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U.S. Out Now! From Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and all U.S. bases around the world; End all U.S. Aid to Israel; Get the military out of our schools and our communities; Demand Equal Rights and Justice for ALL!
TAX THE RICH NOT THE POOR! MONEY FOR HUMAN NEEDS NOT WAR!
Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Table of Contents:
A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
C. ARTICLES IN FULL
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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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Eyewitness Gaza:
Breaking the Siege
ANSWER Educational Forum
San Jose:
Tuesday, September 8, 6:30 p.m.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Library
150 E. San Fernando Street (at S. 4th St.)
ANSWER South Bay
408-829-9506
ANSWERsouthbay@gmail.com
San Francisco:
Thursday, September 10, 7:00 p.m.
Centro del Pueblo
474 Valencia Street (Between 16th and 15th Streets)
ANSWER Coalition, Bay Area
415-821-6545
ANSWER@answersf.org
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THE NEXT OCTOBER 17 COALITION MEETING:
Sunday, September 13, 2:00 PM
Unitarian Church (Chapel)
1187 Franklin at Geary, SF (wheelchair accessible).
Let's make a collective effort to build the heck out of the meeting, that is, get out the word to the broadest forces we can and resume the hard work and collective process that is required to make October 17 a success.
We should have well-prepared reports from our established committees:
a) Logistics
b Program/Speakers (Colonel Ann Wright has confirmed if we want her)
c) Leaflets
d) Fundraising
e) Media/publicity
f) Outreach
2,500 leaflets have already been distributed. As per the sense of the body last Saturday, the back side of all future leaflets will be for educational material on issues that relate to the theme, "Money for Human Needs Not War." A top notch piece on the healthcare debate seems like a great way to start.
Let's have some volunteers to cover this Wednesday's 4:30 pm SF City Hall Single Payer Healthcare Rally. Call Kathy Lipscomb for leaflets if you need them, but call before 10 am.
We will also have tables to distribute thousands of leaflets at the three Bay Area Noan Chomsky meetings as follows:
Oakland (Middle East Children's Alliance sponsored) Saturday, October 3, Paramount Theater, Oakland 7:30 pm
Sunday, October 4, 2 pm, Unitarian Church, San Francisco, Franklin and Geary
Sunday, October 4, 7:30 pm, Spangenberg Theater at Gunn High School, Palo Alto 780 Arastradero Road. Sponsor: Peninsula Peace and Justice Center
Brief announcements (1-2 minutes) on our October 17 rally will be made at all three Chomsky events due to the good graces of all the sponsors. We will have an opportunity to distribute thousands of leaflets. We need your help!
Please call Jeff (510-268-9428) or Kathy (415-387-0873) to volunteer at one of these great opportunities to get out the word.
In solidarity,
Kathy Lipscomb and Jeff Mackler
Temporary Coordinators
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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
(TIME AND ROUTE DETAILS TO BE ANNOUNCED)
Commemorating the eighth anniversary of the war on Afghanistan and the 40th anniversary of the massive October 17, 1969 Vietnam Moratorium.
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) Where the Jobs Aren't
Editorial
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/opinion/05sat1.html
2) NATO Strike Magnifies Divide on Afghan War
By STEPHEN FARRELL and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/world/asia/05afghan.html?ref=world
3) Panel Rules Against Ashcroft in Detention Case
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/us/politics/05witness.html?ref=us
4) Young Adults Swelling Ranks of Uninsured
By ANDREA FULLER
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/health/policy/05uninsured.html?ref=us
5) Kentucky: Ex-Soldier Sentenced
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | South
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/us/05brfs-EXSOLDIERSEN_BRF.html?adxnnl=1&ref=us&adxnnlx=1252174220-Yt2WthWDNaBTHzsAAKfxUg
6) In Unemployment Report, Signs of a Jobless Recovery
By PETER S. GOODMAN and JACK HEALY
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/business/economy/05jobs.html?ref=business
7) Union Head Would Back Bill Without Card Check
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/business/05labor.html?ref=business
8) For Your Health, Froot Loops
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/business/05smart.html?ref=health
9) Wall Street Pursues Profit in Bundles of Life Insurance
By JENNY ANDERSON
Back to Business
September 6, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/business/06insurance.html?hp
10) Surge in Homeless Pupils Strains Schools
By ERIK ECKHOLM
September 6, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/education/06homeless.html?hp
11) U.S. Share of Worldwide Arms Market Grows
By THOM SHANKER
September 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/world/07weapons.html?hp
12) Text of flyer handed out at the San Francisco Labor Council's Pre-Labor Day Breakfast honoring warmonger and Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi on Friday, September 4; written and distributed by Ralph Schoenman, Mya Shone and Bradley Wiedmaier
[This was sent to me by the authors and I agree with it...Bonnie Weinstein]
13) Out of Work, and Too Down to Search On
By MICHAEL LUO
September 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/us/07worker.html?hp
14) As Battlefields Shift, Old Warrior for Peace Pursues the Same Enemy
By DAN FROSCH
September 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/us/07activist.html
15) Aid Group Says U.S. Troops Raided Afghan Hospital
By SANGAR RAHIMI
September 8, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/world/asia/08kabul.html?ref=world
16) Pace of Change Under Obama Frustrates Unions
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and STEVEN GREENHOUSE
September 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/us/politics/07labor.html?ref=us
17) Obama Addresses America's Students
Text
September 8, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/us/politics/08obama.text.html
18) President Obama's Labor Day Speech to the AFL-CIO Picnic
Below is the full text of his speech as prepared for delivery.
huffingtonpost.com
September 7, 2009
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/07/obama-labor-day-speech-at_n_278772.html
19) Schools Aided by Stimulus Money Still Facing Cuts
By SAM DILLON
September 8, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/education/08school.html?ref=education
20) Big U.S. Bases Are Part of Iraq, but a World Apart
By MARC SANTORA
September 9, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/world/middleeast/09bases.html?ref=world
21) The Card Game
Overspending on Debit Cards Is a Boon for Banks
By RON LIEBER and ANDREW MARTIN
September 9, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/your-money/credit-and-debit-cards/09debit.html?ref=business
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1) Where the Jobs Aren't
Editorial
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/opinion/05sat1.html
As is the case with so many economic indicators these days, the only good thing to say about the August jobs report is that it could have been worse. Employers shed another 216,000 jobs last month, a smaller loss than expected and the lowest monthly loss total in a year.
The losses would have been worse had it not been for federal stimulus spending - proof that the government is indeed helping to ease the downturn in its role as the spender of last resort.
Still, the damage to the work force caused by the recession is deep, wide and ongoing. The economy is now coming up short by 9.4 million jobs, including 6.9 million positions that employers have eliminated and 2.5 million jobs that were needed to absorb new workers but were never created.
And unemployment is on the rise, jumping from 9.4 percent in July to 9.7 percent in August. For several demographic groups, the unemployment rate is already in double digits, including men (10.1 percent), Hispanics (13 percent), African-Americans (15.1 percent) and teenagers (25.5 percent). In all, 14.9 million workers are now jobless, of which fully one-third have been out of work for more than six months, the highest level of long-term unemployment by far in any post World War II recession. There are now nearly six workers available for every job opening, up from 1.7 workers per opening when the recession began in December 2007.
Worse, hiring is not expected to rebound anytime soon, even if overall economic growth resumes this year. Employers are likely to fill any additional workloads by adding hours to truncated workweeks and ending worker furloughs. Wage gains, which are always repressed when jobs are scarce and unemployment is high, will be an even longer time coming as employers restore pay cuts put in place during the recession before giving raises.
Without job growth and pay raises, consumer spending will not revive substantially because alternative sources of spending power - home equity and credit cards - are largely tapped out. And without an upsurge in spending, businesses will not add workers, and so on, in a decidedly unvirtuous cycle.
It has become commonplace to explain each dismal job report by saying that a resurgence in employment always lags general economic recovery. But with the job market severely wounded, and with consumer spending expected to be weak for a very long time, it could easily take until 2014 for employment to recover. It's safe to say that five years or more of subpar job growth is not what most people have in mind when they think of a "lag."
The question, then, is how bad does it have to get before the Obama administration and Congress make job creation a priority.
Will administration officials and lawmakers fight for new laws to make it easier to form unions, which are especially important in elevating and protecting the jobs of low-income workers? How will professed support for green jobs be translated into a manufacturing policy that promotes good jobs? Will efforts to improve the educational system also include serious efforts to train and retrain people for new jobs?
Help is wanted for out of work Americans.
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2) NATO Strike Magnifies Divide on Afghan War
By STEPHEN FARRELL and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/world/asia/05afghan.html?ref=world
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan - A NATO airstrike on Friday exploded two fuel tankers that had been hijacked by the Taliban, setting off competing claims about how many among the scores of dead were civilians and raising questions about whether the strike violated tightened rules on the use of aerial bombardment.
Afghan officials said that up to 90 people were killed by the strike near Kunduz, a northern city where the trucks got stuck after militants tried to drive them across a river late Thursday night.
The strike came at a time of intense debate over the Afghan war in both the United States and Europe and after a heavily disputed election that has left Afghanistan tense and, at least temporarily, without credible leaders.
Though there seemed little doubt some of the dead were militants, it was unclear how many of the dead were civilians, and with anger at the foreign forces high here, NATO ordered an immediate investigation.
Recently, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American and NATO commander here, severely restricted the use of airstrikes, arguing that America risked losing the war if it did not reduce civilian casualties.
Underscoring his concern, on Friday he recorded a video message, translated into Dari and Pashto, to be released to Afghan news organizations.
The general began by greeting "the great people of Afghanistan, salaam aleikum."
"As commander of the International Security Assistance Force, nothing is more important than the safety and protection of the Afghan people," General McChrystal said in the brief message. "I take this possible loss of life or injury to innocent Afghans very seriously."
General McChrystal said he had ordered the investigation "into the reasons and results of this attack, which I will share with the Afghan people."
Two 14-year-old boys and one 10-year-old boy were admitted to the regional hospital here in Kunduz, along with a 16-year-old who later died. Mahboubullah Sayedi, a spokesman for the Kunduz provincial governor, said most of the estimated 90 dead were militants, judging by the number of charred pieces of Kalashnikov rifles found. But he said civilians were also killed.
In explaining the civilian deaths, military officials speculated that local people were conscripted by the Taliban to unload the fuel from the tankers, which were stuck near a river several miles from the nearest villages.
But some people wounded by the strike said that they had gone to the scene with jerrycans after other people had run through their villages saying that free fuel was available.
"They were just telling us, 'Come and get the fuel,' " Wazir Gul, a 23-year-old farmer, said at the hospital, where he was treated for serious burns on his back. He estimated that hundreds of people from surrounding villages went to siphon fuel from the trucks before the airstrike.
Mr. Gul said his older brother Amir was among the villagers incinerated in the blast. "When the tanker exploded and burned, I knew he was dead," Mr. Gul said.
The wounded 10-year-old, Shafiullah, who like many Afghans goes by only one name, said he had defied his father's orders by climbing on the family donkey to join the throng of villagers heading to pick up fuel.
"When I arrived there, I was on the donkey," Shafiullah, wounded in his arms and legs, said from his hospital bed. "I was not very close. I had not gotten the fuel yet when the bomb landed and the shrapnel injured me."
German forces in northern Afghanistan under the NATO command called in the attack, and German military officials initially insisted that no civilians had been killed. But a Defense Ministry spokesman in Berlin later said the ministry believed that more than 50 fighters had been killed but could give no details about civilian casualties.
The public health officer for Kunduz Province, Dr. Azizullah Safar, said a medical team sent to the village reported that 80 people had been killed, and he said that "most of them were civilians and villagers."
But he said it was also clear that some of the dead were militants, noting that the site was scattered with remnants of ammunition vests and other gear carried by insurgents.
A statement issued by the office of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, said that he was "deeply saddened" and that he had sent a delegation to investigate. "Targeting civilian men and women is not acceptable," the statement added.
Afghan officials said the attack struck a collection of hamlets known as Omar Kheil, near the border of the districts of Char Dara and Ali Abad. The district governor of Ali Abad, Hajji Habibullah, said the area was controlled by Taliban commanders.
The Kunduz area was once calm, but much of it has recently slipped under the control of insurgents at a time when the Obama administration has sent thousands of more troops to other parts of the country to combat an insurgency that continues to gain strength in many areas.
The region is patrolled mainly by NATO's 4,000-member German force, which is barred by German leaders from operating in combat zones farther south. The United States has 68,000 troops in Afghanistan, more than any other nation; other countries fighting under the NATO command have a combined total of about 40,000 troops here.
If a high number of civilian casualties is confirmed, it is likely to not only deepen antipathy toward NATO forces in Afghanistan, but also further diminish support for the war in Germany, where it is already unpopular. It could also become an issue in the coming German election as Chancellor Angela Merkel tries to win a second term.
A senior NATO official who had watched aerial surveillance video of the attack site said the Germans who ordered the strike "had every reason to believe what they were looking at was groups of insurgents offloading tankers," a process that went on for several hours.
The official said that the nearest villages were two miles away and that the authorities "don't know yet" whether the attack violated the rules governing the use of airstrikes tightened this summer by General McChrystal.
According to the new rules, airstrikes are, in most cases, allowed only to prevent American and other coalition troops from being overrun by enemy fighters. Even in the case of active firefights with Taliban forces, airstrikes are to be limited if the combat is taking place in populated areas.
From initial accounts given by NATO and Afghan officials, it was not clear whether this strike met those conditions, regardless of whether the majority of the dead were insurgents or civilians.
On Friday, Foreign Secretary David Miliband of Britain called for a "prompt and urgent investigation."
"It is a vital time for NATO and Afghanistan's people to come together," he told Sky News.
Stephen Farrell reported from Kunduz, Afghanistan and Richard A. Oppel, Jr., from Kabul, Afghanistan. Reporting was contributed by Abdul Waheed Wafa from Kabul; Sultan M. Munadi from Kunduz; Judy Dempsey from Berlin; and Sharon Otterman from New York.
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3) Panel Rules Against Ashcroft in Detention Case
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/us/politics/05witness.html?ref=us
Former Attorney General John Ashcroft may face personal liability for the decisions that led to the detention of an American citizen as a material witness after the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal appeals court panel ruled on Friday.
In the decision, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, was sharply critical of the Bush administration's practice of holding people it suspected of terrorism without charges, as material witnesses.
"We find this to be repugnant to the Constitution, and a painful reminder of some of the most ignominious chapters of our national history," said the opinion, written by Judge Milan D. Smith Jr.
The lawsuit was brought in 2005 by Abdullah al-Kidd, who was born Lavoni T. Kidd in Kansas and converted to Islam in college. He was arrested in 2003 at Dulles Airport as he prepared to fly to Saudi Arabia for graduate work in Islamic studies, and was held for weeks under a law that allows the indefinite detention of material witnesses to a crime. After his detention, he was ordered to stay with his in-laws in Las Vegas; his travel was restricted over the next year.
Mr. Kidd, who was not called as a witness in the case in which he was detained and was never charged with a crime, sued Mr. Ashcroft and other officials in 2005, challenging his detention as unconstitutional and saying it cost him his marriage and his job. His lawyers argued that he was held as part of a secret Bush administration policy to use the material witness statute as a tool to detain and interrogate people when there was insufficient evidence to charge them with a crime.
Mr. Ashcroft, who was represented by the Justice Department, disputed Mr. Kidd's version of the facts and claimed his position granted him immunity.
Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who represented Mr. Kidd, called it "an enormous decision" that says "no official, including the attorney general of the United States, can be immune if he adopts and implements an unconstitutional policy."
Material witness laws, said Ronald L. Carlson, a law professor at the University of Georgia, have generally been used to hold witnesses briefly if they have crucial information but are thought to be likelier to flee than to testify. But during the Bush administration, the use of the law was expanded for use in terrorism investigations, and "the net swept pretty widely," Professor Carlson said.
Charles S. Miller, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said, "We're reviewing the court's ruling." Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Mr. Ashcroft, would say only that Mr. Ashcroft was reviewing the decision as well.
A report in 2005 by Human Rights Watch and the A.C.L.U. said that 70 people were improperly detained under the material witness law after 9/11. Although the decision could conceivably apply to those people, few, if any, of them could now sue because of the statute of limitations, Mr. Gelernt said.
Judge Smith, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, was joined in the majority opinion by Judge David R. Thompson, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan. The third judge on the panel, Carlos T. Bea, filed an opinion that concurred in part and dissented in part. Judge Bea, who was also appointed by President Bush, argued that Mr. Ashcroft should have immunity in the case, and that the majority was wrong to allow Mr. Kidd "to seek redress from the wallet of a federal cabinet-level official."
Unless Mr. Ashcroft appeals the decision, the case will go back to federal district court for further hearings, which could involve extensive investigation of the former administration's antiterrorism policies.
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4) Young Adults Swelling Ranks of Uninsured
By ANDREA FULLER
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/health/policy/05uninsured.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON - Some of the difficult financial choices facing uninsured Americans - whether to go to a hospital or tough out an illness, whether to pay the rent or pay doctor bills - confront young people who not that long ago had to worry only about buying gasoline or paying a cellphone bill.
The age group of people 19 to 24 years old has the highest percentage of uninsured individuals, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Thirty percent of them did not have health insurance in 2007, a number almost certainly driven higher in an arid job market.
An additional 26 percent of people 25 to 34 years old were uninsured, Kaiser found. As a whole, polls have found that adults under 34 are more supportive than others of President Obama's drive to overhaul health care, though their views are hardly unanimous.
For now, some of them are without insurance by choice, gambling that their youth will keep them healthy. But others, already dealing with medical issues, say that affording medical care is a near impossibility because they either have no insurance or have inadequate coverage.
For a 23-year-old woman who graduated from Duke University in 2008, her efforts to break into the film industry mean a string of internships, none providing insurance. Nor can she afford insurance with her earnings from the jobs she has taken to support herself, including a position as a nanny and as a part-timer at a boutique.
But the woman, who asked not to be identified to keep her medical condition private, has HPV, a virus linked to cervical cancer. An annual pap smear and a colposcopy, a follow-up procedure to check for cancer, cost her hundreds of dollars.
"Do I keep checking that or do I save some money?" she said. "Do I do what I'm supposed to do and pay for the next procedure? Do I opt out of it because I can't afford it?"
For some, landing a steady job does not necessarily translate into insurance.
Kristy Weaver, 22, began working full-time as a certified nursing assistant at a nursing home in Crescent City, Fla., when she was 16. But Ms. Weaver said that the only insurance offered through her job "wasn't worth what you paid for it."
When Ms. Weaver was 11, doctors told her that she had ovarian cysts. Last year, a specialist told her the only way to eliminate the problem would be to remove her left ovary, an operation that she was told could cost $6,000 to $10,000. Unable to afford the surgery, she began taking heavy doses of birth control pills the doctor prescribed.
"All it did was make it worse," said Ms. Weaver, who is now a staffing coordinator at the nursing home. Ms. Weaver now has insurance through her employer, and said she has to wait 12 months before consulting a doctor about the cysts or else the insurer could designate the problem as a pre-existing condition that will not be covered. She has six months to go.
"It's a really throbbing pain," Ms. Weaver said. "The first time I had an attack, I thought I was losing a baby. I couldn't catch my breath. I was in bed for three or four days."
Now, she is about $5,000 in debt from her medical bills.
"I can't get a new car," she said. "I can't look at buying a house."
Instead of racking up medical bills, other young people decide to forgo treatment completely.
Spencer Krasch, 19, had surgery last year for Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, a condition that causes his heart to beat rapidly, while covered on his father's insurance. Now out of high school and working in a deli, he is uninsured and has discontinued routine check-ups.
But recently, when Mr. Krasch, who lives in Temple City, Calif., was helping his girlfriend move into her dorm at Pomona College, he felt as if he was having a stroke, which he said doctors told him could be a complication of the surgery.
"All of a sudden the whole left side of my body went completely numb," he said. "My lips started twitching."
But he refused to let his girlfriend's parents call an ambulance.
"That would have been way too expensive for me to pay for," he said. Instead, Mr. Krasch waited until the symptoms subsided.
Even those who are in good health can quickly find themselves on the other side of the divide.
Josh Pavlacky, 23, knows that all too well. As a graduate of a top liberal arts college, Wesleyan University, with a bachelor's degree in studio art, he expected to find nonprofit work. Instead he is working as a dishwasher and running an art gallery out of his garage in Portland, Ore.
While in college, he was covered by the policy of his father, who works security at Costco. But now, he says, that coverage has ended and his family cannot afford to help him buy something else.
So when Mr. Pavlacky got hit by a car while biking in May, he decided that a hospital visit was out of the question. Instead of seeking treatment, he had friends bring him prescription painkillers they had left over from procedures like having their wisdom teeth removed.
"I was flipped over and fell on my back," he said. "I had a bruise all down my leg and couldn't walk for three days."
Mr. Pavlacky says he supports the president's health care overhaul, and wishes Mr. Obama had pushed a public plan forward himself instead of turning the negotiations over to Congress and "bringing everybody into the tent."
Young people are split on how the president is handling health care, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Aug. 5, though they are more supportive than other age groups. In the poll, 48 percent of those ages 18 to 34 said "disapprove" while 44 percent said they "approve."
Still, 53 percent of that group said the president would do a better job at handling health care policy than Congressional Republicans, while 35 percent sided with the Republican lawmakers.
Ms. Weaver, who voted for Senator John McCain for president, says she worried that a health care overhaul could make taxpayers finance a system that does not work.
But she said she feels that politicians do not seem to understand what young people are going through.
"It's the people who are trying to make a foundation for themselves," she said. "It's so difficult for younger people who are just now starting."
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5) Kentucky: Ex-Soldier Sentenced
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | South
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/us/05brfs-EXSOLDIERSEN_BRF.html?adxnnl=1&ref=us&adxnnlx=1252174220-Yt2WthWDNaBTHzsAAKfxUg
In Paducah, a former soldier, Steven D. Green, received five consecutive life sentences for his role in the rape and murder of an Iraqi teenager and the slaying of three of her family members. Mr. Green, 24, of Midland, Tex., had been convicted by a civilian jury in May of rape, conspiracy and multiple counts of murder. He shot and killed the teenager's mother, father and sister, then became the third soldier to rape her before shooting her in the face. Her body was set on fire March 12, 2006, at their rural home outside Mahmoudiya, Iraq, about 20 miles south of Baghdad. Barring a successful appeal or presidential pardon, Mr. Green will not be eligible for release from prison.
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6) In Unemployment Report, Signs of a Jobless Recovery
By PETER S. GOODMAN and JACK HEALY
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/business/economy/05jobs.html?ref=business
The unemployment rate surged to 9.7 percent in August, signaling that joblessness and financial anxiety were likely to endure in millions of American homes for many months.
The Labor Department's latest employment report, released Friday, added weight to a growing belief that, at least technically, the economy had already escaped the grip of recession. Though 216,000 net jobs vanished in August, the losses continued to moderate from their worst numbers of the year.
Yet the report also lent credence to a deepening consensus that, even as the economy resumes expansion, the recovery was likely to be weak, prompting most companies to hold back from aggressive hiring.
"In the context of a full-blooded recovery, this report is disappointing," said Alan Ruskin, an economist with the Royal Bank of Scotland in Stamford, Conn. "We're still clawing our way back."
Many experts envision a jobless recovery, in which the economy grows but job losses persist. That would reprise the end of the last recession in 2001, when payrolls continued to decline for nearly two years afterward.
Such an outcome would confront the Obama administration with a potentially nettlesome political problem heading into next year's midterm elections. After the government unleashed $787 billion to stimulate economic growth, and after it bailed out financial institutions and the auto industry, the unemployment rate exceeds worst-case projections envisioned by the administration early this year.
On Friday, Jared Bernstein, the top economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said the picture would look far worse were it not for the stimulus spending. He added that more help was on the way as the government distributed the remaining two-thirds of the package.
"Our interventions have contributed to significant cuts in the rate of job loss," Mr. Bernstein said. "We're headed in the right direction, but we're far from out of the woods. There are simply too many Americans seeking work."
If the jobless rate continues to climb, as is widely expected, that could generate pressure for another stimulus spending package. But given intensifying concern about the size of federal budget deficits - now projected to exceed $9 trillion within a decade - any new spending could be politically perilous.
The latest snapshot of the nation's labor situation testified to the drastic improvement since early this year, when nearly 700,000 jobs a month were disappearing. Yet it also underscored the continued bleakness of the economic landscape.
"It's a good picture compared to where we were, which was just a free fall," said Dean Baker, a director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. "But compared to anything else, this is just a horrible report. The rate of decline is slowing, but it's not going to stop. We're likely on a path toward more than 10 percent unemployment."
Most economists see recent improvements as the result of pulling away from the disaster of last fall - when the investment giant Lehman Brothers collapsed, spreading fear throughout the financial system - and not a sign of vigorous growth ahead.
After years of borrowing against soaring home values, tapping credit cards and harvesting stock market winnings to spend in excess of their incomes, millions of households are being forced to conserve. That limits consumer spending, which makes up 70 percent of the nation's economy. And that makes businesses that might otherwise hire and expand more inclined to hunker down.
"Household balance sheets are shot," Mr. Ruskin said. From here, spending "has to come from income, and income has to come from employment, and at this juncture it looks like employment will only improve very slowly."
The unemployment rate is up from 9.4 percent in July, when the economy lost 276,000 jobs.
The jobs report underscored the broad reach of the labor crisis, which has imposed austerity even on those still employed. In the last year, average weekly earnings have increased by only 0.8 percent - a decline, after factoring in the rising cost of goods. So many companies have trimmed working hours that paychecks have shrunk.
The so-called underemployment rate - which counts the jobless along with those working part time because their hours have been cut or they cannot find full-time jobs - reached 16.8 percent in August.
In recent months, the economy has benefited from a slowdown in the pace at which businesses have slashed inventories, prompting factories to expand production. Auto sales have been aided by the cash-for-clunkers program, which gave buyers incentives to trade in cars. Home sales have been stimulated by a tax credit for first-time homebuyers, an inducement that expires in November.
After those programs wear off, the nation may again confront a fundamentally weak economy.
"Everybody is looking around saying, 'Where is a robust recovery going to come from?' and not finding it," said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute in Washington. "We're going to have elevated unemployment for four years to come."
In Williamsburg, Va., Ginny Hoover, 49, has remained unemployed since she lost her job at a pharmaceutical company in November 2007. She has maxed out her credit cards and borrowed money from friends. She broke her apartment lease and moved in with her boyfriend. But other than an offer to sell insurance door-to-door for commissions only, she has found no work.
"I thought maybe a month or two and I'd have another job," Ms. Hoover said. "I never would have guessed that it would be as brutal as it was out there."
Despite increased factory production, manufacturing shed 63,000 jobs in August. Construction lost 65,000 jobs. Health care remained a rare bright spot, adding nearly 28,000 jobs.
"I don't think businesses will hire back anytime soon," said Allen Sinai, chief global economist at Decision Economics. "Companies are rewarded by the stock markets for not hiring and keeping their costs down. We will see another jobless recovery."
In Delray Beach, Fla., Donna Angelillo lost her job as a property manager in May and quickly exhausted her savings. Her $1,000 monthly unemployment check does not cover her $1,030 monthly rent.
Jobs are scarce, she said. Past-due bills are abundant.
"I don't have September rent, but right now I'm more concerned about the electricity," she said. "Either today or tomorrow, they're going to shut it off. I'm getting desperate."
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7) Union Head Would Back Bill Without Card Check
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/business/05labor.html?ref=business
WASHINGTON - The A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s president has signaled a significant shift to try to move a long-stalled pro-union bill, saying he would support a change that calls for speedy unionization elections, a provision that would replace the much-attacked card-check provision.
In an interview, John J. Sweeney, the federation's president, said he would accept a fast election campaign instead of card check because it would meet his goal of minimizing management interference during organizing drives.
Mr. Sweeney said he "could live with" fast or snap elections "as long as there is a fair process that protects workers against anti-union intimidation by employers and eliminates the threats to workers."
The move away from card check would be a victory for the business community. Randel Johnson, senior vice president for labor, immigration and employee benefits at the United States Chamber of Commerce, nonetheless criticized the proposal for elections after a short campaign.
"That has the effect as a practical matter of eliminating the ability of the employer to educate its employees about the potential adverse effects of unionization," Mr. Johnson said. "It still begs the question, what is wrong with the existing secret ballot process?"
In recent months, several crucial Democratic senators have told organized labor that they could not round up the 60 votes needed to assure passage of any bill containing card check.
Despite such warnings, labor leaders continued to cling publicly to the idea; Mr. Sweeney's comments were a major departure from that position.
"If modifying that in some way or another is going to bring some more votes for the bill, I think that's worth it," Mr. Sweeney said.
Under Mr. Sweeney's idea, a secret ballot would be held probably within five or 10 days of a substantial number of workers petitioning for a union. Such a brief length of time would be far different from the current practice when campaigns often last two months, giving companies time to persuade workers to vote against a union.
Even before President Obama took office, labor made it clear that its No. 1 legislative goal was a law that would make organizing easier, including a so-called card-check provision that required employers to recognize a union as soon as a majority of workers signed cards favoring a union.
But card check faced huge opposition from Republicans and corporations, which complained that it would largely replace secret ballots. Under current law, companies that face organizing drives can insist on secret-ballot elections, which unions say they often lose because of management's lengthy and intense anti-union campaigns.
In an interview Thursday evening, Richard Trumka, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s secretary-treasurer, who will become the federation's president on Sept. 16, stopped short of endorsing fast elections.
He said the A.F.L.-C.I.O. wanted to make sure that any legislation contained three components: a process in which workers were free of intimidation; greater penalties against employers that break the law during organizing drives, for instance by firing outspoken union supporters; and binding arbitration to prevent employers from indefinitely dragging out negotiations without ever reaching a contract.
Business groups denounce the binding arbitration provision, saying it would be wrong to have federally appointed officials issuing rulings that determine a company's wages, hours, pensions and working conditions.
Echoing Mr. Trumka, Mr. Sweeney said he would accept snap elections only as part of a bill that also called for binding arbitration and stiffer penalties against management.
Mr. Sweeney said President Obama had assured labor that as soon as health care legislation was passed - if it was passed - he would work with labor and the Democrats to pass the pro-union legislation, known as the Employee Free Choice Act.
Mr. Sweeney voiced optimism that the bill would pass.
"It's going to be this year," he said.
Mr. Sweeney said that corporate lobbyists would find it harder to attack fast elections than card check because business could no longer contend that labor wanted to eliminate "sacrosanct secret-ballot elections." But some corporate lobbyists are already attacking snap elections as "ambush elections."
David Bonior, a former House Democratic Whip who heads a group, America Rights at Work, that has campaigned for the pro-union bill, said he still hoped card check could be salvaged.
"The first preference for everybody in labor is the original bill," he said. "And if we preserve the principles of the original bill and there are some changes - and if we can get 80 to 90 percent of what we started with - I think people would move forward on that."
Meanwhile, a Gallup Poll released on Thursday found that while 66 percent of Americans continued to believe unions were beneficial to their own members, fewer than half of Americans - 48 percent, a record low - approved of unions. That was down from 59 percent a year ago.
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8) For Your Health, Froot Loops
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/business/05smart.html?ref=health
A new food-labeling campaign called Smart Choices, backed by most of the nation's largest food manufacturers, is "designed to help shoppers easily identify smarter food and beverage choices."
The green checkmark label that is starting to show up on store shelves will appear on hundreds of packages, including - to the surprise of many nutritionists - sugar-laden cereals like Cocoa Krispies and Froot Loops.
"These are horrible choices," said Walter C. Willett, chairman of the nutrition department of the Harvard School of Public Health.
He said the criteria used by the Smart Choices Program were seriously flawed, allowing less healthy products, like sweet cereals and heavily salted packaged meals, to win its seal of approval. "It's a blatant failure of this system and it makes it, I'm afraid, not credible," Mr. Willett said.
The Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture have also weighed in, sending the program's managers a letter on Aug. 19 saying they intended to monitor its effect on the food choices of consumers.
The letter said the agencies would be concerned if the Smart Choices label "had the effect of encouraging consumers to choose highly processed foods and refined grains instead of fruits, vegetables and whole grains."
The government is interested in improving nutrition labeling on packages in part because of the nation's obesity epidemic, which experts say is tied to a diet heavy in processed foods loaded with calories, fats and sugar.
The prominently displayed label debuts as many in the food industry and government are debating how to provide information on the front of packages that includes important elements from the familiar nutrition facts box that usually appears on the back of products.
Eileen T. Kennedy, president of the Smart Choices board and the dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, said the program's criteria were based on government dietary guidelines and widely accepted nutritional standards.
She said the program was also influenced by research into consumer behavior. That research showed that, while shoppers wanted more information, they did not want to hear negative messages or feel their choices were being dictated to them.
"The checkmark means the food item is a 'better for you' product, as opposed to having an x on it saying 'Don't eat this,' " Dr. Kennedy said. "Consumers are smart enough to deduce that if it doesn't have the checkmark, by implication it's not a 'better for you' product. They want to have a choice. They don't want to be told 'You must do this.' "
Dr. Kennedy, who is not paid for her work on the program, defended the products endorsed by the program, including sweet cereals. She said Froot Loops was better than other things parents could choose for their children.
"You're rushing around, you're trying to think about healthy eating for your kids and you have a choice between a doughnut and a cereal," Dr. Kennedy said, evoking a hypothetical parent in the supermarket. "So Froot Loops is a better choice."
Froot Loops qualifies for the label because it meets standards set by the Smart Choices Program for fiber and Vitamins A and C, and because it does not exceed limits on fat, sodium and sugar. It contains the maximum amount of sugar allowed under the program for cereals, 12 grams per serving, which in the case of Froot Loops is 41 percent of the product, measured by weight. That is more sugar than in many popular brands of cookies.
"Froot Loops is an excellent source of many essential vitamins and minerals and it is also a good source of fiber with only 12 grams of sugar," said Celeste A. Clark, senior vice president of global nutrition for Kellogg's, which makes Froot Loops. "You cannot judge the nutritional merits of a food product based on one ingredient."
Dr. Clark, who is a member of the Smart Choices board, said that the program's standard for sugar in cereals was consistent with federal dietary guidelines that say that "small amounts of sugar" added to nutrient-dense foods like breakfast cereals can make them taste better. That, in theory, will encourage people to eat more of them, which would increase the nutrients in their diet.
Ten companies have signed up for the Smart Choices program so far, including Kellogg's, Kraft Foods, ConAgra Foods, Unilever, General Mills, PepsiCo and Tyson Foods. Companies that participate pay up to $100,000 a year to the program, with the fee based on total sales of its products that bear the seal.
The Smart Choices checkmark is meant to take the place of similar nutritional labels that individual manufacturers began plastering on their packages several years ago, like PepsiCo's Smart Choices Made Easy and Sensible Solution from Kraft.
In joining Smart Choices, the companies agreed to discontinue their own labeling systems, Ms. Kennedy said.
Michael R. Taylor, a senior F.D.A. adviser, said the agency was concerned that sugar-laden cereals and high-fat foods would bear a label that tells consumers they were nutritionally superior.
"What we don't want to do is have front-of-package information that in any way is based on cherry-picking the good and not disclosing adequately the components of a product that may be less good," Mr. Taylor said.
He said the agency would consider the possibility of creating a standardized nutrition label for the front of packages.
"We're taking a hard look at these programs and we want to independently look at what would be the sound criteria and the best way to present this information," Mr. Taylor said.
Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group, was part of a panel that helped devise the Smart Choices nutritional criteria, until he quit last September. He said the panel was dominated by members of the food industry, which skewed its decisions.
"It was paid for by industry and when industry put down its foot and said this is what we're doing, that was it, end of story," he said. Dr. Kennedy and Dr. Clark, who were both on the panel, said industry members had not controlled the results.
Mr. Jacobson objected to some of the panel's nutritional decisions. The criteria allow foods to carry the Smart Choices seal if they contain added nutrients, which he said could mask shortcomings in the food.
Despite federal guidelines favoring whole grains, the criteria allow breads made with no whole grains to get the seal if they have added nutrients.
"You could start out with some sawdust, add calcium or Vitamin A and meet the criteria," Mr. Jacobson said.
Nutritionists questioned other foods given the Smart Choices label. The program gives the seal to both regular and light mayonnaise, which could lead consumers to think they are both equally healthy. It also allows frozen meals and packaged sandwiches to have up to 600 milligrams of sodium, a quarter of the recommended daily maximum intake.
"The object of this is to make highly processed foods appear as healthful as unprocessed foods, which they are not," said Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University.
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9) Wall Street Pursues Profit in Bundles of Life Insurance
By JENNY ANDERSON
Back to Business
September 6, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/business/06insurance.html?hp
After the mortgage business imploded last year, Wall Street investment banks began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they may have found one.
The bankers plan to buy "life settlements," life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash - $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to "securitize" these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.
The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return - though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money.
Either way, Wall Street would profit by pocketing sizable fees for creating the bonds, reselling them and subsequently trading them. But some who have studied life settlements warn that insurers might have to raise premiums in the short term if they end up having to pay out more death claims than they had anticipated.
The idea is still in the planning stages. But already "our phones have been ringing off the hook with inquiries," says Kathleen Tillwitz, a senior vice president at DBRS, which gives risk ratings to investments and is reviewing nine proposals for life-insurance securitizations from private investors and financial firms, including Credit Suisse.
"We're hoping to get a herd stampeding after the first offering," said one investment banker not authorized to speak to the news media.
In the aftermath of the financial meltdown, exotic investments dreamed up by Wall Street got much of the blame. It was not just subprime mortgage securities but an array of products - credit-default swaps, structured investment vehicles, collateralized debt obligations - that proved far riskier than anticipated.
The debacle gave financial wizardry a bad name generally, but not on Wall Street. Even as Washington debates increased financial regulation, bankers are scurrying to concoct new products.
In addition to securitizing life settlements, for example, some banks are repackaging their money-losing securities into higher-rated ones, called re-remics (re-securitization of real estate mortgage investment conduits). Morgan Stanley says at least $30 billion in residential re-remics have been done this year.
Financial innovation can be good, of course, by lowering the cost of borrowing for everyone, giving consumers more investment choices and, more broadly, by helping the economy to grow. And the proponents of securitizing life settlements say it would benefit people who want to cash out their policies while they are alive.
But some are dismayed by Wall Street's quick return to its old ways, chasing profits with complicated new products.
"It's bittersweet," said James D. Cox, a professor of corporate and securities law at Duke University. "The sweet part is there are investors interested in exotic products created by underwriters who make large fees and rating agencies who then get paid to confer ratings. The bitter part is it's a return to the good old days."
Indeed, what is good for Wall Street could be bad for the insurance industry, and perhaps for customers, too. That is because policyholders often let their life insurance lapse before they die, for a variety of reasons - their children grow up and no longer need the financial protection, or the premiums become too expensive. When that happens, the insurer does not have to make a payout.
But if a policy is purchased and packaged into a security, investors will keep paying the premiums that might have been abandoned; as a result, more policies will stay in force, ensuring more payouts over time and less money for the insurance companies.
"When they set their premiums they were basing them on assumptions that were wrong," said Neil A. Doherty, a professor at Wharton who has studied life settlements.
Indeed, Mr. Doherty says that in reaction to widespread securitization, insurers most likely would have to raise the premiums on new life policies.
Critics of life settlements believe "this defeats the idea of what life insurance is supposed to be," said Steven Weisbart, senior vice president and chief economist for the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group. "It's not an investment product, a gambling product."
After Mortgages
Undeterred, Wall Street is racing ahead for a simple reason: With $26 trillion of life insurance policies in force in the United States, the market could be huge.
Not all policyholders would be interested in selling their policies, of course. And investors are not interested in healthy people's policies because they would have to pay those premiums for too long, reducing profits on the investment.
But even if a small fraction of policy holders do sell them, some in the industry predict the market could reach $500 billion. That would help Wall Street offset the loss of revenue from the collapse of the United States residential mortgage securities market, to $169 billion so far this year from a peak of $941 billion in 2005, according to Dealogic, a firm that tracks financial data.
Some financial firms are moving to outpace their rivals. Credit Suisse, for example, is in effect building a financial assembly line to buy large numbers of life insurance policies, package and resell them - just as Wall Street firms did with subprime securities.
The bank bought a company that originates life settlements, and it has set up a group dedicated to structuring deals and one to sell the products.
Goldman Sachs has developed a tradable index of life settlements, enabling investors to bet on whether people will live longer than expected or die sooner than planned. The index is similar to tradable stock market indices that allow investors to bet on the overall direction of the market without buying stocks.
Spokesmen for Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs declined to comment.
If Wall Street succeeds in securitizing life insurance policies, it would take a controversial business - the buying and selling of policies - that has been around on a smaller scale for a couple of decades and potentially increase it drastically.
Defenders of life settlements argue that creating a market to allow the ill or elderly to sell their policies for cash is a public service. Insurance companies, they note, offer only a "cash surrender value," typically at a small fraction of the death benefit, when a policyholder wants to cash out, even after paying large premiums for many years.
Enter life settlement companies. Depending on various factors, they will pay 20 to 200 percent more than the surrender value an insurer would pay.
But the industry has been plagued by fraud complaints. State insurance regulators, hamstrung by a patchwork of laws and regulations, have criticized life settlement brokers for coercing the ill and elderly to take out policies with the sole purpose of selling them back to the brokers, called "stranger-owned life insurance."
In 2006, while he was New York attorney general, Eliot Spitzer sued Coventry, one of the largest life settlement companies, accusing it of engaging in bid-rigging with rivals to keep down prices offered to people who wanted to sell their policies. The case is continuing.
"Predators in the life settlement market have the motive, means and, if left unchecked by legislators and regulators and by their own community, the opportunity to take advantage of seniors," Stephan Leimberg, co-author of a book on life settlements, testified at a Senate Special Committee on Aging last April.
Tricky Predictions
In addition to fraud, there is another potential risk for investors: that some people could live far longer than expected.
It is not just a hypothetical risk. That is what happened in the 1980s, when new treatments prolonged the life of AIDS patients. Investors who bought their policies on the expectation that the most victims would die within two years ended up losing money.
It happened again last fall when companies that calculate life expectancy determined that people were living longer.
The challenge for Wall Street is to make securitized life insurance policies more predictable - and, ideally, safer - investments. And for any securitized bond to interest big investors, a seal of approval is needed from a credit rating agency that measures the level of risk.
In many ways, banks are seeking to replicate the model of subprime mortgage securities, which became popular after ratings agencies bestowed on them the comfort of a top-tier, triple-A rating. An individual mortgage to a home buyer with poor credit might have been considered risky, because of the possibility of default; but packaging lots of mortgages together limited risk, the theory went, because it was unlikely many would default at the same time.
While that idea was, in retrospect, badly flawed, Wall Street is convinced that it can solve the risk riddle with securitized life settlement policies.
That is why bankers from Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs have been visiting DBRS, a little known rating agency in lower Manhattan.
In early 2008, the firm published criteria for ways to securitize a life settlements portfolio so that the risks were minimized.
Interest poured in. Hedge funds that have acquired life settlements, for example, are keen to buy and sell policies more easily, so they can cash out both on investments that are losing money and on ones that are profitable. Wall Street banks, beaten down by the financial crisis, are looking to get their securitization machines humming again.
Ms. Tillwitz, an executive overseeing the project for DBRS, said the firm spent nine months getting comfortable with the myriad risks associated with rating a pool of life settlements.
Could a way be found to protect against possible fraud by agents buying insurance policies and reselling them - to avoid problems like those in the subprime mortgage market, where some brokers made fraudulent loans that ended up in packages of securities sold to investors? How could investors be assured that the policies were legitimately acquired, so that the payouts would not be disputed when the original policyholder died?
And how could they make sure that policies being bought were legally sellable, given that some states prohibit the sale of policies until they have been in force two to five years?
Spreading the Risk
To help understand how to manage these risks, Ms. Tillwitz and her colleague Jan Buckler - a mathematics whiz with a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering - traveled the world visiting firms that handle life settlements. "We do not want to rate a deal that blows up," Ms. Tillwitz said.
The solution? A bond made up of life settlements would ideally have policies from people with a range of diseases - leukemia, lung cancer, heart disease, breast cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's. That is because if too many people with leukemia are in the securitization portfolio, and a cure is developed, the value of the bond would plummet.
As an added precaution, DBRS would run background checks on all issuers. Also, a range of quality of life insurers would have to be included.
To test how different mixes of policies would perform, Mr. Buckler has run computer simulations to show what would happen to returns if people lived significantly longer than expected.
But even with a math whiz calculating every possibility, some risks may not be apparent until after the fact. How can a computer accurately predict what would happen if health reform passed, for example, and better care for a large number of Americans meant that people generally started living longer? Or if a magic-bullet cure for all types of cancer was developed?
If the computer models were wrong, investors could lose a lot of money.
As unlikely as those assumptions may seem, that is effectively what happened with many securitized subprime loans that were given triple-A ratings.
Investment banks that sold these securities sought to lower the risks by, among other things, packaging mortgages from different regions and with differing credit levels of the borrowers. They thought that if house prices dropped in one region - say Florida, causing widespread defaults in that part of the portfolio - it was highly unlikely that they would fall at the same time in, say, California.
Indeed, economists noted that historically, housing prices had fallen regionally but never nationwide. When they did fall nationwide, investors lost hundreds of billions of dollars.
Both Standard & Poor's and Moody's, which gave out many triple-A ratings and were burned by that experience, are approaching life settlements with greater caution.
Standard & Poor's, which rated a similar deal called Dignity Partners in the 1990s, declined to comment on its plans. Moody's said it has been approached by financial firms interested in securitizing life settlements, but has not yet seen a portfolio of policies that meets its standards.
Investor Appetite
Despite the mortgage debacle, investors like Andrew Terrell are intrigued.
Mr. Terrell was the co-head of Bear Stearns's longevity and mortality desk - which traded unrated portfolios of life settlements - and later worked at Goldman Sachs's Institutional Life Companies, a venture that was introducing a trading platform for life settlements. He thinks securitized life policies have big potential, explaining that investors who want to spread their risks are constantly looking for new investments that do not move in tandem with their other investments.
"It's an interesting asset class because it's less correlated to the rest of the market than other asset classes," Mr. Terrell said.
Some academics who have studied life settlement securitization agree it is a good idea. One difference, they concur, is that death is not correlated to the rise and fall of stocks.
"These assets do not have risks that are difficult to estimate and they are not, for the most part, exposed to broader economic risks," said Joshua Coval, a professor of finance at the Harvard Business School. "By pooling and tranching, you are not amplifying systemic risks in the underlying assets."
The insurance industry is girding for a fight. "Just as all mortgage providers have been tarred by subprime mortgages, so too is the concern that all life insurance companies would be tarred with the brush of subprime life insurance settlements," said Michael Lovendusky, vice president and associate general counsel of the American Council of Life Insurers, a trade group that represents life insurance companies.
And the industry may find allies in government. Among those expressing concern about life settlements at the Senate committee hearing in April were insurance regulators from Florida and Illinois, who argued that regulation was inadequate.
"The securitization of life settlements adds another element of possible risk to an industry that is already in need of enhanced regulations, more transparency and consumer safeguards," said Senator Herb Kohl, the Democrat from Wisconsin who is chairman of the Special Committee on Aging.
DBRS agrees on the need to be careful. "We want this market to flourish in a safe way," Ms. Tillwitz said.
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10) Surge in Homeless Pupils Strains Schools
By ERIK ECKHOLM
September 6, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/education/06homeless.html?hp
ASHEVILLE, N.C. - In the small trailer her family rented over the summer, 9-year-old Charity Crowell picked out the green and purple outfit she would wear on the first day of school. She vowed to try harder and bring her grades back up from the C's she got last spring - a dismal semester when her parents lost their jobs and car and the family was evicted and migrated through friends' houses and a motel.
Charity is one child in a national surge of homeless schoolchildren that is driven by relentless unemployment and foreclosures. The rise, to more than one million students without stable housing by last spring, has tested budget-battered school districts as they try to carry out their responsibilities - and the federal mandate - to salvage education for children whose lives are filled with insecurity and turmoil.
The instability can be ruinous to schooling, educators say, adding multiple moves and lost class time to the inherent distress of homelessness. And so in accord with federal law, the Buncombe County district, where Charity attends, provides special bus service to shelters, motels, doubled-up houses, trailer parks and RV campgrounds to help children stay in their familiar schools as the families move about.
Still, Charity said of her last semester, "I couldn't go to sleep, I was worried about all the stuff," and she often nodded off in class.
Charity and her brother, Elijah Carrington, 6, were among 239 children from homeless families in her district as of last June, an increase of 80 percent over the year before, with indications this semester that as many or more will be enrolled in the months ahead.
While current national data are not available, the number of schoolchildren in homeless families appears to have risen by 75 percent to 100 percent in many districts over the last two years, according to Barbara Duffield, policy director of the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth, an advocacy group.
There were 679,000 homeless students reported in 2006-7, a total that surpassed one million by last spring, Ms. Duffield said.
With schools just returning to session, initial reports point to further rises. In San Antonio, for example, the district has enrolled 1,000 homeless students in the first two weeks of school, twice as many as at the same point last year.
"It's hard enough going to school and growing up, but these kids also have to worry where they'll be staying that night and whether they'll eat," said Bill Murdock, chief executive of Eblen-Kimmel Charities, a private group in Asheville that helps needy families with anything from food baskets and money for utility bills to toiletries and a prom dress.
"We see 8-year-olds telling Mom not to worry, don't cry," Mr. Murdock said.
Since 2001, federal law has required every district to appoint a liaison to the homeless, charged with identifying and aiding families who meet a broad definition of homelessness - doubling up in the homes of relatives or friends or sleeping in motels or RV campgrounds as well as living in cars, shelters or on the streets. A small minority of districts, including Buncombe County, have used federal grants or local money to make the position full time.
The law lays out rights for homeless children, including immediate school placement without proof of residence and a right to stay in the same school as the family is displaced. Providing transportation to the original school is an expensive logistical challenge in a huge district like Buncombe County, covering 700 square miles.
While the law's goals are widely praised, school superintendents lament that Congress has provided little money, adding to the fiscal woes of districts. "The protections are important, but Congress has passed the cost to state and local taxpayers," said Bruce Hunter, associate director of the American Association of School Administrators.
Fairfax County, Va., where the number of homeless students climbed from 1,100 in June 2007 to 1,800 last spring, has three social workers dedicated to the homeless and is using a temporary stimulus grant to assign a full-time transportation coordinator to commandeer buses, issue gas cards and sometimes call taxis to get the children to their original schools.
Like Fairfax County, the Asheville area looks prosperous, drawing tourists and retirees, but manicured lawns, million-dollar homes and golf courses mask the struggles of many adults working at low-paying jobs in sales and food service.
Emily Walters, the liaison to the homeless for the Buncombe County schools, is busy as school begins, providing backpacks and other supplies and signing children up for free breakfasts and lunches. But her job continues through the school year as other families lose their footing and those who had concealed their status, because of the stigma or because they were not aware of the benefits, join the list.
Sometimes it includes driving families in crisis to look at prospective shelters - a temporary solution at best, Ms. Walters said. When the county receives a two-year stimulus grant next month, she said, she hopes there will be more money to help people avoid eviction or pay security deposits for new rentals.
The evening before school began, Ms. Walters drove 45 minutes to an RV campground to deliver a scientific calculator and other essential school supplies to Cody Curry, 14, who lives with his mother, Dawn, and his brother, Zack, 11, in a camper. Mrs. Curry had to downsize from a trailer, she said, when her work as a sales clerk was cut to two days a week.
The first day of school, Ms. Walters drove to a men's rescue shelter in the city to take Nate Fountain, 18, to high school. Nate said his parents kicked him out of the house last spring, during his senior year, because he was not doing his school work and was drinking and using drugs. With Ms. Walters's help, he said, he expects to finish high school this semester and study culinary arts at a community college.
"I spend a lot of time just making sure the kids stay in school," Ms. Walters said.
The busing service was especially valued by Leslie Laws, who was laid off from her job in customer service last year and lost her rental apartment.
Ms. Laws and her 12-year-old son are staying in a women's shelter in Asheville, far from his former school. He is deeply involved with activities like chorus. Now he must catch the bus at 6:05 a.m. and ride one and a half hours each way.
Educators and advocates for the homeless across the country said that in the current recession, the law had made a difference, minimizing destructive gaps in schooling and linking schools with social welfare agencies.
Charity Crowell, despite her vow to bring up her grades, may be in store for another rough semester. Her stepfather works long hours delivering food on commission, but business is poor. Her mother, Katrina, wants to look for a job, but that is difficult without a car.
Food stamps help, but by the second half of each month the family is mostly eating "Beanee Weenees and noodles," Ms. Crowell said. As school resumed in late August, the family was facing eviction from the $475-a-month trailer and uncertain about what to do next.
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11) U.S. Share of Worldwide Arms Market Grows
By THOM SHANKER
September 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/world/07weapons.html?hp
WASHINGTON - Despite a recession that knocked down global arms sales last year, the United States expanded its role as the world's leading weapons supplier, increasing its share to more than two-thirds of all foreign armaments deals, according to a new Congressional study.
The United States signed weapons agreements valued at $37.8 billion in 2008, or 68.4 percent of all business in the global arms bazaar, up significantly from American sales of $25.4 billion the year before.
Italy was a distant second, with $3.7 billion in worldwide weapons agreements in 2008, while Russia was third with $3.5 billion in arms sales last year - down considerably from the $10.8 billion in weapons deals signed by Moscow in 2007.
The growth in weapons sales by the United States last year was particularly noticeable against worldwide trends. The value of global arms sales in 2008 was $55.2 billion, a drop of 7.6 percent from 2007 and the lowest total for international weapons agreements since 2005.
The increase in American weapons sales around the world "was attributable not only to major new orders from clients in the Near East and in Asia, but also to the continuation of significant equipment and support services contracts with a broad-based number of U.S. clients globally," according to the study, titled "Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations."
The annual report was produced by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, a division of the Library of Congress. Regarded as the most detailed collection of unclassified global arms sales data available to the general public, it was delivered to the House and Senate on Friday in time for their return from the Labor Day recess.
The overall decline in weapons sales worldwide in 2008 can be explained by the reluctance of many nations to place new arms orders "in the face of the severe international recession," wrote Richard F. Grimmett, a specialist in international security at the Congressional Research Service and author of the study.
Mr. Grimmett's report stated that the growth of weapons sales by the United States was "extraordinary" in a time of global recession, and was the result of new arms deals as well as the sustained cost of maintenance, upgrades, ammunition and spare parts to nations that purchased American weapons in the past.
In the highly competitive global arms market, nations vie for both profit and political influence through weapons sales, in particular to developing nations, which remain "the primary focus of foreign arms sales activity by weapons suppliers," according to the study.
Weapons sales to developing nations reached $42.2 billion in 2008, only a nominal increase from the $41.1 billion in 2007.
The United States was the leader not only in arms sales worldwide, but also to the subset of nations in the developing world, signing $29.6 billion in weapons agreements with these nations, or 70.1 percent of all such deals.
The study found that the larger arms deals concluded by the United States with developing nations last year included a $6.5 billion air defense system for the United Arab Emirates, a $2.1 billion jet fighter deal with Morocco and a $2 billion attack helicopter agreement with Taiwan. Other large weapons agreements were reached between the United States and India, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, South Korea and Brazil.
Russia was far behind in 2008 with $3.3 billion in weapons sales to the developing world, about 7.8 percent of all such agreements. The report notes that while Moscow continues to have China and India as its main weapons clients, Russia's new focus is on arms sales to Latin American, in particular to Venezuela.
France was third with $2.5 billion in arms sales to developing nations, or about 5.9 percent of weapons deals with these countries.
The top buyers in the developing world in 2008 were the United Arab Emirates, which signed $9.7 billion in arms deals, Saudi Arabia, which signed $8.7 billion in weapons agreements, and Morocco, with $5.4 billion in arms purchases.
The study uses figures in 2008 dollars, with amounts for previous years adjusted for inflation to give a constant financial measurement.
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12) Text of flyer handed out at the San Francisco Labor Council's Pre-Labor Day Breakfast honoring warmonger and Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi on Friday, September 4; written and distributed by Ralph Schoenman, Mya Shone and Bradley Wiedmaier
[This was sent to me by the authors and I agree with it...Bonnie Weinstein]
NANCY PELOSI'S APPEARANCE AT THE LABOR DAY BREAKFAST
The decision arbitrarily to reverse a vote to picket Nancy Pelosi's presence at the Labor Day breakfast, initiated by the leadership of the San Francisco Labor Council, is unwarranted.
Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, is a leading policy maker in the administration of Barack Obama and a point person for the imperialist, profoundly anti-democratic and exploitative policies of the Democratic Party - a principal instrument of rapacious class rule in the United States.
She represents the following:
Escalating the war of brutal aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and beyond.
Sustaining the murder of Iraq indefinitely.
Expanding the use of torture, rendition and the implementation in the United States of the architecture of the fascist state.
She is a major figure in the handing over to the banksters, to date, of $23.7 trillion, as documented by Neil Barofsky in his testimony before Congress.
Nancy Pelosi, like the Party and administration she represents, is an enemy of working people - of their economic survival, their right to organize and their political independence.
It is matter of principle to protest her public appearances.
A picket protesting the anti-working class and anti-democratic policies that she represents is not an attack upon labor, let alone upon the San Francisco Labor Council as an organization.
It is disingenuous to equate protesting Ms. Pelosi's appearance at this breakfast with an attack upon the San Francisco Labor Council as an institution.
If the San Francisco Labor Council leadership is embarrassed by protests against Nancy Pelosi, all the more reason to hold this picket.
The leadership that would foist upon the Labor Council and upon working people the policies of the Democratic Party is a misleadership that disarms labor and renders working people unable to fight in their own name and in their class interests.
Those who have engaged in personal attacks upon Steve Zeltzer for proposing to picket Nancy Pelosi's appearance on Friday, September 4 - a proposal that was adopted unanimously - have used abusive language that covers an unprincipled accommodation.
Every defender of the rights of working people will reject this hysteria and recognize that it seeks to cover a bending of the knee to a labor misleadership that undermines the future of working people in the United States.
Ralph Schoenman
Mya Shone
Bradley Wiedmaier
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13) Out of Work, and Too Down to Search On
By MICHAEL LUO
September 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/us/07worker.html?hp
They were left out of the latest unemployment rate, as they are every month: millions of hidden casualties of the Great Recession who are not counted in the rate because they have stopped looking for work.
But that does not mean these discouraged Americans do not want to be employed. As interviews with several of them demonstrate, many desperately long for a job, but their inability to find one has made them perhaps the ultimate embodiment of pessimism as this recession wears on.
Some have halted their job searches out of sheer frustration. Others have decided it makes more sense to become stay-at-home fathers or mothers, or to go back to school, until the job market improves. Still others have chosen to retire for now and have begun collecting Social Security or disability benefits, for which claims have surged.
Rick Alexander, a master carpenter in Florida who has given up searching after months of effort, said the disappointment eventually became unbearable.
"When you were in high school and kept asking the head cheerleader out for a date and she kept saying no, at some point you stopped asking her," he said. "It becomes a 'why bother?' scenario."
The official jobless rate, which garners the bulk of attention from politicians and the public, was reported on Friday to have risen to 9.7 percent in August. But to be included in that measure, which is calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics from a monthly nationwide survey, a worker must have actively looked for a job at some point in the preceding four weeks.
For an increasing number of people in this country who would prefer to be working, that is not the case.
It is difficult to assign an exact figure, because of limitations in the data collected by the bureau, but various measures that capture discouragement have swelled in this recession.
In the most direct measure of job market hopelessness, the bureau has a narrow definition of a group it classifies as "discouraged workers." These are people who have looked for work at some point in the past year but have not looked in the last four weeks because they believe that no jobs are available or that they would not qualify, among other reasons. In August, there were roughly 758,000 discouraged workers nationally, compared with 349,000 in November 2007, the month before the recession officially began.
The bureau also has a broader category of jobless it calls "marginally attached to the labor force," which includes discouraged workers as well as those who have stopped looking because of other reasons, like school, family responsibilities or health issues. But economists agree that many of these workers probably would have found a way to work in a good economy.
There were roughly 2.3 million people in this group in August, up from 1.4 million in November 2007. If the unemployment rate were expanded to include all marginally attached workers, it would have been 11 percent in August.
But even this figure is probably an undercount of the extent of the jobless problem in this country. There are about 1.4 million more people who are not in the labor force than when the recession began. Some of these are retirees, stay-at-home parents, people on disability and students. But it is also rather likely that many of these people have given up looking for work at least partly because of economic reasons as well.
Here are four people's stories:
Rick Alexander: A Builder by Trade, With Too Much Time
In the worst case, Rick Alexander figured, he could scrounge up a job at Home Depot.
He was a master carpenter, after all. He had skills. He had run his own successful home-restoration business for 28 years.
In early 2008, however, he moved to Florida to take care of his ailing parents, leaving his business in Connecticut to his daughter.
After helping his parents into an assisted-living facility, he began applying for jobs. He devoted eight hours a day to the task, sometimes sending out three or four applications a day.
"It was a full-time job," he said.
At first, he focused on jobs in construction, applying to be a site supervisor. He looked for anything within an hour's commute of where he was living in Jensen Beach.
But the real estate industry had fallen off precipitously, bringing building to a near standstill. Mr. Alexander, 58, began branching out to suppliers, applying at lumberyards and other wholesalers. Eventually, he expanded his search to Home Depot, Lowe's and mom-and-pop hardware stores. Finally, he began applying for "everything under the sun," even the overnight shift at convenience stores.
By that summer, he had still received no callbacks for interviews. He went back to Connecticut for several weeks to do a renovation for an old client to earn some cash. When he returned to Florida in August 2008, he tried to start his own business, selling advertising on video displays mounted in coffee shops and other places.
He networked furiously with local businesses, but by then the economy had nose-dived. Mr. Alexander said he grossed a total of $150. He sank into a funk and stopped looking.
"There are thousands of people applying for every job I'm looking at, and potential employers won't even give me the courtesy of acknowledging I applied," he said. "The entirety of that causes me not to bother. It's a waste of my time and theirs."
He has applied to just two jobs this year, both several months ago. The unemployment rate in his area, Martin County, now exceeds 11 percent. After prodding from his companion, Dona Olinger, he went down to Home Depot a little over a month ago to re-activate his application there.
His savings are gone. He lives with Ms. Olinger, who makes $10 an hour as a volunteer coordinator at a food pantry, Harvest Food and Outreach Center, where they also get groceries every week. It is her salary that pays their rent.
Mr. Alexander's parents have since moved out of the assisted-living facility and back into their home, so he tends to them most days. He reads Robert Ludlum novels. He sleeps. To fill his time, he is looking into volunteer work. The other day, he cut the grass on his small lawn using just a pair of clippers.
Ray Rucker: Feeling Counted Out With Years Still Left
Ray Rucker came home from a job interview several months ago, sat down in his living room with his suit still on and wept.
The meeting with the interviewer had lasted 10 minutes. The man did not even open a folder in front of him to study Mr. Rucker's résumé. It was just "jibber jabber," Mr. Rucker said later.
Mr. Rucker, who lives in Overland Park, Kan., had little doubt about what had happened. He is 62 years old and, as he puts it, "I look 62."
He lost his job as a facilities manager for Starbucks in Kansas City and Wichita, Kan., last November, when the company closed hundreds of stores across the country. He had done similar work for years for other national restaurant chains and retail outlets.
He landed his first interview within a month, with a retail chain. He was invited back to talk to the vice president of operations and to the director of operations. He was also invited to meet with the company's chief executive.
But as Mr. Rucker was finishing with the director of operations, she asked him straight out whether he was retiring soon. Shocked, Mr. Rucker answered, truthfully, that he planned to work at least 10 more years.
The meeting with the chief executive never came. Mr. Rucker said he thinks his interviewer simply did not believe he planned to continue working.
A month ago, he found a job posting that seemed tailored for him, a facilities manager for a national restaurant chain. He sent in his résumé and three days later got called for an interview. The company official said he was in a hurry to fill the position. But Mr. Rucker soon learned that this one, too, had slipped from his grasp.
"That's the one when I kind of threw in the towel," he said.
Mr. Rucker said he was done looking. His wife, who works at a small nonprofit organization, protested, saying there was more he could do to look.
"You don't know what I'm going through," Mr. Rucker said he told her.
"You send out so much, and you don't get responses," he said. "Then when you get called in, you're treated like you're too old. Why am I doing this?"
So he made an appointment with the local Social Security office to begin claiming benefits. He might try to get some kind of hourly job to help make ends meet. He has mapped out some home renovation projects he wants to do.
The Social Security checks will not equal even a third of what he used to make. But he is now preparing for semiretirement.
Jenny Salinas: From a Nonstop Career to a Focus on the Home
Jenny Salinas never envisioned being a stay-at-home mother, taking care of the children and keeping house. She was the one with the high-powered career, the six-figure salary, always jetting off to Russia or China.
She put her 5-year-old daughter, Mia, in day care when she was three months old. Mia got so used to her mother going away she would simply say, "Mommy's on a trip," and blow her kisses when she left.
But after searching unsuccessfully since January for a job, Mrs. Salinas, 37, said her priorities had shifted. She is now content to stay home and focus on her family. She and her husband are even talking about having more children.
"It's just amazing how it changes your perspective on what's important," she said.
Mrs. Salinas had been a manager of corporate marketing and media relations at an oil and gas company in Houston, where she lives. She was so focused on her career, she said, that she never noticed her daughter had a lazy eye. Mrs. Salinas's mother mentioned something to her, but only after Mrs. Salinas was laid off did she realize that her daughter needed to see an ophthalmologist.
"That's how much I was on my BlackBerry," Mrs. Salinas said.
Mrs. Salinas was initially confident that she would land somewhere quickly. She seemed to be doing well, too, scoring interview after interview for senior-level corporate marketing positions. But each of those prospects dried up, usually because of a hiring freeze or some other obstacle.
So, for the last two months, she has not looked at all. Partly, she has been busy, selling their old house, moving into a new one they are renting at half the monthly expense, seeing her daughter off to kindergarten.
She is helped by the fact that her husband, a vice president at an advertising agency, still has his job. After the couple realized that her job search might take time, they decided to cut back on their spending.
She has in mind a specific set of companies, but they are all still not hiring. Unwilling to settle for just any job, she said, she would rather bide her time.
But the process of searching for work and coming up empty has also left her feeling spent.
"I was just discouraged, fed up and angry, feeling like my career had betrayed me," she said.
Her daughter used to be in day care or preschool from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., but Mrs. Salinas began dropping her off later and picking her up earlier. Some days, they skip day care completely and while away the day together.
Tatjana Jovanovic-Grove: Moving From Serbia, Scraping By Online
Tatjana Jovanovic-Grove now occupies her days with arts and crafts projects. She makes a little money selling them online - $10 here, $50 there - but mostly it beats the sense of futility that used to envelop her each day during her quest to find a job.
"I stopped looking because that feeling of being rejected again and again is hard," she said. "It's just like somebody punching you in the face."
Ms. Jovanovic-Grove, 41, has struggled to find work since she immigrated in late 2005 to the United States from her native Serbia, where she was a biology researcher at a prestigious research institute in Belgrade.
She had married an American, Doug Grove, 42, a Wal-Mart mechanic she met over the Internet. The couple initially lived in Glendale, Ariz., with their three children from previous marriages, but they moved to Winston-Salem, N.C., in late 2007.
They were attracted by the weather and the low crime rate. They also thought Ms. Jovanovic-Grove, who earned a master's degree in Serbia in environmental protection and zoology, would have an easier time finding a job in an area rich with universities.
"I was really thinking I would have no problem," she said.
The need for her to find work became more urgent after the couple took on thousands of dollars in additional debt after they turned their Arizona home over to a bank in lieu of a foreclosure settlement. They had been unable to sell it amid the state's collapsing real estate market.
But aside from a few temporary jobs, Ms. Jovanovic-Grove has come up empty on everything from research assistant positions to retail jobs. Meanwhile, her husband's hours at Wal-Mart, where he is paid a little more than $14 an hour, have been cut back.
In May, she stopped looking completely, concluding that the job market was saturated. Winston-Salem's unemployment rate exceeded 10 percent.
"You figure out it's just like when you toss a piece of meat at a pack of hungry cats," she said. "I just gave up because I could not compete."
Instead, she has turned to making wood handicrafts and selling them on Etsy.com, an online marketplace. The small payments she gets often mean she earns less than fifty cents an hour for her effort. But she reasoned it is better than wasting gas driving around applying for jobs she believes she cannot get.
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14) As Battlefields Shift, Old Warrior for Peace Pursues the Same Enemy
By DAN FROSCH
September 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/us/07activist.html
GREELEY, Colo. - It had been nearly 30 years since the Rev. Carl Kabat and a group of peace activists, including his fellow Catholic priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan, barged into a General Electric weapons plant outside Philadelphia. Known as the Plowshares Eight, they battered missile nose cones with hammers in an effort to disable some of the world's most fearsome weapons, and sprinkled blood on classified documents to protest the cold war, before they were arrested.
The cold war ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago this November and the splintering of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Three of the Plowshares Eight, including Philip Berrigan, have died, and scores of other activists have turned their attention to the Arab-Israeli conflict, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the terrorism suspects held at Guantánamo.
Not Father Kabat, though. At 75 he continues his crusade against nuclear weapons at missile silos across the United States, armed with a hammer and a pair of bolt cutters. He usually wears a clown suit, in homage, he says, to St. Paul's words: "We are fools for Christ's sake."
Though his actions are mostly symbolic - the authorities have always seized him before he could damage a live missile - he has spent half of the last three decades in state and federal prisons.
His most recent protest unfolded on a quiet dawn last month, when he drove down a country road outside Greeley, a few hours north of Denver, used the bolt cutters to cut a hole in a chain-link fence, wedged his aging body through and stepped atop the silo of a Minuteman III nuclear missile coming up from the ground. He had enough time - about 45 minutes - to drape antiwar banners from the fence, say a prayer and try without success to open a hatch leading to the silo before he was arrested by Air Force security personnel.
"I thought, 'What a beautiful place this is except for this damnable thing in the ground that could kill two or three million people,' " Father Kabat said later in an interview at the Weld County Jail, where he is being held on misdemeanor criminal mischief and trespassing charges. "It's insane."
If convicted, he faces up to a year behind bars, a possibility that does not seem to faze him.
"You can't just kill babies and children and old people indiscriminately," he said. "It should be unreasonable for every human person to accept nuclear weapons."
Bill Sulzman, a former priest from Colorado Springs and a friend, described Father Kabat's impact this way: "Everything in the peace movement has shrunk, but Carl represents steadfastness. When you see a man of his age willing to take on those risks, it has a big shaming effect."
Raised on a farm in southern Illinois, Father Kabat joined the Oblates of Mary Immaculate order as a young man and became radicalized after missions in the Philippines and Brazil. But it was not until the late 1970s, after meeting Philip Berrigan - like his brother Daniel a giant of the peace movement - that Father Kabat hurled himself into the antinuclear weapons fight.
He served about a year and a half in prison for taking part in the 1980 Plowshares Eight protest at the G.E. plant in King of Prussia, Pa., which became a touchstone of the antinuclear movement.
Four years later, Father Kabat, his brother Paul and another man and a woman, armed with a jackhammer, broke into a missile silo in Missouri. Father Kabat served nearly 10 years in prison for that attack. "Even if we were left there for 24 hours, we could not cut through the reinforced concrete," he recalled, "but we wanted to show that this was serious business."
Subsequent protests led to Father Kabat's spending more time in prison than out, raising questions about the effectiveness of his approach.
Liz McAlister, who married Philip Berrigan, has an answer. "We live in a culture where we want to measure everything to know how successful things are," Ms. McAlister said. "It's beautiful to see people who don't spend time wondering and worrying about that and are willing to do what they think is right regardless of the consequences."
Still, the United States no longer teeters on the brink of nuclear war, and the 150 Minuteman III missiles scattered across Wyoming, Nebraska and Colorado go largely unnoticed by a younger generation of activists.
A 30-year-old Catholic peace activist, Chrissy Kirchhoefer, one of Father Kabat's closest friends, acknowledged that she does not entirely relate to his cause, but said his devoutness still commanded a profound respect. "For young people, that issue doesn't really speak to us," she said. "But I don't question the validity or usefulness of it. Carl once said to me, 'If I don't act on this, then what good is my life?' "
To Father Kabat, the nuclear issue - and his protests - remain essential. The building of weapons continues to drain money that could be used to fight poverty and hunger, he says, adding, as if caught in a time warp, "There's still a real threat these things could go to the U.S.S.R."
Nearing his 76th birthday, Father Kabat muses that he now feels freer behind prison walls, where he spends time reading, reflecting and playing basketball, a passion, than he does outside them. On the outside, he says, he is overwhelmed by the sense of not doing enough. "When I die, I want my tombstone to read, 'He really lived,' " the priest said with a grin.
On a recent Thursday, Father Kabat shuffled into a small county courtroom here, shackled to a line of other inmates. He has refused to post $5,000 bond or sign anything that could be interpreted as capitulation. Before his case could be presented, Father Kabat's public defender and a prosecutor agreed to continue the hearing until Sept. 17.
The priest smiled, nodded to a small group of supporters in the courtroom and was taken back to jail.
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15) Aid Group Says U.S. Troops Raided Afghan Hospital
By SANGAR RAHIMI
September 8, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/world/asia/08kabul.html?ref=world
KABUL, Afghanistan - A Swedish aid agency said Monday that American soldiers stormed through one of its hospitals in Afghanistan last week, searching men's and women's wards for wounded Taliban fighters, breaking down doors and tying up hospital staff members and visitors.
The soldiers also demanded that administrators at the hospital inform military authorities of any incoming patients who might be insurgents. After that, they reportedly said, the military would decide if the patients would be admitted.
"This is simply not acceptable," said Anders Fange, the country director for the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, which runs schools, medical facilities and development projects in eastern Afghanistan.
In a statement, Mr. Fange called the episode "not only a clear violation of globally recognized humanitarian principles about the sanctity of health facilities and staff in areas of conflict, but also a clear breach of the civil-military agreement" between nongovernmental organizations and international forces.
The hospital is located in Shaniz, in Wardak Province, in east-central Afghanistan. Mr. Fange said the soldiers arrived about 10 p.m. on Wednesday and searched the facility for two hours.
He said the soldiers were from the United States Army's 10th Mountain Division, The Associated Press reported Monday that a public affairs officer for the United States Navy, Lt. Cmdr. Christine Sidenstricker, confirmed that the hospital had been searched.
"We are investigating, and we take allegations like this seriously," she told The A.P. "Complaints like this are rare."
Mr. Fange said his group "cannot and will not tolerate this kind of treatment" by the military and would not allow troops to decide on hospital admissions.
Meanwhile, the Interior Ministry said Monday that a rocket that struck a house in Kabul on Sunday night killed three members of an Afghan family.
A man, his wife and one of their daughters were killed in the attack, the ministry said. Two other children, both girls, were wounded in the attack.
Two other rockets landed elsewhere in the Afghan capital on Sunday night but reportedly caused no damage or casualties, the ministry said.
Mark McDonald contributed reporting from Hong Kong.
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16) Pace of Change Under Obama Frustrates Unions
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and STEVEN GREENHOUSE
September 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/us/politics/07labor.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON - For eight years under George W. Bush, union officials barely set foot inside the White House. But 10 days after President Obama took office, the nation's most powerful labor leaders mingled in the Blue Room, moments after the new president, a man they helped put there, signed a string of executive orders undoing Mr. Bush's policies.
The mood was euphoric. "He walked in with the biggest smile," James P. Hoffa, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, said of Mr. Obama, "saying, 'Welcome back to your White House.' "
Today that euphoria is giving way to a mixture of frustration and unease, as union leaders are growing concerned that the Obama White House has not delivered as much as they had expected. Some criticize him for not pushing hard enough or moving fast enough on their issues, while others blame the deep recession and Republican opposition for his failure to do more.
Mr. Obama has delayed a push for the unions' No. 1 legislative priority, a measure to make it easier for workers to organize. He faces potential conflict with unions on trade, and on how fast to push for immigration reform. And on health care, friction between labor and the White House is suddenly spilling out into the open.
In response, Mr. Obama is renewing his courtship of the labor movement, whose members worked as foot soldiers in his campaign and spent August doggedly defending his health plan at town-hall-style meetings across the country. On Monday, the president will mark Labor Day by speaking at an A.F.L.-C.I.O. picnic in Cincinnati. During his visit, he is expected to name Ron Bloom, who heads the president's automotive task force, to a second role in the administration as manufacturing czar. The next week, Mr. Obama will address the A.F.L.-C.I.O. convention in Pittsburgh.
"He gets an A for effort, and an incomplete for results," the incoming president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., Richard L. Trumka.
While labor leaders, including the current A.F.L.-C.I.O. president, John J. Sweeney, say they remain extremely supportive of the president - especially his handling of the economic crisis - Mr. Trumka set off an uproar last week when he warned that unions would not support a health care bill that lacks a government-backed insurance plan. It was a shot across the bow to the White House, which is weighing whether to compromise on the so-called public option.
Another top union leader, Gerald W. McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, cautioned that if Mr. Obama abandons the public option, "it will be harder to gin our people up on other issues." Mr. McEntee said he had noticed a shift in sentiment even since July, when 14 union leaders spent 45 minutes in the White House Roosevelt Room with the president and top aides like David Axelrod.
"He said, 'You've stood shoulder to shoulder with me' - and I'm paraphrasing here - 'I want you there, and I'm going to fight for you,' " Mr. McEntee said. "When we left, I think we were all on maybe not cloud nine, but cloud four. I shook hands with all the staff, Axelrod was there. This was the person we elected; this was our president with a voice. It felt good." And now? Mr. McEntee paused. "Well," he said, "not as good."
Blue-collar workers have long been a little bit suspicious of Mr. Obama, who has never quite been able to demonstrate that he is one of them. Still, they stood strongly behind him once he became the Democratic presidential nominee, contributing money, running phone banks and knocking on doors in critical swing states like Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
The two main labor federations, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and Change to Win, said unions and their political action committees had spent nearly $450 million in the presidential race. The addition of Joseph R. Biden Jr. to the ticket as Mr. Obama's running mate helped with his union bona fides. So did the endorsement of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts.
Today, Mr. Biden continues to play an important role as a link between the unions and the president. But Mr. Kennedy's death is a significant loss, one that may force Mr. Obama to work that much harder to win union support for any health care compromise he might make, said Geoff Garin, a Democratic strategist.
"Ted Kennedy was an incredibly important Good Housekeeping seal of approval, and if he lent his prestige to whatever compromise Obama felt he had to make, that would mean an awful lot to people in the labor movement," Mr. Garin said. Mr. Obama, he added, must "persuade labor unions and others that his commitment is to getting it right in the interest of the average working person."
He may have an easier time with some than others. Mr. Hoffa, for instance, said the public option was not a make-or-break provision for him; he is open to legislation containing a "a trigger" to create a public plan if private efforts to expand coverage fail. Mr. McEntee, by contrast, dismissed the trigger idea as "not a real public option."
Dennis Rivera, the point man on health care for the Service Employees International Union, said simply that unions would have to be flexible. "Politics is the art of the possible," he said, adding that Mr. Obama's "heart is in the right place."
Still, there are tensions between unions and the White House on matters beyond health care. Trade is an especially contentious issue; unions are irked that Mr. Obama has backed away from his campaign pledge to reopen the North American Free Trade Agreement. And the United Steelworkers, which represents tire workers, is pressing Mr. Obama to punish China now that the United States International Trade Commission has ruled that China is hurting American manufacturers by inundating the market with cheap tires.
Union leaders have also been patient with Mr. Obama, both on immigration (they want legislation offering a path to citizenship for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants) and the Employee Free Choice Act, the bill to make organizing easier. In the July White House meeting, Mr. Obama made a strong pitch that health care should come first.
Labor leaders were willing to accept that strategy, said David E. Bonior, a former Michigan congressman who is the chairman of the National Labor Coordinating Committee, an umbrella group. But with Mr. Obama planning a major speech before Congress this week to lay out his priorities in a health bill, Mr. Bonior said, union members want reassurance that he will stick his neck out for their priorities.
"They don't want him to leave it up to seven or eight committee chairmen," Mr. Bonior said. "They want him to be the leader and to fight for this stuff."
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17) Obama Addresses America's Students
Text
September 8, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/us/politics/08obama.text.html
Following is a transcript of President Obama's speech to America's students, delivered on Tuesday at a Arlington, Va., high school, as released by the White House.
THE PRESIDENT: Hello, everybody! Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. All right, everybody go ahead and have a seat. How is everybody doing today? (Applause.) How about Tim Spicer? (Applause.) I am here with students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. And we've got students tuning in from all across America, from kindergarten through 12th grade. And I am just so glad that all could join us today. And I want to thank Wakefield for being such an outstanding host. Give yourselves a big round of applause. (Applause.)
I know that for many of you, today is the first day of school. And for those of you in kindergarten, or starting middle or high school, it's your first day in a new school, so it's understandable if you're a little nervous. I imagine there are some seniors out there who are feeling pretty good right now -- (applause) -- with just one more year to go. And no matter what grade you're in, some of you are probably wishing it were still summer and you could've stayed in bed just a little bit longer this morning.
I know that feeling. When I was young, my family lived overseas. I lived in Indonesia for a few years. And my mother, she didn't have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school, but she thought it was important for me to keep up with an American education. So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday. But because she had to go to work, the only time she could do it was at 4:30 in the morning.
Now, as you might imagine, I wasn't too happy about getting up that early. And a lot of times, I'd fall asleep right there at the kitchen table. But whenever I'd complain, my mother would just give me one of those looks and she'd say, "This is no picnic for me either, buster." (Laughter.)
So I know that some of you are still adjusting to being back at school. But I'm here today because I have something important to discuss with you. I'm here because I want to talk with you about your education and what's expected of all of you in this new school year.
Now, I've given a lot of speeches about education. And I've talked about responsibility a lot.
I've talked about teachers' responsibility for inspiring students and pushing you to learn.
I've talked about your parents' responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and you get your homework done, and don't spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with the Xbox.
I've talked a lot about your government's responsibility for setting high standards, and supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren't working, where students aren't getting the opportunities that they deserve.
But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, the best schools in the world -- and none of it will make a difference, none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities, unless you show up to those schools, unless you pay attention to those teachers, unless you listen to your parents and grandparents and other adults and put in the hard work it takes to succeed. That's what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education.
I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself. Every single one of you has something that you're good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That's the opportunity an education can provide.
Maybe you could be a great writer -- maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper -- but you might not know it until you write that English paper -- that English class paper that's assigned to you. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor -- maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or the new medicine or vaccine -- but you might not know it until you do your project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a senator or a Supreme Court justice -- but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.
And no matter what you want to do with your life, I guarantee that you'll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You're going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You cannot drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You've got to train for it and work for it and learn for it.
And this isn't just important for your own life and your own future. What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. The future of America depends on you. What you're learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.
You'll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You'll need the insights and critical-thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You'll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.
We need every single one of you to develop your talents and your skills and your intellect so you can help us old folks solve our most difficult problems. If you don't do that -- if you quit on school -- you're not just quitting on yourself, you're quitting on your country.
Now, I know it's not always easy to do well in school. I know a lot of you have challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your schoolwork.
I get it. I know what it's like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mom who had to work and who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn't always able to give us the things that other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and I felt like I didn't fit in.
So I wasn't always as focused as I should have been on school, and I did some things I'm not proud of, and I got in more trouble than I should have. And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse.
But I was -- I was lucky. I got a lot of second chances, and I had the opportunity to go to college and law school and follow my dreams. My wife, our First Lady Michelle Obama, she has a similar story. Neither of her parents had gone to college, and they didn't have a lot of money. But they worked hard, and she worked hard, so that she could go to the best schools in this country.
Some of you might not have those advantages. Maybe you don't have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job and there's not enough money to go around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don't feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren't right.
But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life -- what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you've got going on at home -- none of that is an excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude in school. That's no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. There is no excuse for not trying.
Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up. No one's written your destiny for you, because here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.
That's what young people like you are doing every day, all across America.
Young people like Jazmin Perez, from Roma, Texas. Jazmin didn't speak English when she first started school. Neither of her parents had gone to college. But she worked hard, earned good grades, and got a scholarship to Brown University -- is now in graduate school, studying public health, on her way to becoming Dr. Jazmin Perez.
I'm thinking about Andoni Schultz, from Los Altos, California, who's fought brain cancer since he was three. He's had to endure all sorts of treatments and surgeries, one of which affected his memory, so it took him much longer -- hundreds of extra hours -- to do his schoolwork. But he never fell behind. He's headed to college this fall.
And then there's Shantell Steve, from my hometown of Chicago, Illinois. Even when bouncing from foster home to foster home in the toughest neighborhoods in the city, she managed to get a job at a local health care center, start a program to keep young people out of gangs, and she's on track to graduate high school with honors and go on to college.
And Jazmin, Andoni, and Shantell aren't any different from any of you. They face challenges in their lives just like you do. In some cases they've got it a lot worse off than many of you. But they refused to give up. They chose to take responsibility for their lives, for their education, and set goals for themselves. And I expect all of you to do the same.
That's why today I'm calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education -- and do everything you can to meet them. Your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention in class, or spending some time each day reading a book. Maybe you'll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community. Maybe you'll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied because of who they are or how they look, because you believe, like I do, that all young people deserve a safe environment to study and learn. Maybe you'll decide to take better care of yourself so you can be more ready to learn. And along those lines, by the way, I hope all of you are washing your hands a lot, and that you stay home from school when you don't feel well, so we can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter.
But whatever you resolve to do, I want you to commit to it. I want you to really work at it.
I know that sometimes you get that sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work -- that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star. Chances are you're not going to be any of those things.
The truth is, being successful is hard. You won't love every subject that you study. You won't click with every teacher that you have. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right at this minute. And you won't necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.
That's okay. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who've had the most failures. J.K. Rowling's -- who wrote Harry Potter -- her first Harry Potter book was rejected 12 times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. He lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, "I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that's why I succeed."
These people succeeded because they understood that you can't let your failures define you -- you have to let your failures teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently the next time. So if you get into trouble, that doesn't mean you're a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to act right. If you get a bad grade, that doesn't mean you're stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.
No one's born being good at all things. You become good at things through hard work. You're not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport. You don't hit every note the first time you sing a song. You've got to practice. The same principle applies to your schoolwork. You might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it right. You might have to read something a few times before you understand it. You definitely have to do a few drafts of a paper before it's good enough to hand in.
Don't be afraid to ask questions. Don't be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do that every day. Asking for help isn't a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength because it shows you have the courage to admit when you don't know something, and that then allows you to learn something new. So find an adult that you trust -- a parent, a grandparent or teacher, a coach or a counselor -- and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals.
And even when you're struggling, even when you're discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you, don't ever give up on yourself, because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.
The story of America isn't about people who quit when things got tough. It's about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.
It's the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and they founded this nation. Young people. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google and Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.
So today, I want to ask all of you, what's your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a President who comes here in 20 or 50 or 100 years say about what all of you did for this country?
Now, your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I'm working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books and the equipment and the computers you need to learn. But you've got to do your part, too. So I expect all of you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So don't let us down. Don't let your family down or your country down. Most of all, don't let yourself down. Make us all proud.
Thank you very much, everybody. God bless you. God bless America. Thank you. (Applause.)
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18) President Obama's Labor Day Speech to the AFL-CIO Picnic
Below is the full text of his speech as prepared for delivery.
huffingtonpost.com
September 7, 2009
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/07/obama-labor-day-speech-at_n_278772.html
Hello Cincinnati. Hello Ohio. I can't think of a better place to be on Labor Day than at America's biggest Labor Day picnic-with the workers and families of the Cincinnati AFL-CIO.
First, give a big round of applause to Charlie. Charlie reminds us that in these tough times, America's working men and women are ready to roll up their sleeves and get back to work.
I want to salute your AFL-CIO local leaders: Executive Secretary-Treasurer Doug Sizemore, President Joe Zimmer and state President Joe Rugola (roo-GO-la). And your outstanding national leaders: a man who we thank for devoting his life to working Americans-President John Sweeney. And the man who will pick up the mantle of leadership-who we need to succeed because a strong labor movement is part of a strong economy-
Secretary-Treasurer Rich Trumka.
Although Ohio's terrific Governor Ted Strickland couldn't be here, we have Lieutenant Governor Lee Fisher, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, Attorney General Richard Cordray, Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory, and Hamilton County Commission President David Pepper.
We're joined by members of Ohio's congressional delegation: Congressman Steve Driehaus (DREE-house) and my great friend-who is at the forefront of every fight for Ohio's working men and women, including the battle for health insurance reform-Senator Sherrod Brown.
And I'm proud to be here with a leader who is re-energizing the Department of Labor-and a daughter of union members-Secretary Hilda Solis. And my director of recovery for auto communities and workers-Ed Montgomery.
Now, like a lot of Americans, you're having some fun today. Taking the day off. Spending time with the kids. Enjoying some good music and good food-some famous Cincinnati chili. But today we also pause. To remember. To reflect. To reaffirm.
We remember that the rights and benefits we enjoy today were not simply handed out to America's working men and women. They had to be won.
They had to be fought for, by men and women of courage and conviction, from the factory floors of the Industrial Revolution to the shopping aisles of today's superstores. They stood up and spoke out to demand a fair shake; an honest day's pay for an honest day's work. Many risked their lives. Some gave their lives. Some made it a cause of their lives-like Senator Ted Kennedy, who we remember today.
So let us never forget: much of what we take for granted-the 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, health insurance, paid leave, pensions, Social Security, Medicare-they all bear the union label. It was the American worker-union men and women-who returned from World War II to make our economy the envy of the world. It was labor that helped build the largest middle class in history. So even if you're not a union member, every American owes something to America's labor movement.
As we remember this history, let us reflect on its meaning in our own time. Like so many Americans, you work hard and meet your responsibilities. You play by the rules and pay your bills. But in recent years, the American Dream seemed to slip away, because from Washington to Wall Street, too often a different culture prevailed.
Wealth was valued over work, selfishness over sacrifice, greed over responsibility, the right to organize undermined rather than strengthened.
That's what we saw. And while it may have worked out well for a few at the top, it sure didn't work out well for our country. That culture-and the policies that flowed from it-undermined the middle class and helped create the greatest economic crisis of our time.
So today, on this Labor Day, we reaffirm our commitment. To rebuild.
To live up to the legacy of those who came before us. To combine the enduring values that have served us so well for so long-hard work and responsibility-with new ideas for a new century. To ensure that our great middle class remains the backbone of our economy-not just a vanishing ideal we celebrate at picnics once a year as summer turns to fall.
That's what we've been working to do every day since I took office.
Now, some people have already forgotten how bad it was just seven months ago. A financial system on the verge of collapse. About 700,000 workers losing their jobs each month. The worst recession of our lifetimes threatening to become another Great Depression.
That's why we took bold, swift action-passing an unprecedented Recovery Act, and doing it without the usual Washington earmarks and pork-barrel spending. And, Ohio, it's working.
We've given 95 percent of America's working families a tax cut-4.5 million families in Ohio, including here in Cincinnati. We've cut taxes for small businesses, and made new loans to more than 1,000 small businesses in Ohio so they can grow and hire more workers.
We've extended unemployment benefits for 12 million Americans, including Charlie and nearly 570,000 Ohio citizens. Across America, we've saved the jobs of tens of thousands of state and local workers-including teachers and first responders here in Ohio. We're rebuilding America's infrastructure, including the improvements to I-75 in Hamilton County-led by a local Cincinnati contractor-and more than 200 other highway projects across Ohio.
And we're making an historic commitment to innovation-much of it still to come in the months and year ahead: doubling our capacity to generate renewable energy; building a new smart grid to carry electricity from coast to coast; laying down broadband lines and high-speed rail lines; and providing the largest boost in basic research in history.
So our Recovery plan is working. The financial system has been saved from collapse. Home sales are up. We're seeing signs of life in the auto industry. Business investment is starting to stabilize. For the first time in 18 months, we're seeing growth in manufacturing.
On Friday, we learned that the economy lost another 216,000 jobs in August. And whenever Americans are losing jobs-especially so many-that's simply unacceptable. But for the second straight month, we lost fewer jobs than the month before and it was the fewest jobs lost in a year. So make no mistake. We're moving in the right direction.
Ohio, we're on the road to recovery.
But we've still got a long way to go. So we will not rest, we will not let up. Not until workers looking for jobs can find them-good jobs that sustain families and sustain dreams. Not until responsible mortgage-owners can stay in their homes. Not until we have a full economic recovery and all Americans have their shot at the American Dream.
But we can't do that if we go back to that old economy-overleveraged banks, inflated profits and maxed-out credit cards. An economy of bubbles and bursts, where your wages and incomes stagnate while corporate profits soar. So even as we recover from the recession and work to cut the deficit in half, we have to build a new foundation for prosperity in America.
An America with a reformed financial regulation system that protects consumers and the entire financial system so we never have a crisis like this again.
An America where energy reform creates green jobs that can never be outsourced and that finally frees America from the grip of foreign oil.
An America that commits to education-because the countries that out-educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow and the best jobs will go to the best educated-whether they live in Cincinnati or Shanghai. So we've got to do a better job educating our sons and daughters.
An America that once again invests in the middle class, which is why I've created our Task Force on Middle Class Working Families, led by Vice President Joe Biden, to make sure that our policies always benefit you-America's workers.
And today we're taking another step. I'm naming Ron Bloom to lead our efforts to revitalize the sector that helped build the middle class:
American manufacturing. Ron has worked with steelworkers, service employees and management to create new jobs. He's helped guide my auto task force. And as my new point person on manufacturing, he'll help us craft the policies that will create the next generation of manufacturing jobs and ensure American competitiveness in the 21st century.
And, yes, we're building an America where health insurance reform delivers more stability and security to every American-the many who have insurance today and the millions who don't.
Now, I'll have a lot more to say about this Wednesday night, and I don't want to give it all away. But let me just say this. We've been fighting for quality, affordable health care for every American for nearly a century-since Teddy Roosevelt. The Congress and the country have been engaged in a vigorous debate for many months. And debate is good, because we have to get this right. But in every debate there comes a time to decide, a time to act. And Ohio, that time is now.
We've never been this close. We've never had such broad agreement on what needs to be done. And because we're so close to real reform, the special interests are doing what they always do-trying to scare the American people and preserve the status quo.
But I've got a question for them: What's your answer? What's your solution? The truth is, they don't have one. It's do nothing. And we know what that future looks like. Insurance companies raking in the profits while discriminating against people because of pre-existing conditions and denying or dropping coverage when you get sick. It means you're never negotiating about higher wages, because you're spending all your time just protecting the benefits you already have.
It means premiums continuing to skyrocket three times faster than your wages. More families pushed into bankruptcy. More businesses cutting more jobs. More Americans losing their health insurance-14,000 every day. And it means more Americans dying every day just because they don't have insurance.
But that's not the future I see for America. I see reform where we bring stability and security to folks who have insurance today. Where you never again have to worry about going without coverage-if you lose your job, change your job or get sick. Where there is a cap on your out-of-pocket expenses, so you don't have to worry that a serious illness will break you and your family. Where you never again have to worry that you or someone you love will be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition.
I see reform where Americans and small businesses that are shut out of health insurance today will be able to purchase coverage at a price they can afford. Where they'll be able to shop and compare in a new health insurance exchange-a marketplace where competition and choice will continue to hold down cost and help deliver them a better deal. And I continue to believe that a public option within the basket of insurance choices would help improve quality and bring down costs.
I see reform where we protect our senior citizens by closing the gaps in their Medicare prescription coverage that costs millions of older Americans thousands of dollars every year out of their own pockets; reforms that will preserve Medicare and put it on a sounder financial footing by cutting waste and fraud and the hundreds of billions of dollars in unwarranted public subsidies to an already profitable insurance industry.
I want a health insurance system that works as well for the American people as it does for the insurance industry. They should be free to make a profit. But they also have to be fair. They also have to be accountable.
Security and stability for folks who have health insurance. Help for those who don't-the coverage they need at a price they can afford.
Finally bringing costs under control. That's the reform we need.
That's the reform we're fighting for. And that's why it's time to do what's right for America's working families. To put aside the partisanship. To come together as a nation. To pass health insurance reform now-this year.
And few have fought harder or longer for health care and America's workers than you-our brothers and sisters of organized labor. And just as we know that we must adapt to all the changes and challenges of a global economy, we also know this: in good economic times and bad, labor is not part of the problem. Labor is part of the solution.
That's why Secretary Solis has made it a priority at the Labor Department to protect workers-
your safety, your benefits, your right to organize and bargain collectively. It's why some of the first executive orders I issued overturned the previous administration's attempts to stifle organized labor. It's why I support the Employee Free Choice Act-to level the playing field so it's easier for employees who want a union to form a union. Because when labor is strong, America is strong. When we all stand together, we all rise together.
And that is why the first piece of legislation I signed into law was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act-guaranteeing equal pay for equal work.
Lilly worked at an Alabama factory. She did her job and did it well.
Then, after nearly two decades, she discovered that for years she was paid less than her male colleagues-for doing the very same work. Over the years, she had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in wages and in pension and Social Security benefits.
Lilly could have just moved on. Instead, this Alabama grandmother made a decision-principle was at stake. She stood up and spoke out for what was right-all the way to the Supreme Court, then Congress, and finally the White House, where I signed the law that bears her name.
That's the lesson of this day-that some things are always worth fighting for. Equal pay. Fair wages. Dignity in the workplace. Justice on the job. An economy that works for everyone, because in America there are no second-class citizens. An economy where you can make a living and care for your families. Where you leave your kids something better.
Where we live up to our fundamental ideals-those words put on paper some 200 years ago. That we are all created equal; that we all deserve a chance to pursue our happiness and achieve our goals.
That is the calling to which we are summoned this Labor Day. That is the cause of my presidency. And that is the commitment we must fulfill to preserve the American Dream for all of America's working families.
God bless you. And God bless the United States of America.
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19) Schools Aided by Stimulus Money Still Facing Cuts
By SAM DILLON
September 8, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/education/08school.html?ref=education
FLOWERY BRANCH, Ga. - Children are returning to classrooms across the nation during one of the most tumultuous periods in American education, in which many thousands of teachers and other school workers - no one yet knows how many - were laid off in dozens of states because of plummeting state and local revenue. Many were hired back, thanks in part to $100 billion in federal stimulus money.
How much the federal money has succeeded in stabilizing schools depends on the state. In those where budget deficits have been manageable, stimulus money largely replaced plunging taxpayer revenues for schools. But in Arizona, California, Georgia and a dozen other states with overwhelming deficits, the federal money has failed to prevent the most extensive school layoffs in several decades, experts said.
When Lori Smallwood welcomed her third-grade students back to school here, it was a new beginning after a searing summer in which she lost her job, agonized over bills, got rehired and, along with all school employees here, saw her salary cut.
"I'm just glad to be teaching," Ms. Smallwood said. "After the misery of losing your job, a pay cut is a piece of cake."
In the hard-hit states, the shuffling of teachers out of their previous classrooms and into new ones, often in new districts or at unfamiliar grade levels - or onto unemployment - continues to disrupt instruction at thousands of schools. Experts said that seniority and dysfunctional teacher evaluation systems were forcing many districts to trim strong teachers rather than the least effective.
And in some places, teacher layoffs have pushed up class sizes. In Arizona, which is suffering one of the nation's worst fiscal crises, some classrooms were jammed with nearly 50 students when schools reopened last month, and the norm for Los Angeles high schools this fall is 42.5 students per teacher.
"I've been in public education north of three decades, and these are the most sweeping cutbacks I've seen," said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools. "But it would have been worse without the stimulus."
Los Angeles Unified, the nation's second-largest district, sent layoff notices to 8,850 teachers, counselors and administrators last spring. Bolstered by stimulus money, it recently rehired some 6,700 of them, leaving about 2,150 demoted to substitute teaching or out of work. Hundreds of districts across California laid off a total of more than 20,000 teachers, according to the California Teachers Association.
In Michigan, the Detroit schools' emergency financial manager closed 29 schools and laid off 1,700 employees, including 1,000 teachers. Arizona school districts laid off 7,000 teachers in the spring, but stimulus money helped them rehire several thousand. Tucson Unified, for instance, laid off 560 teachers, but rehired 400.
Florida's second-largest system, Broward County Schools, laid off 400 teachers, but aided by stimulus money, rehired more than 100. In Washington State, many districts let employees go; Seattle laid off about 50 teachers.
Lauren Stokes, who taught high school English last year in North Carolina's Charlotte-Mecklenburg district, was laid off with about 650 of her colleagues. She sought other jobs, but stimulus money sent to the state helped her district hire her and many others back. One disappointment: her classroom this year is a portable trailer.
"But I'm rehired, thank goodness," said Ms. Stokes, who is 23. "I'm looking forward to trying new things out on this year's batch of students."
Catherine Vidal, a language teacher laid off in May from a high school in Moorpark, Calif., is still out of work. Fifty-nine years old, Ms. Vidal has given up her apartment and is living, for now, on a friend's boat. Teaching has become too iffy, and she will change professions, she said.
Not only school staff members are feeling the pain, of course.
"I struggled this year getting my three boys everything they needed," said Mary Lou Johnson, an unemployed office worker who went back-to-school shopping last month at a Wal-Mart in Chamblee, Ga. "Buying their backpacks, sneakers, all the stuff for their classes - it nearly cleaned me out."
In Ohio, students in the South-Western City district south of Columbus returned to schools with no sports, cheerleading or band, all cut after residents voted down a property tax increase. Stimulus money allowed the district to expand services for disabled students, but it could not save extracurricular programs, said Hugh Garside, the district's treasurer.
Driving the layoffs was a precipitous decline in tax revenues that left states with a cumulative budget shortfall of $165 billion for this fiscal year, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a research institute. About half of the 160 school superintendents from 37 states surveyed by the American Association of School Administrators said that despite receiving stimulus money, they were forced to cut teachers in core subjects. Eight out of 10 said they had cut librarians, nurses, cooks and bus drivers.
Districts unable to avoid layoffs should seek to do minimum damage by retaining outstanding teachers and culling ineffective ones, said Timothy Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit group. But most districts are simply dismissing teachers hired most recently, because union contracts or state laws protect tenured teachers in most states and because few districts have systems to accurately evaluate teacher performance, he said.
"Districts tend to make their problems worse by laying off good teachers and keeping bad ones," Mr. Daly said.
The Hall County district northeast of Atlanta, which has 35 schools, dismissed 100 of its 2,000 teachers, said William Schofield, the superintendent. John Stape, who taught high school Spanish, and his wife, Janie, who taught third grade, were among them.
Ms. Stape, 50, is still out of work. Mr. Stape, who is 65 and has a Ph.D., found a job teaching this school year, for less pay, in a rural high school southeast of Atlanta. He said that no administrator had ever observed his teaching before the day he was laid off.
"They didn't know whether I was a good teacher or not," Mr. Stape said. Mr. Schofield said the district used student achievement data and professional judgment to identify mediocre teachers for dismissal, but he acknowledged that Hall County had to cut so many teachers that strong ones were let go, too.
"We downsized about 50 pretty good folks," Mr. Schofield said. The district also trimmed salaries of all district employees by 2.4 percent. Mr. Schofield said he cut his own by 3.4 percent, bringing it to $183,000 this year, and relinquished $23,000 in bonuses.
The Hall County schools received more than $18 million in stimulus money, and without it, "those 100 layoffs could easily have gone to 150," he said.
Among the Hall County educators helped by the stimulus was Ms. Smallwood, who is 25. After she lost her job teaching kindergarten, she went to her mother's home to cry, then regained her composure and circulated her résumé. A principal eventually hired her to teach third grade.
"I feel like I'm starting over again," she said.
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20) Big U.S. Bases Are Part of Iraq, but a World Apart
By MARC SANTORA
September 9, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/world/middleeast/09bases.html?ref=world
JOINT BASE BALAD, Iraq - It takes the masseuse, Mila from Kyrgyzstan, an hour to commute to work by bus on this sprawling American base. Her massage parlor is one of three on the base's 6,300 acres and sits next to a Subway sandwich shop in a trailer, surrounded by blast walls, sand and rock.
At the Subway, workers from India and Bangladesh make sandwiches for American soldiers looking for a taste of home. When the sandwich makers' shifts end, the journey home takes them past a power plant, an ice-making plant, a sewage treatment center, a hospital and dozens of other facilities one would expect to find in a small city.
And in more than six years, that is what Americans have created here: cities in the sand.
With American troops moved out of Iraq's cities and more than 100 bases across the country continuing to close or to be turned over to Iraq, the 130,000 American troops here will increasingly fall back to these larger bases.
While some are technically called camps or bases, they are commonly referred to as forward operating bases, or F.O.B.'s. The F.O.B. is so ingrained in the language of this war that soldiers who stayed mainly on base were once derisively called Fobbits by those outside the wire. But increasingly, the encampments are the way many Americans experience the war.
To be sure, thousands of Americans are with Iraqis at small bases, where they play an advisory role, and thousands more are on the roads and highways providing the protection needed to carry out the withdrawal.
But the F.O.B. has become an iconic part of the war, both for those fighting it and for the Iraqis, who have been largely kept out of them during the war.
They are in some ways a world apart from Iraq, with working lights, proper sanitation, clean streets and strictly observed rules and codes of conduct. Some bases have populations of more than 20,000, with thousands of contractors and third-country citizens to keep them running.
But the bases are also part of the Iraqi landscape. Mortar shells still occasionally fall inside the wire, and soldiers fall asleep to the constant sounds of helicopters, controlled detonations and gunfire from firing ranges.
"It is definitely a strange place," said Capt. Brian Neese, an Air Force physician. "I've asked the Civil Affairs guy if there is anything that I can do off base, and there just isn't anything for me to do. What kills is not the difficulty of the job but the monotony."
At the height of the war, more than 300 bases were scattered across Iraq. Over the next few months, Americans hope to be at six huge bases, with 13 others being used for staging and preparing for a complete withdrawal.
The first people you encounter when driving up to an American base are not actually American. They are usually Ugandans, employed by a private security company, Triple Canopy, and those at Balad had enough authority to delay for five hours an American Air Force captain escorting an American reporter onto the base.
The Ugandans make up only one nationality of a diverse group of workers from developing nations who sustain life on the F.O.B.'s for American soldiers. The largest contingents come from the Philippines, Bangladesh and India. They live apart from both Western contractors and soldiers on base, interacting with them only as much as their jobs demand.
"Everyone stays pretty much separate," said Mila, the massage therapist, whose last name could not be used out of security concerns. She has been in Iraq a year, but she said other workers had been here as long as six years, some never taking a break to go home. "You miss nature, trees and grass," she said.
The base has two power plants, and two water treatment plants that purify 1.9 million gallons of water a day for showers and other uses. The water the soldiers drink comes from yet another plant, run by a bottling company, which provides seven million bottles of water a month for those on base.
Fifteen bus routes crisscross the complex, with 80 to 100 buses on the roads at any given moment. The Air Force officers who run the base have meetings to discuss road safety; with large, heavily armored vehicles competing for space with sedans, there are bound to be collisions.
There are two fire stations as well, and because Balad has the single busiest landing strip in the entire Defense Department, they can handle everything from an electrical fire in a trailer to a burning airplane.
The Americans also installed two sewage treatment plants, given how deeply troubled Iraq's sewage system remains.
The facilities, like much in Iraq, are run by KBR, a company based in Houston. But as Americans prepare to turn bases over to Iraqis, they are working to bring in Iraqi companies to run some facilities, a process that has been slow and complex largely because of safety concerns.
One of the few places Iraqis can be seen, in fact, is the "Iraqi Free Zone," a fenced-in area enclosed with barbed wire and blast walls. There, Iraqis sell pirated movies, discount cigarettes, electronics and Iraqi tchotchkes.
Each large base in Iraq takes on its own distinct flavor. Most large American bases were once Iraqi bases, but some, like Camp Bucca in southern Iraq near the Kuwaiti border, were created where there was only sand.
An Iraqi interpreter at Bucca who was living in Texas with his family when the war started said that when a contracting firm approached him, he asked where he would be working.
"They told me, 'You would be going to a place called Bucca,' " said the interpreter, whose name the military asked not to be printed for security reasons. "I said, 'There is no city called Bucca.' They showed me it on the map and I said, 'I am from Iraq and there is no city called Bucca.' "
It turned out that the interpreter was correct. Bucca, which would house the largest American-run prison in Iraq, was named after Ronald Bucca, a soldier with the 800th Military Police Brigade and a fire marshal in New York who was killed in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Entertainers come to American bases here, the most frequent being N.F.L. cheerleaders. When the Minnesota Vikings cheerleaders visited Bucca this spring, one could only wonder what the thousands of detainees, among them Muslim extremists for whom the flash of an ankle is cause for severe punishment, would have made of the spectacle less than a mile from their cells.
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21) The Card Game
Overspending on Debit Cards Is a Boon for Banks
By RON LIEBER and ANDREW MARTIN
September 9, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/your-money/credit-and-debit-cards/09debit.html?ref=business
When Peter Means returned to graduate school after a career as a civil servant, he turned to a debit card to help him spend his money more carefully.
So he was stunned when his bank charged him seven $34 fees to cover seven purchases when there was not enough cash in his account, notifying him only afterward. He paid $4.14 for a coffee at Starbucks - and a $34 fee. He got the $6.50 student discount at the movie theater - but no discount on the $34 fee. He paid $6.76 at Lowe's for screws - and yet another $34 fee. All told, he owed $238 in extra charges for just a day's worth of activity.
Mr. Means, who is 59 and lives in Colorado, figured employees at his bank, Wells Fargo, would show some mercy since each purchase was less than $12. In addition, a deposit from a few days earlier would have covered everything had it not taken days to clear. But they would not budge.
Banks and credit unions have long pitched debit cards as a convenient and prudent way to buy. But a growing number are now allowing consumers to exceed their balances - for a price.
Banks market it as overdraft protection, and the fees it generates have become an important source of income for the banking industry at a time of big losses in other operations. This year alone, banks are expected to bring in $27 billion by covering overdrafts on checking accounts, typically on debit card purchases or checks that exceed a customer's balance.
In fact, banks now make more covering overdrafts than they do on penalty fees from credit cards.
But because consumers use debit cards far more often than credit cards, a cascade of fees can be set off quickly, often for people who are least able to afford it. Some banks further increase their revenue by manipulating the order of a customer's transactions in a way that causes more of them to incur overdraft fees.
"Banks will let you overspend on your debit card in a way that is much, much more expensive than almost any credit card," said Eric Halperin, director of the Washington office of the Center for Responsible Lending.
Debit has essentially changed into a stealth form of credit, according to critics like him, and three quarters of the nation's largest banks, except for a few like Citigroup and INGDirect, automatically cover debit and A.T.M. overdrafts.
Although regulators have warned of abuses since at least 2001, they have done little to curb the explosive growth of overdraft fees. But as a consumer outcry grows, the practice is under attack, and regulators plan to introduce new protections before year's end. The proposals do not seek to ban overdraft fees altogether. Rather, regulators and lawmakers say they hope to curb abuses and make the fees more fair.
The Federal Reserve is considering requiring banks to get permission from consumers before enrolling them in overdraft programs, so that consumers like Mr. Means are not caught unaware at the cash register.
Representative Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York, would go even further by requiring warnings when a debit card purchase will overdraw an account and by barring banks from running the most expensive purchases through accounts first.
The proposals carry considerable momentum given the popularity of credit card legislation signed into law in May. They also have a certain inevitable logic, since the credit card legislation requires a similar "opt in" decision from consumers who want to spend more than their credit limits and pay the corresponding over-the-limit fees. Overdrafts are simply the reverse, where the limit is zero, and the bank charges a fee for going under it.
But with so much at stake, the banking industry is intent on holding its ground.
Bankers say they are merely charging a fee for a convenience that protects consumers from embarrassment, like having a debit card rejected on a dinner date. Ultimately, they add, consumers have responsibility for their own finances.
"Everyone should know how much they have in their account and manage their funds well to avoid those fees," said Scott Talbott, chief lobbyist at the Financial Services Roundtable, an advocacy group for large financial institutions.
Some experts warn that a sharp reduction in overdraft fees could put weakened financial institutions out of business.
Michael Moebs, an economist who advises banks and credit unions, said Ms. Maloney's legislation would effectively kill overdraft services, causing an estimated 1,000 banks and 2,000 credit unions to fold within two years. That is because 45 percent of the nation's banks and credit unions collect more from overdraft services than they make in profits, he said.
"Will they be able to replace it with another fee?" Mr. Moebs said. "Not immediately and not soon enough."
They will certainly try. For instance, some banks have said they might slap a monthly fee of between $10 to $20 on every free checking account. At the moment, people who pay overdraft fees help subsidize the free accounts of those who do not.
Banks may also have to answer a question that many consumers ask and that Ms. Maloney has raised in her proposal: Why can't banks simply alert a consumer at the cash register if they are about to spend more than they have in their account, and allow them to say right then and there whether they want to pay a fee to continue?
The banking industry says that simply is not possible without new equipment and software, costs that would be borne by consumers.
"If you think about when you swipe your card at, let's say, Starbucks or at the Safeway or the Giant, there is no real sort of interaction there," said Mr. Talbott. "It's just approved or disapproved. So how logically would that work? Would a screen come up? Would someone at the bank call the checkout clerk and say, 'That customer is overdrawn?' Logistically that would be very difficult to implement."
No one could have imagined this controversy decades ago, when the A.T.M. card was born. Back then, it was simple: when money ran out, the card was usually rejected by the banks.
But then A.T.M. cards started acquiring Visa or MasterCard logos, allowing users to "debit" their bank accounts for purchases. A thorny issue soon sprang up. What if there wasn't enough money in a cardholder's account to cover a purchase?
For years, banks had covered good customers who bounced occasional checks, and for a while they did so with debit cards, too. William H. Strunk, a banking consultant, devised a program in 1994 that would let banks and credit unions provide overdraft coverage for every customer - and charge consumers for each transgression.
"You are doing them a favor here," said Mr. Strunk, adding that overdraft services saved consumers from paying merchant fees on bounced checks.
Some institutions do not see it that way, and either do not offer overdraft services or allow their clients to decline the service. "We've never subscribed to the notion that individuals who overdraw or attempt to should be allowed to do so without the opportunity to opt in," said Gary J. Perez, the president and chief executive of the University of Southern California Credit Union.
A Source of Easy Money
But many of the nation's banks have found that overdraft fees are easy money. According to a 2008 F.D.I.C. study, 41 percent of United States banks have automated overdraft programs; among large banks, the figure was 77 percent. Banks now cover two overdrafts for every one they reject.
In all, $27 billion in fee income flows from covering overdrafts from debit card purchases, A.T.M. transactions, checks and automatic payments for bills like utilities; an additional $11.5 billion arrives from bounced checks and other instances in which banks refuse to pay overdrafts, Mr. Moebs said.
By contrast, penalty fees from credit cards will add up to about $20.5 billion this year, according to R. K. Hammer, a consultant to the credit card industry. For instance, customers incur penalties for paying their bills late or by spending beyond the credit limit the bank has set for them. Banks also make billions in interest from credit cards.
Most of the overdraft fees are drawn from a small pool of consumers. Ninety-three percent of all overdraft charges come from 14 percent of bank customers who exceeded their balances five times or more in a year, the F.D.I.C. found in its survey. Recurrent overdrafts are also more common among lower-income consumers, the study said.
Advocacy groups say banks are making a fortune because consumers are unaware of the exorbitant costs of overdraft services. And banks, they argue, have an incentive to keep it that way.
That is what Mr. Means found when he approached his Wells Fargo branch in Fort Collins, Colo., to redress the $238 in fees he was billed. An employee explained that her ability to waive fees had been revoked by the bank because she had refunded fees for too many customers, Mr. Means said she told him.
Rory Foster, a former branch manager in Illinois, said that Wells Fargo based its compensation for managers in part on overall branch profitability. Fee income, including that from overdrafts, is part of the calculation.
A spokeswoman for Wells Fargo, Richele J. Messick, said the bank did not tie branch manager pay directly to fee collection.
'I Can't Afford That'
Yet fees, and how they are generated, remain a mystery to many consumers. Because regulators do not treat overdraft charges as loans, banks do not have to disclose their annualized cost to consumers.
And often, the price is enormous. According to the F.D.I.C. study, a $27 overdraft fee that a customer repays in two weeks on a $20 debit purchase would incur an annual percentage rate of 3,520 percent. By contrast, penalty interest rates on credit cards generally run about 30 percent.
"People would be shocked at how brutally high those fees are relative to the costs of a credit card," said Edmund Mierzwinski, the consumer program director for the United States Public Interest Research Group.
Ruth Holton-Hodson discovered that the hard way. She keeps close tabs on the welfare of her brother, who lives in a halfway house in Maryland and uses what little he has in his account at Bank of America to pay rent and buy an occasional pack of cigarettes or a sandwich.
When the brother, who has a mental illness that she says requires her to assist with his finances, started falling behind on rent, Ms. Holton-Hodson found he had racked up more than $300 in debit card overdraft fees in three months, including a $35 one for exceeding his balance by 79 cents.
Ms. Holton-Hodson said she spent two years asking bank employees if her brother could get a card that would not allow him to spend more than he had. Though Bank of America does not typically allow customers to opt out of overdraft protection, it finally granted an exemption.
"I've been angered and outraged for many years," she said. "When there is no money in his account, he shouldn't be able to pay."
Anne Pace, a spokeswoman for Bank of America, said the case was "complicated issue without any simple solutions," but declined to elaborate, citing privacy concerns. She added the bank allowed customers to opt out of overdraft services on a "case-by-case basis."
And when a consumer does overdraw an account, banks have found a way to multiply the fees they collect by rearranging the sequence of transactions, critics say.
Ralph Tornes, who lives in Florida, is pursuing a lawsuit against Bank of America for charging him nearly $500 in overdraft fees in 2008 after it rearranged his purchases from largest to smallest. In May 2008, for instance, Mr. Tornes had $195 in his account when he made two debit purchases for $8 and $13; the bank also processed a bill payment of $256.
He claims that Bank of America took his purchases out of chronological order and ran the biggest one through first. So instead of paying $35 for one overdraft fee, he was stuck with three, for a total of $105.
Mr. Talbott, of the Financial Services Roundtable, said some banks reordered purchases based on surveys showing that consumers want their most vital bills, like rent and car payments, which tend to be for larger amounts, paid before items like a $3 coffee.
Consumers who have been slapped with large fees as a result of this practice have a different perspective. "There is no reason they should get the little guy because he's only got a few bucks in his account," said Ryan Pena, 24, a recent college graduate who has filed suit against Wachovia, now part of Wells Fargo, for what he says are abusive practices, including reordering his purchases. "I can't afford that."
Officials at Bank of America and Wachovia declined to talk about specific complaints, but echoed Mr. Talbott's remarks on processing payments.
The Debate in Washington
These lawsuits open a window onto the questions that government officials and banks are now trying to answer. Do consumers actually want overdraft service? Can they use it responsibly? If so, what is the best way to deliver it?
Federal regulators have acknowledged problems with overdraft fees since at least 2001 but have done little aside from improving disclosure and issue voluntary guidelines they hoped the industry would follow. That year, Daniel P. Stipano, deputy chief counsel for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, wrote that a company that markets overdraft programs to banks showed a "complete lack of consumer safeguards."
In 2005, after intense industry pressure, the Federal Reserve ruled that overdraft charges should not be covered by the Truth in Lending Act. That meant bankers did not have to seek consumers' permission to sign them up, nor did they have to disclose the equivalent interest rate for the fees.
That same year, the Federal Reserve said that some banks had "adopted marketing practices that appear to encourage consumers to overdraw their accounts." It issued a list of "best practices" that asked banks to more clearly disclose overdraft fees, let customers opt out of overdraft programs and provide an alert when a purchase occurs that would put the account below zero. But critics said the recommendations had no teeth.
"No regulator has made any of their bank examiners adhere to best practices," said Mr. Halperin, of the Center for Responsible Lending. "The result is over that time period consumers have paid probably upwards of $80 billion in overdraft fees while the Federal Reserve considers and considers and considers whether or not they are going to do anything."
Officials at the Federal Reserve dispute that they have not taken sufficient action on overdraft fees, noting that they imposed tougher disclosure requirements in 2004 and are now considering additional regulations to address abusive practices. They will disclose their intent before the end of the year.
What no one disputes is that the stakes in the coming battle on overdraft fees are enormous. Ms. Maloney said she did not push her overdraft legislation this spring because the uproar from the banking industry could have jeopardized the credit card bill.
"It was very important to provide more tools to consumers to better manage their credit cards," she said. "And now I think they deserve the same treatment with debit cards."
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