting by a Miami Beach police officer was in 2003.
Officer Tavss’ commanders said that he “meets expectations.” But records also show that he was investigated last year by internal affairs after a female officer accused him of using cocaine after spending a night with him in 2007.
The case was closed with the findings unsubstantiated after he passed a drug test seven months later.
Police Chief Carlos Noriega defended his officer’s actions in the shootings, saying they must make split-second decisions “and cannot afford to hesitate or be wrong.”
Much of Miami Beach seems to agree. The only public protest against the shootings — alleging that they were part of “an epidemic of racist police killings” (Mr. Tavss is white, Mr. McCoy was black) — yielded more reporters than critics.
For many here, the shootings just seem to confirm what they already think they know. “Miami Beach is a dangerous place,” said David Davis, 23, a clerk at Surf Style, a souvenir shop on the block where Mr. Shehada died. “I’m afraid more of the people who visit than the police.”
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17) Job Losses Show Wider Racial Gap in New York
By PATRICK McGEEHAN and MATHEW R. WARREN
July 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/13/nyregion/13unemployment.html?ref=business
Unemployment among blacks in New York City has increased much faster than for whites, and the gap appears to be widening at an accelerating pace, new studies of jobless data have found.
While unemployment rose steadily for white New Yorkers from the first quarter of 2008 through the first three months of this year, the number of unemployed blacks in the city rose four times as fast, according to a report to be released on Monday by the city comptroller’s office. By the end of March, there were about 80,000 more unemployed blacks than whites, according to the report, even though there are roughly 1.5 million more whites than blacks here.
Across the nation, the surge in unemployment has cut across all demographic lines, and the gap between blacks and whites has risen, but at a much slower rate than in New York.
Economists said they were not certain why so many more blacks were losing their jobs in New York, especially when a large share of the layoffs in the city have been in fields where they are not well represented, like finance and professional services. But in those sectors, the economists suggested that blacks may have had less seniority when layoffs occurred. And black workers hold an outsize share of the jobs in retailing and other service industries that have been shrinking as consumers curtail their spending.
“African-Americans have been hit disproportionately hard,” said Frank Braconi, the chief economist in the comptroller’s office. “The usual pattern is that the unemployment rate among African-Americans tends to be about twice as high as for non-Hispanic whites, but the gap has widened substantially in the city during the past year.”
Historically, the unemployment rate for blacks has always been higher than for whites. But since the start of the recession, in December 2007, the overall rate has risen by 4.6 percentage points — driving the black unemployment rate as high as 15 percent in April. The jobless figures among blacks became enough of a national issue that at a White House news conference last month, President Obama was asked what he could do to “stop the bloodletting in the black unemployment rate.”
The president said that to help any community, whether it be blacks, Latinos or Asians, he needed to “get the economy as a whole moving.”
“If I don’t do that, then I’m not going to be able to help anybody,” the president added.
In the first quarter of 2008, the rate of joblessness among blacks nationwide was 8.9 percent, compared with 4.8 percent for whites; in the first quarter of 2009, the rate for blacks had risen to 13.6 percent, while the rate for whites had gone to 8.2 percent.
But policy experts and public officials expressed concern over the much sharper trend in New York, where the city’s overall unemployment rate hit a 12-year high of 9 percent in May. The jobless rate for all blacks in the city rose to 14.7 percent in the first quarter, up from 5.7 percent in the first quarter of 2008. During the same period, the unemployment rate for white New Yorkers rose only moderately, to 3.7 percent from 3 percent, suggesting that black residents of the city were four times as likely as whites to be out of work, he said.
At a work force center in the Bronx on Friday, Ahmadi Scruggs, 32, said he was dismissed in April from his job in customer service at a New York bank that cut its payroll after many of the mortgages it made went sour. Mr. Scruggs, who is black and lives in Soundview, in the Bronx, said he did not think that the layoff, which followed a hiring freeze, was racially motivated, but said that it appeared to have a disparate effect on whites and minority workers.
“My department was mostly black and Hispanic,” Mr. Scruggs said. “Management was mostly white and they didn’t get let go. You would think they would trim the fat from the top, not the bottom, because it’s the lower-wage workers that do the bulk of the work.”
Mr. Scruggs, who is married and has three children, said his three-month severance package had run out. Mr. Scruggs said he was trying to have his unemployment benefits extended so that he could begin studying to become a surgical technician.
“I might as well invest in myself for the next year and then get back in the work force,” he said.
Last month, Roger Richardson, who lives in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, left his sales job at a Home Depot store after his hours were cut by more than half. “I had to find something else because my bills surpassed my salary,” said Mr. Richardson, who is black.
The recession has also worsened the unemployment rate in New York among other ethnic groups, although none as sharply as blacks. Among Hispanics, the rate rose to 9.3 percent in the first quarter of 2009 from 6.4 percent in the first quarter of 2008; among Asians and other ethnic classifications, the rate rose to 7.1 percent from 5.5 percent.
David R. Jones, president and chief executive of the Community Service Society, which lobbies on behalf of low-income workers, said he did not “think this recession has gone out equally.”
“Low-wage workers and workers who lack skills are really getting hit hard,” he said. “These are the workers who are sort of fungible. They lose their jobs very quickly, particularly in retail, the people who move boxes and do unskilled work. There are large numbers of African-Americans in that sector.”
Manufacturing, which has shed more jobs than any other sector of the city’s economy, had become a mainstay for black workers, Mr. Jones said. Government jobs had also become a prime source of solid, stable work for many blacks in the city, he added. But lately there have been cutbacks there, too, as falling tax revenue has forced the paring back of budgets.
James Parrott, the chief economist for the Fiscal Policy Institute, a liberal research group, pointed out that employment with the Postal Service in the city has declined by about 2,000 jobs, many of which were held by blacks. City officials have been wringing their hands about the mass firings that have occurred in high-paying industries like financial and legal services, consulting and publishing, but those cutbacks account for less than half of the 108,000-job decline since employment in the city peaked in August.
In comparing jobs data for the 12 months through April 30 with the previous one-year period, Mr. Parrott found that white New Yorkers had gained jobs while blacks and other minority residents had lost them. He was seeking to compare the recession with the end of the hiring boom that preceded it, though employment did not begin to fall in the city until after the Lehman Brothers investment bank collapsed in September, a full nine months after the recession began to take its toll in other parts of the country.
Still, Mr. Parrott’s analysis painted a stark picture of how uneven the effects have been for whites, blacks and members of other minorities. His figures show that whites gained about 130,000 jobs in the year that ended April 30 over the previous 12 months, but blacks, Hispanics and Asians all lost jobs during that period. Employment fell by about 17,000 jobs for blacks, 26,000 jobs for Hispanics and 18,000 for Asians and other ethnic groups, the data show.
“That’s a black-and-white employment picture,” Mr. Parrott said. “It’s like night and day over the 12 months. “There’s a real racial shift taking place in the city’s labor market in the past year.”
Aldumen Gomez said he had firsthand experience with the trend. Mr. Gomez, 25, was a nursing assistant in a Bronx nursing home for more than a year until it closed in January, he said.
“These were the jobs you used to rely on, but now because of all the cuts, it’s not like that,” said Mr. Gomez, who is part Haitian and part Dominican. “At the company I worked for, the ones who did get to keep their jobs were people at management levels who were mostly white. They were transferred to other nursing homes.”
Mr. Gomez has been studying political science at night at Baruch College, hoping to go on to law school. But he said he feared that he might not be able to keep paying for school — and living in student housing in Manhattan — unless he finds another job soon.
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18) GM to Spend $1 Billion In Brazil on New Family Of Cars
By REUTERS
July 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/07/15/business/business-us-gm-brazil.html
BRASILIA (Reuters) - General Motors unveiled plans on Wednesday to spend about $1 billion in Brazil through 2012 to develop a new family of vehicles for South America, a priority market for the U.S. automaker as it looks to rebound from bankruptcy protection.
GM plans to invest the bulk of the money at its Gravatai factory in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, which it will expand to increase production capacity, Jaime Ardila, GM's chief executive for Brazil and the Mercosur region of South America, said in a statement.
The investment, which in Brazilian currency amounts to 2 billion reais ($1.02 billion), is part of a $2.5 billion spending plan spanning 2007 through 2012 in the Mercosur region that includes Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay.
GM made the announcement after Ardila met in Brasilia with President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a former metalworker who cut his political teeth in the late 1970s as a union leader representing auto workers in Sao Paulo's industrial hub.
The plan calls for spending 1.4 billion reais to develop two new compact models under the Chevrolet brand and boost production at GM's Gravatai plant to 380,000 vehicles a year, three times its current capacity.
The remaining 600 million reais will be spent at GM's operations elsewhere in Brazil, the company said in a statement without elaborating.
GM said it plans to use cash flow from South America to fund a large part of the investment plan. It has already secured a credit line of 344 million reais from local bank Banrisul, and is in talks with two other Brazilian banks, including state development bank BNDES.
Brazil, Latin America's largest country, has emerged as a crucial market for GM in recent years thanks to a healthy economy and burgeoning credit market that have allowed millions of Brazilians to buy cars for the first time.
The U.S. automaker had its best year ever in Brazil in 2008 and is making a profit so far in 2009 despite an economic slowdown that has forced manufacturers to cut costs, Ardila said on June 2.
GM emerged from bankruptcy protection in the United States last week as a much leaner automaker after selling key operations to a new company majority-owned by the U.S. government. The restructuring gave the U.S. Treasury a 60 percent stake in the new GM.
($1=1.95 reais)
(Reporting by Ana Nicolaci da Costa, Writing by Todd Benson, editing by Matthew Lewis)
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19) 2 Police Officers Injured in Indonesian Gold Mine Skirmish
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
"It is in that environment that Freeport, which is based in Phoenix, operates the world’s largest gold mine and employs 20,000 workers. The company, which has enjoyed close ties to the Indonesian government for four decades, including during the late Suharto’s 32-year military dictatorship, has long made a practice of paying the military and the police for protection."
July 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/16/world/asia/16indo.html?ref=world
JAKARTA, Indonesia — At least two police officers were wounded Wednesday in a skirmish with gunmen near a gold mine operated by an American company in eastern Indonesia, officials said.
The firefight followed several days of violence, including three deaths, directed at the mining operations of Freeport-McMoran in Papua, an impoverished province under military control. It came just after Freeport ordered a group of employees to avoid traveling along a road linking a nearby town and the gold mine.
“Because of the violence, we told a couple of hundred of our workers to stay home this morning,” said Mindo Pangaribuan, a spokesman for Freeport, adding that the company’s production had not been affected by the violence.
Mr. Mindo said it was not clear who the gunmen were, and the authorities had yet to make any arrests in the recent deadly ambushes. Two Freeport workers, an Australian mining expert and an Indonesian security guard, were killed in skirmishes over the weekend; a police officer fleeing from an ambush also died after falling down a ravine.
Despite a decade of democratization, the Indonesian government still severely restricts access to Papua, especially for journalists. More than 10,000 troops and police officers, most of them non-Papuan, are stationed in Papua and have been accused by rights activists of frequently committing human rights abuses against the local population.
It is in that environment that Freeport, which is based in Phoenix, operates the world’s largest gold mine and employs 20,000 workers. The company, which has enjoyed close ties to the Indonesian government for four decades, including during the late Suharto’s 32-year military dictatorship, has long made a practice of paying the military and the police for protection.
“To many Papuans, Freeport is a symbol of imperialism,” said Andreas Harsono, who is an analyst for the Human Rights Watch office here in Jakarta and recently completed a report on abuses committed in Papua by Indonesia’s special forces.
The authorities blamed separatists in the Free Papua Movement for this week’s violence. But Papuan officials quoted in the Indonesian news media have denied the accusations, saying the movement lacked the kind of sophisticated weapons used in the ambushes.
The Indonesian news outlets have speculated that military or police officials, who are paid by Freeport for protection, may have directed the ambushes to secure their business.
The defense minister, Jowono Sudarsono, said Wednesday that there was no “proof” that active military or police were involved in the attacks. But he allowed that “rogue elements” or “deserters” from the military or police could be responsible.
In a meeting with foreign journalists, Mr. Jowono also said that the violence may stem from rival groups of illegal miners engaged in gold mining near Freeport’s operations.
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20) Part-Time Workers Mask Unemployment Woes
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Economic Scene
July 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/business/economy/15leonhardt.html?ref=us
In California and a handful of other states, one out of every five people who would like to be working full time is not now doing so.
It is a startling sign of the pain that the Great Recession is inflicting, and it is largely missed by the official, oft-repeated statistics on unemployment. The national unemployment rate has risen to 9.5 percent, the highest level in more than a quarter-century. Yet it still excludes all those who have given up looking for a job and those part-time workers who want to be working full time.
Include them — as the Labor Department does when calculating its broadest measure of the job market — and the rate reached 23.5 percent in Oregon this spring, according to a New York Times analysis of state-by-state data. It was 21.5 percent in both Michigan and Rhode Island and 20.3 percent in California. In Tennessee, Nevada and several other states that have relied heavily on manufacturing or housing, the rate was just under 20 percent this spring and may have since surpassed it.
Almost nobody believes that unemployment has finished rising, either. On Tuesday, President Obama said he expected it to “tick up for several months.”
It’s fair to say, then, that the downturn is moving into a new stage. It has already been through three: the prologue, when credit markets began to quiver in 2007; the big shock, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers, in September 2008, led into almost six months of terrible economic news; and the stabilization, when the news became more mixed.
Now comes Stage 4: the slog.
“It’s not going to be an overnight turnaround,” as Bernard Smith, an unemployed engineer in Greenville, S.C. (a state where the broader jobless rate was 20.5 percent this spring), who has been looking for work since May, told me. “It’s going to take time.”
Various indicators suggest the nation’s economic output could start growing again this summer, which would mean the end of the recession. But the economy will still be weighed down by troubled credit markets and huge household debts. So it may be awhile before growth is fast enough to persuade companies to hire large numbers of workers.
This would make for an odd contrast, in which the economy was getting better but feeling worse. These broad measures of unemployment and underemployment could approach a hard-to-fathom 25 percent in California, up from 12 percent a year ago. In several other states, including Florida, North Carolina and Washington, the rate could yet reach 20 percent — and, unfortunately, the stimulus bill does not do a good enough job of targeting the hardest-hit states.
After a decade in which household income barely outpaced inflation, a slow recovery could leave many people hard-pressed and frustrated. In just the last week, the Labor Department reported that the number of people filing new claims for jobless benefits dropped — but so did consumer confidence and Mr. Obama’s approval rating. Welcome to the slog.
A jobless rate of 20 percent is clearly a bit shocking. It sounds like something out of the Great Depression, and as bad as this recession is, it’s no Great Depression. So what’s going on?
For starters, this rate does include part-time workers who want to be full time. Such people are not quite unemployed or fully employed.
On average, they are working three days a week, and many are struggling to get by. Richard Smith (not related to Bernard) and his wife, Lynn, for example, moved from Michigan to Charlotte, N.C., last summer, after he had been laid off from white-collar jobs by both Ford and General Motors in the last five years. But after talking with 35 headhunters and sending out hundreds of applications, Mr. Smith, who’s 58, still hasn’t found full-time work.
Instead, he works a few days a week at a golf shop, repairing clubs and making $9.50 an hour. The money has helped the Smiths buy a bargain-basement foreclosed house. “You get depressed, obviously,” he said. “But that never changes my attitude about my capability.”
Part-time workers like Mr. Smith make up about one-third of those counted in the broader rates, which leaves roughly 13 percent of the work force in states like Oregon and Michigan who are completely out of work.
And even that is probably an understatement, because it includes only people who have looked for work at some point in the last year. (To be counted in the official jobless rate, someone must have looked in the last four weeks.) Anyone who has spent time in old industrial areas knows that plenty of former factory workers would like a decent-paying job but haven’t looked for one in more than a year.
When I saw these statistics last week, my first reaction was to wonder why there weren’t more tangible signs of joblessness. Many communities are pockmarked with foreclosure signs and postponed construction projects. But unless you go looking for the unemployed, they are mostly invisible.
As Susan Rose — a lawyer at a nonprofit group in South Carolina who represented the unemployed until she herself was recently laid off — said, “It’s almost as if unemployed people are a forgotten, silent crowd.”
The stimulus bill is helping somewhat. It has extended jobless benefits and prevented layoffs by state and local governments. A lot more stimulus is on the way, too. So far, about $90 billion has gone out the door, according to Moody’s Economy.com. From now until the end of 2010, an additional $25 billion or so will be spent every month.
But the stimulus isn’t helping as much as it could, because too much of the money is going to states that need it the least. In most of the Great Plains and Mountain West, the broad jobless rate was still below 12 percent this spring. In North Dakota, it was 7.8 percent. Yet these are some of the places receiving a disproportionate share of stimulus, as recent articles by The Associated Press and The Times have shown. It’s a classic case of politics trumping economics.
Barring an unexpected bit of bad news — something that turns the slog into a relapse — Congress and the White House are not likely to pursue another stimulus bill until September. By then, more of the money from the last stimulus will have been spent, and the economy’s condition will be clearer.
If lawmakers do decide more is needed, they would do well to remember that this is not an equal opportunity recession. By September, one out of every four Californians — and Oregonians and South Carolinians and Michiganders — who would like to have a full-time job might not have one.
Who ever thought we would be saying such a thing?
Victoria Cherrie contributed reporting.
E-mail: Leonhardt@nytimes.com
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21) Ex-G.M. Chief to Get $8.5 Million in Retirement Pay
By BLOOMBERG NEWS
July 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/business/15auto.html?ref=business
Rick Wagoner, who was ousted this year as chief executive of General Motors, was eligible for $20.2 million in retirement pay but will get about $8.5 million over the next five years, the company said on Tuesday.
Mr. Wagoner, who was pushed out March 29 by the Obama administration as part of the eventual bankruptcy of the firm, will retire Aug. 1, the company said in a filing.
He will get $1.64 million annually in the next five years under an executive retirement plan, and $74,030 a year for the rest of his life under a salaried-employee retirement program, according to the regulatory filing.
Mr. Wagoner’s retirement package was one of the unanswered questions when the Treasury formed the General Motors Company from assets of the former G.M. last week. After his ouster, Mr. Wagoner remained on the payroll, earning a salary of $1 a year.
Mr. Wagoner, 56, will also receive a life insurance policy that G.M. has maintained for his benefit since Jan. 1, 1997, or its cash value, now $2.57 million, the firm said in the filing. He worked for G.M. for 32 years.
His original pension included a $68,900 yearly amount and five annual payments of $4.5 million.
A Warning on Old G.M. Stock
Investors in the old General Motors have been warned by the government. But will they listen?
The old G.M. stock, now almost certainly worthless, was a star performer during the bankruptcy proceeding of General Motors, when it traded under the ticker symbol GMGMQ.
From 75 cents a share on May 29, before the company filed for bankruptcy, the shares rose to $1.15 before trading was halted on Friday by alarmed regulators who feared heavy volume in the stock might show that investors believed it was in some way connected to the new General Motors. It is not.
The Securities and Exchange Commission and Finra, the securities industry self-regulatory body, put out an investoron Tuesday, saying that investing in bankrupt companies was very risky, and announcing that the old G.M. had been renamed the Motors Liquidation Company, with a ticker symbol of MTLQQ. Trading under that symbol will begin Wednesday.
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