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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!
On the 8th Anniversary of the War on Afghanistan
U.S. -- NATO OUT! BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
End colonial occupation in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Haiti...
Healthcare, jobs, housing, education for all--Not War!
San Francisco Protest:
Wednesday, October 7, 5:00 p.m.
New Federal Building
7th and Mission Streets, Near Civic Center BART
Volunteers needed: 415-821-6545
answer@answersf.org
ANSWERcoalition.org
ANSWERsf.org
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17 SAN FRANCISCO MARCH AND RALLY AGAINST THE WARS
U.S. Troops Out Now! Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan!
Assemble 11:00 A.M. U.N. Plaza, SF (Market between 7th and 8th Streets)
March begins at 12:00 Noon
Rally begins at 1:00 P.M. back at U.N. Plaza
Commemorating the eighth anniversary of the war on Afghanistan and the 40th anniversary of the massive October 17, 1969 Vietnam Moratorium.
Sponsor: October 17 Antiwar Coalition
510-268-9429 or 415-794-7354
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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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Taking Aim Radio Program with
Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone
The Chimera of Capitalist Recovery, Parts 1 and 2
http://www.takingaimradio.com/shows/audio.html
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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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THE FINAL TWO OCTOBER 17 COALITION MEETINGS WILL TAKE PLACE:
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2:00 PM AND SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2 PM
Unitarian Church (Chapel)
1187 Franklin at Geary, SF (wheelchair accessible).
Let's reach out to as many people as possible to come to these final two meetings to ensure a maximum effort to build Oct. 17. Flyers will be available for pickup as well as cementing the final planning for important, last-minute organizational tasks.
We all need to step up and give our best efforts to make this a successful protest against these wars and bankster-bailouts, and for jobs, education, healthcare, housing and a peaceful world for all.
A new website has been set up at:
www.oct17awc.wordpress.com
A calendar will be posted listing activities and events for flyering and getting the word out about Oct. 17.
To arrange to pick up flyers, or to add another event to the calendar, call either of the numbers below. (Please note, Michael Moor's new film, "Capitalism: A Love Story" opens nationwide on Oct. 2. This will be a great place to flyer for Oct. 17.)(See the trailer at: http://www.capitalismalovestory.com/)
Please call Jeff (510-268-9428) or Kathy (415-641-1997) to volunteer at one of these great opportunities to get out the word.
In solidarity,
Bonnie Weinstein
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National Call For Action And Endorsements at the
G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh, PA
Sept. 19 - 25, 2009
Endorsers (list in formation): Iraq Veterans Against the War Chapter 61, Pittsburgh; PA State Senator Jim Ferlo; Veterans for Peace Chapter 047, Pittsburgh; National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations; Thomas Merton Center Pittsburgh; Codepink Pittsburgh Women for Peace; Bail Out The People; Green Party of Allegheny County; World Can't Wait; ISO (International Socialist Organization); WILPF (Women's International League for Peace and Freedom) Pittsburgh; Socialist Action; Ohio Valley Peace
Activists from Pittsburgh, the U.S., and across the globe will converge to protest the destructive policies of the G-20 - meeting in Pittsburgh this September 24-25.
The Group of Twenty (G-20) Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors represents the world's economic leaders, intimately connected to the most powerful multi-national corporations that dominate the global economy. Their neo-liberal policies have squandered billions on war, plunged economies into deep recessions, worsened social, economic and political inequality, and polluted the earth.
We believe a better world is possible. We anticipate involvement and support from like-minded people and organizations across the country for projected actions from September 19-25:
People's Summit - Sept. 19, 21-22 (Saturday, Monday, Tuesday)
A partnership of educators and social justice groups is organizing a People's Summit to discuss global problems and seek solutions that are informed by the basic principles of genuine democracy and human dignity. This will bring together informed speakers and panels to discuss problems we face and possible solutions, also providing interactive workshop discussions.
Mass March on the G-20 - Friday, Sept. 25:
Money for human needs, not for war!
Gather at 12 noon, march to the City County Building downtown
A peaceful, legal march is being sponsored by the Thomas Merton Center, an umbrella organization that supports a wide variety of peace and justice member projects in Pittsburgh. We will hold a mass march to demand "Money for human needs, not for war!"
WE SEEK THE BROADEST RANGE OF SUPPORT, PARTICIPATION, AND ENDORSEMENTS FOR THE MASS MARCH AND PEOPLE'S SUMMIT
To endorse, E-mail: info@pittsburghendthewar.org
Or contact: Thomas Merton Center AWC, 5125 Penn Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15224
Several other events are being planned by a wide variety of community and social justice groups in Pittsburgh.
For more information and updates please visit:
http://www.thomasmertoncenter.org/g20action.htm
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The Human Face of Death Row
Join us October 2nd at 7pm for the opening reception for an exhibition of paintings from three men - Kevin Cooper, James Anderson and Eddie Vargas. Two of them are condemned - on death row; the third has a life sentence - the other death penalty.
These three men use art to express themselves. We hope you will see their work, hear their stories, and take away an understanding of their humanity from viewing it.
PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY
ROCK PAPER SCISSORS GALLERY
TELEGRAPH & 23RD ST, OAKLAND
October 1 - October 31, 2009
OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2ND - 7 TO 9 PM
JUSTICE FOR OSCAR GRANT: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16TH - 7 TO 9 PM - a memorial movie of Oscar Grant, with Uncle Cephus Bobby Johnson, other members of Oscar's family and Jack Bryson. Come for update: Meserlhe's trial starts October 13th, unless continued again.
STAN TOOKIE WILLIAMS LEGACY NETWORK: SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17TH - 4 TO 6 PM - with Barbara Becnel and Stan Tookie Williams' books for children.
LIVE FROM DEATH ROW: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 23RD - 7 TO 9 PM - with Kevin Cooper, an innocent man on San Quentin's death row calling (at 7:30 sharp). Q&A with Kevin Cooper and members of the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee.
PLEASE JOIN US
FOR MORE INFO: CALIFORNIA@NODEATHPENALTY.ORG
510-589-6820
2278 Telegraph Ave., Ca 94612(click here for a map)http://www.mapquest.com/maps?city=Oakland&state=CA&address=2278+Telegraph
Presented by the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, a grassroots organization dedicated to the abolition of capital punishment in the United States.
website: www.nodeathpenalty.org
Also by Art for a Democratic Society, an Oakland based art and activism group specializing in participatory grassroots interventionist art.
website: www.a4ds.org email: a4ds@earthlink.net
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On the 8th Anniversary of the War on Afghanistan
U.S. -- NATO OUT!
BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
End colonial occupation in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Haiti...
Healthcare, jobs, housing, education for all--Not War!
San Francisco Protest:
Wednesday, October 7, 5:00 p.m.
New Federal Building
7th and Mission Streets, Near Civic Center BART
Initiated by the ANSWER Coalition--Act Now to Stop War and End Racism
Volunteers needed: 415-821-6545
answer@answersf.org
ANSWERcoalition.org
ANSWERsf.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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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17 SAN FRANCISCO MARCH AND RALLY AGAINST THE WARS
U.S. Troops Out Now! Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan!
Assemble 11:00 A.M. U.N. Plaza, SF (Market between 7th and 8th Streets)
March begins at 12:00 Noon
Rally begins at 1:00 P.M. back at U.N. Plaza
Commemorating the eighth anniversary of the war on Afghanistan and the 40th anniversary of the massive October 17, 1969 Vietnam Moratorium.
Sponsor: October 17 Antiwar Coalition
510-268-9429 or 415-794-7354
Money for Human Needs Not War!
Immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. troops, military personnel, bases, contractors, and mercenaries from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Colombia.
End U.S. support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine! End the Seige of Gaza!
U.S. Hands Off Iran and North Korea!
Self-determination for All Oppressed Nations and Peoples!
End War Crimes Including Torture and Prosecute the War Criminals!
See historical images of the Vietnam Moratorium at:
http://images.google.com/images?q=vietnam+moratorium&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=lGaISs7pMIP-sQOr2OznAg&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4
Image of San Francisco Vietnam Moratorium, Golden Gate Park, October 17, 1969 (I was there...bw):
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.rchrd.com/photo/images/pb2-12-15.jpg&imgrefurl=http://rchrd.com/photo/archives/1969/&usg=__FeHN5CAwDXv-ewwCt2Hfni6ZUn8=&h=567&w=850&sz=143&hl=en&start=3&um=1&tbnid=EJH6Kzj6YI6zzM:&tbnh=97&tbnw=145&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dvietnam%2Bmoratorium%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DX%26um%3D1
This is an initial announcement. Contact information, endorsers and further details to be announced.
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Please forward widely. Contact us if you or your organization would like to endorse this call.
CALL FOR OCTOBER 22 DEMONSTRATION IN OAKLAND, CA:
NATIONAL DAY OF PROTEST TO STOP POLICE BRUTALITY, REPRESSION AND THE CRIMINALIZATION OF A GENERATION
Oscar Grant. Brownie Polk. Parnell Smith. And dozens more Oakland alone. Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo in New York City. Adolph Grimes in New Orleans. Robbie Tolan in Houston. Julian Alexander in Anaheim. Jonathan Pinkerton in Chicago. And thousands more nationwide.
All shot down, murdered by law enforcement, their lives stolen, victims of a nationwide epidemic of police brutality and murder.
The racist arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates this summer in Cambridge, Massachusetts - right in his own home - showed that any Black man or woman, no matter their stature, no matter their education, no matter their accomplishments can be targeted for brutality - even murder - at any moment.
Meanwhile, a whole generation of youth is treated as guilty until proved innocent, and hundreds of thousands are criminalized, and locked away in U.S. prisons with no hope for the future. And immigrants are subject to brutal raids, with families cruelly split up in an instant.
We refuse to suffer these outrages in silence. We need to put a stop to this and drag the truth about the nationwide epidemic of police violence and repression into the light of day for all so see. We say no more! Enough is Enough!
Oct 22nd 2009 is the 14th annual national day of protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of Generation---bringing together those under the gun and those not under the gun as a powerful voice to expose the epidemic of police brutality. On that day in cities across the country many different people will take to the streets against police brutality and murder, against the criminalization of youth, and against the targeting of immigrants.
We call for a powerful demonstration in Oakland on October 22 demanding:
* Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation!
* October 22....No To Police Brutality
* No to ICE raids and round-ups of immigrants!
* Enough Is Enough! No More Stolen Lives!
* Justice for Oscar Grant and all victims of police murder!
* Wear Black, Fight Back
Contact the National Office of October 22nd at:
Info@october22.org or 1-888-NOBRUTALITY
October 22nd Coalition
P.O. Box 2627
New York, N.Y. 10009
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B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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URGENT ALERT!
Call-In To Save San Francisco's Only State Park Wilderness Area From
Toxic Condominium Development!
Within the next two weeks, State Senator Mark Leno will seek to pass a
bill allowing environmentally criminal Lennar Corporation to build high
priced condos on the wildlife habitat and parkland in San Francisco's
Candlestick Point State Recreation Area!
San Francisco Supervisors Avalos, Daly, Mirkarimi, Mar and Campos have
sponsored a local resolution to tell the State legislature not to wreck
our State parkland for real estate developer profits.
This measure needs the crucial sixth vote of Board of Supervisors
President David Chiu to win, before Leno's bill (SB 792) goes for its
own final vote.
**WHAT YOU CAN DO**
Call Supervisor David Chiu at 415-554-7450 with the comment:
"Please bring the Avalos/Daly resolution opposing SB 792 to a full Board
vote by September 15th and vote YES! Don't give away one inch of
California's only urban state park!"
If you call during the weekend or evening, or get a recording, just
leave your comment as voice mail.
For more on the State Park land grab see
http://www.sfbayview.com/2009/privatizing-california-senate-bill-792/
For more on Lennar's history of corporate abuses see page 3 of Our
City's Fall 2007 Update at http://our-city.org/Update-Oct07.pdf
###
This alert sent by:
Our City
1028-A Howard St.
San Francisco, CA 94103
415-756-8844
For more information about Our City campaigns go to:
http://www.our-city.org
info@our-city.org
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HELP VFP PUT THIS BOOK IN YOUR HIGH SCHOOL OR PUBLIC LIBRARY
For a donation of only $18.95, we can put a copy of the book "10 Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military" into a public or high school library of your choice. [Reason number 1: You may be killed]
A letter and bookplate will let readers know that your donation helped make this possible.
Putting a book in either a public or school library ensures that students, parents, and members of the community will have this valuable information when they need it.
Don't have a library you would like us to put it in? We'll find one for you!
https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/826/t/9311/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=4906
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Take Action: Stop Rite Aid's abuses: Pass the Employee Free Choice Act!
For years Rite Aid workers have faced unfair firings, campaigns of misinformation, and intimidation for trying to form a union. But Rite Aid would never have been able to get away with any of this if Congress had passed the Employee Free Choice Act.
You can help us fight mounting anti-union opposition to the bill that would have protected Rite Aid's workers. Tell Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act today!
http://action.americanrightsatwork.org/campaign/riteaidefca2/8gg63dd407ejd5wi?
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This is a must-see video about the life of Oscar Grant, a young man who loved his family and was loved by his family. It's important to watch to understand the tremendous loss felt by his whole family as a result of his cold-blooded murder by BART police officers--Johannes Mehserle being the shooter while the others held Oscar down and handcuffed him to aid Mehserle in the murder of Oscar Grant January 1, 2009.
The family wants to share this video here with you who support justice for Oscar Grant.
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/07/21/18611878.php
WE DEMAND JUSTICE FOR OSCAR GRANT!
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Urgent: Ahmad Sa'adat transferred to isolation in Ramon prison!
http://www.freeahmadsaadat.org/
Imprisoned Palestinian national leader Ahmad Sa'adat, the General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was transferred on August 11, 2009 to Ramon prison in the Naqab desert from Asqelan prison, where he had been held for a number of months. He remains in isolation; prior to his transfer from Asqelan, he had been held since August 1 in a tiny isolation cell of 140 cm x 240 cm after being penalized for communicating with another prisoner in the isolation unit.
Attorney Buthaina Duqmaq, president of the Mandela Association for prisoners' and detainees' rights, reported that this transfer is yet another continuation of the policy of repression and isolation directed at Sa'adat by the Israeli prison administration, aimed at undermining his steadfastness and weakening his health and his leadership in the prisoners' movement. Sa'adat has been moved repeatedly from prison to prison and subject to fines, harsh conditions, isolation and solitary confinement, and medical neglect. Further reports have indicated that he is being denied attorney visits upon his transfer to Ramon.
Ahmad Sa'adat undertook a nine-day hunger strike in June in order to protest the increasing use of isolation against Palestinian prisoners and the denial of prisoners' rights, won through long and hard struggle. The isolation unit at Ramon prison is reported to be one of the worst isolation units in terms of conditions and repeated violations of prisoners' rights in the Israeli prison system.
Sa'adat is serving a 30 year sentence in Israeli military prisons. He was sentenced on December 25, 2008 after a long and illegitimate military trial on political charges, which he boycotted. He was kidnapped by force in a military siege on the Palestinian Authority prison in Jericho, where he had been held since 2002 under U.S., British and PA guard.
Sa'adat is suffering from back injuries that require medical assistance and treatment. Instead of receiving the medical care he needs, the Israeli prison officials are refusing him access to specialists and engaging in medical neglect and maltreatment.
The Campaign to Free Ahmad Sa'adat demands an end to this isolation and calls upon all to protest at local Israeli embassies and consulates (the list is available at: http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/ About+the+Ministry/Diplomatic+mission/Web+Sites+of+Israeli+ Missions+Abroad.htm) and to write to the International Committee of the Red Cross and other human rights organizations to exercise their responsibilities and act swiftly to demand that the Israelis ensure that Ahmad Sa'adat and all Palestinian prisoners receive needed medical care and that this punitive isolation be ended. Email the ICRC, whose humanitarian mission includes monitoring the conditions of prisoners, at jerusalem..jer@icrc.org, and inform them about the urgent situation of Ahmad Sa'adat!
Ahmad Sa'adat has been repeatedly moved in an attempt to punish him for his steadfastness and leadership and to undermine his leadership in the prisoners' movement. Of course, these tactics have done nothing of the sort. The Palestinian prisoners are daily on the front lines, confronting Israeli oppression and crimes. Today, it is urgent that we stand with Ahmad Sa'adat and all Palestinian prisoners against these abuses, and for freedom for all Palestinian prisoners and for all of Palestine!
The Campaign to Free Ahmad Sa'adat
http://www.freeahmadsaadat.org
info@freeahmadsaadat.org
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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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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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C. ARTICLES IN FULL
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1) Public Option Fades From Debate Over Health Care
By ROBERT PEAR
News Analysis
September 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/health/policy/13plan.html?hp
2) Big Spenders? They Wish
By PETER S. GOODMAN
September 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/business/economy/13excerpt.html?8dpc
3) Toxic Waters
Clean Water Laws Are Neglected, at a Cost in Suffering
By CHARLES DUHIGG
September 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/us/13water.html?hp
4) The Recession's Racial Divide
By BARBARA EHRENREICH and DEDRICK MUHAMMAD
Op-Ed Contributors
September 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/opinion/13ehrenreich.html
5) Class Size Brings Strike by Teachers
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
September 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/us/13kent.html?ref=us
6) Judge Rejects Settlement Over Merrill Bonuses
By LOUISE STORY
September 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/business/15bank.html?hp
7) U.S. Cost-Saving Policy Forces New Kidney Transplant
By KEVIN SACK
September 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/health/policy/14kidney.html?ref=us
8) Military Chief Says More Troops Needed for Afghan War
By THOM SHANKER
September 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/world/asia/16mullen.html?hp
9) Iraqi Shoe Thrower Says He Was Tortured in Jail
By MARC SANTORA
September 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/world/middleeast/16shoe.html?ref=world
10) U.S. Kills Top Qaeda Militant in Southern Somalia
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and ERIC SCHMITT
September 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/world/africa/15raid.html?ref=world
11) A New Meaning for Cutting Classes
By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ
September 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/education/15cuts.html?ref=education
12) Fed Chief Says Recession Is 'Very Likely Over'
By STEPHEN LABATON
September 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/business/economy/16bernanke.html?ref=business
13) Real 'Norma Rae' Dies of Cancer after Insurer Delayed Treatment
By Sue Sturgis
September 14, 2009
http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/09/real-norma-rae-dies-of-cancer-after-insurer-delayed-treatment.html
14) Poll: Support for Afghan war at all-time low
By Paul Steinhauser
CNN Deputy Political Director
September 15, 2009
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/09/15/afghan.war.poll/index.html?eref=rss_topstories#cnnSTCText
15) A Long Way Down
Editorial
"As is now painfully evident, the economic growth of the Bush era was largely an illusion. Poverty worsened during most of the boom years and middle-class pay stagnated, as most gains flowed to the top. In a recent update of their groundbreaking series on income trends, the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez found that from 2002 to 2007, the top 1 percent of households - those making more than $400,000 a year - received two-thirds of the nation's total income gains, their largest share of the spoils since the 1920s."
September 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/opinion/16wed1.html
16) Man in Queens Raids Denies Any Terrorist Link
By KAREN ZRAICK and DAVID JOHNSTON
September 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/nyregion/16terror.html?ref=nyregion
17) E.U. Seeks Global Agreement for Curbs on Bonuses at Banks
By STEPHEN CASTLE
September 17, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/17/business/global/17bonus.html?ref=business
18) Film: Capitalism's Little Tramp
By BRUCE HEADLAM
September 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/movies/20head.html?hp
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1) Public Option Fades From Debate Over Health Care
By ROBERT PEAR
News Analysis
September 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/health/policy/13plan.html?hp
WASHINGTON - It was just one line in a campaign manifesto, and it hardly seemed the most significant or contentious. As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama said he would "establish a new public insurance program" alongside private health care plans.
That proposal took on a life of its own, but it now appears to be dying, a victim of an ineffectual White House strategy, the president's failure to argue passionately for the "public option" and all-out opposition by the insurance industry and much of the health care industry.
In the campaign, Mr. Obama said the public plan would compete with private insurers on the price and quality of care, thus benefiting consumers. What Mr. Obama did not foresee is that, to some people on the right and the left, it would become the most important issue in the debate over health care, touching off a battle over the role of government in one of the nation's biggest, fastest-growing industries.
Once in office Mr. Obama and his advisers have sent conflicting signals about how critical a government-run health plan would be. He prefers a public plan but is open to other ideas.
Dancing around the issue for eight months, Mr. Obama has seemed, at various times, pragmatic, flexible or indecisive.
"I just want to figure out what works," Mr. Obama said in March at a White House forum. If he could drive down health costs and expand coverage "entirely through the market," he said, "I'd be happy to do it that way." And "if there was a way of doing it that involved more government regulation and involvement, I'm happy to do it that way, as well," he added.
Champions of the public plan said it could save money by using Medicare rates and fee schedules to pay hospitals and doctors. In a book last year, one of Mr. Obama's top advisers, former Senator Tom Daschle, said consumers should have the option of enrolling in "a government-run insurance program modeled after Medicare, a proven and popular program."
That is exactly what worries health care providers, who say Medicare pays them less than market rates paid by private insurers. And they have pressed their concerns on Capitol Hill with a small army of lobbyists.
Conservatives have another concern. They see the public option as a step toward a single-payer system in which the government would pay most of the nation's health care bill and could supplant private insurers.
"A public plan is essentially a stalking horse for a single-payer plan," said Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire. "It is more than the camel's nose under the tent. It is the camel's neck, and probably front legs, under the tent. There is no way the private sector will be able to compete."
In trying to answer this charge, Democrats feel torn. Mr. Obama and many Democrats deny that they want to drive private insurers from the market. But others embrace the ultimate goal of "Medicare for all."
The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which supports Mr. Obama and the public option, has long supported a single-payer system.
In a memorandum to union leaders last year, Gerald W. McEntee, president of the 1.6-million-member federation, said a public plan would "create a competitive check on the private market and build both public support and the infrastructure for a single-payer system."
Then in April, Representative Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois, said insurers were right to fear that a public plan could "put the private insurance industry out of business."
That might happen because of "the superiority of the public health care option," said Ms. Schakowsky, one of 86 co-sponsors of a bill to establish a single-payer system.
Such comments provided new ammunition to Republicans already worried about the costly commitments undertaken by the federal government to stave off an economic collapse.
Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, voiced this sense of bailout fatigue in June when he said, "We have the takeover of the auto companies and banks and A.I.G. and student loans - and now health care."
In battering the proposal for a public option, Republicans have made effective use of estimates by the Lewin Group, a consulting concern, which said that more than 100 million people might sign up for the government-run insurance plan.
By contrast, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that 11 million to 12 million people might enroll.
Mr. Obama cited the lower estimate in a speech to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, to buttress his assertion that fears of a public plan were overblown. "We believe that less than 5 percent of Americans would sign up," Mr. Obama said.
But a leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Representative Lynn Woolsey, Democrat of California, predicted that over time "more and more people will select the public option."
If only 5 percent of people will enroll, she asked, "Why are the private insurance companies so worried?"
The different estimates by Lewin and the Congressional Budget Office are based on different assumptions about who would be permitted to enroll in the public plan - workers in all companies or just those in smaller businesses.
Many people who cite studies by the Lewin Group do not know it is a unit of Ingenix, a wholly owned subsidiary of UnitedHealth, one of the nation's largest insurers. John F. Sheils, a vice president of the Lewin Group, said the parent company had no influence over its research.
Momentum for the public option has waned, in part, because senators have been focusing on an alternative: nonprofit member-owned insurance cooperatives.
Apart from the question of whether co-ops would be workable or effective, they provide a politically convenient middle ground for centrists. With no immediate prospect of getting the votes for a public option in the Senate, some liberals have said they too are willing to consider the idea - if it enables them to pass a bill, and if the co-ops are strong enough to put competitive pressure on insurance companies.
Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, who floated the idea in early June, said co-ops would accomplish "much of what those who want a public option are calling for - something to compete with private for-profit insurance companies."
At the same time, Mr. Conrad said, co-ops address Republican concerns because they are not controlled by the government.
Liberal Democrats are not giving up. Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, said the president and Senate Democratic leaders had not made a serious effort to round up votes for a public option. If they did, he said, it could pass.
While the White House has struggled to define its position, insurance companies have never wavered. Starting two weeks after the 2008 election, they have said they would accept greater federal regulation of their market practices if Congress also required everyone to have health insurance.
These may have been tactical concessions, to abate public wrath, but they were well received in Congress. While making these offers, the industry conserved its resources for the bigger battle over a public option.
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2) Big Spenders? They Wish
By PETER S. GOODMAN
September 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/business/economy/13excerpt.html?8dpc
Millions of Americans have lost homes, jobs and savings to the financial crisis and recession. While greed and extravagance played roles, many lived beyond their means because their paychecks shrank. This article is adapted from "Past Due: The End of Easy Money and the Renewal of the American Economy," by Peter S. Goodman, a reporter for The New York Times. The book, to be published Tuesday by Times Books, explores the origins of the crisis and suggests ways to reinvigorate the economy.
ONE afternoon in November 2006, a policeman spotted an expired license plate on Dorothy Thomas's 10-year-old Toyota Corolla as she drove through San Jose, Calif. He ordered her to pull over.
Struggling under the weight of thousands of dollars in credit card bills, Ms. Thomas was perpetually short of cash. She had not bought a $10 auto registration sticker. The officer checked his database and recognized that she had already been ticketed once before for the same thing. He arranged to have her car towed away.
"I got down on my knees and begged that officer," Ms. Thomas recalled.
As she watched her car being hauled off, she sensed that this was the beginning of a descent into a crisis from which she might not easily escape. Without money to pay the towing and storage fees, she could not extract her car from the lot, and the tab soon grew to $1,600. Without a car, she could not reach the hospital where she worked in the administrative offices, so she lost her $16-an-hour job. Without a paycheck, she could no longer pay the rent on her modest home. She moved to Oakland, where a friend lived in a beaten-down, rented house on a street they called Crack Avenue. By year's end, Ms. Thomas, then 49, was occupying a bunk at a homeless shelter, searching in vain for a job in an economy plagued by unemployment.
Across the United States a sense has taken hold that the Great Recession and the financial crisis are predominantly a result of national profligacy, as if the economy had been undone by insatiable shoppers, foolhardy home buyers and greedy investment bankers. Extravagance and recklessness certainly played crucial roles, and yet they are only part of the explanation.
Many have lived beyond their incomes simply because incomes have been outstripped by the costs of middle-class life. By the fall of 2008, most American workers were bringing home roughly the same weekly wages they had earned in 1983, after accounting for inflation.
"For middle- and low-wage workers, the median wage basically went nowhere over these years," said the economist Jared Bernstein.
Spirited and eloquent, Ms. Thomas had worked her way up from rural Oklahoma poverty, enduring the strains of forcibly integrated schools, before settling in California. She had become one of the first African-Americans to sell cosmetics at a Sacramento department store. Then, she forged a career in medical billing, at one point making $22 an hour. She had lived beyond her means, but not out of decadence. For years, she had rented homes in better neighborhoods than she could afford in order to send her two daughters to quality schools. She had run up credit card balances to pay for summer science camps and school supplies. She had never earned more than a high school diploma, but one of her daughters already had a master's in education; the other was about to start college.
"I truly bought into the idea that education is the way out of poverty," Ms. Thomas said. "If your kids are going to school with kids who are preprogrammed to go to college, then that's what they will expect. I didn't get myself out of poverty. But I got my daughters out. I was the bridge."
Long before "subprime" entered the American lexicon, before Wall Street convulsed with the collapse of giant institutions and the financial world seized with fear, a slower-moving crisis was already under way for tens of millions of ordinary people like Ms. Thomas. The shock of recent times has merely intensified this deeper crisis, rendering void a mode of living that was already unsustainable.
As wages stagnated, and as the costs of health care and education spiraled higher, easy money filled the gap: shrinking paychecks were masked by an explosion of consumer credit and by a pair of investment manias that made money surge through the American economy - one centered on the supposedly limitless promise of the Internet, the other propelled by faith that real estate values could only climb.
On the backs of these fantasies, the financial system lent out ridiculous sums of money to businesses and homeowners, as if the laws of supply and demand had been repealed.
Americans became addicted to dreaming up the Next Big Thing, telling one another stories that seemed to justify pouring money into stocks, real estate and exotic new investments. A nation skilled in innovation and craftsmanship relinquished its traditional focus on engineering goods and services of intrinsic value in favor of financial make-believe, mostly unchecked by government regulation.
As exotic mortgages proliferated along with inscrutable investments backed by home payments, respected leaders like Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Robert E. Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers - both Treasury secretaries in the Clinton administration - silenced those inclined to damp the festivities with limits on how much money financial institutions could put into play.
Bankers operating freely would assess risks better than bureaucrats, they counseled, enabling gold rush fever to flourish on Wall Street and in every suburban cul-de-sac, while the consequences of failure swelled to monstrous proportions.
"Proposals to bring even minimalist regulation were basically rebuffed by Greenspan and various people in the Treasury," recalled Alan S. Blinder, who served with Mr. Greenspan on the board of governors at the Federal Reserve.
Easy money generated economic growth and spread riches. Yet when arithmetic reasserted itself, annihilating trillions of dollars in wealth and millions of jobs, the economy was left with a debilitating case of disillusionment: once markets lost faith in make-believe, they starved the economy of capital. Even people who had barely benefited - people like Dorothy Thomas - suffered an outsize share of hurt.
The challenge now confronting American society is how to transition from an era in which we spent and consumed in brazen disregard of traditional limits into a new period in which we live on what we bring home from work. Yet just as Americans most need jobs to rebuild savings and pay off past-due bills, jobs are in exceedingly scarce supply.
"If you had told me before that a person could look for a year and not find a job, I'd have said they were just lazy," Ms. Thomas said. "Every day, I feel like I'm losing a piece of myself."
BY early 2008, the electricity and water had been cut for lack of payment at the house on Crack Avenue. For Ms. Thomas, 12 months had passed without work, despite dozens of applications at medical billing offices - those she could reach without a car. One potential employer rejected her after she failed a credit check.
"They're saying that credit is a reflection of your character," she said, choking back tears.
The confident young woman who had once sold expensive cosmetics had become a middle-aged woman bulging out of sweat pants, her face sagging with exhaustion, her hair matted for lack of access to a shower. Each rejection intensified her fears that she might never work again.
"Is it my age?" she asked. "Is it because I've gained weight?" She had been visiting a nearby food bank. "They give us cakes and cookies," she said. "Then you wonder why poor people are fat! They're not giving us fruits and vegetables."
She riffled through a folder, proffering her résumé - evidence that she belonged in the white-collar world. "I'm articulate," she said, shifting into the smooth tones of a receptionist as she pantomimed answering the phone. "How may I direct your call?"
"When you get discouraged, it's hard to recover," she said. "People who aren't poor, it's as if they think we don't know what our lives are like and what's happening to us. But we know. Poverty is like a prison without bars."
Three months later, the crumbling house on Crack Avenue fell into foreclosure, and Ms. Thomas was forced out. She thought of asking her oldest daughter for help. But her daughter was struggling to pay her own bills on a teacher's salary. So Ms. Thomas checked into a homeless shelter for battered women and substance abusers. She pretended to be a drug addict in order to stay, using the free bed as an opportunity to reconstruct her life.
In November, she got a job scheduling appointments for a chain of medical clinics for $16 an hour. She could reach the offices using public transportation. She wore a crisp white blouse and a neat ponytail. Her face radiated calm.
"I feel so good," she said, "because I feel so normal."
A long stretch of hopelessness had given way to the outlines of a future. A few weeks later, she had saved $1,600. Soon, she bought a used car, a Toyota Rav 4, which greatly expanded her field of potential workplaces. Another few months of work and saving and she figured to have enough to recover her independence.
But in late January this year, with the economy still deteriorating, her new employer laid her off.
"That first week, I really slipped under," she said. "I did feel suicidal. I just felt so knocked off the block. To lose that job was just devastating."
She was sobbing.
"I'm back at Square One," she said.
MUCH the same might be said of the American economy. Many experts say it may take years to fully recover, creating enough decent-paying jobs so that paychecks can replace home equity loans and credit cards as fuel for spending. "The open question is whether we're in for a bad couple of years, or a bad decade," said Kenneth S. Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund.
As attention focuses on how best to nurture good jobs, many advocate increased government investment into research institutions to spur innovation, in addition to tax incentives for private ventures that turn the resulting know-how into businesses. Renewable energy and biotechnology exemplify how such public-private partnerships have already produced jobs. Amid mounting concerns about climate change, states are compelling utilities to buy energy from clean sources, creating new markets for wind power and solar energy.
Iowa is exploiting its position on the Great Plains - the so-called Saudi Arabia of wind - to manufacture wind turbines. Toledo's glass factories, confronting declining orders for auto windshields, are focused on making solar panels. North Carolina has twinned the brainpower of its research universities with its engineering prowess to construct a thriving hub of biotechnology, employing people laid off from tobacco and textiles.
These are merely examples of one fruitful approach to creating jobs, say economists, one that may be applied to myriad other areas of American industry. Silicon Valley remains a hotbed of valuable thinking. Wall Street - much maligned though it may be - retains important skills that await incentives to make it function in the national interest.
Some argue that the Next Big Thing may not be big at all, but rather a diffuse process of innovation unleashed on established areas of the economy, one that extracts greater value by improving goods and services we already use every day. Traffic-choked cities may be liberated with modernized public transportation. Homes may be made more comfortable with advances in furnishing. The great American capacity to engineer solutions to life's problems - still intact - may need only the right policies to flourish again.
"There's a lot of opportunities for change in existing industries," says Joe Cortright, an economist at Impresa, a consulting firm in Portland, Ore., where traditional agriculture has in recent years evolved into boutique wineries and specialty-vegetable growers, extracting far greater value.
We are only now beginning to emerge from the longest recession since the Great Depression. The economy remains alarmingly lean. Yet many see in this moment an opportunity to refocus on areas of economic strength.
This month, amid reports that businesses were beginning to receive new orders, Dorothy Thomas was still living in a homeless shelter, unemployed.
Before the end of the month, she will reach the shelter's time limit and be forced to move again. Yet, a new confidence was evident in her words. After nearly two years of rejection and terrifying proximity to the streets, she had tapped back into a deep resilience. She had polished her résumé, acquired a penchant for saving and secured transportation. All that sat between her desperation and renewal was an item that - in the traditional American narrative - was supposed to be available to anyone willing to work: a paycheck.
"A job," Ms. Thomas said, "is really all I need."
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3) Toxic Waters
Clean Water Laws Are Neglected, at a Cost in Suffering
By CHARLES DUHIGG
September 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/us/13water.html?hp
Jennifer Hall-Massey knows not to drink the tap water in her home near Charleston, W.Va.
In fact, her entire family tries to avoid any contact with the water. Her youngest son has scabs on his arms, legs and chest where the bathwater - polluted with lead, nickel and other heavy metals - caused painful rashes. Many of his brother's teeth were capped to replace enamel that was eaten away.
Neighbors apply special lotions after showering because their skin burns. Tests show that their tap water contains arsenic, barium, lead, manganese and other chemicals at concentrations federal regulators say could contribute to cancer and damage the kidneys and nervous system.
"How can we get digital cable and Internet in our homes, but not clean water?" said Mrs. Hall-Massey, a senior accountant at one of the state's largest banks.
She and her husband, Charles, do not live in some remote corner of Appalachia. Charleston, the state capital, is less than 17 miles from her home.
"How is this still happening today?" she asked.
When Mrs. Hall-Massey and 264 neighbors sued nine nearby coal companies, accusing them of putting dangerous waste into local water supplies, their lawyer did not have to look far for evidence. As required by state law, some of the companies had disclosed in reports to regulators that they were pumping into the ground illegal concentrations of chemicals - the same pollutants that flowed from residents' taps.
But state regulators never fined or punished those companies for breaking those pollution laws.
This pattern is not limited to West Virginia. Almost four decades ago, Congress passed the Clean Water Act to force polluters to disclose the toxins they dump into waterways and to give regulators the power to fine or jail offenders. States have passed pollution statutes of their own. But in recent years, violations of the Clean Water Act have risen steadily across the nation, an extensive review of water pollution records by The New York Times found.
In the last five years alone, chemical factories, manufacturing plants and other workplaces have violated water pollution laws more than half a million times. The violations range from failing to report emissions to dumping toxins at concentrations regulators say might contribute to cancer, birth defects and other illnesses.
However, the vast majority of those polluters have escaped punishment. State officials have repeatedly ignored obvious illegal dumping, and the Environmental Protection Agency, which can prosecute polluters when states fail to act, has often declined to intervene.
Because it is difficult to determine what causes diseases like cancer, it is impossible to know how many illnesses are the result of water pollution, or contaminants' role in the health problems of specific individuals.
But concerns over these toxins are great enough that Congress and the E.P.A. regulate more than 100 pollutants through the Clean Water Act and strictly limit 91 chemicals or contaminants in tap water through the Safe Drinking Water Act.
Regulators themselves acknowledge lapses. The new E.P.A. administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, said in an interview that despite many successes since the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972, today the nation's water does not meet public health goals, and enforcement of water pollution laws is unacceptably low. She added that strengthening water protections is among her top priorities. State regulators say they are doing their best with insufficient resources.
The Times obtained hundreds of thousands of water pollution records through Freedom of Information Act requests to every state and the E.P.A., and compiled a national database of water pollution violations that is more comprehensive than those maintained by states or the E.P.A. (For an interactive version, which can show violations in any community, visit www.nytimes.com/toxicwaters.)
In addition, The Times interviewed more than 250 state and federal regulators, water-system managers, environmental advocates and scientists.
That research shows that an estimated one in 10 Americans have been exposed to drinking water that contains dangerous chemicals or fails to meet a federal health benchmark in other ways.
Those exposures include carcinogens in the tap water of major American cities and unsafe chemicals in drinking-water wells. Wells, which are not typically regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act, are more likely to contain contaminants than municipal water systems.
Because most of today's water pollution has no scent or taste, many people who consume dangerous chemicals do not realize it, even after they become sick, researchers say.
But an estimated 19.5 million Americans fall ill each year from drinking water contaminated with parasites, bacteria or viruses, according to a study published last year in the scientific journal Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology. That figure does not include illnesses caused by other chemicals and toxins.
In the nation's largest dairy states, like Wisconsin and California, farmers have sprayed liquefied animal feces onto fields, where it has seeped into wells, causing severe infections. Tap water in parts of the Farm Belt, including cities in Illinois, Kansas, Missouri and Indiana, has contained pesticides at concentrations that some scientists have linked to birth defects and fertility problems.
In parts of New York, Rhode Island, Ohio, California and other states where sewer systems cannot accommodate heavy rains, untreated human waste has flowed into rivers and washed onto beaches. Drinking water in parts of New Jersey, New York, Arizona and Massachusetts shows some of the highest concentrations of tetrachloroethylene, a dry cleaning solvent that has been linked to kidney damage and cancer. (Specific types of water pollution across the United States will be examined in future Times articles.)
The Times's research also shows that last year, 40 percent of the nation's community water systems violated the Safe Drinking Water Act at least once, according to an analysis of E.P.A. data. Those violations ranged from failing to maintain proper paperwork to allowing carcinogens into tap water. More than 23 million people received drinking water from municipal systems that violated a health-based standard.
In some cases, people got sick right away. In other situations, pollutants like chemicals, inorganic toxins and heavy metals can accumulate in the body for years or decades before they cause problems. Some of the most frequently detected contaminants have been linked to cancer, birth defects and neurological disorders.
Records analyzed by The Times indicate that the Clean Water Act has been violated more than 506,000 times since 2004, by more than 23,000 companies and other facilities, according to reports submitted by polluters themselves. Companies sometimes test what they are dumping only once a quarter, so the actual number of days when they broke the law is often far higher. And some companies illegally avoid reporting their emissions, say officials, so infractions go unrecorded.
Environmental groups say the number of Clean Water Act violations has increased significantly in the last decade. Comprehensive data go back only five years but show that the number of facilities violating the Clean Water Act grew more than 16 percent from 2004 to 2007, the most recent year with complete data.
Polluters include small companies, like gas stations, dry cleaners, shopping malls and the Friendly Acres Mobile Home Park in Laporte, Ind., which acknowledged to regulators that it had dumped human waste into a nearby river for three years.
They also include large operations, like chemical factories, power plants, sewage treatment centers and one of the biggest zinc smelters, the Horsehead Corporation of Pennsylvania, which has dumped illegal concentrations of copper, lead, zinc, chlorine and selenium into the Ohio River. Those chemicals can contribute to mental retardation and cancer.
Some violations are relatively minor. But about 60 percent of the polluters were deemed in "significant noncompliance" - meaning their violations were the most serious kind, like dumping cancer-causing chemicals or failing to measure or report when they pollute.
Finally, the Times's research shows that fewer than 3 percent of Clean Water Act violations resulted in fines or other significant punishments by state officials. And the E.P.A. has often declined to prosecute polluters or force states to strengthen their enforcement by threatening to withhold federal money or take away powers the agency has delegated to state officials.
Neither Friendly Acres Mobile Home Park nor Horsehead, for instance, was fined for Clean Water Act violations in the last eight years. A representative of Friendly Acres declined to comment. Indiana officials say they are investigating the mobile home park. A representative of Horsehead said the company had taken steps to control pollution and was negotiating with regulators to clean up its emissions.
Numerous state and federal lawmakers said they were unaware that pollution was so widespread.
"I don't think anyone realized how bad things have become," said Representative James L. Oberstar, a Minnesota Democrat, when told of The Times's findings. Mr. Oberstar is chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which has jurisdiction over many water-quality issues.
"The E.P.A. and states have completely dropped the ball," he said. "Without oversight and enforcement, companies will use our lakes and rivers as dumping grounds - and that's exactly what is apparently going on."
The E.P.A. administrator, Ms. Jackson, whose appointment was confirmed in January, said in an interview that she intended to strengthen enforcement of the Clean Water Act and pressure states to apply the law.
"I've been saying since Day One I want to work on these water issues pretty broadly across the country," she said. On Friday, the E.P.A. said that it was reviewing dozens of coal-mining permits in West Virginia and three other states to make sure they would not violate the Clean Water Act.
After E.P.A. officials received detailed questions from The New York Times in June, Ms. Jackson sent a memo to her enforcement deputy noting that the E.P.A. is "falling short of this administration's expectations for the effectiveness of our clean water enforcement programs. Data available to E.P.A. shows that, in many parts of the country, the level of significant noncompliance with permitting requirements is unacceptably high and the level of enforcement activity is unacceptably low."
State officials, for their part, attribute rising pollution rates to increased workloads and dwindling resources. In 46 states, local regulators have primary responsibility for crucial aspects of the Clean Water Act. Though the number of regulated facilities has more than doubled in the last 10 years, many state enforcement budgets have remained essentially flat when adjusted for inflation. In New York, for example, the number of regulated polluters has almost doubled to 19,000 in the last decade, but the number of inspections each year has remained about the same.
But stretched resources are only part of the reason polluters escape punishment. The Times's investigation shows that in West Virginia and other states, powerful industries have often successfully lobbied to undermine effective regulation.
State officials also argue that water pollution statistics include minor infractions, like failing to file reports, which do not pose risks to human health, and that records collected by The Times failed to examine informal enforcement methods, like sending warning letters.
"We work enormously hard inspecting our coal mines, analyzing water samples, notifying companies of violations when we detect them," said Randy Huffman, head of West Virginia's Department of Environmental Protection. "When I look at how far we've come in protecting the state's waters since we took responsibility for the Clean Water Act, I think we have a lot to be proud of."
But unchecked pollution remains a problem in many states. West Virginia offers a revealing example of why so many companies escape punishment.
One Community's Plight
The mountains surrounding the home of Mrs. Hall-Massey's family and West Virginia's nearby capital have long been mined for coal. And for years, the area enjoyed clean well water.
But starting about a decade ago, awful smells began coming from local taps. The water was sometimes gray, cloudy and oily. Bathtubs and washers developed rust-colored rings that scrubbing could not remove. When Mrs. Hall-Massey's husband installed industrial water filters, they quickly turned black. Tests showed that their water contained toxic amounts of lead, manganese, barium and other metals that can contribute to organ failure or developmental problems.
Around that time, nearby coal companies had begun pumping industrial waste into the ground.
Mining companies often wash their coal to remove impurities. The leftover liquid - a black fluid containing dissolved minerals and chemicals, known as sludge or slurry - is often disposed of in vast lagoons or through injection into abandoned mines. The liquid in those lagoons and shafts can flow through cracks in the earth into water supplies. Companies must regularly send samples of the injected liquid to labs, which provide reports that are forwarded to state regulators.
In the eight miles surrounding Mrs. Hall-Massey's home, coal companies have injected more than 1.9 billion gallons of coal slurry and sludge into the ground since 2004, according to a review of thousands of state records. Millions more gallons have been dumped into lagoons.
These underground injections have contained chemicals at concentrations that pose serious health risks, and thousands of injections have violated state regulations and the Safe Drinking Water Act, according to reports sent to the state by companies themselves.
For instance, three coal companies - Loadout, Remington Coal and Pine Ridge, a subsidiary of Peabody Energy, one of the largest coal companies in the world - reported to state officials that 93 percent of the waste they injected near this community had illegal concentrations of chemicals including arsenic, lead, chromium, beryllium or nickel.
Sometimes those concentrations exceeded legal limits by as much as 1,000 percent. Those chemicals have been shown to contribute to cancer, organ failures and other diseases.
But those companies were never fined or punished for those illegal injections, according to state records. They were never even warned that their activities had been noticed.
Remington Coal declined to comment. A representative of Loadout's parent said the company had assigned its permit to another company, which ceased injecting in 2006. Peabody Energy, which spun off Pine Ridge in 2007, said that some data sent to regulators was inaccurate and that the company's actions reflected best industry practices.
West Virginia officials, when asked about these violations, said regulators had accidentally overlooked many pollution records the companies submitted until after the statute of limitations had passed, so no action was taken. They also said their studies indicated that those injections could not have affected drinking water in the area and that other injections also had no detectable effect.
State officials noted that they had cited more than 4,200 water pollution violations at mine sites around the state since 2000, as well as conducted thousands of investigations. The state has initiated research about how mining affects water quality. After receiving questions from The Times, officials announced a statewide moratorium on issuing injection permits and told some companies that regulators were investigating their injections.
"Many of the issues you are examining are several years old, and many have been addressed," West Virginia officials wrote in a statement. The state's pollution program "has had its share of issues," regulators wrote. However, "it is important to note that if the close scrutiny given to our state had been given to others, it is likely that similar issues would have been found."
More than 350 other companies and facilities in West Virginia have also violated the Clean Water Act in recent years, records show. Those infractions include releasing illegal concentrations of iron, manganese, aluminum and other chemicals into lakes and rivers.
As the water in Mrs. Hall-Massey's community continued to worsen, residents began complaining of increased health problems. Gall bladder diseases, fertility problems, miscarriages and kidney and thyroid issues became common, according to interviews.
When Mrs. Hall-Massey's family left on vacation, her sons' rashes cleared up. When they returned, the rashes reappeared. Her dentist told her that chemicals appeared to be damaging her teeth and her son's, she said. As the quality of her water worsened, Mrs. Hall-Massey's once-healthy teeth needed many crowns. Her son brushed his teeth often, used a fluoride rinse twice a day and was not allowed to eat sweets. Even so, he continued getting cavities until the family stopped using tap water. By the time his younger brother's teeth started coming in, the family was using bottled water to brush. He has not had dental problems.
Medical professionals in the area say residents show unusually high rates of health problems. A survey of more than 100 residents conducted by a nurse hired by Mrs. Hall-Massey's lawyer indicated that as many as 30 percent of people in this area have had their gallbladders removed, and as many as half the residents have significant tooth enamel damage, chronic stomach problems and other illnesses. That research was confirmed through interviews with residents.
It is difficult to determine which companies, if any, are responsible for the contamination that made its way into tap water or to conclude which specific chemicals, if any, are responsible for particular health problems. Many coal companies say they did not pollute the area's drinking water and chose injection sites that flowed away from nearby homes.
An independent study by a university researcher challenges some of those claims.
"I don't know what else could be polluting these wells," said Ben Stout, a biology professor at Wheeling Jesuit University who tested the water in this community and elsewhere in West Virginia. "The chemicals coming out of people's taps are identical to the chemicals the coal companies are pumping into the ground."
One night, Mrs. Hall-Massey's 6-year-old son, Clay, asked to play in the tub. When he got out, his bright red rashes hurt so much he could not fall asleep. Soon, Mrs. Hall-Massey began complaining to state officials. They told her they did not know why her water was bad, she recalls, but doubted coal companies had done anything wrong. The family put their house on the market, but because of the water, buyers were not interested.
In December, Mrs. Hall-Massey and neighbors sued in county court, seeking compensation. That suit is pending. To resolve a related lawsuit filed about the same time, the community today gets regular deliveries of clean drinking water, stored in coolers or large blue barrels outside most homes. Construction began in August on a pipeline bringing fresh water to the community.
But for now most residents still use polluted water to bathe, shower and wash dishes.
"A parent's only real job is to protect our children," Mrs. Hall-Massey said. "But where was the government when we needed them to protect us from this stuff?"
Regulators 'Overwhelmed'
Matthew Crum, a 43-year-old lawyer, wanted to protect people like Mrs. Hall-Massey. That is why he joined West Virginia's environmental protection agency in 2001, when it became clear that the state's and nation's streams and rivers were becoming more polluted.
But he said he quickly learned that good intentions could not compete with intimidating politicians and a fearful bureaucracy.
Mr. Crum grew up during a golden age of environmental activism. He was in elementary school when Congress passed the Clean Water Act of 1972 in response to environmental disasters, including a fire on the polluted Cuyahoga River in Cleveland. The act's goal was to eliminate most water pollution by 1985 and prohibit the "discharge of toxic pollutants in toxic amounts."
"There were a bunch of us that were raised with the example of the Clean Water Act as inspiration," he said. "I wanted to be part of that fight."
In the two decades after the act's passage, the nation's waters grew much healthier. The Cuyahoga River, West Virginia's Kanawha River and hundreds of other beaches, streams and ponds were revitalized.
But in the late 1990s, some states' enforcement of pollution laws began tapering off, according to regulators and environmentalists. Soon the E.P.A. started reporting that the nation's rivers, lakes and estuaries were becoming dirtier again. Mr. Crum, after a stint in Washington with the Justice Department and the birth of his first child, joined West Virginia's Department of Environmental Protection, where new leadership was committed to revitalizing the Clean Water Act.
He said his idealism was tested within two weeks, when he was called to a huge coal spill into a stream.
"I met our inspector at the spill site, and we had this really awkward conversation," Mr. Crum recalled. "I said we should shut down the mine until everything was cleaned up. The inspector agreed, but he said if he issued that order, he was scared of getting demoted or transferred to the middle of nowhere. Everyone was terrified of doing their job."
Mr. Crum temporarily shut the mine.
In the next two years, he shut many polluting mines until they changed their ways. His tough approach raised his profile around the state.
Mining companies, worried about attracting Mr. Crum's attention, began improving their waste disposal practices, executives from that period said. But they also began complaining to their friends in the state's legislature, they recalled in interviews, and started a whisper campaign accusing Mr. Crum of vendettas against particular companies - though those same executives now admit they had no evidence for those claims.
In 2003, a new director, Stephanie Timmermeyer, was nominated to run the Department of Environmental Protection. One of West Virginia's most powerful state lawmakers, Eustace Frederick, said she would be confirmed, but only if she agreed to fire Mr. Crum, according to several people who said they witnessed the conversation.
She was given the job and soon summoned Mr. Crum to her office. He was dismissed two weeks after his second child's birth.
Ms. Timmermeyer, who resigned in 2008, did not return calls. Mr. Frederick died last year.
Since then, hundreds of workplaces in West Virginia have violated pollution laws without paying fines. A half-dozen current and former employees, in interviews, said their enforcement efforts had been undermined by bureaucratic disorganization, a departmental preference to let polluters escape punishment if they promise to try harder, and a revolving door of regulators who leave for higher-paying jobs at the companies they once policed.
"We are outmanned and overwhelmed, and that's exactly how industry wants us," said one employee who requested anonymity for fear of being fired. "It's been obvious for decades that we're not on top of things, and coal companies have earned billions relying on that."
In June, four environmental groups petitioned the E.P.A. to take over much of West Virginia's handling of the Clean Water Act, citing a "nearly complete breakdown" in the state. The E.P.A. has asked state officials to respond and said it is investigating the petition.
Similar problems exist in other states, where critics say regulators have often turned a blind eye to polluters. Regulators in five other states, in interviews, said they had been pressured by industry-friendly politicians to drop continuing pollution investigations.
"Unless the E.P.A. is pushing state regulators, a culture of transgression and apathy sets in," said William K. Reilly, who led the E.P.A. under President George H. W. Bush.
In response, many state officials defend their efforts. A spokeswoman for West Virginia's Department of Environmental Protection, for instance, said that between 2006 and 2008, the number of cease-operation orders issued by regulators was 10 percent higher than during Mr. Crum's two-year tenure.
Mr. Huffman, the department's head, said there is no political interference with current investigations. Department officials say they continue to improve the agency's procedures, and note that regulators have assessed $14.7 million in state fines against more than 70 mining companies since 2006.
However, that is about equal to the revenue those businesses' parent companies collect every 10 hours, according to financial reports. (To find out about every state's enforcement record and read comments from regulators, visit www.nytimes.com/waterdata.)
"The real test is, is our water clean?" said Mr. Huffman. "When the Clean Water Act was passed, this river that flows through our capital was very dirty. Thirty years later, it's much cleaner because we've chosen priorities carefully."
Some regulators admit that polluters have fallen through the cracks. To genuinely improve enforcement, they say, the E.P.A. needs to lead.
"If you don't have vigorous oversight by the feds, then everything just goes limp," said Mr. Crum. "Regulators can't afford to have some backbone unless they know Washington or the governor's office will back them up."
It took Mr. Crum a while to recover from his firing. He moved to Virginia to work at the Nature Conservancy, an environmental conservation group. Today, he is in private practice and works on the occasional environmental lawsuit.
"We're moving backwards," he said, "and it's heartbreaking."
Shortcomings of the E.P.A.
The memos are marked "DO NOT DISTRIBUTE."
They were written this year by E.P.A. staff, the culmination of a five-year investigation of states' enforcement of federal pollution laws. And in bland, bureaucratic terms, they describe a regulatory system - at the E.P.A. and among state agencies - that in many ways simply does not work.
For years, according to one memo, federal regulators knew that more than 30 states had major problems documenting which companies were violating pollution laws. Another notes that states' "personnel lack direction, ability or training" to levy fines large enough to deter polluters.
But often, the memos say, the E.P.A. never corrected those problems even though they were widely acknowledged. The E.P.A. "may hesitate to push the states" out of "fear of risking their relationships," one report reads. Another notes that E.P.A. offices lack "a consistent national oversight strategy."
Some of those memos, part of an effort known as the State Review Framework, were obtained from agency employees who asked for anonymity, and others through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Enforcement lapses were particularly bad under the administration of President George W. Bush, employees say. "For the last eight years, my hands have been tied," said one E.P.A. official who requested anonymity for fear of retribution. "We were told to take our clean water and clean air cases, put them in a box, and lock it shut. Everyone knew polluters were getting away with murder. But these polluters are some of the biggest campaign contributors in town, so no one really cared if they were dumping poisons into streams."
The E.P.A. administrators during the last eight years - Christine Todd Whitman, Michael O. Leavitt and Stephen L. Johnson - all declined to comment.
When President Obama chose Ms. Jackson to head the E.P.A., many environmentalists and agency employees were encouraged. During his campaign, Mr. Obama promised to "reinvigorate the drinking water standards that have been weakened under the Bush administration and update them to address new threats." He pledged to regulate water pollution from livestock operations and push for amendments to the Clean Water Act.
But some worry those promises will not be kept. Water issues have taken a back seat to other environmental concerns, like carbon emissions.
In an interview, Ms. Jackson noted that many of the nation's waters were healthier today than when the Clean Water Act was passed and said she intended to enforce the law more vigorously. After receiving detailed questions from The Times, she put many of the State Review Framework documents on the agency's Web site, and ordered more disclosure of the agency's handling of water issues, increased enforcement and revamped technology so that facilities' environmental records are more accessible.
"Do critics have a good and valid point when they say improvements need to be made? Absolutely," Ms. Jackson said. "But I think we need to be careful not to do that by scaring the bejesus out of people into thinking that, boy, are things horrible. What it requires is attention, and I'm going to give it that attention."
In statements, E.P.A. officials noted that from 2006 to 2008, the agency conducted 11,000 Clean Water Act and 21,000 Safe Drinking Water Act inspections, and referred 146 cases to the Department of Justice. During the 2007 to 2008 period, officials wrote, 92 percent of the population served by community water systems received water that had no reported health-based violations.
The Times's reporting, the statements added, "does not distinguish between significant violations and minor violations," and "as a result, the conclusions may present an unduly alarming picture." They wrote that "much of the country's water quality problems are caused by discharges from nonpoint sources of pollution, such as agricultural runoff, which cannot be corrected solely through enforcement."
Ultimately, lawmakers and environmental activists say, the best solution is for Congress to hold the E.P.A. and states accountable for their failures.
The Clean Water Act, they add, should be expanded to police other types of pollution - like farm and livestock runoff - that are largely unregulated. And they say Congress should give state agencies more resources, in the same way that federal dollars helped overhaul the nation's sewage systems in the 1970s.
Some say changes will not occur without public outrage.
"When we started regulating water pollution in the 1970s, there was a huge public outcry because you could see raw sewage flowing into the rivers," said William D. Ruckelshaus, who served as the first head of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Richard M. Nixon, and then again under President Ronald Reagan.
"Today the violations are much more subtle - pesticides and chemicals you can't see or smell that are even more dangerous," he added. "And so a lot of the public pressure on regulatory agencies has ebbed away."
Karl Russell contributed reporting.
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4) The Recession's Racial Divide
By BARBARA EHRENREICH and DEDRICK MUHAMMAD
Op-Ed Contributors
September 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/opinion/13ehrenreich.html
WHAT do you get when you combine the worst economic downturn since the Depression with the first black president? A surge of white racial resentment, loosely disguised as a populist revolt. An article on the Fox News Web site has put forth the theory that health reform is a stealth version of reparations for slavery: whites will foot the bill and, by some undisclosed mechanism, blacks will get all the care. President Obama, in such fantasies, is a dictator and, in one image circulated among the anti-tax, anti-health reform "tea parties," he is depicted as a befeathered African witch doctor with little tusks coming out of his nostrils. When you're going down, as the white middle class has been doing for several years now, it's all too easy to imagine that it's because someone else is climbing up over your back.
Despite the sense of white grievance, though, blacks are the ones who are taking the brunt of the recession, with disproportionately high levels of foreclosures and unemployment. And they weren't doing so well to begin with. At the start of the recession, 33 percent of the black middle class was already in danger of falling to a lower economic level, according to a study by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University and Demos, a nonpartisan public policy research organization.
In fact, you could say that for African-Americans the recession is over. It occurred from 2000 to 2007, as black employment decreased by 2.4 percent and incomes declined by 2.9 percent. During those seven years, one-third of black children lived in poverty, and black unemployment - even among college graduates - consistently ran at about twice the level of white unemployment.
That was the black recession. What's happening now is more like a depression. Nauvata and James, a middle-aged African American couple living in Prince Georges County, Md., who asked that their last name not be published, had never recovered from the first recession of the '00s when the second one came along. In 2003 Nauvata was laid off from a $25-an-hour administrative job at Aetna, and in 2007 she wound up in $10.50-an-hour job at a car rental company. James has had a steady union job as a building equipment operator, but the two couldn't earn enough to save themselves from predatory lending schemes.
They were paying off a $524 dining set bought on credit from the furniture store Levitz when it went out of business, and their debt swelled inexplicably as it was sold from one creditor to another. The couple ultimately spent a total of $3,800 to both pay it off and hire a lawyer to clear their credit rating. But to do this they had to refinance their home - not once, but with a series of mortgage lenders. Now they face foreclosure.
Nauvata, who is 47, has since seen her blood pressure soar, and James, 56, has developed heart palpitations. "There is no middle class anymore," he told us, "just a top and a bottom."
Plenty of formerly middle- or working-class whites have followed similar paths to ruin: the layoff or reduced hours, the credit traps and ever-rising debts, the lost home. But one thing distinguishes hard-pressed African-Americans as a group: Thanks to a legacy of a discrimination in both hiring and lending, they're less likely than whites to be cushioned against the blows by wealthy relatives or well-stocked savings accounts. In 2008, on the cusp of the recession, the typical African-American family had only a dime for every dollar of wealth possessed by the typical white family. Only 18 percent of blacks and Latinos had retirement accounts, compared with 43.4 percent of whites.
Racial asymmetry was stamped on this recession from the beginning. Wall Street's reckless infatuation with subprime mortgages led to the global financial crash of 2007, which depleted home values and 401(k)'s across the racial spectrum. People of all races got sucked into subprime and adjustable-rate mortgages, but even high-income blacks were almost twice as likely to end up with subprime home-purchase loans as low-income whites - even when they qualified for prime mortgages, even when they offered down payments.
According to a 2008 report by United for a Fair Economy, a research and advocacy group, from 1998 to 2006 (before the subprime crisis), blacks lost $71 billion to $93 billion in home-value wealth from subprime loans. The researchers called this family net-worth catastrophe the "greatest loss of wealth in recent history for people of color." And the worst was yet to come.
In a new documentary film about the subprime crisis, "American Casino," solid black citizens - a high school social studies teacher, a psychotherapist, a minister - relate how they lost their homes when their monthly mortgage payments exploded. Watching the parts of the film set in Baltimore is a little like watching the TV series "The Wire," except that the bad guys don't live in the projects; they hover over computer screens on Wall Street.
It's not easy to get people to talk about their subprime experiences. There's the humiliation of having been "played" by distant, mysterious forces. "I don't feel very good about myself," says the teacher in "American Casino." "I kind of feel like a failure."
Even people who know better tend to blame themselves - like Melonie Griffith, a 40-year-old African-American who works with the Boston group City Life/La Vida Urbana helping other people avoid foreclosure and eviction. She criticizes herself for having been "naïve" enough to trust the mortgage lender who, in 2004, told her not to worry about the high monthly payments she was signing on for because the mortgage would be refinanced in "a couple of months." The lender then disappeared, leaving Ms. Griffith in foreclosure, with "nowhere for my kids and me to go." Only when she went public with her story did she find that she wasn't the only one. "There is a consistent pattern here," she told us.
Mortgage lenders like Countrywide and Wells Fargo sought out minority homebuyers for the heartbreakingly simple reason that, for decades, blacks had been denied mortgages on racial grounds, and were thus a ready-made market for the gonzo mortgage products of the mid-'00s. Banks replaced the old racist practice of redlining with "reverse redlining" - intensive marketing aimed at black neighborhoods in the name of extending home ownership to the historically excluded. Countrywide, which prided itself on being a dream factory for previously disadvantaged homebuyers, rolled out commercials showing canny black women talking their husbands into signing mortgages.
At Wells Fargo, Elizabeth Jacobson, a former loan officer at the company, recently revealed - in an affidavit in a lawsuit by the City of Baltimore - that salesmen were encouraged to try to persuade black preachers to hold "wealth-building seminars" in their churches. For every loan that resulted from these seminars, whether to buy a new home or refinance one, Wells Fargo promised to donate $350 to the customer's favorite charity, usually the church. (Wells Fargo denied any effort to market subprime loans specifically to blacks.) Another former loan officer, Tony Paschal, reported that at the same time cynicism was rampant within Wells Fargo, with some employees referring to subprimes as "ghetto loans" and to minority customers as "mud people."
If any cultural factor predisposed blacks to fall for risky loans, it was one widely shared with whites - a penchant for "positive thinking" and unwarranted optimism, which takes the theological form of the "prosperity gospel." Since "God wants to prosper you," all you have to do to get something is "name it and claim it." A 2000 DVD from the black evangelist Creflo Dollar featured African-American parishioners shouting, "I want my stuff - right now!"
Joel Osteen, the white megachurch pastor who draws 40,000 worshippers each Sunday, about two-thirds of them black and Latino, likes to relate how he himself succumbed to God's urgings - conveyed by his wife - to upgrade to a larger house. According to Jonathan Walton, a religion professor at the University of California at Riverside, pastors like Mr. Osteen reassured people about subprime mortgages by getting them to believe that "God caused the bank to ignore my credit score and bless me with my first house." If African-Americans made any collective mistake in the mid-'00s, it was to embrace white culture too enthusiastically, and substitute the individual wish-fulfillment promoted by Norman Vincent Peale for the collective-action message of Martin Luther King.
But you didn't need a dodgy mortgage to be wiped out by the subprime crisis and ensuing recession. Black unemployment is now at 15.1 percent, compared with 8.9 percent for whites. In New York City, black unemployment has been rising four times as fast as that of whites. By 2010, according to Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute, 40 percent of African-Americans nationwide will have endured patches of unemployment or underemployment.
One result is that blacks are being hit by a second wave of foreclosures caused by unemployment. Willett Thomas, a neat, wiry 47-year-old in Washington who describes herself as a "fiscal conservative," told us that until a year ago she thought she'd "figured out a way to live my dream." Not only did she have a job and a house, but she had a rental property in Gainesville, Fla., leaving her with the flexibility to pursue a part-time writing career.
Then she became ill, lost her job and fell behind on the fixed-rate mortgage on her home. The tenants in Florida had financial problems of their own and stopped paying rent. Now, although she manages to have an interview a week and regularly upgrades her résumé, Ms. Thomas cannot find a new job. The house she lives in is in foreclosure.
Mulugeta Yimer of Alexandria, Va., still has his taxi-driving job, but it no longer pays enough to live on. A thin, tall man with worry written all over his face, Mr. Yimer came to this country in 1981 as a refugee from Ethiopia, firmly believing in the American dream. In 2003, when Wells Fargo offered him an adjustable-rate mortgage, he calculated that he'd be able to deal with the higher interest rate when it kicked in. But the recession delivered a near-mortal blow to the taxi industry, even in the still relatively affluent Washington suburbs. He's now putting in 19-hour days, with occasional naps in his taxi, while his wife works 32 hours a week at a convenience store, but they still don't earn enough to cover expenses: $400 a month for health insurance, $800 for child care and $1,700 for the mortgage. What will Mr. Yimer do if he ends up losing his house? "We'll go to a shelter, I guess," he said, throwing open his hands, "if we can find one."
So despite the right-wing perception of black power grabs, this recession is on track to leave blacks even more economically disadvantaged than they were. Does a black president who is inclined toward bipartisanship dare address this destruction of the black middle class? Probably not. But if Americans of all races don't get some economic relief soon, the pain will only increase and with it, perversely, the unfounded sense of white racial grievance.
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of the forthcoming "Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America." Dedrick Muhammad is a senior organizer and research associate at the Institute for Policy Studies.
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5) Class Size Brings Strike by Teachers
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
September 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/us/13kent.html?ref=us
KENT, Wash. (AP) - On what was scheduled to be the first day of school, students and teachers at Mill Creek Middle School here never made it through the front door. They stood or sat outside by the flagpole, waving signs and yelling at passing motorists.
The teachers have just ended a second week on strike, keeping more than 26,000 students at 40 schools out of the classroom.
The strike is not centered on wage and contract issues. Kent teachers are instead fighting for smaller class sizes, arguing that the district should spend some of the $21 million it has in reserve to alleviate overcrowding.
The district maintains that it needs to save the reserve money in this economy and that classes are not as crowded as teachers say. Some teachers complain that they do not have enough desks for students, with more than 30 children in some elementary and middle school classes.
Teachers said they were ready to stay out as long as it took to convince the school district that classroom overcrowding hurt academic achievement.
They have drawn the support of a handful of students who took to the picket lines during their extended summer vacation.
"I support them 100 percent in smaller class sizes for a better education," said Stewart Kunzelman, a 13-year-old eighth grader.
Teacher strikes are illegal in Washington State, and a judge said each teacher would have to pay $200 a day in fines if not back in school by Monday.
It is the only teacher strike in the nation taking place this week, and experts said such strikes were becoming rarer.
But that is not necessarily the case in Washington; teachers in a city east of Seattle staged a two-week strike last fall.
Rich Wood, a spokesman for the largest teachers' union in Washington, said strikes were not that common because most states did not allow them and some ban collective bargaining.
Mr. Wood said strikes in Washington State are about very local issues. Last year's extended strike in Bellevue, Wash., focused on district control of curriculum. Strikes in Illinois, Michigan and Pennsylvania last fall concerned salaries and retirement.
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6) Judge Rejects Settlement Over Merrill Bonuses
By LOUISE STORY
September 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/business/15bank.html?hp
A Federal District judge on Monday overturned a settlement between the Bank of America and the Securities and Exchange Commission over bonuses paid to Merrill Lynch executives just before the bank took over Merrill last year.
The judge said that Bank of America "materially lied" in shareholder communications about the bonuses.
The $33 million settlement "does not comport with the most elementary notions of justice and morality," wrote Jed S. Rakoff, the judge assigned to the case in federal court in Lower Manhattan.
The ruling directed both the agency and the bank to prepare for a possible trial that would begin no later than Feb. 1.
The case involved $3.6 billion in bonuses that were paid by Merrill Lynch late last year, just as that firm was about to be merged with Bank of America. Neither company provided details of the bonuses to their shareholders, who voted on Dec. 5 to approve the merger.
The judge focused much of his criticism on the fact that the fine in the case would be paid by the bank's shareholders, who were the ones that were supposed to have been injured by the lack of disclosure.
"It is quite something else for the very management that is accused of having lied to its shareholders to determine how much of those victims' money should be used to make the case against the management go away," the judge wrote.
In a statement, the S.E.C. said on Monday: "As we said in our court filings, we believe the proposed settlement properly balanced all of the relevant considerations. We will carefully review the court's most recent order."
Bank of America has argued in its filings with the judge that it did nothing wrong in its disclosures.
The judge also criticized the S.E.C., which has been trying to step up the effectiveness of its investigations unit. The judge quoted Oscar Wilde's "Lady Windermere's Fan" in the end of his ruling to say that a cynic is someone "who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."
The proposed settlement, the judge continued, "suggests a rather cynical relationship between the parties: the S.E.C. gets to claim that it is exposing wrongdoing on the part of the Bank of America in a high-profile merger; the bank's management gets to claim that they have been coerced into an onerous settlement by overzealous regulators. And all this is done at the expense, not only of the shareholders, but also of the truth."
The case before Judge Rakoff is just one of several investigations into the bank's deal with Merrill. Andrew M. Cuomo, the attorney general of New York, is also investigating the bank's disclosures of bonuses and of Merrill's surprise losses late last year. The House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform is also looking into the merger.
It is not the first time Judge Rakoff has ruffled feathers in the business world. In 2003, for example, he refused to approve what he saw as a low settlement the S.E.C. had negotiated with WorldCom, the phone company that collapsed in an $11 billion accounting fraud.
Rewarding - and punishing - the right parties was at the fore of the judge's thinking in that case. Shareholders of WorldCom had already lost out. So when the judge forced the S.E.C. to increase the $500 million fine it was levying against WorldCom to $750 million, he also demanded that the money be paid out to the company's shareholders, rather than to the agency.
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7) U.S. Cost-Saving Policy Forces New Kidney Transplant
By KEVIN SACK
September 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/health/policy/14kidney.html?ref=us
SAN DIEGO - Melissa J. Whitaker has one very compelling reason to keep up with the health care legislation being written in Washington: her second transplanted kidney.
The story of Ms. Whitaker's two organ donations - the first from her mother and the second from her boyfriend - sheds light on a Medicare policy that is widely regarded as pound-foolish. Although the government regularly pays $100,000 or more for kidney transplants, it stops paying for anti-rejection drugs after only 36 months.
The health care bill moving through the House of Representatives includes a little-noticed provision that would reverse the policy, but it is not clear whether the Senate will follow suit. The 36-month limit is one of several reimbursement anomalies - along with inadequate primary care payments and incentives that encourage unneeded care - that many in Congress hope to cure.
Ms. Whitaker, 31, who describes herself as "kind of a nerd," has Alport syndrome, a genetic disorder that caused kidney failure and significant hearing loss by the time she was 14. In 1997, after undergoing daily dialysis for five years, she received her first transplant. Most of the cost of the dialysis and the transplant, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars, was absorbed by the federal Medicare program, which provides broad coverage for those with end-stage renal disease.
Despite that heavy investment, federal law limits Medicare reimbursement for the immunosuppressant drugs that transplant recipients must take for life, at costs of $1,000 to $3,000 a month.
Once Ms. Whitaker's Medicare expired, she faced periods without work and, more important, without group health insurance, which disregards pre-existing conditions. Struggling financially, she soon found herself skipping doses of anti-rejection drugs.
By late 2003, her transplanted kidney had failed, and she returned to dialysis, covered by the government at $9,300 a month, more than three times the cost of the pills. Then 15 months ago, Medicare paid for her second transplant - total charges, $125,000 - and the 36-month clock began ticking again.
"If they had just paid for the pills, I'd still have my kidney," said Ms. Whitaker, who shares an apartment in the La Jolla neighborhood with her boyfriend, Joseph D. Jamieson. "I'd be healthy, working and paying taxes."
The Medicare program is not sure how many of the country's 100,000 transplant recipients are without insurance for their immunosuppressant drugs. Officials with the National Kidney Foundation said some dialysis patients never put themselves on transplant lists because they fear that they will not be able to afford the drugs.
Currently unemployed, Ms. Whitaker is nervous that in two years she will again find herself without health coverage. She and Mr. Jamieson, who have been together five years, said they would marry if necessary so he could insure her under the group policy provided by his employer, the drug manufacturer Pfizer. But nothing is guaranteed.
"If Joe were ever to lose his job or medical coverage, I do feel it would be possible for me to find myself without insurance again," said Ms. Whitaker, who reads lips to compensate for her hearing loss. "I'm extremely nervous about whether I'm going to be able to afford my medications once my coverage runs out."
Bills have been introduced in Congress since 2000 to lift the 36-month limit and extend coverage of immunosuppressant drugs indefinitely. They have never made it to a vote, largely because of the projected upfront cost; the Congressional Budget Office estimates that unlimited coverage would add $100 million a year to the $23 billion Medicare kidney program.
But the cost-benefit analysis would seem obvious. The most recent report from the United States Renal Data System found that Medicare spends an average of $17,000 a year on care for kidney transplant recipients, most of it for anti-rejection drugs. That compares with $71,000 a year for dialysis patients and $106,000 for a transplant (including the first year of monitoring).
"It doesn't make any sense at all," Ms. Whitaker said. "Somebody's not looking at the numbers."
A provision to cover the drugs is in the sweeping House health care bill, which has cleared three committees. It is uncertain whether the Senate Finance Committee will include it in its bill.
Since 1973, end-stage renal disease has been the only condition specifically covered by Medicare regardless of age. In 1988, coverage was extended for 12 months to anti-rejection drugs, which had recently been developed. Congress gradually lengthened the cutoff to 36 months, and then in 2000 made the benefit unlimited for those who are at least 65 or disabled. The rationale for leaving out younger transplant recipients was simply that the money was not there, Congressional aides said.
Ms. Whitaker was married when her Medicare eligibility expired after her first transplant, and her husband was able to insure her under his group policy. They divorced in 2001, and she became uninsured until taking a job at Kinko's that provided health benefits.
Her downward spiral began the day she awoke to find that her dog had used her hearing aids as a chew toy. She could not afford replacements and had to leave her job because she was unable to interact with customers.
She lived in Seattle for a while without electricity or hot water. The bank repossessed her car, and she filed for bankruptcy. Her grandmother eventually bought her new hearing aids, and she went back to work. But she was laid off a year later.
"That's when I started stretching out the pills," she said. "I'd take one in the morning and one at night, instead of two. Toward the end, I ran out of pills and was taking nothing for a couple of months. I figured I was young and could make it until I found insurance."
She figured wrong. When she arrived at an emergency room, weak from weight loss and anemia, her doctors told her they were surprised she was not in a coma. The kidney, they said, had not been functioning at all.
"I felt really guilty because it was my mom's kidney and I broke it," Ms. Whitaker said.
Ms. Whitaker moved back to Southern California to live with her mother, and soon met Mr. Jamieson. He is seven years younger and, at 6-foot-8, stands 16 inches taller, but they had what Mr. Jamieson calls "a mutual dork synchronicity" (they share a passion for video games). He bought her a stuffed kidney, with a ureter nose, and almost immediately offered her one of his kidneys.
She declined. "I didn't want to start dating somebody and steal his kidney," she said. "That seemed kind of rude."
Several years later, she reversed course and accepted the transplant on June 10, 2008. She has suffered several minor rejection episodes, but lately has been feeling well.
The couple gets by on Mr. Jamieson's paycheck and Ms. Whitaker's Social Security benefits. With the help of financial aid, she recently completed two years at a community college and will soon start classes at the University of California, San Diego. She said she hoped a degree would help her find a job with health coverage, perhaps as an addiction counselor.
But her bigger hope is that Congress will eliminate the 36-month limit so she can pursue any job, without concern for insurance.
"My whole life is dictated by my illness, and it's such a waste," Ms. Whitaker said. "If the government is going to spend all that money to help people get a kidney, they should help you keep it."
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8) Military Chief Says More Troops Needed for Afghan War
By THOM SHANKER
September 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/world/asia/16mullen.html?hp
WASHINGTON - The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, told Congress on Tuesday that success in Afghanistan would probably require more troops and certainly much more time, a position seconded by a top Republican but challenged by a leading Democrat.
The intense dialogue, at a morning hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, previewed the sharp national debate expected over coming weeks as the White House considers how best to pursue its new strategy in Afghanistan in the face of growing skepticism from members of President Obama's own party.
The committee chairman, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, insisted that accelerated efforts to train and equip Afghan security forces should precede any deployment of American troops beyond those already committed by the Obama administration. Mr. Levin's stance is expected to have great sway, as he is the most powerful Democrat in Congress on military matters.
But the committee's ranking Republican, Senator John McCain of Arizona, his party's most experienced voice on military affairs, countered by declaring that more troops were "vitally needed" in Afghanistan - and that any delay in ordering more combat forces to the fight put American lives at risk.
Admiral Mullen said that no specific troop request had yet been received from Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan.
"But I do believe that - having heard his views and having great confidence in his leadership - a properly resourced counterinsurgency probably means more forces, and, without question, more time and more commitment to the protection of the Afghan people and to the development of good governance," Admiral Mullen said.
"We will need resources matched to the strategy," he added.
Broad as they were, Admiral Mullen's comments were his most specific to date in a public setting on whether more troops would have to be sent to Afghanistan, and they and seem certain to frame the debate facing the White House, Congress and the nation in coming weeks.
The hearing officially was called to consider Admiral Mullen's nomination to serve a second term as chairman, but it immediately turned into an analysis of the administration's broader policy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, in particular whether more American combat forces should be sent rapidly or whether it would be wiser to immediately begin shifting the bulk of the fighting to local forces.
A range of officials have said that the White House hopes to have several weeks at least before being faced with dealing with any requests for more forces for Afghanistan - and the political implications of such a request here at home.
Admiral Mullen acknowledged the importance of the training effort as advocated by Mr. Levin, but he pointed out that training could not quickly provide sufficient levels of security required by the new counterinsurgency strategy.
"I share your view that larger and more capable Afghan National Security forces remain vital to that nation's viability," Admiral Mullen said. "I share your view - and have stated publicly - that the path to achieving the president's goal is through our training efforts there. We must rapidly build the Afghan Army and police."
But he cautioned that "sending more trainers more quickly may give us a jump-start, but only that."
"Quality training takes time and patience," he said. "Private trust by the Afghans - so vital to our purpose - is not fostered in a public hurry."
Mr. Levin, who met with commanders and troops in Afghanistan during the congressional Labor Day recess, said that training Afghan Army and police units "would demonstrate our commitment to the success of a mission that is in our national security interest, while avoiding the risks associated with a larger U.S. footprint."
And he said emphatically that "these steps should be urgently implemented before we consider a further increase in U.S. ground combat troops, beyond what is already planned to be deployed by the end of the year."
Mr. Levin said new goals should be established for Afghan security forces: The Afghan Army, he said, should grow to 250,000 by the end of 2012, and the police to 160,000 by that date. The current target is 134,000 army personnel members and 96,000 police officers by the end of next year.
Although Mr. Levin and Mr. McCain have a cordial working relationship on the committee, they were blunt in expressing opposing views on whether more combat troops should be deployed to Afghanistan.
Mr. McCain recalled that initial attempts in Iraq to shift the security burden to local forces instead of American forces failed dismally. "I've seen that movie before," he said.
He lauded Mr. Obama's decision earlier this year to send 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. Those extra combat troops, Mr. McCain said, were the correct priority - and he said more troops were "even more necessary now."
Additional combat troops "are vitally needed," Mr. McCain said, and warned that each day of delay "puts lives in danger."
"We will need more U.S. combat forces in Afghanistan, not less or the same amount we have today," Mr. McCain said.
The final brigade of fresh troops ordered to Afghanistan - a group of about 4,000 trainers - is scheduled to land by November, bringing the American troop level there to 68,000.
Other members of the committee said the civilian agencies of the United States government needed to accelerate their assistance for rebuilding Afghanistan.
And Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who recently visited Afghanistan, warned that such civilian efforts were urgently needed to fix a government in Kabul that he described as "dysfunctional" and that was not viewed as legitimate by much of the population.
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9) Iraqi Shoe Thrower Says He Was Tortured in Jail
By MARC SANTORA
September 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/world/middleeast/16shoe.html?ref=world
BAGHDAD - Hours after his release from prison, the Iraqi journalist who hurled his shoes at former President George W. Bush said that he had been tortured while in jail, and his family said that he would flee Iraq, fearing for his life.
"Here I am free, and my country is still captured," said the journalist, Muntader al-Zaidi, during a news conference Tuesday at the television station where he had worked.
He said that he was beaten with pipes and steel cables, and that he received electric shocks while in custody. He added that there were many who would like to see him dead, including members of unidentified American intelligence agencies.
Mr. Zaidi did not take questions after his brief remarks, but family members said he would travel to Greece, where he would receive medical and psychological care.
"He is going to flee," said his brother, Uday al-Zaidi. Part of the reason he fears for his life, his brother said, is that he plans to identify the people who played a role in his mistreatment, including high-ranking security officials.
Mr. Zaidi said that after he was arrested after hurling his shoes at Mr. Bush at a December news conference, he was shackled, soaked in water and kept in a place with no heat in the cold night.
Ali al-Mosawi, an adviser to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, said that the accusations should be viewed skeptically, since Mr. Zaidi had just been released from prison. He did not address the specific charges.
In a room packed with reporters and family members, Mr. Zaidi described the anger and helplessness he experienced after the American invasion in 2003, the suffering of widows and orphans he witnessed and why he felt compelled to wage a protest.
"I saw the chance and I seized it," he said. "If those who blamed me knew how many destroyed houses I walked over with those shoes that I threw; and how many times those shoes mixed with the blood of the innocent; and how many times those shoes went into homes where the honor of those who lived there was disgraced, then it was probably the proper response."
Security was tight around the television studio where Mr. Zaidi spoke, with dozens of police officers and other armed escorts cordoning off much of the neighborhood. On the streets, supporters banged drums, chanted his name and slaughtered sheep in his honor. Inside, family members wept with joy, even though they knew that Mr. Zaidi might not be able to return to Iraq in the near future.
The Iraqi government, which was acutely embarrassed by the shoe-throwing episode, played down Mr. Zaidi's release, barring the family from meeting him at the prison gates and quietly escorting him to his family's residence in the capital. Given Mr. Zaidi's cult hero status, his charges that he was mistreated could resonate widely.
Mr. Zaidi, 30, was originally sentenced to three years in prison, but this spring that was reduced to a one-year jail term. He was released after nine months for good behavior, court officials said.
Mr. Zaidi was a journalist for an independent Iraqi television station, Al Baghdadiya, when he attended the news conference with Mr. Bush on the president's final visit to Iraq during his administration.
As stunned members of the traveling White House press corps and other Iraqi journalists looked on, Mr. Zaidi rose from his seat and shouted in Arabic, "This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!"
He then whipped one of his shoes straight at Mr. Bush's head, narrowly missing him as the former president quickly ducked.
Before anyone could react, Mr. Zaidi, only 12 feet from Mr. Bush, had his other shoe in hand and shouted once again, "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!"
Prime Minister Maliki, standing at a lectern next to Mr. Bush, stuck a hand in front of the president's face to help shield him and, once again, Mr. Bush ducked and was not struck.
Mr. Zaidi was then wrestled to the ground and hustled out of the room.
On Tuesday, he said he was severely beaten by Iraqi security officers even as the news conference continued inside.
Mr. Bush first joked that he could report that the shoe was a size ten. Then he played down the episode, saying it was a sign of democracy.
"That's what people do in a free society, draw attention to themselves," he said.
Mr. Zaidi described what happened over the next few hours. "At the time the prime minister went on a satellite television station, saying that he did not go to sleep until he made sure that I found a comfortable bed and a cover, at the very same moment he was talking, I was being tortured," he said. He added that his treatment in custody included "electric shocks and being beaten by electric cables and steel rods."
Mr. Zaidi offered no proof and looked in fine physical condition at his news conference, but he was missing a front tooth.
The incident, which was shown repeatedly on television programs across the globe, seemed to crystallize for many the deep anger felt toward the United States over its invasion and occupation of Iraq.
From Libya, where he was awarded a Medal of Freedom, to Syria, where banners of praise were unfurled on street corners and his photo was shown on state television all day, Mr. Zaidi has been lionized.
There was even an offer from a wealthy Saudi citizen to buy one of the shoes for $10 million. It is unclear where the shoes actually are at the moment, but an Iraqi security official said he believed they are still being held by the government.
Mr. Maliki initially said that he believed Mr. Zaidi had been put up to the act by a "head cutter," apparently referring to Sunni insurgents tied to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which frequently beheaded their enemies.
Mr. Zaidi said that he had no ties to political groups and that he was acting purely out of rage at what the American occupation had cost Iraq.
Even after nine months in jail, Mr. Zaidi did not back down from his denunciation of Mr. Bush and the war.
"I was roaming throughout the past years of the war in our scorched land and I was seeing with my own eyes the pains of the victims and hearing the weeping of the grieving women and orphans," he said. "Shame was chasing me, like an ugly name for my helplessness."
Through clenched teeth, he promised himself that if the chance came he would avenge those victims.
"The chance came," he said. "And I did not miss it. "
Amir A. al-Obeidi, Abeer Mohammed and Saad al-Izzi contributed reporting for this article.
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10) U.S. Kills Top Qaeda Militant in Southern Somalia
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and ERIC SCHMITT
September 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/world/africa/15raid.html?ref=world
NAIROBI, Kenya - American commandos killed one of the most wanted Islamic militants in Africa in a daylight raid in southern Somalia on Monday, according to American and Somali officials, an indication of the Obama administration's willingness to use combat troops strategically against Al Qaeda's growing influence in the region.
Western intelligence agents have described the militant, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, as the ringleader of a Qaeda cell in Kenya responsible for the bombing of an Israeli hotel on the Kenyan coast in 2002. Mr. Nabhan may have also played a role in the attacks on two American embassies in East Africa in 1998.
American military forces have been hunting him for years, and on Monday, around 1 p.m., villagers near the town of Baraawe said four military helicopters suddenly materialized over the horizon and shot at two trucks rumbling through the desert.
The trucks were carrying leaders of the Shabab, an Islamist extremist group fighting to overthrow Somalia's weak but internationally recognized government. The Shabab work hand-in-hand with foreign terrorists, according to Western and Somali agents, and in the past few months, as the battle for control of Somalia has intensified, the group seems to be drawing increasingly close to Al Qaeda.
American officials on Monday provided few details, but confirmed that Special Operations forces, operating from a nearby American warship, participated in the helicopter raid.
Under the administration of President George W. Bush, the American military used long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles and AC-130 gunships to carry out strikes against terrorism suspects in Somalia. One American adviser said the decision to use commandos and not long-range missiles in this case may reflect a shift by the Obama administration to go to greater lengths to avoid civilian deaths. In the past, many Somali villagers have been killed by American missiles.
But urgency was a major, if not overriding, factor as well. A senior American military official said the Special Operations forces, who had kept Mr. Nabhan under lengthy surveillance waiting for the right moment to strike, acted quickly after tracking Mr. Nabhan to a location away from civilians on Monday. "We have been watching him for a long, long time," said the military official.
Despite the danger of conducting the mission during the day, the strategy ensured that the troops could more accurately identify their target, attack it and confirm the deaths afterward. "This approach was, 'Let's do it very quickly, very swiftly and confirm he's gone,' " the adviser said.
Mr. Nabhan played an increasingly important role as a senior instructor for new militant recruits, including some Americans, as well as a liaison to senior Qaeda leaders in Pakistan, the senior American adviser said.
"This is very significant because it takes away a person who's been a main conduit between the East Africa extremists and big Al Qaeda," said the adviser, who like several United States officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the mission.
The helicopters, with commandos firing .50-caliber machine guns and other automatic weapons, quickly disabled the trucks, according to villagers in the area, and several of the Shabab fighters tried to fire back. Shabab leaders said that six foreign fighters, including Mr. Nabhan, were quickly killed, along with three Somali Shabab. The helicopters landed, and the commandos inspected the wreckage and carried away the bodies of Mr. Nabhan and the other fighters for identification, a senior American military official said.
"We are very upset, very upset," said a Shabab official from the town of Merka, near where the raid happened. "This is a big loss for us."
Mr. Nabhan, who was thought to be around 30 years old and of Yemeni descent, was born in Mombasa, on Kenya's coast. American intelligence sources have said that he masterminded the suicide bombing of the Paradise hotel in Mombasa, which killed 11 Kenyans and 3 Israelis and wounded dozens of others.
The Paradise was a popular Israeli hangout, complete with a kosher restaurant and synagogue. That same day, Nov. 28, 2002, a group of assailants fired several missiles at an Israeli passenger jet at the Mombasa airport, narrowly missing it. Intelligence agents said Mr. Nabhan helped fire the missiles.
Mr. Nabhan was one of the handful of Qaeda terrorists hiding out in Somalia for years, taking advantage of the country's chaos to elude agents pursuing them.
Mr. Nabhan was believed to be a close associate of Fazul Abdullah Mohamed, Al Qaeda's East Africa operations chief, who helped organize the bombings of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, which killed more than 200 people. American military forces have tried to kill Mr. Nabhan and Mr. Mohamed with airstrikes several times in recent years.
The Baraawe area, like much of southern Somalia, is controlled by the Shabab. There is increasing evidence that foreign jihadists, like Mr. Nabhan, are leading Somali Shabab and training them in suicide bombs.
American officials said Mr. Nabhan's death is likely to send other suspects scurrying for cover. When they resurface, there may be killings of those suspected of being informants, sowing further turmoil in their ranks, American officials said.
Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Nairobi and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Mohamed Ibrahim contributed reporting from Mogadishu, Somalia
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11) A New Meaning for Cutting Classes
By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ
September 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/education/15cuts.html?ref=education
The band class at Public School 48 on Staten Island is no more. At Middle School 189 in Queens, the after-school program credited with raising math and reading scores has vanished. And that end-of-the-year steak dinner for high achievers at Public School 273 in Brooklyn? Gone, too.
New York City's 1,500 public schools officially opened for business last week, and alongside the usual confusion over locker assignments and lunch periods, there were new questions in the air: Why isn't Mrs. Brown teaching here anymore? What happened to the science lab? Where are the boxes of free notebooks and pencils?
Across the city, principals are facing budgets that are 5 percent slimmer, a steep cut for a school system where coffers swelled until the current economic downturn. As a result, principals, who now wield extraordinary authority over budgets, are learning to say "No," and hoping the changes they make will not result in academic ruin.
With cash in short supply but loud mandates from above to keep test scores high, principals say they are confronting some of their most challenging decisions, like small class sizes or tutors in English and math? After-school remediation or extra lunchroom monitors? Chess club or drumming class?
"It's tough," said Melessa Avery, principal of P.S. 273, which earned an A on its report card from the city this year. "I want to be held accountable, I'm always open to that, but you are stripping me of funds that have helped me become successful."
At the start of school, Ms. Avery gathered her staff to tell them it would be one of the most difficult years they would face. This year, the school will have 29 students to a class, instead of 21, four fewer teachers and fewer incentives for students, such as free bicycles.
In a back-to-school slideshow, Ms. Avery told teachers they might be asked to take on multiple jobs. She suggested they scour advertisements for supplies and post cheap finds in the teachers' lounge, and urged them to hold grant-writing get-togethers.
"Don't hoard, share," she listed as mantra No. 1 in her presentation.
In Queens, Cindy Diaz-Burgos, who is beginning her sixth year as principal of M.S. 189, said it would be difficult to keep students on track academically with such severe cuts. Her budget was trimmed by about $285,000, and in August she discovered her school would lose at least $65,000 more from the state because it no longer qualified as a low-performing school needing extra support.
"It's like being diabetic," she said. "The doctor gives you medication and your levels are good, and then he suddenly decides to take you off. We need all the money we can get."
In light of the reductions, Ms. Diaz-Burgos decided to eliminate an after-school program of tutoring in English, math, science and social studies. She has also ended a volleyball program that had attracted 90 students before breakfast, and students will be expected to pay for their own hand sanitizer and tissues to protect against swine flu.
Citywide, principals made most of the reductions by eliminating teaching positions (36 percent of the cuts) or reducing spending on equipment, supplies and books (28 percent), according to the Department of Education. Some schools also reduced spending on substitutes and overtime pay for teachers.
Teachers whose positions are eliminated are not laid off but instead are placed in a reserve pool and serve as substitutes. Chancellor Joel I. Klein has urged principals to use the reserve pool to fill openings rather than hiring from outside the system, because the teachers in the pool are already drawing full pay.
Education officials said they did not expect spending on arts programs, which makes up about 3 percent of the total budget, to decrease disproportionately because of the cuts.
But Richard Kessler, executive director of the Center for Arts Education, said he had received complaints from "many, many quarters" that schools were disproportionately trimming arts supply budgets and eliminating part-time arts educators.
Ernest A. Logan, president of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, the city's principals' union, said the cuts had led local organizations to fill the gaps. For instance, at Public School 86 in Brooklyn, he said, a local church provided free backpacks filled with supplies to students. Parents had pushed the Department of Education to allow the continued hiring school aides paid with P.T.A. funds as a way to keep school staffs robust and won that battle. "We're really looking at the community to pick up some of the slack," Mr. Logan said. "And the community is coming forward."
It is not the first time in recent years that schools have had to cut spending. In 2008, school budgets were cut by 1 percent in January, followed by another 1 percent in November. Most city agencies have endured similar cuts, because of the sluggish economy.
Federal stimulus dollars helped offset some of this year's cut, but not enough to eliminate it entirely.
"The stimulus is wonderful and it is great and it has saved jobs and programs, but we can't kid ourselves," said Photeine Anagnostopoulos, chief operating officer for the Education Department, saying that half the school districts in the country were in a similar position. "It didn't cover everything."
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who gained control of city schools in 2002, has made it a priority to give principals more power over their schools. Principals now have control over much of their spending, as well as the power to hire teachers and choose vendors for academic programs.
Ms. Avery said it was important to share that power in a time of crisis, adding that she had consulted teachers in deciding what to cut so they would all have ownership over the decisions.
"We know that we're not the only ones who are going through this," she said. "The entire country is going through this. Nobody said this job was going to be easy, and it's still not easy."
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12) Fed Chief Says Recession Is 'Very Likely Over'
By STEPHEN LABATON
September 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/business/economy/16bernanke.html?ref=business
WASHINGTON - The Federal Reserve chairman Ben S. Bernanke said Tuesday that it was "very likely" that the recession had ended although he cautioned that it would be many months before unemployment rates would drop significantly.
"From a technical perspective, the recession is very likely over at this point," he said, adding that "it's still going to feel like a very weak economy for some time, as many people will still find that their job security and their employment status is not what they wish it was."
The cautiously optimistic assessment came at the conclusion of a speech by Mr. Bernanke at the Brookings Institution marking the anniversary of the market crisis that was precipitated by the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers.
Mr. Bernanke said the consensus of forecasters was for moderate growth for the rest of this year and next, particularly as credit markets thaw, consumer confidence takes time to heal, and the federal government begins to unwind a series of federal spending and lending programs intended to mend the economy.
Business cycles are officially dated by a committee of economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research. The committee often spends many months sifting through economic trends before declaring the beginning and end dates of a recession.
For policymakers in Washington the more significant question than the actual date of the end of the recession will be when to begin unwinding the myriad of lending programs that were hastily created in response to the crisis. Officials at the Federal Reserve have already begun to think about that question. Mr. Bernanke and other top officials, including the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, have warned that winding down the programs too early could lead to another round of problems. Historians now generally agree that, during the Great Depression, the early withdrawal of government programs in the 1930s led to deeper economic problems throughout that decade.
On the other hand, waiting too long could fuel significant price increases and lead to a return of corrosive levels of inflation.
During his speech, Mr. Bernanke repeated his broad defense of the extraordinary rescue efforts by the central bank, the United States government and other foreign powers over the last year.
"Without these speedy and forceful actions, last October's panic would likely have continued to intensify, or major financial firms would have failed, and the entire global financial system would have been at serious risk," Mr. Bernanke said. "We cannot know for sure what the economic effects of these events would have been, but what we know about the effects of financial crises suggests that the resulting global downturn could have been extraordinarily deep and protracted."
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13) Real 'Norma Rae' Dies of Cancer after Insurer Delayed Treatment
By Sue Sturgis
September 14, 2009
http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/09/real-norma-rae-dies-of-cancer-after-insurer-delayed-treatment.html
The North Carolina union organizer who was the inspiration for the movie "Norma Rae" died on Friday of brain cancer after a battle with her insurance company, which delayed her treatment. She was 68.
Crystal Lee Sutton, formerly Crystal Lee Jordan, was fired from her job folding towels at the J.P. Stevens textile plant in her hometown of Roanoke Rapids, N.C. for trying to organize a union in the early 1970s. Her last action at the plant -- writing the word "UNION" on a piece of cardboard and standing on her work table, leading her co-workers to turn off their machines in solidarity -- was memorialized in the 1979 film by actress Sally Field. The police physically removed Sutton from the plant for her action.
But her efforts ultimately succeeded, as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers won the right to represent the plant's employees on Aug. 28, 1974. Sutton later became a paid organizer for the union, which through a series of mergers became part of UNITE HERE before splitting off this year to form Workers United, which is affiliated with the Service Employees International Union.
Several years ago, Sutton was diagnosed with meningioma, a type of cancer of the nervous system. While such cancers are typically slow-growing, Sutton's was not -- and she went two months without potentially life-saving medication because her insurance wouldn't cover it initially. Sutton told the Burlington (N.C.) Times-News last year that the insurer's behavior was an example of abuse of the working poor:
"How in the world can it take so long to find out [whether they would cover the medicine or not] when it could be a matter of life or death," she said. "It is almost like, in a way, committing murder."
Though Sutton eventually received the medication, the cancer had already taken hold. She passed away on Friday, Sept. 11 in a Burlington, N.C. hospice.
"Crystal Lee Sutton was a remarkable woman whose brave struggles have left a lasting impact on this country and without doubt, on me personally," Field said in a statement released Friday. "Portraying Crystal Lee in 'Norma Rae,' however loosely based, not only elevated me as an actress, but as a human being."
Field won an Oscar, a Golden Globe and the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival for her portrayal of the character based on Sutton. The film in turn was based on the 1975 book "Crystal Lee: A Woman of Inheritance" by New York Times reporter Henry P. "Hank" Leiferman.
Sutton was only 17 when she began working at the J.P. Stevens plant in northeastern North Carolina, where conditions were poor and the pay was low. A Massachusetts-based company that for many years was listed on the Fortune 500, J.P. Stevens is now part of the WestPoint Home conglomerate.
In 1973, Sutton, by then a mother of three, was earning only $2.65 an hour. That same year, Eli Zivkovich, a former coal miner from West Virginia, came to Roanoke Rapids to organize the plant and began working with Sutton, who was fired after she copied a flyer posted by management warning that blacks would run the union. It was that incident which led Sutton to stand up with her "UNION" sign.
"It is not necessary I be remembered as anything, but I would like to be remembered as a woman who deeply cared for the working poor and the poor people of the U.S. and the world," she said in a newspaper interview last year. "That my family and children and children like mine will have a fair share and equality."
For more on Sutton's life and work, visit the website of the Alamance Community College's Crystal Sutton Collection.
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14) Poll: Support for Afghan war at all-time low
By Paul Steinhauser
CNN Deputy Political Director
September 15, 2009
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/09/15/afghan.war.poll/index.html?eref=rss_topstories#cnnSTCText
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Support for the war in Afghanistan is at an all-time low, according to a new national poll.
A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Tuesday morning indicates that 39 percent of Americans favor the war in Afghanistan, with 58 percent opposed to the mission.
Support is down from 53 percent in April, marking the lowest level since the start of the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan soon after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
The poll suggests that 23 percent of Democrats support the war. That number rises to 39 percent for independents and 62 percent for Republicans.
"Most of the recent erosion in support has come from within the GOP," said Keating Holland, CNN's polling director. "Unlike Democrats and independents, Republicans still favor the war, but their support has slipped eight points in just two weeks."
How does Afghanistan compares with Iraq?
"The Afghan war is almost as unpopular as the Iraq war has been for the past four years," Holland said, noting that support for the war in Iraq first dropped to 39 percent in June 2005 and has generally remained in the low to mid-30s since.
The poll's release comes after the two deadliest months for the U.S. military in Afghanistan. In August, 48 U.S. troops were killed in the fighting, surpassing the previous high of 45 the month before.
President Obama has called Afghanistan a "war of necessity" and has placed great emphasis on defeating the Taliban and al Qaeda militants operating there and in Pakistan.
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is expected to approve sending thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan to deal with the growing threat from roadside bombs, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said last week.
Gates has concluded there is not enough manpower or equipment in Afghanistan to protect U.S. troops from such bombs, Morrell said.
The CNN/Opinion Research poll was conducted Friday through Sunday, with 1,012 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey's overall sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
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15) A Long Way Down
Editorial
"As is now painfully evident, the economic growth of the Bush era was largely an illusion. Poverty worsened during most of the boom years and middle-class pay stagnated, as most gains flowed to the top. In a recent update of their groundbreaking series on income trends, the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez found that from 2002 to 2007, the top 1 percent of households - those making more than $400,000 a year - received two-thirds of the nation's total income gains, their largest share of the spoils since the 1920s."
September 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/opinion/16wed1.html
It is sadly predictable that in a recession, the poor get poorer and the middle class loses ground. But even a downturn as deep and prolonged as this one cannot fully account for the desperate straits of so many Americans.
The Census Bureau reported last week that the nation's poverty rate rose to 13.2 percent in 2008, the highest level since 1997 and a significant increase from 12.5 percent in 2007. That means that some 40 million people in this country are living below the poverty line, defined as an income of $22,205 for a family of four.
The middle class also took a major hit. Median household income fell in 2008 to $50,300 from $52,200 in 2007. That is the steepest year-to-year drop since the government began keeping track four decades ago; adjusted for inflation, median income was lower in 2008 than in 1998 and every year since then.
Clearly, the recession has been brutal. But even before the recession, far too many Americans were already living far too close to the edge.
As is now painfully evident, the economic growth of the Bush era was largely an illusion. Poverty worsened during most of the boom years and middle-class pay stagnated, as most gains flowed to the top. In a recent update of their groundbreaking series on income trends, the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez found that from 2002 to 2007, the top 1 percent of households - those making more than $400,000 a year - received two-thirds of the nation's total income gains, their largest share of the spoils since the 1920s.
Because many if not most Americans gained little to nothing from the Bush "growth" years, they have found themselves especially vulnerable to the recession.
Federal stimulus spending has helped cushion the blow. The question going forward is whether an economic recovery, when it comes, will help the poor and middle class or whether the top-heavy favoritism of the previous expansion will reassert itself.
The answer depends on how policy makers foster and manage a recovery. Economic growth alone does not guarantee job growth. Congress and the Obama administration must extend certain components of the stimulus package until employment does revive, including unemployment benefits, food stamps, tax breaks for working families with children and fiscal aid to states.
Policy makers must also resist the reassuring but false notion that renewed economic growth can, by itself, raise living standards broadly. Government policies are needed to ensure that growth is shared. Reforming health care so that illness is not bankrupting - for families or for the federal budget - would be a major step in the right direction.
The administration has also said that it would let the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich expire as scheduled at the end of 2010. More progressive taxation needs to be accompanied by more progressive spending, on public education and on job training and job creation. Support for unions and enforcement of labor standards would also help to ensure that in the next economic expansion, a fair share of profits would find its way into wages.
As the Bush era showed, the economy can grow without any of that happening. But it also showed that such growth is neither defensible nor sustainable. With half the population falling behind or struggling to keep up, the economy cannot generate secure and adequate spending, investing or upward mobility for the country to truly prosper.
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16) Man in Queens Raids Denies Any Terrorist Link
By KAREN ZRAICK and DAVID JOHNSTON
September 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/nyregion/16terror.html?ref=nyregion
A Colorado man whose visit to New York apparently set off government raids on several Queens apartments on Monday has denied having ties to al Qaeda or any other terrorist group.
"I have nothing to do with this," said the man, Najibullah Zazi, 25, who was reached by telephone in Colorado on Monday and Tuesday. "This looks like it's going toward me, which is more shocking every hour."
Law enforcement authorities have not divulged the man's identity, but they confirmed that he was suspected of having al Qaeda ties and was already under surveillance for that reason.
The man whom officials were watching left New York last weekend, according to officials who have knowledge of the raids but were not authorized to discuss them. No arrests were made and no explosives or weapons were found.
Representative Peter T. King of Long Island said agents of the city's Joint Terrorism Task Force "acted very appropriately" in carrying out the raids.
"It was based on the totality of the evidence, and from what I understand of the evidence, it was important that they acted when they did," Mr. King said. "I am positive they did the right thing."
Federal authorities regarded the man to be a legitimate terrorist suspect who had become the focus of intense investigation and elaborate covert surveillance before his trip to New York, according to government officials briefed on the case.
The man's arrival last Thursday appeared to be the event that prompted authorities to stop his car near the George Washington Bridge and then carry out the searches that began late Sunday night - based on federal search warrants drafted during a frantic weekend in which prosecutors in New York and Washington hastily assembled the necessary legal documents. Officials said they decided to disrupt any plot that might have been imminent, but the raid came before investigators understood the suspect's intentions, according to several federal officials. Because there were no arrests, officials have been left to assert that they acted out of an abundance of caution.
But several said the raids were carried out well before investigators had a prosecutable case, and before they had figured out the nature of the plot, its intended target or its likely means of execution - if there was a plot at all.
Several federal officials said they were persuaded that the case was an important one and had been moving in a significant direction, but was prematurely brought to a close at the urging of police officials in New York.
Mr. Zazi said on Tuesday that he was contacting a lawyer, but he invited the F.B.I. to question him.
"I was hoping they'd come question me, give me a chance to question them, ask, 'Why are you following me?' " said Mr. Zazi. "If they want to investigate, they can."
He said he left Aurora, Colo., in a rented car and headed to New York to try to resolve an issue with a coffee cart that he said his family is licensed to operate in Lower Manhattan. A spokeswoman for the New York City health department could not confirm if the man or his father operated a mobile food cart.
Mr. Zazi said he was stopped at the George Washington Bridge by the authorities, who briefly detained him and searched his car. A city official confirmed that officers stopped a man at the bridge and searched his car, and that "everything was clean." The official could not say what prompted the stop.
Mr. Zazi said he thought the police might be profiling him or suspected him because he has a beard and had rented the car. The next day, he said he thought his car had been stolen, but the police told him it had been towed. The following day, he said, he noticed he was being followed and called the police twice to complain.
Finally, he said, he cut short his stay in New York, deciding to fly back to Colorado on Saturday.
"It was too much for me," Mr. Zazi said. "I said, 'I can't stay here, even for a minute.' "
A relative of Mr. Zazi's who lives in Aurora, Colo., Abdul Jaji, said he has "never seen anything wrong" with Mr. Zazi, and that he works 16-hour days as an airport shuttle driver. He added that Mr. Zazi traveled last year to Peshawar, Pakistan, where his wife lives, and stayed there four months.
It was not known who ordered the searches, but it was evident that that decision worsened the sometimes-quarrelsome relations between the New York Police Department and the F.B.I.
Evidence uncovered as part of the investigation and raids prompted the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security to issue a bulletin to law enforcement agencies around the country, warning them to be vigilant about homemade explosives, officials said.
The bulletin said the two agencies had no specific information on the timing, location, or target of any planned attack. But it noted that chemicals used to form hydrogen-peroxide-based explosives can be found at places like hardware stores and pharmacies, and that recipes for such explosives are easily obtainable.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said Tuesday that while "there was enough substance" in the intelligence gathered to result in search warrants for the raids, the city was not under an imminent threat.
At one raid site, a fifth-floor apartment on 41st Avenue, a tenant, Naiz Khan, spoke of Mr. Zazi, who stayed overnight there on Thursday. He said that he had barely spoken with Mr. Zazi on his recent visit but that they had been closer when they were students at Flushing High School. He said he was committed to helping the F.B.I.
"Anything they need, I will help them out," Mr. Khan said on Tuesday, standing amid a messy jumble of belongings. "It's my responsibility."
Al Baker and William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting from New York and Dan Frosch from Aurora, Colo.
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17) E.U. Seeks Global Agreement for Curbs on Bonuses at Banks
By STEPHEN CASTLE
September 17, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/17/business/global/17bonus.html?ref=business
STRASBOURG, FRANCE - European leaders are set to endorse a call for more government control over bank pay ahead of the G-20 summit meeting next week in Pittsburgh.
In a statement expected to be adopted at an extraordinary E.U. summit meeting in Brussels on Thursday evening, the leaders called on the Group of 20 nations to stand by commitments made early this month in London "to encourage sound risk management and a strong link between compensation and long term performance, while ensuring a level-playing field."
They reiterated that "binding rules" should be "backed up by the threat of sanctions at the national level," but did not elaborate.
A copy of the draft was obtained Wednesday by the International Herald Tribune.
European leaders, including President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and his German counterpart, Chancellor Angela Merkel, have been outspoken in calling on regulators to better monitor bank pay, arguing that the financial crisis stems partly from the foolish credit risks taken by banks thinking only of their next bonuses. Mr. Sarkozy has reportedly threatened to walk out of the meeting in Pittsburgh if an agreement is not reached.
U.S. regulators have not taken as hard a line as the Europeans, and there is uneasiness in Washington - not to mention on Wall Street and the City of London - about the government setting pay policy in the private sector. But leaders are widely expected to paper over their differences in Pittsburgh.
The E.U. draft, which could still be amended at Thursday night's meeting, calls for the G-20 to ensure that bonuses "be set at an appropriate level in relation to fixed remuneration and made dependent on performances of the bank, the business unit and individuals; taking due account of negative developments, so as to avoid guaranteed bonuses."
The Europeans also will call for the G-20, which includes 19 of the leading economic powers as well as the European Union, to take other measures to better balance the risk of systemic shocks and banks' compensation demands, including giving supervisory boards "the means to reduce compensation in case of deterioration of the performance of the bank."
They also call on the body to "explore ways to limit total variable remuneration in a bank either to a certain proportion of total compensation or the bank's revenues and/or profits."
Those recommendations were broadly in line with those of the Financial Stability Board, set up by the G-20 to advise on the global response to the financial crisis. On Tuesday, the F.S.B. said it would set out for the Pittsburgh meeting "specific implementation guidelines on the governance, structure and disclosure of compensation, which will limit the level of compensation in the light of the need to conserve capital and ensure that the structure and incentives are aligned with good risk management."
Mario Draghi, chairman of the board and governor of the Bank of Italy, said at a press conference Tuesday night in Paris that regulators have all the authority they need to adjust compensation when banks take inappropriate risks.
"It used to be they were told it was a private contract," Bloomberg News quoted him as saying. "It's now quite clear that when compensation is not aligned with risk-taking incentives, regulators have the right to have their say."
The archbishop of Canterbury says that bankers should repent over their mistakes which led to a global financial crisis, but he fears that the financial industry is returning to business as usual, The Associated Press reported from London.
Archbishop Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the global Anglican Communion, said in an interview on BBC television Tuesday that he senses a feeling of "diffused resentment" against bankers for failing to accept responsibility and that the government should act to cap bonus payments.
"There hasn't been a feeling of closure about what happened last year," Williams said in an interview on BBC television. "There hasn't been what I would, as a Christian, call repentance. We haven't heard people saying 'well actually, no, we got it wrong and the whole fundamental principle on which we worked was unreal, was empty."'
David Jolly contributed from Paris.
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18) Film: Capitalism's Little Tramp
By BRUCE HEADLAM
September 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/movies/20head.html?hp
TORONTO
"DO not get out of the car!" the private security guard barked at the driver from the back seat of a black van carrying Michael Moore and five striking workers from the United Steelworkers union (Local 6500). The event was the screening of Mr. Moore's latest film, "Capitalism: A Love Story" at the Toronto International Film Festival and, as with most premieres, the sidewalk was packed with people waiting for the limousine doors to open.
But as the driver pulled the van close enough to the curb to clip the shoulder of a Toronto policeman holding back the surging crowd, it became evident that this crowd wanted more than autographs. There were picketers, homemade protest signs and people dressed as 19th-century robber barons. Even the miners, whom Mr. Moore invited to bring attention to their bitter two-month strike against the mining giant Vale Inco in Sudbury, Ontario, looked wide-eyed at the spectacle last Sunday.
"Uh, oh," Mr. Moore said, looking out the front-seat passenger window. "They've got pitchforks."
Mr. Moore, a veteran of political action and perhaps the most successful documentary filmmaker in history, had little reason to worry. Getting out of the van, he waded into the crowd and greeted the protesters, whose pitchforks were directed at the bankers and bureaucrats behind last year's huge Wall Street bailout. He then entered the Elgin Theater and introduced the miners (wearing their full work gear) to the news media, the warm mood broken only slightly when a reporter from "Entertainment Tonight" asked sarcastically whether Mr. Moore had arrived in a Cadillac.
"I don't notice," he said, asking if anyone knew the make.
"Jeez, I think it was a Ford," one of the miners said, squinting into the paparazzi flashes that lighted up his face.
Canada has been friendly territory since 1989, when Mr. Moore came to the festival here to hawk his first film, a 16-millemeter documentary called "Roger & Me," about how General Motors abandoned Flint, Mich. Still living on weekly unemployment checks of $98, Mr. Moore was a surprise winner of the festival's People's Choice Award and his unlikely career rise began.
Since then, in films like "Fahrenheit 9/11," "Bowling for Columbine" and "Sicko," his hulking figure shambling toward company executives and bewildered security guards has become the postindustrial version of Chaplin's Little Tramp. This year's entry is not a sortie on a particular industry; it is a frontal assault on the very idea of American free enterprise - a beast, he called it in an address to the Toronto audience, "and you can't tie it down with a flimsy piece of rope."
For this crowd that is a message that goes down as easily as weak American beer. In the United States Mr. Moore's conservative critics may decry his popularity, but his films and best-selling books are far more popular outside the country, especially in Britain, elsewhere in Europe and in Japan. In such places Mr. Moore has become a kind of anti-cultural ambassador - the prism through which a large part of the world views the United States.
But a film that flatly concludes that capitalism is evil is certain to put him at odds with most of the left wing in his own country, and even with President Obama, who gave a speech the next day on Wall Street on the need to reregulate, not replace the financial industry.
"I know what I'm facing when I go back across the Blue Water Bridge," Mr. Moore told the theater's 1,500 cheering "socialist Canadians," as he called them. After the screening many in the audience looked for ballots to vote again for Mr. Moore's film for the People's Choice Award, which is sponsored by - who else? - Cadillac. Your tax dollars at work.
HYPOCRITE. PROPAGANDIST. Egomaniac. Glutton. Exploiter. Embarrassment. Slob. These are a few of the criticisms that have been lobbed at Mr. Moore since his career began, and these are just the ones from liberals.
His arrival with "Roger & Me" seemed to crystallize a contradiction in the elite liberal sensibility, one that is still unresolved. Through President Ronald Reagan, both Bushes, Whitewater and Kenneth W. Starr, some liberals have craved their own class warrior, a Rush Limbaugh for the left who would take the fight unapologetically to the Republicans.
But faced with Mr. Moore (and later, Keith Olbermann) they recoil, claiming that kind of aggressiveness is somehow at odds with the notion of being a liberal. In a famous attack, Pauline Kael wrote that "Roger & Me" was "gonzo demagoguery that made me feel cheap for laughing." Funny - none of Rush's listeners ever say that about him.
"I don't think they like a guy who is hovering around 300 pounds and walks around in a ball cap who comes from a factory town and talks like where he comes from," Mr. Moore said over lunch in Toronto the day before his premiere here. "People want to have polite conversation at their wine-and-cheese functions."
Over lunch Mr. Moore seemed more than polite enough. In private conversation he speaks slowly and softly, broken up by an occasional Fat Albert laugh. Wearing a black Ralph Lauren T-shirt under a dark jacket, his head bowed over his plate of pasta, he could pass for a kindly Jesuit, even while trying to dab at the tomato sauce spilled down his front.
And for someone who has often been accused of playing fast and loose with facts, he seems to have an almost pathological precision about dates and specific incidents, framing sentences with, "The first reports came across the wire on Saturday morning in Traverse City, Michigan" and "Dana Milbank wrote about this on Page 10 of The Washington Post ... ."
He decided, long before last year's financial meltdown, that his next project would focus on what he saw as the central thread of his films: how greed and short-term thinking were undermining the middle-class life he knew growing up. And he decided to reverse his usual filmmaking process by making the argument first, then collecting his material.
"While I was making 'Sicko' I began to think: 'I've been doing this for 20 years. How many more films can I make when I'm talking about the car industry in this film or Halliburton in that film or the insurance industry in this film?' And I was thinking, 'What if this would be your last documentary?' Well, I wouldn't pull my punches."
As much as Mr. Moore sometimes plays a comic-book version of class warrior - Left-Thing vs. the Republic of Fear! - his politics are not grounded in class as much as in Roman Catholicism. Growing up in Michigan, he attended parochial school and intended to go into the seminary, inspired by the priests and nuns who, at least until Pope John Paul II, inherited a long tradition of social justice and activism in the American church.
"The nuns always made a point to take us to the Jewish temple for Passover seders," he said. "They wanted to make it clear that the Jews had nothing to do with putting Jesus up on the cross."
Along with a moral imperative, Catholicism also gave a method. Mr. Moore idolized the Berrigan brothers, the radical priests who introduced street theater into their activism, for example, mixing their own napalm to burn government draft records. Their actions were a form of political spectacle that, conceptually, is Marxist - workers seizing means of production and all that - and it influenced some of Mr. Moore's best-remembered stunts.
The central conceit in "Roger & Me" was his futile pursuit to interview the chief executive of General Motors, Roger Smith. And in "Sicko," he took ailing rescue workers from ground zero to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, because detainees there were receiving excellent health care. "Although I'm trying to say things I want to say politically, I primarily want to make an entertaining movie," he said. "If the art of the movie doesn't work, the politics won't get through."
To make sure the politics do get through, Mr. Moore invokes the privileges of much-better-financed producers and does market research. Jim Czarnecki, a documentary filmmaker who has worked with Mr. Moore for years, remembers screening "Fahrenheit 9/11" on eight consecutive Tuesday nights for select audiences, gathering feedback and recutting the film.
"We discovered what was clear, not clear, what worked and what didn't," he said, adding, "Michael works hard to craft his movies for a large audience."
Mr. Moore's obsessive reworking produces results, but can also exasperate his collaborators. The day before the screening of "Capitalism" he went to his sister Anne Moore, who produced the film, with a new idea for cutting a scene. She looked slightly exhausted in telling the story, then added, "but it was a good idea."
David Johnson, who produced "Michael Moore Live!," a one-man London stage show which ran in 2002, said that Mr. Moore would often rewrite the script in the morning, then deliver the new version "word perfect" that night. He added: "There is a frantic element that surrounds him. Obviously, it's something he requires. It is emotional and sometimes spins out of control. But he's also the first to apologize and that's unique."
Mr. Moore admits that his frenetic work habits - in addition to the documentaries, he's written three best sellers - are also therapeutic. In the last few years his personal mood has wavered between what he calls "passive despair" and outright anger. The work, especially the humor writing, he said, keeps him "from finding out what's on the other side of that anger."
THERE ARE FEWER of the trademark Moore stunts in "Capitalism," a sprawling 126-minute film that tries to connect data points across the economy, including the bailout, financial deregulation, privatized juvenile detention centers, the collapse of the American auto business (again), "dead peasant" insurance policies, Goldman Sachs's influence in Washington, the crash of a commuter jet in Buffalo, the Florida condo market and an old-fashioned sit-in at a Chicago door-and-window factory.
In part the stunts are harder to pull off for a famous, rabble-rousing filmmaker. But at the movie's heart is the original footage Mr. Moore's shooters made of workers inside the occupied factory in Chicago (his was the only crew let in during the five-day strike) and of homeowners being evicted. Mr. Moore retains an ear for ordinary speech that is uninflected by the exigencies of morning talk shows or "SportsCenter" clichés.
In one scene the neighbor of an evicted family in Florida argues with the enforcer sent from the bank, telling him if too many people are locked out, "the value of everybody else's house goes down." That, on a more vast scale, is precisely the rationale offered by the White House for the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street.
"One of my favorite lines in the film, and I hoped it would provoke a reaction," Mr. Moore said. "The bailout in and of itself - the idea of protecting people's pension funds and hoping that everything doesn't go down a rathole - that's not a bad thing. It's the way it was done."
When it comes to the question of how exactly it should be done, the film gets a little blurred. Although he likes to quote Scripture, saying that the rich man will have a hard time entering into the kingdom of heaven, Mr. Moore doesn't offer a specific marginal tax rate that might at least inch him along. Instead "Capitalism" tugs on the familiar autobiographical thread of Mr. Moore, the product of a middle-class upbringing spurned by the corporation and the system his family helped to build.
This theme - class warfare as unrequited love - runs through almost all his films, starting with "Roger & Me," which can be read as a kind of screwball comedy with Roger Smith in the Irene Dunne role of unattainable idol. As Iggy Pop sings in the "Capitalism" theme song, a version of "Louie, Louie" that was specifically created for the film, "the capitalists just break your heart."
After the screening in Toronto, Mr. Moore took questions from audience members eager to know exactly what they should do. He offered some broad suggestions, stressing that he worried that Democrats in the United States would begin to abandon Mr. Obama (whom he enthusiastically supports) now that the election is won.
Pushed harder on Mr. Obama, a gradualist seemingly out of step with Mr. Moore's radical agenda of scrapping capitalism, Mr. Moore only said that he hoped for the best, but feared the influence of Goldman Sachs on the administration. Finally, he just shrugged.
"You know," he said, "the next movie may be about him."
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