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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Table of Contents:
A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
C. ARTICLES IN FULL
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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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ANSWER Statement on Proposed SF Parking Meter Hours
The ANSWER Coalition-SF Bay Area strongly opposes the proposal to extend parking meter hours in San Francisco. The SFMTA, the Metropolitan Transit Agency, is proposing to have parking meters in most of SF run until midnight Monday-Saturday, and from 11 am-6 pm on Sundays!
This is another attempt by the politicians to solve the city's budget crisis by squeezing every last dollar they can out of working people. They have outrageously jacked up MUNI fares, other city fees and parking fines. At the same time they have let the big banks, developers and other wealthy corporate interests-the ones who have created the current economic and budget crisis-off the hook.
The DPT (Department of Parking and Traffic) has already begun a policy of "enhanced enforcement," super-aggressively ticketing vehicles from 9:01 am to 5:59 pm, Monday-Saturday. Every day in every working class neighborhood of SF you can see the booted cars and trucks. On top of the $53, $63 and higher parking tickets, it costs over $200 just to get a boot removed! If your car gets towed, you have to pay $400 or more to get it back. This is causing many low-income people to lose their vehicles.
City officials are trying to mislead people by falsely claiming that the reason for extending meter hours is to collect more quarters and "open up more parking spaces." What they really want is to hit us with thousands more high-priced tickets, and then collect the ransom for booted and towed cars.
This is a class issue. The rich and the well-to-do don't have to worry about where to park in this small and crowded city. They have garages or can afford to pay for parking. It is overwhelmingly working class people who are being hit and who will be hit much, much harder if the new policy goes into effect. Many residents in neighborhoods with meters have no choice but to park at meters after 6 pm and move their vehicles before 9 am the next morning. There just aren't enough spaces otherwise.
As Cristina Gutierrez of Barrio Unido, an immigrant rights group opposed to the plan, asked: "What are we supposed to do, run out of our homes every hour at night to feed the meter?"
But the MTA board and some misguided individuals are trying to pose the issue as MUNI riders vs. car drivers. Some have even ignorantly asserted that if you own a car, you can't possibly be poor. Really? Tell that to the growing number of people forced to LIVE in their cars due to the depression!
The reality is that many people in SF both ride MUNI and own cars (some ride bikes, too). For a lot of people getting to work, shopping, medical appointments, etc. requires a car. That's especially true for families and for people whose jobs are outside SF or not easily accessible by mass transit. Posing the issue as bus riders vs. car riders is false and reactionary.
Does MUNI need more funding? Of course. Should MUNI fares be cut and service increased? No question about it. The issue is: Who should pay?
While taxes, fees, fines, fares, etc., etc, have been constantly increased for us, the taxes on corporate profits have been going down. Many big banks and corporations have been able to avoid paying income tax altogether. While we're told that there's no money for people's needs, $500,000,000 is spent every day on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trillions of dollars have been handed over to the biggest banks in just the last year.
It's time to say: Enough is Enough! It's time for the politicians to stop trying to make working people pay for the economic crisis that the rich created. It's time to make those who can afford it-big business-pay for the services that the people of the city, state and country need.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
Act Now to Stop War & End Racism
http://www.ANSWERcoalition.org http://www.answersf.org
answer@answersf.org
2489 Mission St. Rm. 24
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
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Marjorie Cohn, Rebecca Solnit & Aimee Allison
SUNDAY, Oct 25, Oakalnd - Benefit to support GI resistance
Book release benefit to support Courage to Resist and GI resistance!
Sunday, October 25 from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm
First Congregational Church
2501 Harrison St, Oakland, California
(across from the new Whole Foods near Lake Merritt)
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=750
Featuring:
Marjorie Cohn, President of the National Lawyers Guild
Professor of Law at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, San Diego
Rebecca Solnit, award-winning author
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster
Aimee Allison, KPFA Morning Show host
Marjorie Cohn is president of the National Lawyers Guild and a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, where she teaches criminal law and procedure, evidence, and international human rights law. She is author of "Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law" that "makes the case for prosecuting Bush officials with exquisite legal detail in straightforward, everyman language" (William Fisher review). Along with Kathleen Gilberd, Prof. Cohn has just published "Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent" which "takes the side of US service members who didn't check their conscience-and their sense of honor-at the door when they signed up" (Truthout review).
Rebecca Solnit is an award winning author/writer/essayist. Her new on disaster and civil society "A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster" is now available. Ms. Solnit has won an NEA Fellowship for Literature, the 2004 Wired Rave Award for writing, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Aimee Allison is an is an author, public affairs TV host, and counter-recruitment leader. Since 2007, she has been a co-host of The Morning Show on Pacifica station KPFA. Aimee, an Army medic at the time, was discharged as a Conscientious Objector during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
This event is a benefit for Courage to Resist in support of military war resisters. Endorsed and supported by the National Lawyers Guild SF Bay Area Military Law Task Force, Veterans for Peace SF Bay Area Chapter, Iraq Veterans Against the War - SF Bay Area, BAY-Peace, Asian Americans for Peace and Justice, American Friends Service Committee - SF, CodePink, War Resisters League-West, United for Peace and Justice - SF Bay Area, and National Lawyers Guild SF Bay Area Chapter.
Free event, $5 donation suggested. $20 donation to include the new book "Rules of Disengagement". Wheelchair accessible. Book signing will be held. For more information, contact 510-488-3559.
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The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal urges you to attend a public meeting
JAIL KILLER COPS!
FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL!
Justice for Oscar Grant!
Drop All Charges Against JR Valrey!
End the Racist Death Penalty!
For Labor Action To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!
Wednesday, 28 October 2009, 7 PM
Niebyl Proctor Marxist Library
6501 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley CA
VIDEO: OPERATION SMALL AXE, narrated by JR Valrey, a short film that shows "the occupation of Black and Brown neighborhoods by a militarized local law enforcement apparatus that parallels, in many ways, the current experiences of neighborhoods of color in post-apartheid South Africa and of Palestinians on their own occupied land." -- Cynthia McKinney
SPEAKERS: JR Valrey - Minister of Information for the Prisoners of Conscience Committee (POCC), host of Block Report Radio, a producer at KPFA and associate editor of the SF Bay View,
Gerald Sanders - Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal,
Jack Bryson - father of two friends of Oscar Grant, who were with him on the BART platform the night he was murdered, and
Richard Brown - former SF 8 defendant.
JR VALREY was arrested and had his camera confiscated by the Oakland Police on the night of January 7th, 2009, for covering the street uprising following the murder of Oscar Grant. He was charged with felony arson! JR has consistently covered police brutality and terrorism. It is clear that the police are continuing to use all means at their disposal to stifle criticism of their repressive actions.
The BART cop who put a bullet in the back of the young Oscar Grant--while he was face down on the station platform--is Johannes Mehserle. With 45 police killings in Oakland in the past 5 years, Mehserle is the only cop to be charged with murder while on duty. But the cops are pulling out all the stops to avoid a conviction. Mehserle's lawyer put on a starkly racist argument for a change of venue, which succeeded recently in getting the cop's trial moved out of the city.
The next hearing date for JR Valrey is October 30th. Come out to show your opposition to this vindictive police prosecution! 9 AM, at Superior Court,1225 Fallon St, Oakland.
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, an innocent man on death for 27 years now and also a journalist, faces renewed danger of execution. Mumia's appeals have been exhausted, and the Supreme Court will rule soon on the petition by the State of Pennsylvania, We must remain vigilant, and organize to free him!
-- The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222 Oakland CA 94610
INFO: 510 763-2347
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There will be a follow-up October 17 Coalition meeting:
Sunday, November 1, 2:00 P.M.
Unitarian Church (Fireside Room)
1187 Franklin at Geary, SF (wheelchair accessible).
www.oct17awc.wordpress.com
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Black is Back Coalition Rally and March: Stop
U.S. Occupation and War inside U.S. and Abroad!
Saturday, November 7 beginning at 10 am, Malcolm X Park, Washington DC
Washington, D.C. - A newly-formed Black coalition has announced a Rally and March on the White House to take place November 7, 2009 beginning in Washington, D.C.'s historic Malcolm X Park. The Rally and March are to protest the expanding U.S. wars and other policy initiatives that unfairly target African and other oppressed people around the world. Known as the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations, the coalition formed on September 12, 2009 during a meeting in Washington, D.C. of more than fifteen activists from various Black organizations, institutions and communities.
http://blackisbackcoalition.org/
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A DAY OF ACTION FOR MUMIA ABU-JAMAL & MUSLIM POLITICAL PRISONERS
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2009
WASHINGTON, DC
Special Note:
This mobilization replaces the one that The Peace And Justice Foundation and FUJA had initially planned for Nov 23rd.
The November 12 mobilization will include a press conference at the National Press Club, and a demonstration at the U.S. Department of Justice. This will be a joint mobilization effort involving The Peace And Justice Foundation, Families United for Justice in America (FUJA), and some deeply committed grassroots folk connected to International Friends and Family of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Volunteers are needed in the DC Metro area. To volunteer call (301) 762-9162 or e-mail: peacethrujustice@aol.com
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U.S. OUT OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN NOW!
FREE PALESTINE!
San Francisco March and Rally
on Saturday, March 20, 2010
11am, Civic Center Plaza
National March on Washington
on Saturday, March 20, 2010
Fri., March 19 Day of Action & Outreach in D.C.
People from all over the country are organizing to converge on Washington, D.C., to demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan and Iraq.
On Saturday, March 20, 2010, there will be a massive National March & Rally in D.C. A day of action and outreach in Washington, D.C., will take place on Friday, March 19, preceding the Saturday march.
There will be coinciding mass marches on March 20 in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
The national actions are initiated by a large number of organizations and prominent individuals. (see below)
Click here to become an endorser:
http://answer.pephost.org/site/Survey?SURVEY_ID=5940&ACTION_REQUIRED=URI_ACTION_USER_REQUESTS&autologin=true&link=endorse-body-1
Click here to make a donation:
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Donation?ACTION=SHOW_DONATION_OPTIONS&CAMPAIGN_ID=2302&autologin=true&donate=body-1&JServSessionIdr002=2yzk5fh8x2.app13b
We will march together to say "No Colonial-type Wars and Occupations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine!" We will march together to say "No War Against Iran!" We will march together to say "No War for Empire Anywhere!"
Instead of war, we will demand funds so that every person can have a job, free and universal health care, decent schools, and affordable housing.
March 20 is the seventh anniversary of the criminal war of aggression launched by Bush and Cheney against Iraq. One million or more Iraqis have died. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops have lost their lives or been maimed, and continue to suffer a whole host of enduring problems from this terrible war.
This is the time for united action. The slogans on banners may differ, but all those who carry them should be marching shoulder to shoulder.
Killing and dying to avoid the perception of defeat
Bush is gone, but the war and occupation in Iraq still go on. The Pentagon is demanding a widening of the war in Afghanistan. They project an endless war with shifting battlefields. And a "single-payer" war budget that only grows larger and larger each year. We must act.
Both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were predicated on the imperial fantasy that the U.S. could create stable, proxy colonial-type governments in both countries. They were to serve as an extension of "American" power in these strategic and resource-rich regions.
That fantasy has been destroyed. Now U.S. troops are being sent to kill or be killed so that the politicians in uniform ("the generals and admirals") and those in three-piece suits ("our elected officials") can avoid taking responsibility for a military setback in wars that should have never been started. Their military ambitions are now reduced to avoiding the appearance of defeat.
That is exactly what happened in Vietnam! Avoiding defeat, or the perception of defeat, was the goal Nixon and Kissinger set for themselves when they took office in 1969. For this noble cause, another 30,000 young GIs perished before the inevitable troop pullout from Vietnam in 1973. The number of Vietnamese killed between 1969 and 1973 was greater by many hundreds of thousands.
All of us can make the difference - progress and change comes from the streets and from the grassroots.
The people went to the polls in 2008, and the enthusiasm and desire for change after eight years of the Bush regime was the dominant cause that led to election of a big Democratic Party majority in both Houses of Congress and the election of Barack Obama to the White House.
But it should now be obvious to all that waiting for politicians to bring real change - on any front - is simply a prescription for passivity by progressives and an invitation to the array of corporate interests from military contractors to the banks, to big oil, to the health insurance giants that dominate the political life of the country. These corporate interests work around the clock to frustrate efforts for real change, and they are the guiding hand behind the recent street mobilizations of the ultra-right.
It is up to us to act. If people had waited for politicians to do the right thing, there would have never been a Civil Rights Act, or unions, women's rights, an end to the Vietnam war or any of the profound social achievements and basic rights that people cherish.
It is time to be back in the streets. Organizing centers are being set up in cities and towns throughout the country.
We must raise $50,000 immediately just to get started. Please make your contribution today. We need to reserve buses, which are expensive ($1,800 from NYC, $5,000 from Chicago, etc.). We have to print 100,000 leaflets, posters and stickers. There will be other substantial expenses as March 20 draws closer.
Please become an endorser and active supporter of the March 20 National March on Washington.
Please make an urgently needed tax-deductible donation today. We can't do this without your active support.
The initiators of the March 20 National March on Washington (preceded by the March 19 Day of Action and Outreach in D.C.) include: the ANSWER Coalition; Muslim American Society Freedom; National Council of Arab Americans; Cynthia McKinney; Malik Rahim, co-founder of Common Ground Collective; Ramsey Clark; Cindy Sheehan; Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK; Deborah Sweet, Director, World Can't Wait; Mike Ferner, President, Veterans for Peace; Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition; Heidi Boghosian, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild; Ron Kovic, author of "Born on the 4th of July"; Juan Jose Gutierrez, Director, Latino Movement USA; Col. Ann Wright (ret.); March Forward!; Partnership for Civil Justice; Palestinian American Women Association; Alliance for a Just and Lasting Peace in the Philippines; Alliance for Global Justice; Claudia de la Cruz, Pastor, Iglesia San Romero de Las Americas-UCC; Phil Portluck, Social Justice Ministry, Covenant Baptist Church, D.C.; Blase & Theresa Bonpane, Office of the Americas; Coalition for Peace and Democracy in Honduras; Comite Pro-Democracia en Mexico; Frente Unido de los Pueblos Americanos; Comites de Base FMLN, Los Angeles; Free Palestine Alliance; GABRIELA Network; Justice for Filipino American Veterans; KmB Pro-People Youth; Students Fight Back; Jim Lafferty, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild - LA Chapter; LEF Foundation; National Coalition to Free the Angola 3; Community Futures Collective; Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival; Companeros del Barrio; Barrio Unido for Full and Unconditional Amnesty, Bay Area United Against War.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.answercoalition.org/
info@internationalanswer.org
National Office in Washington DC: 202-265-1948
New York City: 212-694-8720
Los Angeles: 213-251-1025
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
Chicago: 773-463-0311
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B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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Oakland's Judge Jacobson ruled at 4:00PM Friday, October 16 to move the trial of Johannes Mehserle, killer of unarmed Oscar Grant, OUT OF OAKLAND. The location of the trial venue has not been announced.
In the case of an innocent verdict, folks are encouraged to head to Oakland City Hall ASAP to express our outrage in a massive and peaceful way! Our power is in our numbers! Oscar Grant's family and friends need our support!
For more information:
Contact BAMN at 510-502-9072
letters@bamn.com
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Cleve Jones Speaks At Gay Rights Rally In Washington, DC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvC3hVXZpc4
Free the SF8: Drop the Charges!
by Bill Carpenter ( wcarpent [at] ccsf.edu )
Monday Oct 12th, 2009 11:20 AM
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/10/12/18625220.php
Sony Piece of crap (Hilarious!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I-JByPDJm0
Sick For Profit
http://sickforprofit.com/videos/
Fault Lines: Despair & Revival in Detroit - 14 May 09 - Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ7VL907Qb0&feature=related
VIDEO INTERVIEW: Dan Berger on Political Prisoners in the United States
By Angola 3 News
Angola 3 News
37 years ago in Louisiana, 3 young black men were silenced for trying to expose continued segregation, systematic corruption, and horrific abuse in the biggest prison in the US, an 18,000-acre former slave plantation called Angola. In 1972 and 1973 prison officials charged Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox, and Robert King with murders they did not commit and threw them into 6x9 ft. cells in solitary confinement, for over 36 years. Robert was freed in 2001, but Herman and Albert remain behind bars.
http://angola3news.blogspot.com/2009/09/video-dan-berger-on-political-prisoners.html
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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JROTC MUST GO!
The San Francisco Board of Education has re-installed the Junior Reserve Officer's Training Corps in San Francisco schools -- including allowing it to count for Physical Education credits.
This is a complete reversal of the 2006 decision to end JROTC altogether in San Francisco public schools. Our children need a good physical education program, not a death education program!
With the economy in crisis; jobs and higher education for youth more unattainable; the lure, lies and false promises of military recruiters is driving more and more of our children into the military trap.
This is an economic draft and the San Francisco Board of Education is helping to snare our children to provide cannon fodder for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and for over 700 U.S. military bases around the world!
We can't depend upon "friendly politicians" who, while they are campaigning for office claim they are against the wars but when they get elected vote in favor of military recruitment--the economic draft--in our schools. We can't depend upon them. That has been proven beyond doubt!
It is up to all of us to come together to stop this NOW!
GET JROTC AND ALL MILITARY RECRUITERS OUT OF OUR SCHOOLS NOW!
Write, call, pester and ORGANIZE against the re-institution of JROTC in our San Francisco public schools NOW!
In solidarity,
Bonnie Weinstein
Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
San Francisco Board of Education
555 Franklin Street, 1st Floor
San Francisco, CA 94102
415/241-6427, (415) 241-6493
cascoe@sfusd.edu
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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) Amid Ruin of Flint, Seeing Hope in a Garden
By DAN BARRY
October 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/us/19land.html?ref=us
2) 'Good Without God,' Atheist Subway Ads Proclaim
By Jennifer 8. Lee
October 19, 2009 , 11:45 am
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/good-without-god-atheist-subway-ads-proclaim/
3) Arts Education and Graduation Rates
Compiled by RACHEL LEE HARRIS
Arts, Briefly
October 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/arts/19arts-ARTSEDUCATIO_BRF.html?ref=nyregion
4) Energy Star Appliances May Not All Be Efficient, Audit Finds
By MATTHEW L. WALD
October 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/business/energy-environment/19star.html?ref=business
5) A Limited, Modified Pullout From Afghanistan: Et Tu, CodePink?
By Sharon Smith
October 20, 2009
http://www.counterpunch.org/
6) Safety Nets for the Rich
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
October 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/opinion/20herbert.html
7) College Costs Keep Rising, Report Says
By TAMAR LEWIN
October 21, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/education/21costs.html?ref=education
8) New Shockwaves From Courts and Accounting Board
The Next Financial Crisis Hits Wall Street,
as Judges Start Nixing Foreclosures
By PAM MARTENS
October 21, 2009
http://www.counterpunch.com/martens10212009.html
9) Major U.S.-Israel defense drill to highlight military alliance
By The Associated Press
Last update - 23:09 20/10/2009
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1122465.html
Statement by the US Palestine Communities Network demanding an end to US training of Palestine Authority contras who are acting on behalf of Israel to repress Palestinian dissent:
http://palestineconference.org/dayton-statement.shtml
"US-Israel air drills to prompt road closures":
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=233605
10) Army Prisoners Isolated, Denied Right to Legal Counsel
By Dahr Jamail
September 28, 2009
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/army-prisoners-isolated-denied-right-to-legal-counsel
11) San Francisco Alters When Police Must Report Immigrants
By JESSE McKINLEY
October 21, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/us/21sanctuary.html?ref=us
12) When the Assembly Expelled Socialists for Disloyalty
By Nicholas Confessore
October 21, 2009
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/when-the-assembly-expelled-socialists-for-disloyalty/?scp=1&sq=When%20the%20Assembly%20Expelled%20Socialists%20for%20Disloyalty&st=cse
13) U.S. to Order Steep Pay Cuts at Firms That Got Most Aid
"The administration will also warn A.I.G. that it must fulfill a commitment it made to significantly reduce the $198 million in bonuses promised to employees in the financial products division."
By STEPHEN LABATON
October 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/business/22pay.html?ref=business
14) Experts Worry as Population and Hunger Grow
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
October 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/world/22food.html?hpw
15) $13 an Hour? 500 Sign Up, 1 Wins a Job
By MICHAEL LUO
October 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/us/22hire.html?ref=us
16) Texas: Two Inmates Exonerated
By RACHEL MARCUS
National Briefing | Southwest
October 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/us/22brfs-TWOINMATESEX_BRF.html?ref=us
17) New Jobless Claims Rise Higher Than Expected
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
October 23, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/business/economy/23econ.html?ref=business
18) Michigan Again Reports Highest Jobless Rate
By REUTERS
October 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/business/economy/22jobless.html?ref=business
19) NATO Defense Ministers Endorse Wider Afghan Effort
By THOM SHANKER
October 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/world/europe/24nato.html?ref=world
20) Economic Adviser Predicts 10% Jobless Rate
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
October 23, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/business/23outlook.html?ref=us
21) Bank failures top 100,
only part of industry woes
By DANIEL WAGNER, AP Business Writer
October 24, 2009
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091024/ap_on_bi_ge/us_bank_failures
22) Arizona May Put State Prisons in Private Hands
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
October 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/us/24prison.html?hp
23) Carefully Cleaning Up the Garbage at Los Alamos
By MICHAEL COOPER
October 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/us/24alamos.html?ref=us
24) Hawaii: Protesting School Closings
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | West
October 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/us/24brfs-PROTESTINGSC_BRF.html?ref=us
25) Food Label Program to Suspend Operations
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
October 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/business/24food.html?ref=business
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1) Amid Ruin of Flint, Seeing Hope in a Garden
By DAN BARRY
October 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/us/19land.html?ref=us
FLINT, Mich.
On one side of the fertile lot stands an abandoned house, stripped long ago for scrap. On the other side, another abandoned house, windows boarded, structure sagging. And diagonally across the street, two more abandoned houses, including one blackened by a fire maybe a year ago, maybe two.
But on this lot, surrounded by desertion in the north end of Flint, the toughest city in America, collard greens sprout in verdant surprise. Although the broccoli and turnips and snap peas have been picked, it is best to wait until deep autumn for the greens, says the garden's keeper, Harry Ryan. The frost lends sweetness to the leaves.
His is not just another tiny community garden growing from a gap in the urban asphalt. This one lot is really 10 contiguous lots where a row of houses once stood. On this spot, the house burned down. ("I was the one who called the fire department.") On that spot, the house was lost to back taxes. ("An older guy; he was trying to fix it up, and he was struggling.")
Garbage and chest-high overgrowth filled the domestic void of these lots on East Piper Avenue until four years ago, when Mr. Ryan decided one day: no. After receiving the proper permission, he began clearing the land.
Rose Barber, 56, a neighbor who keeps a 30-inch Louisville Slugger, a Ryne Sandberg model, by her front door, offered her help. Then came Andre Jones, 40, another neighbor, using his shovel to do the backbreaking work of uncovering long stretches of sidewalk, which had disappeared under inches of soil, weeds and municipal neglect.
East Piper Avenue now has its sidewalk back, along with a vegetable garden, a grassy expanse where a children's playground will be built, and, close to one of those abutting abandoned houses, a mix-and-match orchard of 18 young fruit trees.
"This is a Golden Delicious tree," Mr. Ryan says, reading the tags on the saplings. "This is a Warren pear. That's a McIntosh. This is a Mongolian cherry tree. ..."
In many ways, this garden on East Piper Avenue reflects all of Flint, a city working hard to re-invent itself, a city so weary of serving as the country's default example of post-industrial decline. Nearly every day its visitors' bureau sends out a "Changing Perceptions of Flint" e-mail message that includes a call to defend the city's honor:
"If a blogger is bashing Flint and Genesee County, go post a positive message. If there is an article about the depressed economy in Flint, go post something uplifting."
But uplifting and depressing both describe Flint, where encouraging development grows beside wholesale abandonment. You can visit one of the first-class museums (at the moment, the Flint Institute of Arts has a music-enhanced exhibit of rock 'n' roll posters), then drive past rows of vacant, vandalized houses that convey a Hurricane Katrina despair - though Flint's hurricane came in the form of the automobile industry's collapse.
No question: Downtown Flint, about five miles from Mr. Ryan's garden, suddenly feels vital. A large civil engineering firm has built an office there, and the headquarters of a second large firm is about to open. New dormitory rooms at the University of Michigan-Flint are full. New restaurants have popped up, including an Irish pub in a long-closed men's clothing store. An old flophouse is now a smart apartment complex. The majestic Durant Hotel, vacant for 35 years, is being transformed into apartments for students and young professionals.
And just last week, General Motors announced a $230 million investment in four local factories as part of its plan to build a new generation of fuel-efficient cars.
But Dayne Walling, the recently elected mayor, says these developments, while exciting, tell but one side of the city's story. The other side: a steep decline in the tax base, an unemployment rate hovering around 25 percent, rising health care and pension costs, drastic cutbacks in municipal services, a legacy of fiscal mismanagement - and, of course, the loss of some 70,000 jobs at General Motors, the industry that defined Flint for nearly a century.
The job loss, compounded by the recession, has led to an astonishing plunge in the city's population - to about 110,000, and falling, from roughly 200,000 in 1960. Thousands of abandoned houses now haunt the 34-square-mile city; one in four houses is said to be vacant.
As a result, Flint finds itself the centerpiece of a national debate about so-called shrinking cities, in which mostly abandoned neighborhoods might become green space, and their residents would be encouraged to live closer to a downtown core.
The matter is being pressed here by the Genesee County Land Bank, which acquires foreclosed properties and works with communities to restore or demolish them. It has been sponsoring a series of forums titled "Strengthening Our Community in the Face of Population Decline."
Mayor Walling, though, prefers to talk about sustainable cities, rather than shrinking cities. He imagines the Flint of 2020 as a city of 100,000, with a vibrant downtown surrounded by greener neighborhoods, in which residents have doubled their lot sizes by acquiring adjacent land where houses once stood.
"We're down, but we're not out," he says. "And that's a classic American story."
Part of that classic story is up in the north end, on East Piper Avenue, where some people are trying to make use of one of the few abundant resources in Flint: land.
Harry Ryan, 59, the child of auto workers, traveled for years as a rhythm and blues musician before returning to follow his parents into the auto plants. He got laid off, found other employment, and is now retired, with gray in his moustache and a stoop to his walk.
In 2005 he went to the land bank - he is on its advisory board - and received permission to plant a garden on a lot it owns a few yards from the broken side window of an abandoned house. He and some neighbors cleaned brush, removed the remnant pieces of concrete of demolished houses, and planted hardy turnips and greens.
But the garden could not contain their growing sense of pride in their community. Soon they were mowing front lawns all along East Piper Avenue - for free, and without seeking permission. "We just cut everybody's property, even if they were sitting on the porch," he says. "Sometimes they wouldn't say anything, and that would get us mad."
That first year, Mr. Ryan and Ms. Barber, who works nights at the post office, bagged up the greens and gave them away, often by just leaving a bag at the door of someone they suspected could use the food but was too proud to ask for it. But they also ate some of what they harvested; Mr. Ryan still savors that first batch of collard greens he had with some smoked turkey.
Today, the ever-expanding garden continues to feed people. Front lawns are still mowed, though now by neighborhood children paid through a county grant. Ms. Barber still works in the garden, and Mr. Jones has expanded his sidewalk mission to the cross street of Verdun, where he has cleared a path past the shell of a house lost to arson.
When asked why he does the work, he just says, "It needs to be done."
As for Mr. Ryan, he is working on a plan to build a power-generating windmill in the garden on East Piper Avenue in the great Michigan city of Flint. That's right: a windmill.
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2) 'Good Without God,' Atheist Subway Ads Proclaim
By Jennifer 8. Lee
October 19, 2009 , 11:45 am
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/good-without-god-atheist-subway-ads-proclaim/
Atheism is coming to the subway - or at least subway ads promoting it are.
Starting next Monday, a coalition of local groups will run a monthlong advertising campaign in a dozen Manhattan subway stations with the slogan "A Million New Yorkers Are Good Without God. Are You?" The posters also advertise the Web site BigAppleCoR.org, which provides a listing of local groups affiliated with the Coalition of Reason, the umbrella organization that coordinated the campaign.
The campaign - which is being paid for by $25,000 from an anonymous donor - follows a similar but unrelated monthlong campaign on buses by New York City Atheists in July. Jane Everhart, a spokeswoman for the New York City Atheists, said that campaign was highly successful and brought in many new members. "We are trying to raise money to do it again," she said.
The subway station advertisements were chosen for the $25,000 campaign because they were the best deal for the given budget, said Michael De Dora Jr., the executive director for the New York branch of the Center for Inquiry. A Times Square ad would have cost $45,000 to $50,000 for a month, while a campaign that blanketed the inside of subway cars would have cost $70,000.
The subway campaign is timed to a new book called "Good Without God" by Greg Epstein, which is to be released on Oct. 27 by William Morrow. Mr. Epstein, the Harvard University humanist chaplain, is having a book signing at Columbia University Bookstore on Oct. 28.
Other books on atheism, including best-selling ones by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, have helped to give visibility to an "atheism awakening," where atheists have been finding strength in numbers. President Barack Obama's inaugural address even included a reference to "nonbelievers" among an enumeration of various religions.
Mr. De Dora said the million-person estimate of New Yorkers who do not believe in God was an extrapolation from surveys on religion. The American Religious Identification Survey, which was released earlier this year, showed that those who put "none" for religion had risen to 15 percent in 2008, from 8 percent in 1990. Based on their projections, New York City, with its 8.3 million population, would have more than a million nonbelievers, Mr. De Dora said. (It is questionable, of course, whether New York City, given its demographics, is representative of the country as a whole.)
Asked to comment on the advertisement, Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, said: "The First Amendment allows these groups to preach their religious beliefs. I hope that the rights of other religious groups will also be respected when they also seek to advertise their beliefs."
A number of atheist-themed advertising campaigns have been promoted this year. The largest so far has been one in Britain that put ads on 800 buses stating: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."
In the United States, the Coalition of Reason has also placed billboards that read "Don't Believe in God? You Are Not Alone." in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and Morgantown, W.Va. An Indiana atheist group ran ads in the cities of Bloomington and South Bend that read "You can be good without God." The group, called the Indiana Atheist Bus campaign, also crossed the border into Chicago, where they purchased ads for 25 buses.
Because New York is so large and diverse, the atheist message is actually harder to promote, Mr. De Dora said. "Collectively, we've had a harder time selling our message to New Yorkers," he said. In addition, since there are so many different atheist and secular-minded groups in New York, they are competing for an audience. Aside from the center, other groups in the coalition include the Flying Spaghetti Monster Meetup, New York City Brights, New York Philosophy, New York Society for Ethical Culture, Richie's List and the Secular Humanist Society of New York.
The dozen subway stations where the ads are running are:
* 14th Street-Sixth Avenue
* 14th Street-Seventh Avenue
* 14th Street-Eighth Avenue
* 23rd Street-Eighth Avenue
* Pennsylvania Station (three ads)
* 86th Street-Lexington Avenue
* 96th Street-Lexington Avenue
* 42nd Street-Sixth Avenue/Bryant Park
* 66th Street-Broadway/Lincoln Center
* 72nd Street-Central Park West
* 86th Street-Central Park West
* West Fourth Street
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3) Arts Education and Graduation Rates
Compiled by RACHEL LEE HARRIS
Arts, Briefly
October 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/arts/19arts-ARTSEDUCATIO_BRF.html?ref=nyregion
In a report to be released on Monday the nonprofit Center for Arts Education found that New York City high schools with the highest graduation rates also offered students the most access to arts education. The report, which analyzed data collected by the city's Education Department from more than 200 schools over two years, reported that schools ranked in the top third by graduation rates offered students the most access to arts education and resources, while schools in the bottom third offered the least access and fewest resources. Among other findings, schools in the top third typically hired 40 percent more certified arts teachers and offered 40 percent more classrooms dedicated to coursework in the arts than bottom-ranked schools. They were also more likely to offer students a chance to participate in or attend arts activities and performances. The full report is at caenyc.org.
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4) Energy Star Appliances May Not All Be Efficient, Audit Finds
By MATTHEW L. WALD
October 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/business/energy-environment/19star.html?ref=business
WASHINGTON - The Energy Department has concluded in an internal audit that it does not properly track whether manufacturers that give their appliances an Energy Star label have met the required specifications for energy efficiency.
Some manufacturers could therefore be putting the stickers on unqualified products, according to the audit, by the Energy Department's inspector general, Gregory H. Friedman.
The Energy Star program, jointly managed by the Energy Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, has benefited from a renewed emphasis by the Obama administration, as a mechanism for reducing the waste of energy and curbing resulting greenhouse gas emissions. Under the federal stimulus bill, $300 million will go to rebates for consumers who buy Energy Star products.
Some consumers choose energy-efficient appliances for the same reason they might choose a car with good fuel economy: to save money or reduce the environmental impact.
Teams from the Energy Department and the E.P.A. oversee different categories of products. Last December, the environmental agency's inspector general said the Energy Star ratings for products it oversees, like computers and television sets, were "not accurate or verifiable" because of weak oversight by the agency.
The Energy Department vowed then to scrutinize its performance in evaluating the products that it oversees, like windows, dishwashers, washing machines and refrigerators.
The new audit, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, indicates that the Energy Department has also fallen far short. Those shortcomings "could reduce consumer confidence in the integrity of the Energy Star label," according to the department's inspector general. The audit is to be submitted to Energy Secretary Steven Chu this week. While the Energy Department requires manufacturers of windows and L.E.D. and fluorescent lighting to have independent laboratories evaluate their products, the report said, companies that make refrigerators, washing machines, dishwashers, water heaters and room air-conditioners, which consume far more energy, can certify those appliances themselves.
One refrigerator manufacturer tipped off the Energy Department that some models from a competitor that carried the Energy Star label did not meet the criteria, the audit said. That problem was also described by Consumer Reports magazine in October 2008 about tests it had conducted. In a settlement last year, the manufacturer, LG of South Korea, agreed to modify circuit boards in the machines already sold, to reduce their consumption and to compensate consumers for the extra power consumed.
The report also noted that while the government said in 2007 that it would conduct "retail assessments" to ensure that all the products carrying the Energy Star logo deserved them, it is still not doing so for windows, doors, skylights, water heaters and solid-state lighting. And the department is not following through to ensure that when inappropriately labeled products are identified, the labels are actually taken off, the audit said.
In one category, compact fluorescent lights, the government has certified nearly all existing products, the audit said. "When 90 percent of the products qualify, the consumer cannot easily judge the relative efficiencies of C.F.L. products," the report said.
Jen Stutsman, an Energy Department spokeswoman, cited the recent agreement with the E.P.A., and said, "The Obama administration is strongly committed to ensuring that all Energy Star products provide American consumers with significant energy and cost savings, and has moved forward with steps to streamline and enhance the program."
An outside expert, Lane Burt, the manager of building energy policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said some of the criticisms were justified.
"It's been a tremendously successful program," Mr. Burt said. "It's grown by leaps and bounds, and any time you have that kind of growth, you're going to have growing pains."
Nonetheless, he said, "it's crucial to make sure consumers are actually saving money and energy when buying an Energy Star appliance." On Sept. 30, the Energy Department and the E.P.A. signed a memorandum of understanding that seeks to address some of the shortcomings detailed in the report.
Mr. Burt said the memorandum committed both agencies to having all of their products evaluated by certified independent laboratories, and to expand the Energy Star program to cover products that were not in common use when it began in 1996. No target date was set.
The memorandum called for a "super star" program within Energy Star to identify the top-performing 5 percent of products, ranked by efficiency, he said.
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5) A Limited, Modified Pullout From Afghanistan: Et Tu, CodePink?
By Sharon Smith
October 20, 2009
http://www.counterpunch.org/
Eight years into the war on Afghanistan-and with no end in sight-seems a peculiar time for antiwar activists to claim that U.S. forces need to stay there even longer for the sake of the Afghan people.
Yet Yifat Susskind, Communications Director for the human rights organization MADRE, recently argued on CommonDreams.org, "'Bring the Troops Home' is a bumper sticker, not a policy." She continued, "For MADRE, U.S. obligations stem from the fact that Afghanistan's poverty, violence against women, and political corruption are, in part, results of U.S. policy over the past 30 years."
CodePink co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans began arguing for a "responsible" withdrawal after their recent visit to Afghanistan, which focused on discovering Afghan women's attitudes toward the U.S. occupation. While there, they met with a hand picked group of politically connected Afghan women that included President Karzai's sister-in-law, Wazhma Karzai.
According to CodePink, many of these members of parliament and businesswomen opposed sending an additional 40,000 U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan but also said they rely on U.S. troops for their own personal safety. On October 6, the Christian Science Monitor published an interview with Benjamin and reported on her change of heart based on conversations with some of the women she met in Kabul. For example, CSM reported, "Shinkai Karokhail, an Afghan Member of Parliament and woman activist, told them. 'International troop presence here is a guarantee for my safety.'"
Benjamin claimed she was misrepresented in the Christian Science Monitor. Yet she made similar comments in an interview with antiwar.com blogger Scott Horton, "[W]e certainly did hear some people say that they felt if the U.S. pulled out right now there would be a collapse and the Taliban might take over, there might be a civil war. But we also heard a lot of people say they didn't want more troops to be sent in and they wanted the U.S. to have a responsible exit strategy that included the training of Afghan troops, included being part of promoting a real reconciliation process and included economic development; that the United States shouldn't be allowed to just walk away from the problem. So that's really our position."
This reasoning assumes, of course, that the U.S. is capable of behaving responsibly toward the Afghan people. It is not.
The Obama administration feigned disappointment at the rampant corruption of the Karzai regime, now that the UN Election Complaints Commission has reported that widespread stuffing of ballot boxes and coercion by warlords helped Karzai "win" reelection by a margin of 54 percent this past summer. As many as one in every three votes was fraudulent, and most of them went to Karzai. But the Obama administration hasn't yet lost faith in Karzai. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton reportedly told Karzai over the weekend "that this is an important moment where he can show statesmanship and actually strengthen his leadership position," according to administration officials.
To add to the embarrassment, Karzai appears ready to reject the Commission's findings. Despite a flurry of phone calls and visits, including one from Senator John Kerry and another from former U.S. State Department envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, Karzai remains defiant. He indicated that he will only accept a decision from Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission (IEC), a body dominated by his political allies, which was also accused of involvement in the massive election fraud this past summer.
Through blackmail, bribery and brute military force, the U.S. has determined the political landscape of post-Taliban Afghanistan.
U.S. conquerors installed Karzai as Afghanistan's transitional head of state in December 2001. But Karzai was never meant to build a genuine democracy in Afghanistan. Nor was he expected to champion the rights of women. On the contrary, he was chosen not for his ethical credentials but rather for his close ties to the band of warlords with which the U.S. partnered to quickly overthrow the Taliban in November 2001.
Renamed the "Northern Alliance" for the purpose of casting these warlords as freedom fighters, in reality they were veterans of the National Islamic United Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, an unstable coalition that ruled Afghanistan between 1992 and 1996, when the Taliban overthrew it.
Together, they constituted seven separate Mujahideen political parties, each representing the fiefdom of a corrupt warlord. Their president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, suspended the constitution and issued a series of religious edicts banishing women from broadcasting and government jobs, and requiring women to wear veils. More severe repression soon followed.
Karzai served as Deputy Foreign Minister in Rabbani's government, while the feuding Mujahideen parties unleashed a rein of terror against Afghanistan's already war-torn population. Women were routinely abducted, beaten and raped, or sold into prostitution. According to human rights expert Patricia Gossman, "Between 1992 and 1995, fighting among the factions of the alliance reduced a third of Kabul to rubble and killed more than 50,000 civilians. The top commanders ordered massacres of rival ethnic groups, and their troops engaged in mass rape."
In June 2002, in what the U.S. media depicted as a "flowering of democracy," a Loya Jirga, or tribal council, elected Karzai as Afghanistan's interim president. But most of the decisions were made behind the scenes, where then-U.S. envoy Khalilzad-a former Unocal oil executive-worked hand in glove with Karzai and the Northern Alliance to manipulate the votes. During the Loya Jurga, Karzai announced his own election as president before the vote had actually taken place, to the dismay of many delegates.
In the run up to the 2002 Loya Jirga, eight delegates were murdered amid a general rise in political violence and intimidation by warlords guarding their own fiefdoms. Meanwhile, Karzai used a rumored plot to overthrow his government as an excuse to round up 700 of his political opponents in the weeks before the voting.
Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, has long been flagged as a drug trafficker in Southern Afghanistan, but the allegations have never been investigated. He continues to head the Kandahar Provincial Council, the governing body for the region. He also has played a role in passing information to international intelligence agencies. According to Rajiv Chandrasekaran, writing in the Washington Post, while aware of information implicating Karzai in the drug trade, "U.S. and Canadian diplomats have not pressed the matter, in part because Ahmed Wali Karzai has given valuable intelligence to the U.S. military, and he also routinely provides assistance to Canadian forces, according to several officials familiar with the issue."
Under President Karzai's watch, Afghanistan has returned to providing roughly 95 percent of the world's heroin supplies while the U.S. military looks the other way. As Jeff Stein recently reported from the Huffington Post, Republican Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan, explained bluntly why Karzai's brother has never been charged: "We certainly need the president to be with us. That would be hard if we're hauling off his brother to a detention center."
The U.S. left has failed to effectively oppose the war in Afghanistan from its onset, when the population overwhelmingly supported the war on the pretext that "We were attacked." That support has severely eroded, and polls show that a clear majority now wants to end the occupation. Yet many on the left have remained confused for the last eight years-ardently opposing the war in Iraq while remaining silent about the equally immoral war in Afghanistan.
This confusion has apparently been compounded by the election of Barack Obama, who initially opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Obama's Nobel Peace Prize notwithstanding, however, he has since embraced the aims of U.S. imperialism with gusto. U.S. troops and, perhaps more importantly, U.S. military bases remain in Iraq with no deadline for complete withdrawal.
Obama authorized a surge of 21,000 additional U.S. troops soon after taking office and is now pondering whether to send at least 40,000 more. These are no longer George W. Bush's wars. Obama has claimed them for himself. So far, the only consequence of the surge has been the resurgence of the Taliban resistance against U.S. occupation. Even his pledge to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay remains unfulfilled.
Yet Obama maintains a substantial following on the U.S. left, sowing yet more confusion among antiwar activists. For example, in response to Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, Juan Lopez wrote in the People's World on October 12th, "Now, don't get me wrong... Like other left and progressive folks, I advocate ending the Afghanistan military venture." Yet he went on to praise the award: "Most of the nation and world embraced the choice as affirmation that, with President Obama at the helm, America has embarked on a new, far more constructive course."
Likewise, CodePink's Evans argued on womensmediacenter.com, "I left the states with a judgment about some of the women who were members of the Parliament: So many are sisters and wives of warlords or tribal leaders chosen merely to fill the required quota of women. But Member of Parliament Shinkai Karokhal, a radical feminist from Kabul, reminded me that just their existence, that they constitute 25 percent of the body, is inspiring to women throughout the country."
Afghan women surely deserve better than parliamentary representation by the wives of warlords enforcing the lawless and repressive status quo. Those seeking alternative opinions among Afghan women can easily discover that there is no shortage of those with the courage to expose the rule of warlords and call for the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops.
Malalai Joya is a case in point. As a young woman, she denounced the participation of drug traffickers and warlords at the 2002 Loya Jirga. Soon after she was elected to parliament in 2005, she was suspended for her outspokenness. She now escapes violent retribution by wearing a burka as a disguise.
As she wrote in the Guardian on July 25th, "You must understand that the government headed by Hamid Karzai is full of warlords and extremists who are brothers in creed of the Taliban. Many of these men committed terrible crimes against the Afghan people during the civil war of the 1990s. For expressing my views I have been expelled from my seat in parliament, and I have survived numerous assassination attempts. The fact that I was kicked out of office while brutal warlords enjoyed immunity from prosecution for their crimes should tell you all you need to know about the 'democracy' backed by NATO troops."
Likewise, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) has maintained its anti-occupation principles since the war began, risking their lives to organize an underground movement in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan.
In a recent post to the U.S. antiwar movement, RAWA stated, "The U.S. and allies occupied Afghanistan in the name of 'democracy,' 'women's rights' and 'war on terror,' but after eight long years, everyone knows that the situation is as critical in Afghanistan as it was under the brutal regime of the Taliban. While they talk about democracy and women's rights, on the other end they are supporting and nourishing the diehard enemies of these values and impose them on our people."
Washington's warmongers have been getting away with mass murder in Afghanistan for far too long. Obama is now at the helm of this disastrous imperial adventure. "Troops out now" is the only viable exit strategy, yet it can also easily fit onto a bumper sticker. Those who argue for prolonging the U.S. occupation until the U.S. transforms its mission into a benevolent one are likely to be kept waiting forever.
Sharon Smith is the author of Women and Socialism and Subterranean Fire: a History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States.
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6) Safety Nets for the Rich
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
October 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/opinion/20herbert.html
The headlines that ran side by side on the front page of Saturday's New York Times summed up, inadvertently, the terrible fix that we've allowed our country to fall into.
The lead headline, in the upper right-hand corner, said: "U.S. Deficit Rises to $1.4 Trillion; Biggest Since '45."
The headline next to it said: "Bailout Helps Revive Banks, And Bonuses."
We've spent the last few decades shoveling money at the rich like there was no tomorrow. We abandoned the poor, put an economic stranglehold on the middle class and all but bankrupted the federal government - while giving the banks and megacorporations and the rest of the swells at the top of the economic pyramid just about everything they've wanted.
And we still don't seem to have learned the proper lessons. We've allowed so many people to fall into the terrible abyss of unemployment that no one - not the Obama administration, not the labor unions and most certainly no one in the Republican Party - has a clue about how to put them back to work.
Meanwhile, Wall Street is living it up. I'm amazed at how passive the population has remained in the face of this sustained outrage.
Even as tens of millions of working Americans are struggling to hang onto their jobs and keep a roof over their families' heads, the wise guys of Wall Street are licking their fat-cat chops over yet another round of obscene multibillion-dollar bonuses - this time thanks to the bailout billions that were sent their way by Uncle Sam, with very little in the way of strings attached.
Nevermind that the economy remains deeply troubled. As The Times pointed out on Saturday, much of Wall Street "is minting money."
Call it déjà voodoo. I wrote a column that ran three days before Christmas in 2007 that focused on the deeply disturbing disconnect between Wall Streeters harvesting a record crop of bonuses - billions on top of billions - while working families were having a very hard time making ends meet.
We would later learn that December 2007 was the very month that the Great Recession began. I wrote in that column: "Even as the Wall Streeters are high-fiving and ordering up record shipments of Champagne and caviar, the American dream is on life support."
So we had an orgy of bonuses just as the recession was taking hold and now another orgy (with taxpayers as the enablers) that is nothing short of an arrogantly pointed finger in the eye of everyone who suffered, and continues to suffer, in this downturn.
Whether P.T. Barnum actually said it or not, there is a sucker born every minute. American taxpayers might want to take a look in the mirror. If the epithet fits...
We need to make some fundamental changes in the way we do things in this country. The gamblers and con artists of the financial sector, the very same clowns who did so much to bring the economy down in the first place, are howling self-righteously over the prospect of regulations aimed at curbing the worst aspects of their excessively risky behavior and preventing them from causing yet another economic meltdown.
We should be going even further. We've institutionalized the idea that there are firms that are too big to fail and, therefore, "we, the people" are obliged to see that they don't - even if that means bankrupting the national treasury and undermining the living standards of ordinary people. What sense does that make?
If some company is too big to fail, then it's too big to exist. Break it up.
Why should the general public have to constantly worry that a misstep by the high-wire artists at Goldman Sachs (to take the most obvious example) would put the entire economy in peril? These financial acrobats get the extraordinary benefits of their outlandish risk-taking - multimillion-dollar paychecks, homes the size of castles - but the public has to be there to absorb the worst of the pain when they take a terrible fall.
Enough! Goldman Sachs is thriving while the combined rates of unemployment and underemployment are creeping toward a mind-boggling 20 percent. Two-thirds of all the income gains from the years 2002 to 2007 - two-thirds! - went to the top 1 percent of Americans.
We cannot continue transferring the nation's wealth to those at the apex of the economic pyramid - which is what we have been doing for the past three decades or so - while hoping that someday, maybe, the benefits of that transfer will trickle down in the form of steady employment and improved living standards for the many millions of families struggling to make it from day to day.
That money is never going to trickle down. It's a fairy tale. We're crazy to continue believing it.
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7) College Costs Keep Rising, Report Says
By TAMAR LEWIN
October 21, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/education/21costs.html?ref=education
The average annual cost of tuition and fees at four-year public colleges rose 6.5 percent from last year, to $7,020, according to a report issued Tuesday by the College Board. Including room and board, the average total cost of attendance is $15,213, up 5.9 percent from last year.
Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, called the increases "hugely disappointing," particularly in a period of low inflation. From July 2008 to July 2009, the Consumer Price Index declined 2.1 percent.
"Given the financial hardship of the country, it's simply astonishing that colleges and universities would have this kind of increases," Mr. Callan said. "It tells you that higher education is still a seller's market. The level of debt we're asking people to undertake is unsustainable."
According to the College Board report, "Trends in College Pricing 2009," average tuition and fees at public two-year colleges are $2,544, up 7.3 percent from the previous year. At for-profit colleges, annual tuition and fees average $14,171, a 6.5 percent rise. And for out-of-state students at four-year public universities, tuition and fees average $18,548, up 6.2 percent.
At private nonprofit universities, the average tuition and fees are $26,273, up 4.4 percent from last year.
Although grant aid also rose significantly in 2008-9, the latest year for which data are available, student borrowing - and the gap between available resources and the overall cost of attending college - continued to increase, the report said.
About two-thirds of full-time undergraduates receive grants, according to a companion College Board report also released Tuesday, "Trends in Student Aid 2009."
Last year, the average grant aid was $5,041, supplemented by $4,585 in federal loans. Colleges and universities provided 41 percent of the grant aid, the federal government 32 percent, the states 11 percent and employers and other sources 32 percent.
The aid report found that public four-year colleges gave out two-thirds of their grant money as merit aid, that is, without considering the recipient's financial need.
Sandy Baum, the College Board senior policy analyst who wrote both reports, said it was important to focus on the net price students actually paid, after subtracting grants and tax benefits, rather than the published tuition, or sticker price. And in that regard, Ms. Baum said, the situation looks far less dire. "Over all, it could have been worse," she said.
"The really interesting thing to me," she said, "is if you look at net prices students pay, considering the grant aid and tax benefits, students at public two-year institutions are actually paying less, in inflation-adjusted dollars. And that's pretty significant. Even though the sticker price, adjusting for inflation, is up 20 percent in the past five years, the net price is actually lower than it was five years ago."
In 2009-10, the report found, full-time students at private nonprofit four-year institutions receive about $14,400 in grant aid and federal tax benefits, reducing their net tuition and fees to about $11,900, from the published $26,300.
Full-time students at public four-year colleges and universities receive an estimated average of about $5,400 in grant aid and federal tax benefits, reducing their net tuition and fees to about $1,600, from the published $7,000. And full-time students at public two-year colleges get $3,000 in grant aid and tax benefits, enough to pay the average $2,500 tuition and fees, and still have $500 left toward living expenses.
Mr. Callan did not view the net costs as so easily manageable.
"I have great respect for Sandy Baum," he said, "and I'm sure the calculations are correct. But the assumptions in the report about financial aid to the average student are very, very optimistic - higher than anything I've ever seen before."
While total education borrowing increased 5 percent from 2007-8 to 2008-9, the report said, there was a large shift to federal loans and away from private loans. Federal loans increased by about $15 billion last year, while nonfederal education loans declined by about half, to about $11 billion.
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8) Study Finds Growing Work for School Counselors
By JACQUES STEINBERG
October 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/education/20college.html?ref=education
The struggling economy has taken a toll on those directly responsible for advising students about the college admission process.
Nearly half of public schools have raised the caseloads of high school counselors this year, compared with last year, with the average increase exceeding 53 students, according to a study by the National Association for College Admission Counseling.
At the same time, the report said, the pressures on applicants (and, by extension, their counselors) are growing, as the number of applications to four-year colleges continued to rise, along with the number of students applying to colleges under early-decision programs.
In many respects, the report, "2009 State of College Admission," seeks to quantify the extent of the frenzy engulfing many of today's college applicants.
For example, about 22 percent of students who enrolled in college in the fall of 2008 applied to at least seven colleges, up from about 19 percent from a year earlier. Meanwhile, the average acceptance rate at four-year colleges declined slightly, to 66.8 percent in 2007, the last year for which the report provided full data in that category, from 71.3 percent in 2001.
Those applicants who find themselves on a waiting list face tough odds of being accepted. Fewer than one in three on such lists in 2008 were ultimately accepted, according to the report, about the same as a year earlier.
And yet the report included some indications that the pressures on applicants could soon ease. The number of students graduating from high school annually is believed to have peaked this spring, at 3.33 million, according to the report, so competition for places in colleges should diminish over the next few years.
But families of children in elementary school take note: the nation's collective high school graduating class "is projected to rebound to 3.31 million by 2017-18," the report said.
Many applicants rely on their school counselors for advice on college admissions, and the report described the rising workloads of those counselors, particularly at public high schools. (While private school counselors are also working harder, in many instances, fewer than 20 percent reported that their caseloads had increased since the last school year, compared with 45 percent of their public school counterparts.)
Among the states with the highest student-to-counselor ratios are California (986 students for each counselor), Minnesota (799) and Utah (720), according to the report, which cited government data for the 2006-7 school year. While Illinois was listed as having the highest ratio (1,172), the report suggested that the figure was probably "the result of a reporting error," and was most likely closer to about 700.
Sandie Gilbert, a counselor at Highland Park High School in Illinois said in an interview that she had a caseload of about 280 students this year - an increase of about 45, or 20 percent, since she first began working at the school 15 years ago.
"It's been inching up every year," Ms. Gilbert said.
About a quarter of her students are freshmen, who have been streaming into her office since school began in late August with any number of "acclimation" issues, she said. Another quarter are seniors, whom Ms. Gilbert must serve not only in one-on-one guidance sessions but by writing college recommendations for each.
"I wrote 43 recommendations before Oct. 15, and that's at home, at night," she said, citing the November deadlines for early-decision applications.
"I was really busy every single period, for the first six weeks of school," she added. "I'm just now eating lunch. It's been sitting there on my desk. It's 2:30."
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8) New Shockwaves From Courts and Accounting Board
The Next Financial Crisis Hits Wall Street,
as Judges Start Nixing Foreclosures
By PAM MARTENS
October 21, 2009
http://www.counterpunch.com/martens10212009.html
The financial tsunami unleashed by Wall Street's esurient alchemy of spinning toxic home mortgages into triple-A bonds, a process known as securitization, has set off its second round of financial tremors.
After leaving mortgage investors, bank shareholders, and pension fiduciaries awash in losses and a large chunk of Wall Street feeding at the public trough, the full threat of this vast securitization machine and its unseen masters who push the levers behind a tightly drawn curtain is playing out in courtrooms across America.
Three plain talking judges, in state courts in Massachusetts and Kansas, and a Federal Court in Ohio, have drilled down to the "straw man" aspect of securitization. The judges' decisions have raised serious questions as to the legality of hundreds of thousands of foreclosures that have transpired as well as the legal standing of the subsequent purchasers of those homes, who are more and more frequently the Wall Street banks themselves.
Adding to the chaos, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has made rule changes that will force hundreds of billions of dollars of these securitizations back onto the Wall Street banks balance sheets, necessitating the need to raise capital just as the unseemly courtroom dramas are playing out.
The problems grew out of the steps required to structure a mortgage securitization. In order to meet the test of an arm's length transaction, pass muster with regulators, conform to accounting rules and to qualify as an actual sale of the securities in order to be removed from the bank's balance sheet, the mortgages get transferred a number of times before being sold to investors. Typically, the original lender (or a sponsor who has purchased the mortgages in the secondary market) will transfer the mortgages to a limited purpose entity called a depositor. The depositor will then transfer the mortgages to a trust which sells certificates to investors based on the various risk-rated tranches of the mortgage pool. (Theoretically, the lower rated tranches were to absorb the losses of defaults first with the top triple-A tiers being safe. In reality, many of the triple-A tiers have received ratings downgrades along with all the other tranches.)
Because of the expense, time and paperwork it would take to record each of the assignments of the thousands of mortgages in each securitization, Wall Street firms decided to just issue blank mortgage assignments all along the channel of transfers, skipping the actual physical recording of the mortgage at the county registry of deeds.
Astonishingly, representatives for the trusts have been foreclosing on homes across the country, evicting the families, then auctioning the homes, without a proper paper trail on the mortgage assignments or proof that they had legal standing. In some cases, the courts have allowed the representatives to foreclose and evict despite their admission that the original mortgage note is lost. (This raises the question as to whether these mortgage notes are really lost or might have been fraudulently used in multiple securitizations, a concern raised by some Wall Street veterans.)
But, at last, some astute judges have done more than take a cursory look and render a shrug. In a decision handed down on October 14, 2009, Judge Keith Long of the Massachusetts Land Court wrote:
"The blank mortgage assignments they possessed transferred nothing...in Massachusetts, a mortgage is a conveyance of land. Nothing is conveyed unless and until it is validly conveyed. The various agreements between the securitization entities stating that each had a right to an assignment of the mortgage are not themselves an assignment and they are certainly not in recordable form...The issues in this case are not merely problems with paperwork or a matter of dotting i's and crossing t's. Instead, they lie at the heart of the protections given to homeowners and borrowers by the Massachusetts legislature. To accept the plaintiffs' arguments is to allow them to take someone's home without any demonstrable right to do so, based upon the assumption that they ultimately will be able to show that they have that right and the further assumption that potential bidders will be undeterred by the lack of a demonstrable legal foundation for the sale and will nonetheless bid full value in the expectation that that foundation will ultimately be produced, even if it takes a year or more. The law recognizes the troubling nature of these assumptions, the harm caused if those assumptions prove erroneous, and commands otherwise." [Italic emphasis in original.] (U.S. Bank National Association v. Ibanez/Wells Fargo v. Larace)
A month and a half before, on August 28, 2009, Judge Eric S. Rosen of the Kansas Supreme Court took an intensive look at a "straw man" some Wall Street firms had set up to handle the dirty work of foreclosure and serve as the "nominee" as the mortgages flipped between the various entities. Called MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc.) it's a bankruptcy-remote subsidiary of MERSCORP, which in turn is owned by units of Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, the Mortgage Bankers Association and assorted mortgage and title companies. According to the MERSCORP web site, these "shareholders played a critical role in the development of MERS. Through their capital support, MERS was able to fund expenses related to development and initial start-up."
In recent years, MERS has become less of an electronic registration system and more of a serial defendant in courts across the land. In a May 2009 document titled "The Building Blocks of MERS," the company concedes that "Recently there has been a wave of lawsuits filed by homeowners facing foreclosure which challenge MERS standing..." and then proceeds over the next 30 pages to describe the lawsuits state by state, putting a decidedly optimistic spin on the situation.
MERS doesn't have a big roster of employees or lawyers running around the country foreclosing and defending itself in lawsuits. It simply deputizes employees of the banks and mortgage companies that use it as a nominee. It calls these deputies a "certifying officer." Here's how they explain this on their web site: "A certifying officer is an officer of the Member [mortgage company or bank] who is appointed a MERS officer by the Corporate Secretary of MERS by the issuance of a MERS Corporate Resolution. The Resolution authorizes the certifying officer to execute documents as a MERS officer."
Kansas Supreme Court Judge Rosen wasn't buying MERS' story. In fact, Wall Street was probably not too happy to land before Judge Rosen. In January 2002, Judge Rosen had received the Martin Luther King "Living the Dream" Humanitarian Award; he previously served as Associate General Counsel for the Kansas Securities Commissioner, and as Assistant District Attorney in Shawnee County, Kansas. Judge Rosen wrote:
"The relationship that MERS has to Sovereign [Bank] is more akin to that of a straw man than to a party possessing all the rights given a buyer... What meaning is this court to attach to MERS's designation as nominee for Millennia [Mortgage Corp.]? The parties appear to have defined the word in much the same way that the blind men of Indian legend described an elephant -- their description depended on which part they were touching at any given time. Counsel for Sovereign stated to the trial court that MERS holds the mortgage 'in street name, if you will, and our client the bank and other banks transfer these mortgages and rely on MERS to provide them with notice of foreclosures and what not.' " (Landmark National Bank v. Boyd A. Kesler)
Lawyers for homeowners see a darker agenda to MERS. Timothy McCandless, a California lawyer, wrote on his blog as follows:
"...all across the country, MERS now brings foreclosure proceedings in its own name -- even though it is not the financial party in interest. This is problematic because MERS is not prepared for or equipped to provide responses to consumers' discovery requests with respect to predatory lending claims and defenses. In effect, the securitization conduit attempts to use a faceless and seemingly innocent proxy with no knowledge of predatory origination or servicing behavior to do the dirty work of seizing the consumer's home. While up against the wall of foreclosure, consumers that try to assert predatory lending defenses are often forced to join the party -- usually an investment trust -- that actually will benefit from the foreclosure. As a simple matter of logistics this can be difficult, since the investment trust is even more faceless and seemingly innocent than MERS itself. The investment trust has no customer service personnel and has probably not even retained counsel. Inquiries to the trustee -- if it can be identified -- are typically referred to the servicer, who will then direct counsel back to MERS. This pattern of non-response gives the securitization conduit significant leverage in forcing consumers out of their homes. The prospect of waging a protracted discovery battle with all of these well funded parties in hopes of uncovering evidence of predatory lending can be too daunting even for those victims who know such evidence exists. So imposing is this opaque corporate wall, that in a 'vast' number of foreclosures, MERS actually succeeds in foreclosing without producing the original note -- the legal sine qua non of foreclosure -- much less documentation that could support predatory lending defenses."
One of the first judges to hand Wall Street a serious slap down was Christopher A. Boyko of U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Ohio. In an opinion dated October 31, 2007, Judge Boyko dismissed 14 foreclosures that had been brought on behalf of investors in securitizations. Judge Boyko delivered the following harsh rebuke in a footnote:
"Plaintiff's 'Judge, you just don't understand how things work,' argument reveals a condescending mindset and quasi-monopolistic system where financial institutions have traditionally controlled, and still control, the foreclosure process...There is no doubt every decision made by a financial institution in the foreclosure is driven by money. And the legal work which flows from winning the financial institution's favor is highly lucrative. There is nothing improper or wrong with financial institutions or law firms making a profit - to the contrary, they should be rewarded for sound business and legal practices. However, unchallenged by underfinanced opponents, the institutions worry less about jurisdictional requirements and more about maximizing returns. Unlike the focus of financial institutions, the federal courts must act as gatekeepers..." (In Re Foreclosure Cases)
While the illegal foreclosure filings, investor lawsuits over securitization improprieties, and predatory lending challenges play out in courts across the country, a few sentences buried deep in Citigroup's 10Q filing for the quarter ended June 30, 2009 signals that we've seen merely a few warts on the head of the securitization monster thus far and the massive torso remains well hidden in murky water.
Citigroup tells us that the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has issued a new rule, SFAS No. 166, and this is going to have a significant impact on Citigroup's Consolidated Financial Statements "as the Company will lose sales treatment for certain assets previously sold to QSPEs [Qualifying Special Purpose Entities], as well as for certain future sales, and for certain transfers of portions of assets that do not meet the definition of participating interests. Just when might we expect this new land mine to go off? "SFAS 166 is effective for fiscal years that begin after November 15, 2009." There's more bad news. The FASB has also issued SFAS 167 and, long story short, more of those off balance sheet assets are going to move back onto Citi's books.
Bottom line says Citi:
"... the cumulative effect of adopting these new accounting standards as of January 1, 2010, based on financial information as of June 30, 2009, would result in an estimated aggregate after-tax charge to Retained earnings of approximately $8.3 billion, reflecting the net effect of an overall pretax charge to Retained earnings (primarily relating to the establishment of loan loss reserves and the reversal of residual interests held) of approximately $13.3 billion and the recognition of related deferred tax assets amounting to approximately $5.0 billion...." [Emphasis in original.]
I'm trying to imagine how the American taxpayer is going to be asked to put more money into Citigroup as it continues to bleed into infinity.
Citigroup is far from alone in financial hits that will be coming from the Qualifying Special Purpose Entities. Regulators are receiving letters from Citigroup and other Wall Street firms pressing hard to rethink when this change will take effect.
Putting aside for the moment the massive predatory lending frauds bundled into mortgage securitizations, inadequate debate has occurred on whether securitization of home mortgages (other than those of government sponsored enterprises) should be resuscitated or allowed to die a welcome death. If we understand the true function of Wall Street, to efficiently allocate capital, the answer must be a resounding no to this racket.
Trillions of dollars of bundled home mortgage loans and derivative side bets tied to those loans were being manufactured by Wall Street without any one asking the basic question: why is all this capital being invested in a dormant structure? Houses don't think and innovate. Houses don't spawn new technologies, patents, new industries. Houses don't create the jobs of tomorrow.
Also, by acting as wholesale lenders to the unscrupulous mortgage firms (some in house at Wall Street firms), Wall Street was not responding to legitimate consumer demand, it was creating an artificial demand simply to create mortgage product to feed its securitization machine and generate big fees for itself. Now we see the aftermath of that inefficient allocation of capital: a massive glut of condos and homes pulling down asset prices in neighborhoods as well as in those ill-conceived securitizations whose triple-A ratings have been downgraded to junk.
There's no doubt that one of the contributing factors to the depression of the 30s and the intractable unemployment today stem from a massive misallocation of capital to both bad ideas and fraud. Today's Wall Street, it turns out, is just another straw man for a rigged wealth transfer system.
Pam Martens worked on Wall Street for 21 years; she has no security position, long or short, in any company mentioned in this article other than that which the U.S. Treasury has thrust upon her and fellow Americans involuntarily through TARP. She writes on public interest issues from New Hampshire. She can be reached at pamk741@aol.com
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9) Major U.S.-Israel defense drill to highlight military alliance
By The Associated Press
Last update - 23:09 20/10/2009
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1122465.html
Statement by the US Palestine Communities Network demanding an end to US training of Palestine Authority contras who are acting on behalf of Israel to repress Palestinian dissent:
http://palestineconference.org/dayton-statement.shtml
"US-Israel air drills to prompt road closures":
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=233605
The Israeli and U.S. militaries were set to begin a major joint air defense exercise on Wednesday, highlighting military ties between the two allies at a time of heightened tensions over Iran's nuclear program.
The drill could have political implications for Israel's regional foes, with the exercise testing technology that could be used to defend Israel against an Iranian attack.
The maneuver underlines the strong alliance between the U.S. and Israel, despite recent spats over Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.
The exercise, codenamed Juniper Cobra 10, will test the two countries' missile defense systems and will include roughly 1,000 U.S. military personnel and a similar number of Israeli troops, the Israeli military said.
The U.S. has deployed 17 warships equipped with radar systems to detect surface-to-surface missiles for the exercise. The countries plan to set up radar sites along the Israeli coast and launch dummy missiles from the sea to test the system's performance.
The exercise will include the use of X-band radar technology, used to detect incoming missiles from hundreds of miles away, a senior Israeli defense official said, speaking on condition of anonymity under security regulations.
"The radar is now part of Israel's active defense lineup, on the understanding that the missile threat on Israel is growing," the official said.
Israel and the U.S. say that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. Tehran denies the allegation and says it is only seeking nuclear power. Israel considers a nuclear Iran an existential threat and has signaled readiness to attack if international diplomatic efforts fail to curb the nuclear program.
The exercise goes beyond defense drills, said Eytan Gilboa, a political scientist at Israel's Bar-Ilan University. "This sends a message to Iran, to Hezbollah and to Hamas that the strategic relationship between the United States and Israel remains solid," he said.
Hezbollah and Hamas are Iranian proxies in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip that have warred with Israel in recent years.
The U.S. could also use the maneuvers to make Israel feel more secure in order to encourage Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, Gilboa said.
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10) Army Prisoners Isolated, Denied Right to Legal Counsel
By Dahr Jamail
September 28, 2009
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/army-prisoners-isolated-denied-right-to-legal-counsel
Afghanistan war resister Travis Bishop has been held largely "incommunicado" in the Northwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility at Fort Lewis, Washington.
Bishop, who is being held by the military as a "prisoner of conscience," according to Amnesty International, was transported to Fort Lewis on September 9 to serve a 12-month sentence in the Regional Correctional Facility. He had refused orders to deploy to Afghanistan based on his religious beliefs, and had filed for Conscientious Objector (CO) status.
Bishop, who served a 13-month deployment to Iraq and was stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, was court marshaled by the Army for his refusal to deploy to Afghanistan. Given that he had already filed for CO status, many local observers called his sentencing a "politically driven prosecution."
By holding Bishop incommunicado, the military violated Bishop's legal right to counsel, a violation of the Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution, according to his civil defense attorney James Branum.
The Sixth Amendment is the part of the Bill of Rights that sets forth rights related to criminal prosecutions in federal courts, and reads, "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district where in the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense."
Attorney LeGrande Jones, who practices in Olympia and was designated by Branum as the local counsel for Bishop, was also denied access to Bishop, on the grounds that Jones was on an unnamed and unobtainable "watch-list," which constitutes deprivation of counsel.
Jones was denied entry to Fort Lewis and told he would never be allowed to enter the base. Fort Lewis authorities never gave him a reason for his being denied access to the base and his client. To this, Branum told Truthout, "Fort Lewis authorities have a duty to tell LeGrande the reasons why he is being barred from Fort Lewis, and therefore [barred] from communicating with his client in the Fort Lewis brig."
Until September 18, Bishop's condition was unclear due to his having been completely cut off from the public.
Branum, who is the legal adviser to the Oklahoma GI Rights Hotline and co-chair of the Military Law Task Force, also represents Leo Church, another war resister being held at Fort Lewis.
Church, who was also stationed at Fort Hood, went AWOL (Absent Without Leave) to prevent his wife and children from becoming homeless. The fact that he was unable to financially support his family off his military pay alone dictated that Church seek other means to support them. With his pleas to the military for assistance going unheeded, he opted to go AWOL in order to support his dependents.
According to Branum, "Church received eight months jail time because he put the safety and welfare of his children over his obligation to the Army. Leo tried to get help from his unit, but was denied."
Branum told Truthout that Church had been able to contact him while at Fort Lewis, but the call was monitored by a guard, violating his attorney-client privilege.
Gerry Condon, with Project Safe Haven (an advocacy group for GI resisters in Canada), and a veteran himself as a member of the Greater Seattle Veterans for Peace, told Truthout he believes Bishop and Church are being held in a way that is both "intolerable and unconstitutional."
Condon, who is working to try to support both Bishop and Church, told Truthout, "They are denied all visitors, except for immediate family, clergy and legal counsel [legal counsel is limited at this time]. No friends or fiancés. This is not the normal practice at other brigs."
Branum told Truthout he feels that how Bishop and Church are being treated at Fort Lewis is "part of a broader pattern the military has of just throwing people in jail and not letting them talk to their attorneys, not let visitors come, and this is outrageous. In the civilian world even murderers get visits from their friends."
Speaking further of the conditions in which the military is holding Bishop and Church, Condon added, "Fort Lewis authorities have made it virtually impossible for Bishop and Church to make phone calls. They must first get money on their calling account. This must be done by money order and according to several other similarly prohibitive procedures. And the money may not be credited to the account until a month after it is received. Plus, officials at the Fort Lewis brig must approve the names of people that can be called."
Condon told Truthout, "Travis Bishop is a leader in what has become an international GI resistance movement that is attempting to bring troops home from both occupations by following their consciences and international law. They deserve all the support we can give them, especially while they are in prison - they are owed their constitutional liberties."
Branum told Truthout that as far as he knows, he may well be the only person on Bishop's call list.
Both Bishop and Church have been prevented from adding any names to their respective "authorized contacts" lists (even for family members), which effectively cuts them off from almost all contact with the outside world. According to Branum, mail and commissary funds sent by friends and supporters will likely be "returned to sender" due to what he feels is "a cruel and inhumane policy."
In addition, there are no work programs at the Fort Lewis brig, nor any classes available for soldiers to take while they are incarcerated. Generally, work programs and/or classes are available for incarcerated soldiers.
"By participating in work programs and school classes, soldiers being held in brigs can get time cut off their sentences," Branum explained to Truthout, "But these don't exist at Fort Lewis, so that means Travis and Leo can't get time taken off their sentences. Travis will do a minimum of 10 months, and could have theoretically worked an additional month off his sentence if Fort Lewis had these programs."
Branum, who is the lead attorney for both Bishop and Church, told Truthout the actions of officials at Fort Lewis violate his clients' constitutional rights.
"Bishop and Church's defense team and supporters are in the process of negotiating with Fort Lewis officials to ensure transparency and that Bishop and Church's legal rights are being met," Branum stated in a press release on the matter that was published on September 17. "The unusual circumstances of isolation of these soldiers is unquestionably illegal. If Fort Lewis doesn't change its ways, we will be forced to go to court and demand justice."
On September 18, officials at Fort Lewis finally allowed Branum to speak with Bishop on the telephone, but not privately.
Bishop was accompanied by two guards, who monitored his conversation with Branum. In addition, Fort Lewis authorities claimed that the recently rebuilt/remodeled brig does not yet have proper facilities to facilitate a private telephone conversation.
Speaking further about the conversation he was finally allowed to have with Bishop, Branum added, "In the phone call we did get to do, they still refused to let Travis talk to me privately. He actually had two guards in the room with him the entire time, which obviously negates any compliance with attorney-client privilege. And presumably the phone call was taped (all of the other brigs have special rooms for attorney calls, that have phone lines to the outside that are not taped) which is completely unconstitutional. The brig of course will say, "well we won't listen to that tape" but that is bullshit, and it is illegal."
"The only reason they [Fort Lewis authorities] let me talk to Travis on Friday [September 18] was that he was finally "medically cleared," Branum told Truthout, "This took 10 days in this case, and it looks like this is their standard operating procedure, which is completely wrong."
When Truthout questioned the public affairs office at Fort Lewis about Bishop's situation, we were told all matters were being handled "legally, and according to standard operating procedure," and "any wrongdoing would be investigated."
Branum added, "They are giving the excuse that "we don't have the secure room for attorney phone calls set up yet," but can't tell me when they are going to have the room set up."
Branum and Jones are planning to file a lawsuit against Fort Lewis in the near future, specifically targeting the denial of attorney-client privilege.
Both soldiers are being supported by two GI resistance cafes: Under the Hood cafe (in Killeen, Texas, near Fort Hood) and Coffee Strong (in Tacoma, Washington, near Fort Lewis).
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11) San Francisco Alters When Police Must Report Immigrants
By JESSE McKINLEY
October 21, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/us/21sanctuary.html?ref=us
SAN FRANCISCO - The San Francisco board of supervisors voted Tuesday to overturn a city policy that has been at the center of a national debate over offering illegal immigrants sanctuary.
The policy, ordered by Mayor Gavin Newsom last summer, requires the police to contact Immigration and Customs Enforcement whenever they arrest a juvenile on felony charges who they suspect is in the United States illegally. Since the policy took effect last summer, more than 100 undocumented minors have been turned over to federal immigration authorities.
Mr. Newsom has said the ordinance is necessary to prevent young criminals from using the city's so-called sanctuary policy, which prevents the use of city money for immigration enforcement.
"Sanctuary city was never designed to protect people who commit crimes," said Nathan Ballard, a spokesman for Mr. Newsom.
But under the changes approved Tuesday, referrals would be required only after juveniles were convicted of crimes, instead of after their arrest. Immigration advocates say that referrals upon arrest have resulted in the deportation of innocent youths, the breakup of families and a fear among immigrants of contacting the police when they are the victims of crime.
"We recognize that there's a need to do some reporting" of illegal juveniles, said David Campos, the supervisor who sponsored the new ordinance. "But we're trying to strike a balance."
Tuesday's meeting was filled to capacity, with hundreds of supporters of Mr. Campos's bill filling the board's chambers and two overflow rooms. Simultaneous translation of supervisors' comments were offered in Mandarin and Spanish, and when the bill was passed, by 8 to 2 with one absentee, cheers erupted in the chambers, with chants of "Yes We Can" in English and Spanish echoing through the ornate City Hall.
Supporters continued chanting as they filed out past a bust of Harvey Milk, the trailblazing San Francisco supervisor and gay rights advocate whose name was invoked by supporters of Mr. Campos's bill.
The vote was a sharp rebuke to Mr. Newsom, a Democrat who is running for governor and who has promised to veto it, though supporters seem to have enough votes to overturn that.
San Francisco adopted its sanctuary policy in 1989, and has long refused to refer minors in police custody to the federal authorities, although adults accused of felonies have always been referred. Some of these minors were later flown to their home countries at taxpayer expense rather than being turned over to immigration authorities. Mr. Newsom learned of those flights last May and ordered them stopped.
Mr. Newsom's policy was also a response to a series of embarrassing revelations in The San Francisco Chronicle, including that the city, rather than turning a group of young Honduran crack dealers over to ICE, sent them to a group home in Southern California, from which they walked away.
The city was also shocked by a June 2008 triple murder, which prosecutors say was committed by Edwin Ramos, a suspected gang member and an illegal immigrant from El Salvador who had been picked up as a juvenile by the San Francisco police but not referred to immigration authorities.
The fate of the sanctuary policy may well be decided in court.
An August memorandum from the office of the city attorney, Dennis Herrera, to Mr. Newsom said that while federal and state law concerning sanctuary cities was "not settled," the ordinance that passed Tuesday could also "adversely affect" the city's position in several pending cases concerning its sanctuary policy, including a criminal investigation by the United States attorney's office in San Francisco.
Mr. Ballard, Mr. Newsom's spokesman, echoed this, saying the supervisors' vote, which will be formalized at a final reading of the bill next week, could invite a federal legal challenge to the entire sanctuary city policy.
"The supervisors did a foolish thing today by passing this bill that moves one step closer to imperiling the entire sanctuary city ordinance," Mr. Ballard said.
But Mr. Campos, the supervisor and a naturalized citizen who emigrated - illegally - from his native Guatemala when he was 14, said the vote to change Mr. Newsom's policy was necessary to maintain the city's reputation as a safe haven for illegal residents.
"We went from being one of the most enlightened cities," Mr. Campos said, "to be a place many steps backward to where the rest of the country is."
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12) When the Assembly Expelled Socialists for Disloyalty
By Nicholas Confessore
October 21, 2009
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/when-the-assembly-expelled-socialists-for-disloyalty/?scp=1&sq=When%20the%20Assembly%20Expelled%20Socialists%20for%20Disloyalty&st=cse
"Assembly again Expels Three Socialists; Decides to Oust them by Vote of 90 to 45; De Witt and Orr Seated, but Resign," New York Times headline from Sept. 22, 1920 after the State Assembly expelled three Socialists.
ALBANY - Albany is no stranger to lawmakers who tread on the wrong side of the law, whether for official misconduct or personal transgressions.
The latest is Senator Hiram Monserrate, the Queens Democrat, who was recently found guilty of misdemeanor assault, but acquitted of more serious felony charges in a case in which he was accused of cutting his companion's face with a glass.
On Thursday, Democratic leaders in the Senate announced the formation of a special committee to determine whether Mr. Monserrate should be punished, or even expelled, as several of fellow lawmakers have called for.
But it turns out that expulsion is quite a rare event in Albany. In fact, as far as anyone can remember, the last time it happened was 90 years ago, during the anticommunist Red Scare. And it was quite a dramatic affair.
The lawmakers involved five assemblymen: August Claessens and Louis Waldman of Manhattan; Charles Solomon of Brooklyn; and Samuel Orr and Samuel A. DeWitt of the Bronx.
At the time, Republicans controlled the Assembly, headed by Speaker Thaddeus C. Sweet.
The grounds cited for expulsion were disloyalty to the United States and New York State, and their affiliation with the Socialist Party of America, a "disloyal organization composed exclusively of perpetual traitors" and intent on overthrowing the government by force and violence, according to a March 1920 report by the Assembly's judiciary committee.
On a 7-to-6 vote, the committee found that "the right of the Assembly to exclude members is fundamental, inherent, and exclusive."
A debate on the floor took almost 24 hours and ended on April 1, 1920, with all five members expelled. Speaker Sweet was congratulated with "scores of telegrams, some from persons of prominence in the political, financial, or industrial world," according to the account in The Times.
Messrs. Waldman, Claessens and Solomon went down, 116 to 28, with members of both parties in both camps. Messrs. DeWitt and Orr were expelled, 104 to 40.
Messrs. Waldman and Solomon issued a statement accusing the Assembly itself of treason. "The Constitution has been lynched," they said.
During debate two weeks later in the Senate, Senator George F. Thompson, Republican of Niagara, accused one Mark Daly, a lobbyist for upstate manufacturers, of procuring liquor for the debating Assembly members. He said some of them got so drunk during the debate that they had to be carried out.
"A great deal of liquor was on hand and was used for the purpose of getting votes over on the other side the night they threw the Socialists out," Mr. Thompson charged. "Some even got so drunk that they had to be carried out of the Assembly chamber."
All five men were re-elected in September 1920, in special elections called to fill their seats. By this time, the Socialist Party had repudiated key clauses of its party constitution, and Speaker Sweet told members that he believed that the Socialist lawmakers were therefore again eligible to serve.
Nonetheless, on Sept. 21, the Assembly voted again to expel Messrs. Waldman, Claessens and Solomon, this time by a vote of 90 to 45.
A motion to expel Messrs. Orr and DeWitt failed, 48 to 87. But the two men resigned in solidarity with their Socialist brethren, who had been denounced as "un-American." Their resignation was met with cheers.
Messrs. Orr and Solomon ran again in November, and won their seats back. In the same election, Gov. Alfred E. Smith, a Democrat, lost his seat to a Republican challenger, Nathan L. Miller, who, evidently persuaded that persecuting the Socialists was hurting the Republican Party in the Bronx, pressured Assembly Republicans to leave them alone.
The new Republican speaker, H. Edmund Machold, agreed, and resolutions to expel Messrs. Orr and Solomon, and a new Socialist assemblyman, Henry Jager of Brooklyn, were defeated at the opening of session in January 1921. (Mr. Jager was later expelled amid accusations that he lived in New Jersey at the time of his election; his accusers also said he had made inflammatory comments against President Woodrow Wilson during World War I.)
A subsequent vote in April 1921 confirmed that Messrs. Solomon and Orr could keep their seats, bringing an end to a year of rancor and fear-mongering.
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13) U.S. to Order Steep Pay Cuts at Firms That Got Most Aid
"The administration will also warn A.I.G. that it must fulfill a commitment it made to significantly reduce the $198 million in bonuses promised to employees in the financial products division."
By STEPHEN LABATON
October 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/business/22pay.html?ref=business
WASHINGTON - Responding to the growing furor over the paychecks of executives at companies that received billions of dollars in federal bailouts, the Obama administration will order the companies that received the most aid to deeply slash the compensation to their highest paid executives, an official involved in the decision said on Wednesday.
Under the plan, which will be announced in the next few days by the Treasury Department, the seven companies that received the most assistance will have to cut the cash payouts to their 25 best-paid executives by an average of about 90 percent from last year. For many of the executives, the cash they would have received will be replaced by stock that they will be restricted from selling immediately.
And for all executives the total compensation, which includes bonuses, will drop, on average, by about 50 percent.
The companies are Citigroup, Bank of America, the American International Group, General Motors, Chrysler and the financing arms of the two automakers.
At the financial products division of A.I.G., the locus of problems that plagued the large insurer and forced its rescue with more than $180 billion in taxpayer assistance, no top executive will receive more than $200,000 in total compensation, a stunning decline from previous years in which the unit produced many wealthy executives and traders.
In contrast to previous years, an official said, executives in the financial products division will receive no other compensation, like stocks or stock options.
And at all of the companies, any executive seeking more than $25,000 in special perks - like country club memberships, private planes, limousines or company issued cars - will have to apply to the government for permission. The administration will also warn A.I.G. that it must fulfill a commitment it made to significantly reduce the $198 million in bonuses promised to employees in the financial products division.
The pay restrictions illustrate the humbling downfall of the once-proud giants, now wards of the state whose leaders' compensation is being set by a Washington paymaster. They also show how Washington in the last year has become increasingly powerful in setting corporate policies as more companies turned to the government for money to survive.
The compensation schedules set by Kenneth R. Feinberg, the special master at Treasury handling compensation issues, comes as many other banks that received smaller but significant taxpayer assistance in the last year have been reporting huge year-end bonuses, setting off a new round of recrimination in Washington about the bailout of Wall Street.
Since his appointment last June by Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, Mr. Feinberg has spent months in negotiations with the companies as he seeks to balance compensation concerns against fears at the companies that any huge restrictions in pay could prompt an exodus of executives. Under a law adopted earlier this year, the Treasury Department was instructed to examine the salaries and bonuses for the five most-senior executives and their 20 most highly paid employees at companies that have received extraordinary assistance.
Mr. Feinberg has already achieved significant results at several companies. As a result of his discussions, Kenneth D. Lewis, the head of Bank of America who recently resigned, agreed to forgo his salary and bonus for 2009. (He will still receive a pension of $53.2 million, although Mr. Feinberg can issue an advisory opinion challenging it that would carry political weight.) And fearful of a political backlash over the pay of Andrew J. Hall, a successful energy trader who received nearly $100 million last year, Citigroup agreed two weeks ago to sell its Phibro unit that Mr. Hall heads to Occidental Petroleum.
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14) Experts Worry as Population and Hunger Grow
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
October 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/world/22food.html?hpw
ROME - Scientists and development experts across the globe are racing to increase food production by 50 percent over the next two decades to feed the world's growing population, yet many doubt their chances despite a broad consensus that enough land, water and expertise exist.
The number of hungry people in the world rose to 1.02 billion this year, or nearly one in seven people, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, despite a 12-year concentrated effort to cut the number.
The global financial recession added at least 100 million people by depriving them of the means to buy enough food, but the numbers were inching up even before the crisis, the United Nations noted in a report last week.
"The way we manage the global agriculture and food security system doesn't work," said Kostas G. Stamoulis, a senior economist at the organization. "There is this paradox of increasing global food production, even in developing countries, yet there is hunger."
Agronomists and development experts who gathered in Rome last week generally agreed that the resources and technical knowledge were available to increase food production by 50 percent in 2030 and by 70 percent in 2050 - the amounts needed to feed a population expected to grow to 9.1 billion in 40 years.
But the conundrum is whether the food can be grown in the developing world where the hungry can actually get it, at prices they can afford. Poverty and difficult growing conditions plague the places that need new production most, namely sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
A straw poll of the experts in Rome on whether the world will be able to feed its population in 40 years underscored the uncertainty surrounding that question: 73 said yes, 49 said no and 15 abstained.
The track record of failing to feed the hungry haunts the effort. But other important uncertainties also give pause. The effect climate change will have on weather and crops remains an open question. The so-called green revolution of the 1960s and '70s ended the specter of mass famines then, but the environmental cost of chemical fertilizers and heavy irrigation has spurred a bitter divide over the right ingredients for a second one.
In addition, the demand for biofuels may use up crop land. And as scores of food riots in 2008 showed, oil prices and other income shocks can quickly drive millions more people into hunger, sending ripples of instability around the world.
A summit meeting of world leaders in Rome on Nov. 16 is expected to address the future food demands. Since July, the richest countries have ostensibly committed more than $22 billion to the effort over the next three years.
The final meeting of Group of 8 leaders that month in L'Aquila, Italy, started with $15 billion already on the table. Then President Obama gave a speech evoking the Kenyan village where his father herded goats as a child. In countless villages like it, millions of people face hunger daily, Mr. Obama said, and after he finished speaking, the pledges jumped by $5 billion, according to several officials present.
Yet those pledges remain murky. Senior diplomats estimate that less than a third to slightly more than half of the money represents new commitments that had not already been made, with the rest being repackaged existing aid.
Washington and its European allies have also jostled over putting the money in a World Bank account, the American preference, or working through United Nations or domestic aid agencies, an approach the Europeans favor. An initial American proposal of one unified fund was largely rejected. How policy and priorities will be established on a worldwide scale is also a central negotiating hurdle.
"The good news is that the political class considers this important and wants to do something about it," said one financial official involved in the talks who was not authorized to speak publicly. "But nobody has 20 billion and spare change in their sock drawer."
The United States, with the largest pledge, $3.5 billion, organized a conference in Washington along with Italy last month in an unsuccessful attempt to nail down the pledges so that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton could announce the results during the United Nations General Assembly.
"It is a little bit difficult - I cannot give you a precise figure per country," said Renzo Rosso, a senior Italian aid official. "But the most difficult part will be to make them all work together."
Mrs. Clinton often calls agriculture aid a critical issue, saying the administration supports domestic efforts in developing nations and improvements in production by small farmers, particularly women. Philip J. Crowley, a department spokesman, said, "We are trying to shift away from emergency aid toward agricultural development."
Agriculture was once a pillar of international aid programs, with World Bank figures showing that it constituted 17 percent of all foreign assistance in 1980, said Christopher Delgado, the bank's agriculture adviser. But the emphasis declined as the number of hungry people dropped to its lowest recent level, 825 million people, around 1996. By 2000, agriculture aid had shrunk to 4 percent, he said, although it has since ticked up slowly.
World leaders often evoke the green revolution of the 1960s and '70s as an inspiration for future progress. The original revolution employed new seeds, fertilizers and irrigation in Asia and Latin America to stave off famines affecting millions.
But the green revolution's concentration on wheat and rice would be impossible to copy in parts of Asia and in Africa, experts say, noting that Africa has seven or eight staple crops, wildly varied growing conditions and only an estimated 7 percent of farmland irrigated.
Then there is the question of genetically modified crops. No issue provokes such an emotional division among agronomists, who debate whether they constitute the building blocks of a second green revolution or a health menace.
"Who is steering this fear and global paranoia about the G.M. cotton and all these G.M. crops?" said Hans P. Binswanger-Mkhize, a South African agriculture consultant. "Show us where the corpses are - the corpses of earthworms, the corpses of bees, the corpses of antelopes and the corpses of humans. Nobody has yet ever shown us a corpse."
Opponents respond that organic farming is critical to producing healthy food and reducing global warming. Widespread use of nitrogen fertilizers has contributed heavily to greenhouse gases, and the vast water resources required for irrigation are not sustainable, they contend.
"We have a billion hungry people today, so we can't say the green revolution solved the problem," said Markus Arbenz, the executive director of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements. "We can't just cut and paste the solution from the 1960s with G.M. crops."
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15) $13 an Hour? 500 Sign Up, 1 Wins a Job
By MICHAEL LUO
October 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/us/22hire.html?ref=us
BURNS HARBOR, Ind. - As soon as the job opening was posted on the afternoon of Friday, July 10, the deluge began.
C.R. England, a nationwide trucking company, needed an administrative assistant for its bustling driver training school here. Responsibilities included data entry, assembling paperwork and making copies.
It was a bona-fide opening at a decent wage, making it the rarest of commodities here in northwest Indiana, where steel industry layoffs have helped drive unemployment to about 10 percent.
When Stacey Ross, C. R. England's head of corporate recruiting, arrived at her desk at the company's Salt Lake City headquarters the next Monday, she found about 300 applications in the company's e-mail inbox. And the fax machine had spit out an inch-and-a-half thick stack of résumés before running out of paper. By the time she pulled the posting off Careerbuilder.com later in the day, she guessed nearly 500 people had applied for the $13-an-hour job. "It was just shocking," she said. "I had never seen anything so big."
Ms. Ross had only a limited amount of time to sort through the résumés. While C. R. England has not been immune to the downturn, it has added significantly to its stable of drivers and continued to hire office staff members to support them. Ms. Ross was also trying to fill more than two dozen other positions.
The 34-year-old recruiter decided the fairest approach was simply to start at the beginning, reviewing résumés in the order in which they came in. When she found a desirable candidate, she called to ask a few preliminary questions, before forwarding the name along to Chris Kelsey, the school's director. When he had a big enough pool to evaluate, she would stop. Anyone she did not get to was simply out of luck.
She dropped significantly overqualified candidates right away, reasoning that they would leave when the economy improved. Among them was a former I.B.M. business analyst with 18 years experience; a former director of human resources; and someone with a master's degree and 12 years at Deloitte & Touche, the accounting firm.
Over the course of four days, Ms. Ross forwarded 61 résumés to Mr. Kelsey, while rejecting 210 others. The remainder never even got a look. Many were, in fact, never uploaded to the company's internal system because there were too many.
Just before the advertisement was removed, a standard one-page résumé arrived from Tiffany Block, 28, who lived in nearby Portage and had lost her job four months earlier as an accounts receivable manager at a building company when it closed its Indiana office.
Someone she knew had applied for the job and had said so on Facebook. Ms. Block went to the company's Web site and filed an application online, which many others had not. By doing do, her application went directly into the company's system. She was hardly optimistic, since she had not had an interview in months.
Ms. Ross, however, passed it on the next day to Mr. Kelsey.
Attendance at Mr. Kelsey's school has surged during the recession. Mr. Kelsey, 33, had just promoted one of his three administrative assistants, who handle the paperwork needed for drivers to hit the road. He needed a replacement quickly.
The overwhelming response astonished him. He asked Cheree Seawood, one of his current assistants, to go through the résumés and help pick out several to interview. To make the task easier, he decided they should be even more rigorous in ruling out anyone who appeared even slightly overqualified. Mr. Kelsey, an ardent New England Patriots fan, compared his personnel strategy to the team's everyman approach.
"We like to get the fair and middling talent that will work for the wages and groom them from within," he said.
In other words, he said, he did not want the former bank branch manager Ms. Ross had sent, or the woman who had once owned a trucking company, or even the former legal secretary.
He also realized that in this climate he could afford to be extra picky and require trucking industry experience.
The company eventually settled on eight people to interview, inviting in the first two just five days after the job was posted.
In the past, Mr. Kelsey had mostly ad-libbed interviews, but this time he asked his company's human resources department for help. They sent him a list of 13 questions, as well as an eight-page packet with 128 questions grouped under 50 "competencies." He decided he would ask them all.
At the end of each hourlong interview, he and Ms. Seawood each jotted down a rating for each applicant and then compared them.
Invariably, the candidates' job search travails came up. One woman who lost her job had started working as a waitress and confessed she had come directly from her job on the overnight shift.
But Mr. Kelsey resolved to keep his personal sympathies at bay. "If you start judging applicants on want or need, eventually that want, or need, will go away when they get the job and their financial situation stabilizes," he said. "Then you're left with whatever skills they have."
Before Ms. Seawood called Ms. Block to schedule an interview, she had been getting increasingly depressed.
"I felt like, I'm 28 years old, and I don't have a job," she said. "What am I doing with myself?"
But Mr. Kelsey was immediately impressed when she came in on the second day of interviews. Dressed in a conservative business suit, Ms. Block patiently answered all of the 100-plus questions. Mr. Kelsey liked that she remained consistent in her answers and showed independence.
Afterward, Mr. Kelsey gave Ms. Block a 9; Ms. Seawood rated her at a point lower.
The next week, however, Ms. Seawood gravitated to a different candidate. The woman had just had nose surgery and came in wearing a protective mask. Besides her qualifications, the fact she had not tried to postpone impressed Ms. Seawood.
But when Mr. Kelsey invited the woman back, the interview was a disaster. She grew visibly irritated amid his battery of questions.
Mr. Kelsey immediately called Ms. Block to ask if she could come in for a second interview.
Was an hour from now too soon?
Momentarily panicked, Ms. Block quickly assented.
Mr. Kelsey marched through many of his questions again. Then, trying to gauge her ability to be assertive among truck drivers, he added a new hypothetical: if she were in the stands at a baseball game and a foul ball came her way, would she stand up to try to catch it, or wait in her seat and hope it fell her way?
The other finalist had said she would wait. But Ms. Block said immediately that she would jump up to grab it.
Mr. Kelsey decided he had found his hire.
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16) Texas: Two Inmates Exonerated
By RACHEL MARCUS
National Briefing | Southwest
October 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/us/22brfs-TWOINMATESEX_BRF.html?ref=us
Two Dallas men serving life sentences in prison in a 1997 murder case are expected to be released after another man confessed to the crime, the Dallas County District Attorney's Office said. The two men, Claude Alvin Simmons Jr., 54, and Christopher Shun Scott, 39, will appear at a hearing on Friday. They have served 12 years in the killing of Alfonso Aguilar during a break-in. After law students brought statements by another man, Alonzo Hardy, 49, to the attention of the district attorney's office, Mr. Hardy in June gave prosecutors a lengthy videotaped confession. Mr. Hardy, in prison since 1999 on a robbery conviction, implicated another man in the killing, Don Michael Anderson, 40, who was arrested Tuesday.
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17) New Jobless Claims Rise Higher Than Expected
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
October 23, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/business/economy/23econ.html?ref=business
WASHINGTON (AP) - The number of newly laid-off workers filing claims for jobless benefits rose more than expected last week, after falling in five of the last six weeks, as employers remained reluctant to hire even with the economy showing signs of recovery. The Labor Department said Thursday that new jobless claims rose to a seasonally adjusted 531,000 last week from an upwardly revised 520,000 the previous week. Wall Street economists had expected only a slight increase, according to Thomson Reuters.
Economists closely watch initial claims, which are considered a gauge of layoffs and an indication of companies' willingness to hire new workers.
The four-week average of claims, which smoothes out fluctuations, fell slightly to 532,250, the lowest since mid-January and about 125,000 below the peak for the recession, reached this spring. But claims remain well above the 325,000 that economists say is consistent with a healthy economy.
The number of people continuing to claim benefits declined for the fifth straight week to 5.9 million, from just over 6 million. The figures on continuing claims lag initial claims by a week.
Many recipients are moving onto extended benefit programs approved by Congress in response to the recession, which began in December 2007 and is the worst since the 1930s. Those extensions add up to 53 weeks of benefits on top of the 26 typically provided by the states.
When those programs are included, the total number of recipients fell to 8.8 million in the week ending Oct. 3, the latest data available, down about 50,000 from the previous week. That decline is likely a result of recipients having run out of benefits, rather than finding jobs, economists say.
In another report, a private forecast of economic activity rose for the sixth consecutive month in September, a sign the economy will keep growing next year.
In the forecast, the Conference Board said its index of leading economic indicators rose 1 percent last month after a 0.4 percent gain in August. Wall Street economists expected an increase of 0.8 percent last month, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters.
The Conference Board said the indicators' growth rate of 5.7 percent over the six months through September was the strongest since 1983, but joblessness was weighing on the rebound.
"These numbers strongly suggest that a recovery is developing. However, the intensity of that recovery will depend on how much, and how soon, demand picks up," said a Conference Board economist, Ken Goldstein.
Many analysts believe the economy grew as much as 3 percent in the July-September quarter, but employers are reluctant to hire as they wait to see if such growth can be maintained.
The unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent in September from 9.7 percent, the department said earlier this month, as employers cut 263,000 jobs. The recession has eliminated a net total of 7.2 million jobs.
More job cuts were announced this week. Sun Microsystems said it plans to eliminate up to 3,000 jobs, or 10 percent of its worldwide work force, as it awaits a takeover by the Oracle Corporation, a deal being held up by antitrust regulators in Europe.
Among the states, Florida had the largest increase in claims, with 9,976, which were attributed to layoffs in the construction, service, manufacturing and agriculture industries. New York, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Arkansas had the next largest increases. The state data lag initial claims by one week.
California reported the largest drop in claims, down 7,062, which were attributed to fewer layoffs in the construction, service, and manufacturing industries. Tennessee, Maine and Nebraska also reported decreases.
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18) Michigan Again Reports Highest Jobless Rate
By REUTERS
October 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/business/economy/22jobless.html?ref=business
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Michigan again had the highest unemployment rate of all states in September at 15.3 percent, followed by Nevada and Rhode Island, which set records, the Labor Department said Wednesday.
Nevada, at 13.3 percent, and Rhode Island, at 13 percent, were followed by California, at 12.2 percent. Florida also hit its highest rate since records began 33 years ago, 11 percent.
Fifteen states and Puerto Rico now have unemployment rates above 10 percent - meaning more than one person in 10 looking for a job is not working there.
Still, the Labor Department said, unemployment rates were little changed on the month in most states, and dropped in 19 states.
The federal car-buying incentive program known as cash for clunkers helped slow the exodus of work in Michigan, which is the heart of American automobile manufacturing, the state's employment department said.
Manufacturing jobs have increased in the state for three consecutive months, according to the Michigan Department of Energy, Labor and Economic Growth, while the monthly increases in the state's unemployment rate have shrunk.
Still, the work force picture was not as rosy in terms of jobs numbers in a majority of states.
Nonfarm payroll employment decreased in 43 states and the District of Columbia in September. Only seven states gained jobs, and the largest increase - 4,400 in Indiana - was small when compared with the biggest drop of 81,700 in New York.
Texas shed 44,700 positions, California 39,300, Wisconsin 21,700 and Michigan 21,500. The nation's capital, Washington, experienced the largest percentage drop, 1.4 percent.
Since September 2008, all states and the District of Columbia have lost jobs, with California shedding the most, 732,700.
In Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota and California, the unemployment rate dropped from August, but so did the number of jobs.
While Wisconsin found encouragement in its jobless rate falling to 7.7 percent in the state's fourth monthly decrease, Ohio read a different story in the discrepancy.
"Ohio's unemployment rate declined in September as more Ohioans dropped out of the labor force," said Douglas Lumpkin, the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services director, about the decline to 10.1 percent, from 10.8 percent in August.
Laid-off workers can become so discouraged about the prospects of new jobs that they give up looking and are not counted as part of the labor force. At the same time, with the downturn in housing and automobile manufacturing, analysts have begun to worry about structural unemployment creeping into the economy.
The unemployment rate increased the most in any state in Illinois, to 10.5 percent, the highest since October 1983.
Illinois lost 14,200 jobs, the 20th month that payrolls in the state had shrunk, resulting in the smallest number of jobs in the state in 14 years.
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19) NATO Defense Ministers Endorse Wider Afghan Effort
By THOM SHANKER
October 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/world/europe/24nato.html?ref=world
BRATISLAVA - NATO defense ministers gave their broad endorsement Friday to the counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan laid out by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, increasing pressure on the Obama administration and on their own governments to commit more military and civilian resources for the mission to succeed.
General McChrystal, the senior American and allied commander in Afghanistan, landed here early Friday to brief NATO defense ministers on his strategic review of an 8-year-old war in which the American-led effort has lost momentum to a tenacious insurgency. The closed-door session - which had not been disclosed in advance - added a note of drama to the sort of NATO ministerial meeting that is often mundane.
"What we did today was to discuss General McChrystal's overall assessment, his overall approach, and I have noted a broad support from all ministers of this overall counterinsurgency approach," said NATO's secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
Although the broad acceptance by NATO defense ministers of General McChrystal's strategic review included no decision on new troops, it was another in a series of acknowledgements that success there cannot be achieved by a narrower effort that calls only for capturing and killing Al Qaeda-linked terrorists. That counter-terrorism strategy is identified with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
In contrast, General McChrystal's review calls for implementing a full-scale counterinsurgency strategy that focuses on protecting population centers and accelerating the training of Afghan army and police units both requiring significant numbers of fresh troops. NATO diplomats noted that it is difficult to see how an acceptance of this broad strategy can be viewed as anything but an endorsement of the need to increase both military and civilian contributions.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, whose views carry great weight in Mr. Obama's war council, declined to be drawn out on his assessment. "For this meeting, I am here mainly in listening mode," Mr. Gates said, although he noted that "many allies spoke positively about General McChrystal's assessment."
Mr. Gates said the administration's decision on Afghanistan was still two or three weeks away, and he cautioned that it was "vastly premature" to draw conclusions now about whether the president would deploy more troops. He stressed that allied defense ministers had not voiced concerns about the administration's decision-making process.
Although NATO will not meet until next month to decide whether to commit more resources to Afghanistan, Mr. Gates did reveal that he had received indications that some allies were prepared to increase their contributions of civilian experts or troops, or both.
Separate from his strategic review, General McChrystal has submitted a request for forces, which was not under discussion Friday, but is now working its way through both the American and NATO chains of command.
The various options submitted by General McChrystal range up to a maximum of 85,000 more troops, although his leading option calls for increasing forces by about 40,000, according to officials familiar with the proposal.
Pressure for adding troops mounted throughout the day, as other senior international representatives also told NATO defense ministers of the need to increase their commitments in order to succeed in Afghanistan.
Kai Eide, the United Nations special representative for Afghanistan, flew to Slovakia to meet NATO defense chiefs, and he stressed that "additional international troops are required." He also told the allies, "This cannot be a U.S.-only enterprise."
Mr. Eide acknowledged that it may be difficult to rally public support for force contributions while allegations of election fraud continue to taint the government of Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president.
Senior American military officers already have endorsed General McChrystal's overall strategy, including Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American commander in the Middle East. Neither officer has publicly discussed what specific troop increases he might advocate.
Senior NATO officials made clear that additional commitments should go beyond combat forces to include trainers for the Afghan army and police force, as well as civilians to help rebuild the economy and restore confidence in the government.
"What we need is a much broader strategy, which stabilizes the whole of Afghan society, and this is the essence in the recommendations presented by General McChrystal," said Mr. Rasmussen, the alliance secretary general. "This won't happen just because of a good plan. It will also need resources - people and money."
General McChrystal was not scheduled to make any public comments here. This reserve was not unexpected, as some administration officials have criticized his recent statements, including a speech in London, as an attempt to pressure the White House to act.
The general and his aides have denied they were playing politics, and have expressed respect for the importance of the civilian-led policy review process now underway in Washington. General McChrystal said in a recent interview that his ability to succeed requires a unified, government-wide strategy and that he welcomed a process that resulted in a consensus from his civilian bosses that would include clear instructions on the way ahead.
NATO officials assessing the potential for allied troop contributions said that delicate negotiations are underway, and that NATO capitals were watching the Obama administration for signals even while they send signals of their own.
In what one NATO diplomat described as "a chicken-and-egg process," the British government, for example, announced earlier this month a plan still laced with conditions for sending 500 more troops to Afghanistan. Some NATO diplomats viewed that as a way to emphasize their support for a decision by the Obama administration to deploy more troops for the mission.
At the same time, though, some allies with forces in Afghanistan are cautiously discussing how and when to end their deployments there.
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20) Economic Adviser Predicts 10% Jobless Rate
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
October 23, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/business/23outlook.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON - One of President Obama's top economic advisers warned on Thursday that the nation's unemployment was likely to climb above 10 percent by the middle of next year and that job growth would remain anemic through the end of 2010.
"Unemployment is likely to remain at its severely elevated level" through the end of next year, predicted Christina Romer, chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, at a hearing of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress.
Ms. Romer said she agreed with private sector forecasters who expected that the economy would expand at a moderate pace through the end of next year as it slowly recovered from its deep recession.
But she cautioned that unemployment usually recovered much more slowly than economic growth, and that the job creation had to make up for a great deal of lost ground from the last two years.
And she warned that the rebound in jobs could actually be even slower than what White House officials and private forecasters had been predicting. That was a sharp contrast to the Obama administration's forecast at the start of the year, which predicted that unemployment would not climb much above 8 percent and was widely criticized as unrealistic and too optimistic.
Ms. Romer said that a survey of economic forecasters prepared by Blue Chip Economic Indicators, a research organization, forecast that unemployment would peak at 10.1 percent in the second quarter of 2010, up from 9.8 percent last month, and would be at 9.6 percent at the end of next year.
Though Ms. Romer said that economic conditions had improved drastically in the last six months, and that the $787 billion stimulus program had contributed to that improvement, she said the rebound in jobs could actually be even slower than what White House officials currently expected.
"There is a substantial range of uncertainty around any forecast," she cautioned.
Although the stimulus program will help the economy grow faster than it would have otherwise, she said, the effect of the stimulus will not be as pronounced as this year.
In addition, Ms. Romer warned, American companies had registered big productivity gains during the recession, just as they did during the downturn in 2001, and employers might be even more restrained than usual about rebuilding their work forces.
The economy has lost 7.2 million jobs since the recession began almost two years ago, and economists say it needs to produce about 100,000 jobs a month just to keep up with increases in the population. All told, Ms. Romer said, the United States was about nine million jobs short of where it should be.
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21) Bank failures top 100,
only part of industry woes
By DANIEL WAGNER, AP Business Writer
October 24, 2009
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091024/ap_on_bi_ge/us_bank_failures
WASHINGTON - The cascade of bank failures this year surpassed 100 on Friday, the most in nearly two decades. And the trouble in the banking system from bad loans and the recession goes even deeper than the number suggests.
Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other banks remain open even though they are as weak as many that have been shuttered. Regulators are seizing banks slowly and selectively - partly to avoid inciting panic and partly because buyers for bad banks are hard to find.
Going slow buys time. An economic recovery could save some banks that would otherwise go under. But if the recovery is slow and smaller banks' finances get even worse, it could wind up costing even more.
The bank failures, 106 in all, are the most in any year since 181 collapsed in 1992, at the end of the savings-and-loan crisis. On Friday, regulators took over three small Florida banks - Partners Bank and Hillcrest Bank Florida, both of Naples, and Flagship National Bank in Bradenton - along with American United Bank of Lawrenceville, Ga., Bank of Elmwood in Racine, Wis., Riverview Community Bank in Otsego, Minn., and First Dupage Bank in Westmont, Ill.
When a bank fails, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. swoops in, usually on a Friday afternoon. It tries to sell off the bank's assets to buyers and cover its liabilities, primarily customer deposits. It taps the insurance fund to cover the rest.
Bank failures have cost the FDIC's fund that insures deposits an estimated $25 billion this year and are expected to cost $100 billion through 2013. To replenish the fund, the agency wants banks to pay in advance $45 billion in premiums that would have been due over the next three years.
The FDIC won't say how deep a hole its deposit insurance fund is in. It can tap a credit line from the Treasury of up to a half-trillion dollars to cover the gap.
The list of banks in trouble is getting longer. At the end of June, the FDIC had flagged 416 as being at risk of failure, up from 305 at the end of March and 252 at the beginning of the year.
Yet the pace of actual bank failures appears to be slowing. The FDIC seized 24 banks in July, 11 in September and 11 in October.
If any bank poses an immediate danger to customers or the broader financial system, regulators close it immediately, bank supervisors said. The issue is murkier for troubled banks that might qualify to close but whose closings might still be postponed or even prevented.
The FDIC's first priority, spokesman Andrew Gray said, is to maintain public confidence in the banking system. "As evidenced by the stability of insured deposits throughout last year, this mission has been a success," he said.
He said public confidence isn't reason enough to delay a bank closing, because legally the decision to close rests with whoever chartered the bank - a state or federal agency.
But more than a dozen experts, including current and former regulators, bankers and lawyers, say the FDIC's mission to maintain public confidence in the banking system contributes to the go-slow approach.
"The FDIC was set up to create confidence and prevent bank runs," says Mark Williams, a former bank examiner for the Federal Reserve. Being too aggressive about bank closings "can be counter to the mission."
Sarah Bloom Raskin, Maryland's top banking regulator, said: "Technically it's the states who decide, but in reality it's the FDIC calling you to say" when the bank will be closed.
Last fall, the financial turmoil was rooted in bad bets that the nation's biggest banks, like Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp., had made on complicated, high-risk mortgage investments.
Smaller banks have been undone by something more conventional - real estate, construction and industrial loans that have soured as the recession has deepened. Defaults are up as developers abandon failing projects and landlords can't meet their loan payments.
Small- and mid-sized banks hold lots of those loans and have been hurt more than big ones by the sinking commercial real estate market, especially in states like California, Georgia and Illinois. As defaults rise, these banks must set aside more money to cover losses.
For the banks, this means mounting losses and shrinking reserves.
In a healthy economy, Williams said, the Fed and the FDIC would be inclined to close such weak banks. But these days, those agencies and other regulators prefer to hold off, hoping an economic recovery will eventually restore the health of some of the banks.
But the recovery is expected to be slow.
Americans remain hesitant to spend money because of job losses, flat wages, tight credit and high debt. Their cutbacks have triggered tens of thousands of business failures.
Abandoned retail space in downtowns and suburban malls means no rental income for property owners. As landlords default on real estate loans, they weaken the banks that hold the loans.
The situation now is especially grave in Southern California, Georgia and Illinois, which have some of the highest home foreclosure rates. Twenty banks have closed in Georgia alone.
Individual bank depositors aren't at risk when a bank fails. Their money is guaranteed up to $250,000 by the government. Ever conscious of maintaining public confidence, agency officials hammer this point in public statements.
When weak banks are allowed to stay open, their growing losses potentially can drain the FDIC's deposit insurance fund faster, says Bert Ely, an independent banking consultant.
Federal agencies aren't the only ones with an interest in slowing the pace of bank closings. State regulators with closer ties to local communities want to avoid the ripple effects when a town loses its main source of consumer and business credit, Williams said.
But finding buyers for wobbly banks has been tough.
FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair acknowledged as much in testimony this month before a Senate panel. The FDIC has been offering to share buyers' losses on the assets being transferred, she said.
"In the past several months investor interest has been low," she said in prepared testimony.
In an effort to find more potential buyers, the FDIC has relaxed the rules for private-equity firms to buy banks. In the past, regulators had feared such a move would allow investors to protect themselves from the cost of bank failures, escaping serious consequences while drawing down the FDIC's fund.
An early success of the new strategy was a deal announced this month to sell assets from Corus Bank of Chicago to a group of private investors. But there still aren't enough buyers to absorb quickly all the assets held by at-risk banks.
That's because there are so many weak and failing banks on the market - and so few others strong enough to buy them. That's one reason it's hard to know how many more banks could be closed in coming months, said Daniel Alpert, Managing Partner of the New York investment bank Westwood Capital LLC.
"How many banks will survive?" Alpert asked.
"Loans are still deteriorating, but there are glimmers of hope in the economy. Ultimately, it's all about employment."
AP Business Writers Marcy Gordon in Washington and Sara Lepro in New York contributed to this report.
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22) Arizona May Put State Prisons in Private Hands
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
October 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/us/24prison.html?hp
FLORENCE, Ariz. - One of the newest residents on Arizona's death row, a convicted serial killer named Dale Hausner, poked his head up from his television to look at several visitors strolling by, each of whom wore face masks and vests to protect against the sharp homemade objects that often are propelled from the cells of the condemned.
It is a dangerous place to patrol, and Arizona spends $4.7 million each year to house inmates like Mr. Hausner in a super-maximum-security prison. But in a first in the criminal justice world, the state's death row inmates could become the responsibility of a private company.
State officials will soon seek bids from private companies for 9 of the state's 10 prison complexes that house roughly 40,000 inmates, including the 127 here on death row. It is the first effort by a state to put its entire prison system under private control.
The privatization effort, both in its breadth and its financial goals, demonstrates what states around the country - broke, desperate and often overburdened with prisoners and their associated costs - are willing to do to balance the books. Arizona officials hope the effort will put a $100 million dent in the state's roughly $2 billion budget shortfall.
"Let's not kid ourselves," said State Representative Andy Biggs, a Republican who supports private prisons. "If we were not in this economic environment, I don't think we'd be talking about this with the same sense of urgency."
Private prison companies generally build facilities for a state, then charge them per prisoner to run them. But under the Arizona legislation, a vendor would pay $100 million up front to operate one or more prison complexes. Assuming the company could operate the prisons more cheaply or efficiently than the state, any savings would be equally divided between the state and the private firm.
The privatization move has raised questions - including among some people who work for private prison companies - about the private sector's ability to handle the state's most hardened criminals. While executions would still be performed by the state, officials said, the Department of Corrections would relinquish all other day-to-day operations to the private operator and pay a per-diem fee for each prisoner.
"I would not want to be the warden of death row," said Todd Thomas, the warden of a prison in Eloy, Ariz., run by the Corrections Corporation of America. The company, the country's largest private prison operator, has six prisons in Arizona with inmates from other states.
"That's not to say we couldn't," Mr. Thomas said. "But the liability is too great. I don't think any private entity would ever want to do that."
James Austin, a co-author of a Department of Justice study in 2001 on prison privatization and president of the JFA Institute, a corrections consulting firm, said private companies tended to oversee minimum- and medium-security inmates and had little experience with the most dangerous prisoners.
"As for death row," Mr. Austin said, "it is a very visible entity, and if something bad happens there, you will have a pretty big news story for the Legislature and governor to explain."
Arizona is no stranger to private prisons or, for that matter, aggressive privatization efforts (recently, the state put up for sale several government buildings housing executive branch offices in Phoenix). Nearly 30 percent of the state's prisoners are being held in prisons operated by private companies outside the state's 10 complexes.
In addition, other states, including Alaska and Hawaii, have contracts with private companies like Corrections Corporation of America to house their prisoners in Arizona.
For advocates of prison privatization, the push here breathes a bit of life into a movement that has been on the decline across the country as cost savings from prison privatizations have often failed to materialize, corrections officers unions have resisted the efforts and high-profile problems in privately run facilities have drawn unwanted publicity
"We have private prisons in Arizona already, and we are very happy with the performance and the savings we get from them," said Representative John Kavanagh, a Republican who is chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and an architect of the new legislation authorizing the privatization. "I think that they are the future of corrections in Arizona."
Under the legislation, any bidder would have to take an entire complex - many of them mazes of multiple levels of security risks and complexity - and would not be permitted to pick off the cheapest or easiest buildings and inmates. The state also wants to privatize prisoners' medical care.
Louise Grant, a spokeswoman for Corrections Corporation of America, said the high-security prisoners would be well within the company's management capabilities. "We expect we will be there to make a proposal to the state" for at least some of its complexes up for bid, Ms. Grant said.
In pure financial terms, it is not clear how well the state would make out with the privatization. The 2001 study for the Department of Justice found that private prisons saved most states little money (there has been no equivalent study since). Indeed, many states, struggling to keep up with the cost of corrections, have closed prisons when possible, and sought changes in sentencing to reduce crowding in the last two years.
As tough sentencing laws and the ensuing increase in prisoners began to press on state resources in the 1980s, private prison companies attracted some states with promises of lower costs. The private prison boom lasted into the 1990s. Throughout the years, there have been high-profile riots, escapes and other violent incidents. The companies also do not generally provide the same wages and benefits as states, which has resulted in resistance from unions and concerns that the private prisons attract less-qualified workers.
Then the federal government stepped in, with a surge of new immigrant prisoners, and began to contract with the private companies. The number of federal prisoners in private prisons in the United States has more than doubled, to 32,712 in 2008 from 15,524 in 2000. The number of state prisoners in privately run prisons has increased to 93,500 from 75,000 in that time.
With bad economic times again driving many decisions about state resources, other states are sure to watch Arizona's experiment closely.
"There simply isn't the money to keep these people incarcerated, and the alternative is to free many of them or lower cost," said Ron Utt, a senior research fellow for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative group whose work for privatization was cited by one Arizona lawmaker.
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23) Carefully Cleaning Up the Garbage at Los Alamos
By MICHAEL COOPER
October 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/us/24alamos.html?ref=us
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. - No one knows for sure what is buried in the Manhattan Project-era dump here. At the very least, there is probably a truck down there that was contaminated in 1945 at the Trinity test site, where the world's first nuclear explosion seared the sky and melted the desert sand 200 miles south of here during World War II.
But now a team of workers is using $212 million in federal stimulus money to clean up the 65-year-old, six-acre dump, which was used by the scientists who built the world's first atomic bomb. They are approaching the job like an archeological dig - only with even greater care, since some of the things they unearth are likely to be radioactive, while others may be explosive.
The dump has become part of the $6 billion stimulus program to clean up the toxic legacy of the arms race, which is one of the biggest sources of direct federal contracts in the $787 billion stimulus act. More than $1.9 billion is being spent at the Hanford site in Washington, the home of the nuclear reactor that made the plutonium for the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. Another $1.6 billion is being spent cleaning up a Savannah River site, in South Carolina.
After the stimulus bill passed, some Republicans questioned the wisdom of devoting so much money to nuclear cleanups, noting that the Department of Energy's environmental management program had been bedeviled by cost overruns in the past. Democrats countered that the labor-intensive projects would create many jobs while advancing the stimulus act's goal of improving the environment.
They also noted that the money was only a down payment on what is still a staggering task: the Department of Energy is responsible for cleaning up 107 sites, with as much acreage as Delaware and Rhode Island combined, in work that could take decades and cost up to $260 billion to complete.
Nearly 73,000 people have applied for stimulus jobs cleaning up nuclear sites since the program was announced, the Department of Energy says, and more than 10,800 positions have been saved or created with the money.
Here at Los Alamos, some of the first work involves tearing down buildings and cleaning up land at what is called Technical Area 21. It was an isolated mesa in 1945 when the laboratory moved its plutonium processing operations there after a fire broke out uncomfortably close to its original plant near the center of town. But the town has grown since then, and now several businesses - including a hardware store, an auto repair shop and the local newspaper - are right across the street from the old dump.
Since the dump, the laboratory's first, was used only from 1944 through 1948, the cleanup team had to do a great deal of detective work to figure out what might be in it.
"You look for every possible shred of evidence that you can to give you an idea of what kind of surprises you might encounter," said Allan B. Chaloupka, who directs the decontamination and decommissioning program.
The team members pored over wartime classified documents and interviewed old-timers to learn what materials might have found their way into the dump, and took soil samples to test their estimates of how much plutonium might be buried there. They debriefed a laboratory worker who, as a young man, once fell into it.
They asked scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory to come up with worst-case scenarios of how explosive the chemicals dumped there might have grown over the years - and then they blew up the equivalent amounts of dynamite to test all the safety measures that they would be taking. While the laboratory has worked to assure the public that the work will be done safely, some of the site's closest neighbors are eyeing the project warily.
"You wonder what's going on," said Ken Romero, 40, a machinist at the Jona Manufacturing Company, across the street. "One day we looked across the street and there was a guy in a full-body white suit, and he was just 100 yards away from us."
On a recent visit, officials emphasized the extreme care they were taking. When they tore down an air-processing building early one morning, they did not use any explosives, for obvious reasons. Instead, an excavator tore a slice down the center of the building, and then surgically knocked the building's walls inward, so the debris would not hit any of the neighboring buildings.
Some of the workers did wear white body suits, but in this case they were for protection from asbestos, not radiation. The building was not contaminated, though some of its neighbors were.
So far, about 156 people - many from small businesses in the area - have been given jobs on the project, which will ultimately employ roughly 300 people, officials said.
"Many are basically common laborers that come out of commercial operations," Mr. Chaloupka said, "and we're teaching them to do something at a little higher level, and we're creating a cadre of people that can do other jobs later."
The government is under a consent order with the State of New Mexico to clean up the area, so there will be more work after the stimulus program ends.
George Rael, an assistant manager for environmental operations at the Department of Energy's site office here, said that by clearing most of the mesa, the stimulus work would send a signal to the public.
"This is going to be very visible skyline change that people will actually see and recognize," Mr. Rael said.
Several of the buildings they are tearing down date to the Manhattan Project days, when a secret laboratory hastily thrown up here on the Pajarito Plateau at the site of a ranch school for boys produced the bomb that changed the world.
The complex was top secret: eminent physicists who visited were given pseudonyms, the whole town was behind a fence, and the laboratory's inhabitants all had the same mailing address, "P.O. Box 1663, Santa Fe," which was also used on the birth certificates of babies born there.
When the job here is done, and the waste is dug up and trucked elsewhere, officials said, the mesa will be clean enough for homes to be built on it.
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24) Hawaii: Protesting School Closings
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | West
October 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/us/24brfs-PROTESTINGSC_BRF.html?ref=us
Angry parents are protesting the loss of education for their children on the first day of Hawaii's statewide public school closings. The parents rallied at the Capitol in Honolulu as 256 schools shut down to help balance the state budget. In all, 17 furlough days are planned for this year and next. Organizers said the demonstration was meant to show elected leaders that they should not make children suffer for a lack of economic planning. Many hope the government will either raise taxes or dip into emergency money to restore Hawaii's school year. The cuts give Hawaii the shortest school year in the country, at about 163 days, compared with 180 days in most other states.
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25) Food Label Program to Suspend Operations
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
October 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/business/24food.html?ref=business
Under pressure from state and federal authorities who feared consumers would be misled, the food industry on Friday started backing away from a major labeling campaign meant to highlight the nutritional benefits of hundreds of products.
PepsiCo said that it was cutting its ties with the program, called Smart Choices, which features a green checkmark on the front of products that meet its nutritional criteria.
Kellogg's, which makes Froot Loops and other sugary cereals that received the program's seal of approval, said that it would begin phasing out packaging bearing the program logo as its inventories ran out.
Officials with the program said that Smart Choices would suspend most of its operations while they waited for the Food and Drug Administration to devise regulations for package-front nutrition labeling. Those rules could differ from the program's criteria.
"I regard it as a partial victory," said Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general, who recently began an investigation into the program to see if the labeling campaign violated his state's consumer protection law. He called on more companies to pull out of the program.
"Quite bluntly, without a commitment by the companies to stop using the logo, there is absolutely no benefit to consumers," he said.
The actions were a remarkable turnabout for an initiative that was developed by many of the country's largest food manufacturers. It had taken at least two years to develop.
The Smart Choices logo began appearing on food packages this summer but immediately met with criticism from some nutritionists who felt its criteria were too lax. They pointed to sugary cereals, like Froot Loops, and fat-heavy products like mayonnaise, which they said should not be considered among the healthiest choices in the supermarket. The first ingredient in Froot Loops is sugar.
The F.D.A. sent the program a letter in August voicing concern that the label could lead consumers to choose highly processed foods over healthier foods, like fresh fruits and vegetables and whole grains.
And this week, Margaret A. Hamburg, the F.D.A. commissioner, said that the agency would move quickly to devise rules for package-front nutrition labeling, an area that until now has been only loosely regulated.
Ms. Hamburg said that the front of the package should give shoppers quick access to key dietary information that is already provided in greater detail in the Nutrition Facts box on the back or side of packages.
The Smart Choices program sent a letter on Friday to Dr. Hamburg and Mr. Blumenthal saying it would stop recruiting companies to take part in the program and stop promoting the program to consumers.
Eileen T. Kennedy, a nutritionist who is president of the Smart Choices board, said that the program was not bowing to outside pressures.
"I'm actually pleased that F.D.A. has moved in this direction," Dr. Kennedy said. "I think it's one more step in decreasing any confusion that's out there in the marketplace."
David DeCecco, a spokesman for PepsiCo, said the company was pulling out of the program in anticipation of working with the new F.D.A. rules. He said that only a few products, like Life cereal and instant oatmeal, made by PepsiCo's Quaker division, had carried the logo.
"We really just had our toe in the water," Mr. DeCecco said.
Kellogg's said it would maintain ties to the program and that Celeste A. Clark, the company's senior vice president of global nutrition, would remain on the program's board.
Kraft, another participant, said that it planned to stay involved in the program and had no plans to remove the logo from packaging.
Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group, had worked with the Smart Choices program to help develop its criteria, but resigned last year out of concerns that the standards were too loose.
Mr. Jacobson said he believed that the companies involved in Smart Choices had hoped to head off federal regulation of package-front labeling by showing they could develop an acceptable system on their own.
"It clearly blew up in their faces," Mr. Jacobson said. "And the ironic thing is, their device for pre-empting government involvement actually seems to have stimulated government involvement."
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