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U.S. Out Now! From Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and all U.S. bases around the world; End all U.S. Aid to Israel; Get the military out of our schools and our communities; Demand Equal Rights and Justice for ALL!
TAX THE RICH NOT THE POOR! MONEY FOR HUMAN NEEDS NOT WAR!
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17 SAN FRANCISCO MARCH AND RALLY AGAINST THE WARS
U.S. Troops Out Now! Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan!
Assemble 11:00 A.M. U.N. Plaza, SF (Market between 7th and 8th Streets)
March begins at 12:00 Noon
Rally begins at 1:00 P.M. back at U.N. Plaza
Commemorating the eighth anniversary of the war on Afghanistan and the 40th anniversary of the massive October 17, 1969 Vietnam Moratorium.
Sponsor: October 17 Antiwar Coalition
510-268-9429 or 415-794-7354
There will be a news conference on the steps of City Hall (Polk Street)
Thursday, October 15, 10:00 A.M.
All are encouraged to come for support!
Volunteers are needed for set-up, take-down and security:
For set-up, please show up at 8:00 A.M.
Monitor training is at 9:00 A.M.
Volunteers should call Mark at: 415-401-7471
Groups are encouraged to set up tables. The table fee is $25.00.
(Have checks ready and payable to: Bay Area Progressive Forum)
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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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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Sweet Crude, is playing for FREE on Sunday October 18th in San Francisco as part of the United Nations Film Festival. The award winning documentary captures the complex reality of how the oil industry and the Nigerian government have left the Delta in such desperation that some have turned to militancy while others struggle to survive. The film will be followed by a panel discussion with the Director and experts and activists focused on the issues in the Niger Delta.
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
Michael Moore on Good Morning America
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY1pcoBWp3Q
Michael Moore on Countdown With Keith Olbermann
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0URCqniVTOY
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
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Taking Aim Radio Program with
Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone
The Chimera of Capitalist Recovery, Parts 1 and 2
http://www.takingaimradio.com/shows/audio.html
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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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OCTOBER 17 COALITION
NEWS CONFERENCE:
There will be a news conference on the steps of City Hall (Polk Street)
Thursday, October 15, 10:00 A.M.
All are encouraged to come for support!
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SAVE CCSF, UC, K-12, and S.F. STATE!
SAVE PUBLIC EDUCATION!
RALLY @ NOON, OCTOBER 15
SAN FRANCISCO CIVIC CENTER
We're all in this fight together. Corporations and the wealthy are getting tax breaks while we're left behind. Without public education, our futures are in danger.
TAX THE CORPORATIONS FOR EDUCATION!
TAX THE RICH FOR EDUCATION!
For more information contact:
Pablo Rodriguez
pabrodriquez@yahoo.com
Ramon Castellblanch
ramonc5@att.net
Ken Tray
ktray@uesf.org
Partial list of sponsors:
Students for a Quality Education - SF State; AFT2121; the California Faculty Association and California State University Employees Union chapters at San Francisco State; Associated Students (AS), CCSF; United Educators of San Francisco (UESF); SWAT;
UPWA; UPTE; San Francisco Labor Council.
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Thurs. Oct. 15, 6 pm, Union Square, SF
President Obama will be speaking at a major fundraiser inside the St. Francis Hotel, Union Square. Join the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), Bay Area Latin America Solidarity Coalition, Single Payer Now, the ANSWER Coalition and many other organizations. Among the themes of the demonstration are:
Healthcare Not Warfare! Money for People’s Needs, Not the Pentagon!
End the Occupations of Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Haiti!
U.S. Out of Latin America – Restore President Zelaya in Honduras!
Overturn NAFTA and CAFTA!
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ARE WE GOING TO PROTEST????????????????!!!!!!!!!
YES WE ARE!!!
Demonstrate your opposition to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and for Single Payer Healthcare at President Obama's
San Francisco Fundraising Dinner on
Thursday, October 15, from 4:30 to 6:30.
Gather at Union Square across from the St Francis Hotel - 355 Powell St.
( 3 blocks form Powell St BART/MUNI )
[SEE THE $1000.00-A-PLATE ($500.00 FOR STANDING ROOM) DINNER INVITATION BELOW...bw]
For information on Single Payer demonstration contact:
Don Bechler
Chair - Single Payer Now
415-695-7891
www.singlepayernow.net
DINNER INVITATION:
Please join us for a very exciting evening with
President Barack Obama
President Obama will be visiting
San Francisco for the first time since his historic election,
this very special event is in support of Organizing for America and the Democratic National Committee.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2009
Reception
5:00 PM
Westin St. Francis Hotel, San Francisco
Please forward to anyone you know who would appreciate this opportunity, space is limited.
Reception:
$1000 VIP Ticket (seated)
$500 General Ticket (standing)
Please click to rsvp.
http://www.democrats.org/SanFrancisco?custom1=Annemarie+Stephens http://www.democrats.org/SanFrancisco?custom1=Annemarie+Stephens
I hope you will be able to join us for this exciting evening as we welcome President Obama back to San Francisco!
Annemarie Stephens
510-759-2491
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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17 SAN FRANCISCO MARCH AND RALLY AGAINST THE WARS
U.S. Troops Out Now! Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan!
Assemble 11:00 A.M. U.N. Plaza, SF (Market between 7th and 8th Streets)
March begins at 12:00 Noon
Rally begins at 1:00 P.M. back at U.N. Plaza
Commemorating the eighth anniversary of the war on Afghanistan and the 40th anniversary of the massive October 17, 1969 Vietnam Moratorium.
Sponsor: October 17 Antiwar Coalition
510-268-9429 or 415-794-7354
Money for Human Needs Not War!
Immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. troops, military personnel, bases, contractors, and mercenaries from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Colombia.
End U.S. support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine! End the Seige of Gaza!
U.S. Hands Off Iran and North Korea!
Self-determination for All Oppressed Nations and Peoples!
End War Crimes Including Torture and Prosecute the War Criminals!
See historical images of the Vietnam Moratorium at:
http://images.google.com/images?q=vietnam+moratorium&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=lGaISs7pMIP-sQOr2OznAg&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4
Image of San Francisco Vietnam Moratorium, Golden Gate Park, October 17, 1969 (I was there...bw):
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.rchrd.com/photo/images/pb2-12-15.jpg&imgrefurl=http://rchrd.com/photo/archives/1969/&usg=__FeHN5CAwDXv-ewwCt2Hfni6ZUn8=&h=567&w=850&sz=143&hl=en&start=3&um=1&tbnid=EJH6Kzj6YI6zzM:&tbnh=97&tbnw=145&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dvietnam%2Bmoratorium%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DX%26um%3D1
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Protest Ehud Olmert, former Prime Minister of Israel on Thursday October 22 @ 6pm. We want Olmert arrested and tried for his role in the brutal attack on Gaza in December/January, as well as the attack on Lebanon in 2006. Olmert will be appearing as a speaker for the World Affairs Council, at meeting held at the St. Francis Hotel, 335 Powell Street, San Francisco, California, 94102 USA . The protest will be outside this building in Union Square.
As Olmert speaks in the St Francis Hotel, we will be gathered outside on Union Square in San Francisco. We want Israel and its leaders held accountable for their crimes against the people of Palestine and Lebanon.
We support the findings of the Goldstone Report, that detail the crimes committed by Israel during its war against the whole people of Gaza of last December/January, in "Operation Cast Lead". President Obama and most politicians have simply refused to take this report seriously, some by vocally rejecting it, and many more by ignoring it completely.
It is therefore up to us, civil society, to again do what politicians are unwilling to do. Call for universal application of human rights and international law. This will be the message of our protest. We demand that Olmert, who initiated "Operation Cast Lead" and is directly responsible for the crimes that took place and therefore must be held accountable. Olmert is also responsible for the insane attack against Lebanon in the Summer of 2006. Olmert shares criminal responsibility for the siege on Gaza that leaves children hungry and 1.5 million people in desperate circumstances.
Please plan on being there. Please spread the word. We need to stand together to create a new reality. We will not accept that Israel may act with impunity and total disregard for human life. This protest is our opportunity to stand up and be counted.
Spread the word to your friends and all organizations that support the rule of law, human rights, and oppose militarism and occupation. Organizations are urged to send in their endorsements.
More info:
http://stopaipac.org/olmertprotest.htm
Jim Harris
people@stopaipac.org
www.StopAIPAC.org
Stop AIPAC
PO Box 11311
Berkeley, CA 94712
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Please forward widely. Contact us if you or your organization would like to endorse this call.
CALL FOR OCTOBER 22 DEMONSTRATION IN OAKLAND, CA:
NATIONAL DAY OF PROTEST TO STOP POLICE BRUTALITY, REPRESSION AND THE CRIMINALIZATION OF A GENERATION
Oscar Grant. Brownie Polk. Parnell Smith. And dozens more Oakland alone. Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo in New York City. Adolph Grimes in New Orleans. Robbie Tolan in Houston. Julian Alexander in Anaheim. Jonathan Pinkerton in Chicago. And thousands more nationwide.
All shot down, murdered by law enforcement, their lives stolen, victims of a nationwide epidemic of police brutality and murder.
The racist arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates this summer in Cambridge, Massachusetts - right in his own home - showed that any Black man or woman, no matter their stature, no matter their education, no matter their accomplishments can be targeted for brutality - even murder - at any moment.
Meanwhile, a whole generation of youth is treated as guilty until proved innocent, and hundreds of thousands are criminalized, and locked away in U.S. prisons with no hope for the future. And immigrants are subject to brutal raids, with families cruelly split up in an instant.
We refuse to suffer these outrages in silence. We need to put a stop to this and drag the truth about the nationwide epidemic of police violence and repression into the light of day for all so see. We say no more! Enough is Enough!
Oct 22nd 2009 is the 14th annual national day of protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of Generation---bringing together those under the gun and those not under the gun as a powerful voice to expose the epidemic of police brutality. On that day in cities across the country many different people will take to the streets against police brutality and murder, against the criminalization of youth, and against the targeting of immigrants.
We call for a powerful demonstration in Oakland on October 22 demanding:
* Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation!
* October 22....No To Police Brutality
* No to ICE raids and round-ups of immigrants!
* Enough Is Enough! No More Stolen Lives!
* Justice for Oscar Grant and all victims of police murder!
* Wear Black, Fight Back
Contact the National Office of October 22nd at:
Info@october22.org or 1-888-NOBRUTALITY
October 22nd Coalition
P.O. Box 2627
New York, N.Y. 10009
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[please excuse duplicate postings]
INVITATION
October 24 Mobilizing Conference to Save Public Education
We have the power to stop the catastrophic budget cuts, fee hikes, and layoffs -- but to save public education in California requires coordinating our actions on a statewide level.
We invite all UC, CSU, CC, and K-12 students, workers, teachers, and their organizations across the state to participate in and collectively build the October 24 Mobilizing Conference to Save Public Education. The all-day conference will take place at UC Berkeley (contact us for more logistics).
The purpose of this conference is both simple and extremely urgent: to democratically decide on a statewide action plan capable of winning this struggle, which will define the future of public education in this state, particularly for the working class and communities of color.
Why UC Berkeley? On September 24, over 5,000 people massively protested and effectively paralyzed the UCB campus, as part of the UC-wide walkout. A mass General Assembly of over 400 individuals and dozens of organizations met that night and collectively decided to issue this call.
We ask all organizations and individuals in the state who want to save public education to endorse this open conference and help us collectively build it.
Save public education!
No budget cuts, fee hikes, or layoffs!
For statewide student, worker, and faculty solidarity!
Please contact oct24conference@gmail.com to endorse this conference and to receive more details.
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Dear participants, authors, organizational endorsers and allies,
Attached are promotional materials for our upcoming events in support of GI
resistance on Oct. 18 and Oct. 25 featuring Col. Ann Wright (ret.), Dahr
Jamail, David Solnit, Marjorie Cohn, Rebecca Solnit, and Aimme Allison.
Web graphics and text are attached. Some list both events, and others for
each event separately. Please use as needed for your purposes. For example,
if you have an online calendar, you may want to post the date-specific
graphic and/or text for each date. Descriptions below.
Courage to Resist very much appreciates your participation and support.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Jeff Paterson, Courage to Resist
Web graphic for both events - ctr-oak09-events.jpg
Web graphic for Oct 18 only - ctr-18oct09-wright-event.jpg
Web graphic for Oct 25 only - ctr-25oct09-cohn-event.jpg
PDF leaflet for both events - ctr-oak-oct09events.pdf
Text announcement (brief) for both events - oct18-25-events-brief.txt
Text for Oct 18 only - oct18-wright-jamail-solnit.txt
Text for Oct 25 only - oct25-cohn-solnit-allison.txt
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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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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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Stop the Extradition of Sean Garland
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=48273279889
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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) U.S. Mortgage Backer May Need Bailout
By DAVID STREITFELD and LOUISE STORY
October 9, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/business/09fha.html?ref=us
2) Fannie and Freddie Continue to Struggle, Lawmakers Told
By JACK HEALY
October 9, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/business/economy/09loan.html?ref=us
3) Igniting the Growth of Jobs
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
October 10, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/opinion/10herbert.html?hp
4) Marijuana Licensing Fails to Chase the Shadows
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
October 10, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/us/10pot.html?ref=us
5) New Navy Ship to Be Named for Slain Civil Rights Pioneer
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
October 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/us/11evers.html?ref=us
6) Consultants Are Providing High-Profile Inmates a Game Plan for Coping
By JONATHAN ABRAMS
October 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/sports/11consultants.html?ref=us
7) Ohio Death Penalty Case Might Determine Abu-Jamal's Fate
Shannon P. Duffy
The Legal Intelligencer
October 12, 2009
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202434453364&Ohio_Death_Penalty_Case_Might_Determine_AbuJamals_Fate
8) It's a Fork, It's a Spoon, It's a ... Weapon?
By IAN URBINA
October 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/education/12discipline.html
9) Is Medea Benjamin Naive or Just Confused?
Code Pink rethinks Afghan withdrawal
by Scott Horton
October 08, 2009
http://original.antiwar.com/scott/2009/10/07/is-medea-benjamin-confused/
10) Gay Rights Marchers Press Cause in Washington
By JEREMY W. PETERS
October 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/us/politics/12protest.html?ref=us
11) For Long-Term Unemployed, Payments Near End
By PATRICK McGEEHAN
October 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/nyregion/12jobless.html?ref=nyregion
12) Behind the Laughter
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
October 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/opinion/13herbert.html
13) Cleansing the Air at the Expense of Waterways
By CHARLES DUHIGG
October 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/us/13water.html?hp
14) Code Pink Returns From Kabul
By James Dao
October 12, 2009, 4:04 pm
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/code-pink-in-kabul/
15) Texas: Inmate Set Free Because of Unfair Trial
By RACHEL MARCUS
National Briefing | Southwest
October 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/us/13brfs-INMATESETFRE_BRF.html?ref=us
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1) U.S. Mortgage Backer May Need Bailout
By DAVID STREITFELD and LOUISE STORY
October 9, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/business/09fha.html?ref=us
A year after Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac teetered, industry executives and Washington policy makers are worrying that another government mortgage giant could be the next housing domino.
Problems at the Federal Housing Administration, which guarantees mortgages with low down payments, are becoming so acute that some experts warn the agency might need a federal bailout.
Running questions about the F.H.A.'s future - underscored by interviews with policy makers, analysts and home buyers - came to the fore on Thursday on Capitol Hill. In testimony before a House subcommittee, the F.H.A. commissioner, David H. Stevens, assured lawmakers that his agency would not need a bailout and that it was managing its risks.
But he acknowledged that some 20 percent of F.H.A. loans insured last year - and as many as 24 percent of those from 2007 - faced serious problems including foreclosure, offering a preview of a forthcoming audit of the agency's finances.
"Let me simply state at the outset that based on current projections, absent any catastrophic home price decline, F.H.A. will not need to ask Congress and the American taxpayer for extraordinary assistance - we will not need a bailout," Mr. Stevens said in his testimony.
But to its critics, the F.H.A. looks like another Fannie Mae. The hearings on Thursday came on the same day that the federal agency charged with overseeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac provided a somber assessment of those giants' health. In the year since the government stepped in to rescue them, the companies have taken $96 billion from the Treasury, and may need more.
Since the bottom fell out of the mortgage market, the F.H.A. has assumed a crucial role in the nation's housing market. Created in 1934 to help lower-income and first-time buyers purchase homes, the agency now insures roughly 5.4 million single-family home mortgages, with a combined value of $675 billion.
In addition, these loans are bundled into mortgage-backed securities and guaranteed through the Government National Mortgage Association, known as Ginnie Mae. That means the taxpayer is responsible for paying investors who own Ginnie Mae bonds when F.H.A.-backed mortgages hit trouble.
"It appears destined for a taxpayer bailout in the next 24 to 36 months," Edward Pinto, a former Fannie Mae executive, said in testimony prepared for the hearing. Mr. Pinto, who was the chief credit officer from 1987 to 1989 for Fannie Mae, went further than most housing analysts and predicted that F.H.A. losses would more than wipe out the agency's $30 billion of cash reserves.
The issue has polarized Congress. Republicans, who led efforts to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before those companies ran into trouble, are now seeking to bridle the F.H.A. Many Democrats insist the F.H.A. is playing a vital role in the housing market, which is only just starting to stabilize.
"F.H.A. has stepped into the void left by the private market," Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat from California, said at the hearing. "Let's be clear; without F.H.A., there would be no mortgage market right now."
That was the case for Bernadine Shimon. Like many Americans, Ms. Shimon has recently been through some rough times. She lost a house to foreclosure, declared bankruptcy, got divorced and is now a single mother, teaching high school English in a Denver suburb.
She wanted a house but no lender would touch her. The Federal Housing Administration was more obliging. With the F.H.A. insuring her mortgage, Ms. Shimon was able to buy a $134,000 fixer-upper in August.
"The government gave me another chance," she said.
The government is giving as many people as it possibly can the chance to buy a house or, if they are in financial difficulty, refinance it. The F.H.A. is insuring about 6,000 loans a day, four times the amount in 2006. Its portfolio is growing so fast that even F.H.A. backers express amazement.
For decades it was an article of faith that helping people of limited means like Ms. Shimon get a house was good for the new owner, good for the neighborhood and good for American capitalism. Then came the housing bust, which demonstrated that when lenders allowed people to buy houses they ultimately could not afford, it hurt the parties - while putting the economy itself in a tailspin.
In the aftermath of the crash, there is wide divergence on how easy, or how hard, it should be to become a homeowner. Skittish lenders are asking for 20 percent down, which few prospective borrowers have to spare. As a result, private lending has dwindled.
The government has stepped into the breach, facilitating loans with down payments as low as 3.5 percent and offering other incentives to stabilize the market. Real estate agents in some hard-hit areas say every single one of their clients is using the F.H.A.
"They're counting their pennies, scraping up that 3.5 percent," Bonni Malone of Prudential Americana in Las Vegas said. "Mostly they're buying foreclosed homes from banks, although I had one client who bought from a guy that was dying. It's turning around the market."
While the government's actions have helped avert full-scale economic disaster, there is growing concern that it might have doled out its favors with too generous a hand.
Many of the loans the F.H.A. insured in 2007 and last year are now turning delinquent, agency officials acknowledge. The loans made in those two years are performing "far worse" than newer loans, dragging down the whole portfolio, Mr. Stevens of the F.H.A. said in an interview.
The number of F.H.A. mortgage holders in default is 410,916, up 76 percent from a year ago, when 232,864 were in default, according to agency data.
Despite the agency's attempt to outrun its fate by insuring ever-larger amounts of new loans to such borrowers as Ms. Shimon - the current rate is over a billion dollars a day - 7.77 percent of the portfolio is in default, up from 5.6 percent a year ago.
Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview that the defaults were, in essence, worth it.
"I don't think it's a bad thing that the bad loans occurred," he said. "It was an effort to keep prices from falling too fast. That's a policy."
The troubled loans are nevertheless weighing on the agency's capital reserve fund, which has fallen to below its Congressionally mandated minimum of 2 percent, from over 6 percent two years ago.
The optimism expressed by Mr. Stevens, the F.H.A. commissioner, places him at odds not only with some outside experts but with Kenneth Donohue, the inspector general of the Housing and Urban Development Department, who is also F.H.A.'s watchdog. Mr. Donohue said the drop in reserves was "a flashing red light" that the agency was not taking seriously enough.
"It might be we'll get ourselves out of this and that everything will be fine, but I don't paint that rosy a picture," Mr. Donohue said. "They're banking on the fact that the economy will continue to improve, that the housing market will begin to sustain itself."
He noted that if private lenders had raised their down payment requirements in the last two years, it raised the question, "what does the F.H.A. think it is doing by asking only 3.5 percent?"
Any more than that and Ms. Shimon, 45, would still be a renter. As it was, she cashed in her retirement savings account to come up with the necessary funds. She did not have enough to spare for closing costs, so her mortgage broker arranged a deal where the charges were wrapped into the loan at the cost of a higher interest rate. She cried when the deal was done.
The house was empty and trashed. Slowly, she is trying to bring it back to life. She spent the first few weeks picking up garbage in the backyard.
Is Ms. Shimon a good bet? Even she has no easy answer. Her mortgage payment, $1,100, is half of what she takes home every month. It is not easy to make ends meet. Teachers can get laid off like everyone else.
"The government," she said, "is doing what it needed to do - taking a risk on people."
Chaz Fullenkamp, an automotive technician in Columbus, Ohio, got an F.H.A. loan even though he was living on the financial edge. "If I got unemployed, I'd be wiped out in a month or two," he says. Thanks to the F.H.A., however, he is better off than he used to be.
Mr. Fullenkamp used F.H.A. insurance to buy a house this spring for $179,000. The eager seller paid the closing costs and also gave Mr. Fullenkamp $2,500 in cash. He immediately applied for the $8,000 tax rebate. Even taking his down payment into account, he came out ahead.
"I knew in my heart I could not really afford the house, but they gave it to me anyway," said Mr. Fullenkamp, 22. "I thought, 'Wow, I'm surprised I pulled that off.' "
As the number of loans has soared, random quality control checks have decreased sharply, F.H.A. staff members say. Mr. Donohue, the inspector general, cited numerous examples of organized fraud in testimony to Congress earlier this year.
"They need to stop taking bad loans in the door," he said in an interview. "They're taking on all this volume, they have to have very active underwriting standards."
Jack Healy contributed reporting from New York.
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2) Fannie and Freddie Continue to Struggle, Lawmakers Told
By JACK HEALY
October 9, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/business/economy/09loan.html?ref=us
In the year since the government stepped in to rescue the collapsing mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the agencies have taken $96 billion from the Treasury, and may still need more.
That was the somber assessment delivered Thursday by the federal agency charged with overseeing the government-controlled Fannie and Freddie, which have lost a combined $165 billion since July 2007 as their bets on the housing market went bad.
"The short-term outlook for the enterprises remains troubled," said Edward J. DeMarco, acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, in testimony before the Senate Banking Committee.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which bought millions of home mortgages, were taken over by the government last September after their share prices plummeted and investors abandoned the companies, fearing they would collapse under the weight of their loan portfolios. The government put Fannie and Freddie into a conservatorship and offered billions in federal lifelines.
Now, as housing prices struggle higher and an $8,000 tax credit has enticed many first-time home buyers into the market, Fannie and Freddie are limping along. The Federal Reserve is buying more than $1 trillion in mortgage-backed securities in an effort to loosen credit and restart the mortgage-financing markets.
Yet even as the broader economy tries to turns a corner, Fannie and Freddie face huge obstacles, Mr. DeMarco said.
Their books are still bleeding red as foreclosures rise and homeowners - even the highest-quality borrowers - fall behind on their mortgage payments. Several crucial positions remain vacant, and Mr. DeMarco said the agencies were worried about losing workers because of the uncertainties surrounding their fate.
Right now, 3.1 percent of Freddie Mac loans are seriously delinquent, and Fannie's seriously delinquency rate is an even higher 4.2 percent, Mr. DeMarco testified. And as unemployment nears 10 percent and homeowners struggle to persuade lenders to refinance their mortgages, delinquency rates are rising.
Fannie and Freddie now manage nearly 100,000 foreclosed properties, and those numbers are almost certain to grow.
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3) Igniting the Growth of Jobs
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
October 10, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/opinion/10herbert.html?hp
San Francisco
Think of this recession as a monstrous hurricane that swept through the job market and is still wreaking havoc. The latest unemployment rate for California is a knee-buckling 12.2 percent, the highest since World War II.
The job market nationwide is the worst it has been in 70 years, noted Robert Reich, the former labor secretary, during one of several conversations that I had with him over the past week. He dismissed the upbeat talk of "green shoots" sprouting in the devastated economic landscape and the dreamy notion that recovery is no longer just around the corner, it's here.
The economy may have recovered technically, he said, "but this is not a real recovery."
The Obama administration's stimulus package has mitigated the damage, but it was not big enough or targeted enough toward job creation to halt the continued hemorrhaging in employment. (Incredibly, some 40,000 teachers have lost their jobs over the past year, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research.)
Without jobs, you don't have a genuine recovery. And with consumers tapped out and business investment hamstrung, it's up to the government to develop creative approaches and make the investments necessary to start putting people back to work in large numbers.
There are plenty of serious proposals available that are both doable and affordable.
Mr. Reich, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, is among those who favor a tax credit for small businesses that create jobs. This is tricky. Policy makers have to make sure that the credit is given only for net new hires, as companies will attempt to get a tax break for hires they would have made anyway.
"Under normal circumstances," said Mr. Reich, "I would never recommend this. It's a very blunt instrument. But these are not normal circumstances."
A virtue of the tax credit, which reportedly is being considered by the administration, is that it could get significant Republican support.
Another promising approach is substantially increased federal aid to state and local governments, above and beyond what is already occurring. Local governments from one coast to the other are facing budget meltdowns and are slashing services and personnel.
"When states cut programs or raise taxes, that slows the economy down," said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. "You can prevent that if you give them aid, and that means state employees, and employees of local governments that depend on state assistance, don't get laid off."
That's the beginning of an important ripple effect that spreads to the private sector jobs in firms that do business with state and local governments. The federal aid can help keep these folks on the job and contributing to the economy until a real turnaround occurs.
"We estimate that half the jobs that are created by fiscal relief to the states are private-sector jobs," said Mr. Mishel. "No one thinks about that."
More controversial but increasingly important is the idea of direct government job creation. The recession has absolutely crushed employment opportunities for unskilled, undereducated young people - not just in big cities and rural areas, but in suburban communities as well. Without direct government intervention, the recession is never going to end for them.
During the first half of this year in Illinois, to take one wretched example, just one in four black men in the age group of 20 through 24 had a job.
Nationally during that period, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, "the employment rate of males 16-19, 20-24, and 25-29 were at their lowest values over the past 61 years for which national employment data are available." That's for men of all ethnic groups.
"The past," as William Faulkner told us, "is not dead. It's not even past." The lessons of the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s are right in front of us, ready to be studied, analyzed, updated and applied to the present-day needs of the country.
If we're serious about getting the U.S. back on track economically, we will have to take our heads out of the sand at some point with regard to the nation's infrastructure. America has to be rebuilt, modernized and re-energized - from its water and sewer systems to its schools to the smart grid and the alternative energy sources that so many are talking about and beyond. That's where the jobs are for the long term, and that's the only route to a truly flourishing future.
These investments would be costly and require vision. Seeing them through would take an enormous collective effort by politicians and the public alike. But some variation on these themes is absolutely essential if the U.S. is to pull itself out of the economic quicksand and its long-term, potentially very tragic consequences.
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4) Marijuana Licensing Fails to Chase the Shadows
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
October 10, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/us/10pot.html?ref=us
SANTA FE, N.M. - The only person in America with a state license to distribute marijuana wants to keep her identity secret.
"I'm so totally paranoid I can't stand myself," said the distributor, who runs a nonprofit group here that grows and sells marijuana for medicinal purposes and who insisted on meeting in the privacy of a hotel room.
It was not meant to be this way.
New Mexico's new medical marijuana law was intended to provide safe, aboveboard access to the drug for hundreds of residents with chronic pain and other debilitating conditions. By licensing nonprofit distributors, New Mexico hoped to improve upon the free-for-all distribution systems in some states like California and Colorado, where hundreds of for-profit dispensaries have sprung up with virtually no state oversight.
But even in New Mexico, the process - from procuring the starter seed (in Amsterdam, via a middleman) to home delivery (by a former Marine) - is not for the faint of heart. Those engaged in the experiment here never know if they will be arrested, because growing, selling and using marijuana remain illegal under federal law. And robbery is always a fear.
In a reversal of Bush administration policy, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in March that the government would not prosecute medical marijuana distributors who comply with state laws. That announcement has emboldened Rhode Island to adopt legislation similar to New Mexico's: it will license three nonprofit "compassion centers" to grow and dispense the drug by 2012. At least six other states are now considering the model.
But in recent weeks, law enforcement officers, some of them federal, have raided dispensaries in California and Washington State, and in the absence of any actual change in the federal law, many still fear prosecution.
Among New Mexican patients, demand has been great. In the two months since the Santa Fe Institute for Natural Medicine began dispensing marijuana, it has signed up about 400 clients, said Robert Pack, a patient on its board of directors who uses the drug to curb the side effects of epilepsy medication.
Eager patients depleted the initial supply, and the organization had to hurry to produce more marijuana this month, because weeks of rain hampered the drying and curing phase.
Twenty other nonprofit groups are seeking New Mexico's approval to grow and sell medical marijuana, but the state's Health Department will not identify them, citing privacy and safety concerns. Because the groups remain anonymous unless they identify themselves, other regulatory agencies - the Department of Agriculture, for example, which would inspect their growing techniques - will have no oversight.
Such secrecy seems out of keeping with the law's intent: to help medical marijuana patients emerge from the shadows and gain open access to the drug.
"I think what's appropriate is for this to be completely out in the open," said Len Goodman, a patient who started NewMexicann, a nonprofit group seeking state approval to distribute marijuana. "As long as you follow the rules, you should be able to come out of the closet and function with no fear or shame."
For the Santa Fe Institute, the production process has been nerve-racking. The marijuana plants - no more than 95 at a time, under state regulations - are grown in a windowless rural building with steel doors, a motion detector and, to keep the plants' pungent odor indoors, carbon filters. Despite a high-tech alarm system and the hidden location, the institute's grower, who insisted on anonymity, said he constantly feared being robbed.
"If I worked for Brink's driving an armored car, I'd probably feel about the same way," said the grower, a longtime organic farmer who said he had studied with marijuana breeders in Amsterdam.
Delivering the marijuana can also be fraught with anxiety. The Department of Homeland Security informed the group that the former Marine who serves as courier could be prosecuted if stopped at any of several Border Protection checkpoints in southern New Mexico, where many clients live.
"Homeland Security made it clear, clear, clear," the institute's chief said. "Their directive is, 'You got it, we confiscate it.' "
The institute's grower started out producing equal amounts of two cannabis strains - one energizing, the other sedating. But the energizing strain quickly proved more popular with patients, many of whom take morphine and other narcotics for pain that leave them hazy.
"They want something that makes them really clearheaded," the grower said, adding that the energizing strain made users feel "almost like your I.Q. went up about 20 points."
While 13 states have legalized marijuana for medicinal use since 1996, most give patients no help in obtaining it. In Colorado, an alternative newspaper is stepping in: it is hiring a pot critic to review the state's many unregulated dispensaries.
In Rhode Island, which legalized medical marijuana in 2007 but changed its law this year to allow nonprofit producers, it remains unclear whether towns will be able to block dispensaries from opening within their borders, or whether growers will be able to deliver to patients.
One state-approved user, Rob Mooney, said the state's licensed caregivers - who are allowed to grow and sell marijuana to two patients each at a given time - and street dealers "ended up selling me garbage that messed me up."
Ellen Smith, who mixes marijuana-infused oil into applesauce to ease pain from a degenerative tissue disorder, grows her own plants but finds doing so too stressful. Her plants have been stolen, she said, and caring for them requires constant vigilance.
"It's nerve-racking to have this around," Ms. Smith said of her crop, whose skunky odor scented her kitchen. "It will be great to just go to the compassion center, pick up the product and go on with our lives."
But the Rhode Island state police have raised numerous concerns about the state's model, pointing out that the required criminal check for employees of compassion centers will search only for in-state convictions.
At a recent hearing, Capt. David S. Neill of the state police asked officials from the Rhode Island Health Department who would monitor the centers to make sure they are not growing more marijuana than the law allows (12 mature plants per patient at a given time), or selling the drug to people who are not approved users.
The answer: nobody.
Dr. Alfredo Vigil, New Mexico's secretary of health, said tight regulation of medical marijuana programs was crucial.
"As you can probably imagine, we've had all manner of interesting people come forward and say, 'We want to be your producers,' " Dr. Vigil said. "If we do this in some uncontrolled fashion and some big bad thing happens, the whole program comes crashing down."
But with the federal prohibition in place, he said his state's program was a risk. "It's a tricky situation in many, many ways," he said. "As long as there's a disconnect with the federal law, it's guaranteed there will be problems along the way."
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5) New Navy Ship to Be Named for Slain Civil Rights Pioneer
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
October 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/us/11evers.html?ref=us
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) - The widow of the slain civil rights pioneer Medgar Evers fought tears Friday as Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, a former Mississippi governor, announced that he was naming a new Navy supply ship for her husband.
His widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams, said: "I think of those who will serve on this ship and those who will see it in different parts of the world. And perhaps they, too, will come to know who Medgar Evers was and what he stood for." She spoke at Jackson State University, where Mr. Mabus made the announcement.
Mr. Evers was Mississippi field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People when he was assassinated outside his Jackson home on June 12, 1963. He was 37.
"He gave his life for his country," Mr. Mabus told an audience of about 200.
Mr. Mabus embraced Ms. Evers-Williams and Mr. Evers's brother, Charles Evers, as they stood before a screen with a color likeness of the ship and a black-and-white photograph of Medgar Evers.
The Medgar Evers will be built at General Dynamics in San Diego, and Mr. Mabus said construction of the 689-foot vessel would take up to two years. The ship will deliver food, ammunition and parts to other ships at sea.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, Medgar Evers organized nonviolent protests, voter registration drives and boycotts in his home state.
Mr. Mabus, who was a 14-year-old living in northern Mississippi when Mr. Evers was killed, served as governor from January 1988 to January 1992. He said he chose to name his first Navy ship after Mr. Evers because he was a pioneer.
"He was committed to his fellow human beings and the dream of making America a nation for all its citizens," Mr. Mabus said.
Medgar Evers was born in tiny Decatur, Miss., about 60 miles east of Jackson. He served in the Army in World War II, fighting in France. After he returned to Mississippi, he earned a degree from what is now Alcorn State University and became involved in the civil rights movement.
Mr. Evers's assassination prompted President John F. Kennedy to ask Congress for a comprehensive civil rights bill.
Mr. Evers is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. It was 1994 before his killer, the white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith, was convicted of murder.
Ms. Evers-Williams - who lives in Los Angeles and Bend, Ore. - thanked Mr. Mabus for fulfilling a promise he made to her more than 20 years ago, that he would find an appropriate way to commemorate her late husband's legacy.
She said she flew to Mississippi for Friday's ceremony without knowing why she had to be there. She joked that Navy officials and her friends in Mississippi who arranged the trip did a good job of keeping the information from her.
"Mission accomplished," she told Mr. Mabus with a smile.
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6) Consultants Are Providing High-Profile Inmates a Game Plan for Coping
By JONATHAN ABRAMS
October 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/sports/11consultants.html?ref=us
Athletes, celebrities and corporate executives have long sought counsel to prepare for their biggest moments. The same can increasingly be said of those among them who have lost their way.
The former Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress, who is serving a two-year sentence for a weapons charge, recently joined a growing list of high-profile inmates who have hired prison consultants to help them navigate their entry to a confined life. Others have included Bernard L. Madoff, Michael Vick, Mike Tyson, Martha Stewart and Leona Helmsley.
The ranks of prison consultants include professionals who have been involved in the legal system for decades and former prisoners who sell their own experiences as a way to help others and make a profit. Some teach self-defense. Others calm such fears by explaining that the threat of violence, especially at minimum-security prisons, is not significant. And some of the advice even conjures the mundane chore of packing for a vacation.
Becoming a consultant requires no formal training or certification, and nobody tracks the number of people in the business. The Federal Bureau of Prisons has taken no position on the service.
"At every custody level - high, medium, low - do you want to know what should happen or what's going to happen?" said Larry Levine, a former inmate turned consultant in Los Angeles. "How would a patient react if they asked their doctor, 'Have you ever operated on anybody?' and they respond, 'No, I read a book, though'?"
Levine talks fast, and his common-sense lessons are laced with profanity. His Web site shows his prison identification card as if it were a badge of honor. He served 10 years in federal custody for drug trafficking and was released in 2007.
He said there were four consultants when he began such work two years ago and estimated that more than a dozen prison advisers were currently working nationwide.
Levine got his start on the inside, offering advice to fellow inmates. Now he is pitching his work as a reality television show. He does not meet with his clients in person because his supervised release prohibits it. Instead, he fields phone calls and charges $1,000 to $5,000.
He encourages clients to develop a routine.
"I teach them that they should always keep a Bible on their bed," Levine said. "If the guards see a Bible on the bed, they're less likely to move it. It's kind of like the Devil touching the holy water."
Kim S. Buchanan, a professor of constitutional law and prisoner rights at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, said there was nothing wrong with former prisoners making a living off of their experience. The potential problem, she said, is the perception that some people believe they will be physically harmed if they are not properly schooled before entering custody.
"The prison consultants aren't causing a problem; they are just exploiting a problem that exists," Buchanan said.
Herbert J. Hoelter, a consultant who once worked with Webster L. Hubbell during the Whitewater scandal in the 1990s, likened the role to teaching.
"It's a good thing to do just because knowledge is power, and the more you know, the better you're going to do," he said.
Hubbell, an associate attorney general early in the Clinton administration, served 18 months on mail-fraud and tax-evasion charges. In a telephone interview, he said Hoelter helped calm concerns about the unknown world behind bars.
"The devil you know is something you can deal with a lot better than the devil you don't know," Hubbell said.
Hoelter first serves the inmates in his primary role as a sentencing consultant for the nonprofit National Center on Institutions and Alternatives in Baltimore. His clients have included Madoff, Vick and Stewart.
Hoelter discusses the psychological effects of incarceration with the client and the family. And when people meet with him, he said, they usually have prepared questions.
One client, Steven Schulman, a former law firm partner at Milberg Weiss in New York, compiled a list of about 60 initial questions before he was to serve six months in federal prison on racketeering conspiracy charges. The questions concerned his schedule, what he could take with him and what the other inmates might be like.
"When you're first looking at it, it's a black box, a vacuum," said Schulman, who completed his sentence in July.
Hoelter told Schulman to prepare a list of his medication and phone numbers for lawyers and associates. Otherwise, Schulman said, he would never have remembered such information.
"Right now, these things seem obvious to me," he said in a telephone interview. "They did not seem obvious at the time."
Richard J. Schaeffer, a New York lawyer, directs some of his clients to Hoelter because he said he was not equipped to answer the questions himself.
"The kind of contact that lawyers typically have with prisons is very limited," Schaeffer said. "On a day-to-day basis and the practical nitty-gritty on the climate of changes that the client is going to face, Herb is very skilled at that."
Hoelter's knowledge of the prison system does not stem from a first-person experience, but from a database collected over three decades in the field and from a network of offices and employees. Hoelter said he had about 200 clients currently incarcerated. Some serve as greeting parties when a new client is sent to the same prison.
Safety is a concern for many, but it is not considered a large issue at the minimum-security prisons where most of his clients end up because behavioral issues add time to sentences.
Madoff, 71, asked about his medical care before beginning a sentence of 150 years at the Butner Federal Correctional Complex in North Carolina, Hoelter said. Vick wanted advice about the best course for returning to the N.F.L. after an 18-month sentence for his role in a dogfighting ring. Vick has since returned to the league with the Philadelphia Eagles.
Hoelter said Vick developed a routine in prison surrounding chess.
"He'd like to think he was the best in there," Hoelter said. "But he was very competitive. He said, 'There are a couple guys I can't beat, but I'm working on it.' "
Although Madoff and Vick shared no discernible links beyond their status as inmates, Hoelter said they presented him with similar concerns.
"They both asked, 'What do I do with the rest of my life now?' " Hoelter said. "And the answer is, you do the best you can. You can help other people. You can teach. You can educate. You have a mind. Use that and don't atrophy."
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7) Ohio Death Penalty Case Might Determine Abu-Jamal's Fate
Shannon P. Duffy
The Legal Intelligencer
October 12, 2009
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202434453364&Ohio_Death_Penalty_Case_Might_Determine_AbuJamals_Fate
Lawyers for convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal will be watching closely on Tuesday when the U.S. Supreme Court takes up an Ohio death penalty case because its outcome may very well decide whether Abu-Jamal's death sentence will be reinstated.
In April, Abu-Jamal lost his final appeal seeking a new trial for the December 1981 murder of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner when the justices refused to take up the issue of whether blacks were unfairly excluded from the jury.
But, at the time, the justices took no action on a companion petition filed by the Philadelphia district attorney's office demanding reinstatement of Abu-Jamal's death sentence despite having discussed it weeks before.
Now it appears certain that the high court has decided to hold the Philadelphia prosecutors' petition in abeyance pending the outcome of Smith v. Spisak -- an Ohio case that raises strikingly similar issues to those in Abu-Jamal's case.
If the prosecutors in that case are successful and win reinstatement of the death sentence imposed on Frank G. Spisak, the justices may then see no need to take up Abu-Jamal's case.
Instead, at that point, it's likely that the justices would simply issue a one-page order in Abu-Jamal's case that would summarily reverse the decision by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and order the appellate court to reconsider whether Abu-Jamal's death sentence should be reinstated.
Why is Abu-Jamal's case so similar to Spisak's? Both were on death row for notorious murders, but both won rulings in federal court that granted them partial new trials limited to the penalty phase.
In both cases, the federal courts' decisions to overturn the death sentences hinged on Mills v. Maryland -- a 1988 U.S. Supreme Court decision that governs how juries should deliberate during the penalty phase of a capital trial.
The Mills ruling struck down a Maryland statute that said juries in capital cases must be unanimous on any aggravating or mitigating factor. Voting 5-4, the justices declared that unanimity was properly required for any aggravating factor, but that mitigating factors -- those that weigh against imposing a death sentence -- must be handled more liberally, with each juror free to find on his or her own.
Since then, Mills has proven to be a powerful tool for defense lawyers aiming to overturn death sentences in numerous other states.
The question now before the courts is whether Mills truly requires that death sentences in other states be overturned if the juries in those states might have been confused by faulty instructions or verdict forms and led to believe that mitigating factors require unanimity.
Perhaps even more important to the justices is a corollary question of federalism: Is it fair for the federal courts to overturn a state court's decision on how to interpret Mills by imposing its own interpretation that extends Mills beyond its original scope?
It's possible that the justices will provide the answers to those questions in Spisak's case that will be immediately applied to Abu-Jamal's case -- with Abu-Jamal and his lawyers forced to simply watch and wait until that happens.
Spisak, 57, was sentenced to death in 1983 for a killing spree at Cleveland State University after a monthlong trial that reportedly included testimony that he was a neo-Nazi and cross-dresser.
According to briefs in the case, Spisak killed Horace T. Rickerson, Timothy Sheehan and Brian Warford and also shot at John Hardaway and Coletta Dartt. Hardaway was shot seven times but survived and identified Spisak as the shooter.
After his arrest, Spisak confessed to all five shootings and declared that his actions were motivated by his hatred of gay people, blacks and Jews.
As Ohio prosecutors argued in their Supreme Court brief, Spisak "proudly testified at length as to his neo-Nazi beliefs and told the jury that those beliefs had motivated the murders."
In 2006, the 6th Circuit overturned Spisak's death sentence based on a Mills violation as well as findings that his lawyers were ineffective and had "demonized" Spisak during the trial.
The Supreme Court overturned the ruling and ordered the 6th Circuit to study the case again in light of two other decisions by the high court.
But the 6th Circuit in 2008 reinstated its prior decisions, finding they were correct.
Now the Supreme Court has taken the Spisak case up a second time to tackle the question of whether the 6th Circuit failed to give proper deference to the Ohio state courts "when it applied Mills v. Maryland to resolve ... questions that were not decided or addressed in Mills."
Abu-Jamal's lead lawyer, Robert R. Bryan of San Francisco, said in April that the issue in Spisak is "very similar" to the issue raised in the prosecutors' petition in Abu-Jamal's case.
"The question we've got," Bryan said at the time, "is whether we'll be left dangling in the wind until Spisak is decided."
In the prosecutor's petition in Abu-Jamal's case, Deputy District Attorney Ronald Eisenberg argued that the 3rd Circuit failed to give the proper deference to the rulings of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court which had addressed the Mills issue in 1995 and -- relying on a 3rd Circuit decision -- concluded that the Pennsylvania jury instructions did not run afoul of Mills.
But by the time Abu-Jamal's case made its way into the federal courts, the 3rd Circuit "had changed its mind," Eisenberg argued, with a series of decisions that said the Pennsylvania courts' analysis of Mills was not only wrong but unreasonable.
Eisenberg urged the justices to see a difference between Mills -- where the Maryland jury was specifically instructed that it had to be unanimous on mitigating factors -- and the situation in states like Pennsylvania, where the issue is much subtler and hinges on speculation by the federal courts that the jury might have been confused.
"The difficulty with the 3rd Circuit's 'risk of confusion' view is that Mills, quite simply, stated no such rule," Eisenberg argues.
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8) It's a Fork, It's a Spoon, It's a ... Weapon?
By IAN URBINA
October 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/education/12discipline.html
NEWARK, Del. - Finding character witnesses when you are 6 years old is not easy. But there was Zachary Christie last week at a school disciplinary committee hearing with his karate instructor and his mother's fiancé by his side to vouch for him.
Zachary's offense? Taking a camping utensil that can serve as a knife, fork and spoon to school. He was so excited about recently joining the Cub Scouts that he wanted to use it at lunch. School officials concluded that he had violated their zero-tolerance policy on weapons, and Zachary was suspended and now faces 45 days in the district's reform school.
"It just seems unfair," Zachary said, pausing as he practiced writing lower-case letters with his mother, who is home-schooling him while the family tries to overturn his punishment.
Spurred in part by the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings, many school districts around the country adopted zero-tolerance policies on the possession of weapons on school grounds. More recently, there has been growing debate over whether the policies have gone too far.
But, based on the code of conduct for the Christina School District, where Zachary is a first grader, school officials had no choice. They had to suspend him because, "regardless of possessor's intent," knives are banned.
But the question on the minds of residents here is: Why do school officials not have more discretion in such cases?
"Zachary wears a suit and tie some days to school by his own choice because he takes school so seriously," said Debbie Christie, Zachary's mother, who started a Web site, helpzachary.com, in hopes of recruiting supporters to pressure the local school board at its next open meeting on Tuesday. "He is not some sort of threat to his classmates."
Still, some school administrators argue that it is difficult to distinguish innocent pranks and mistakes from more serious threats, and that the policies must be strict to protect students.
"There is no parent who wants to get a phone call where they hear that their child no longer has two good seeing eyes because there was a scuffle and someone pulled out a knife," said George Evans, the president of the Christina district's school board. He defended the decision, but added that the board might adjust the rules when it comes to younger children like Zachary.
Critics contend that zero-tolerance policies like those in the Christina district have led to sharp increases in suspensions and expulsions, often putting children on the streets or in other places where their behavior only worsens, and that the policies undermine the ability of school officials to use common sense in handling minor infractions.
For Delaware, Zachary's case is especially frustrating because last year state lawmakers tried to make disciplinary rules more flexible by giving local boards authority to, "on a case-by-case basis, modify the terms of the expulsion."
The law was introduced after a third-grade girl was expelled for a year because her grandmother had sent a birthday cake to school, along with a knife to cut it. The teacher called the principal - but not before using the knife to cut and serve the cake.
In Zachary's case, the state's new law did not help because it mentions only expulsion and does not explicitly address suspensions. A revised law is being drafted to include suspensions.
"We didn't want our son becoming the poster child for this," Ms. Christie said, "but this is out of control."
In a letter to the district's disciplinary committee, State Representative Teresa L. Schooley, Democrat of Newark, wrote, "I am asking each of you to consider the situation, get all the facts, find out about Zach and his family and then act with common sense for the well-being of this child."
Education experts say that zero-tolerance policies initially allowed authorities more leeway in punishing students, but were applied in a discriminatory fashion. Many studies indicate that African-Americans were several times more likely to be suspended or expelled than other students for the same offenses.
"The result of those studies is that more school districts have removed discretion in applying the disciplinary policies to avoid criticism of being biased," said Ronnie Casella, an associate professor of education at Central Connecticut State University who has written about school violence. He added that there is no evidence that zero-tolerance policies make schools safer.
Other school districts are also trying to address problems they say have stemmed in part from overly strict zero-tolerance policies.
In Baltimore, around 10,000 students, about 12 percent of the city's enrollment, were suspended during the 2006-7 school year, mostly for disruption and insubordination, according to a report by the Open Society Institute-Baltimore. School officials there are rewriting the disciplinary code, to route students to counseling rather than suspension.
In Milwaukee, where school officials reported that 40 percent of ninth graders had been suspended at least once in the 2006-7 school year, the superintendent has encouraged teachers not to overreact to student misconduct.
"Something has to change," said Dodi Herbert, whose 13-year old son, Kyle, was suspended in May and ordered to attend the Christina district's reform school for 45 days after another student dropped a pocket knife in his lap. School officials declined to comment on the case for reasons of privacy.
Ms. Herbert, who said her son was a straight-A student, has since been home-schooling him instead of sending him to the reform school.
The Christina school district attracted similar controversy in 2007 when it expelled a seventh-grade girl who had used a utility knife to cut windows out of a paper house for a class project.
Charles P. Ewing, a professor of law and psychology at the University at Buffalo Law School who has written about school safety issues, said he favored a strict zero-tolerance approach.
"There are still serious threats every day in schools," Dr. Ewing said, adding that giving school officials discretion holds the potential for discrimination and requires the kind of threat assessments that only law enforcement is equipped to make.
In the 2005-6 school year, 86 percent of public schools reported at least one violent crime, theft or other crime, according to the most recent federal survey.
And yet, federal studies by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and another by the Department of Justice show that the rate of school-related homicides and nonfatal violence has fallen over most of the past decade.
Educational experts say the decline is less a result of zero-tolerance policies than of other programs like peer mediation, student support groups and adult mentorships, as well as an overall decrease in all forms of crime.
For Zachary, it is not school violence that has left him reluctant to return to classes.
"I just think the other kids may tease me for being in trouble," he said, pausing before adding, "but I think the rules are what is wrong, not me."
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9) Is Medea Benjamin Naive or Just Confused?
Code Pink rethinks Afghan withdrawal
by Scott Horton
October 08, 2009
http://original.antiwar.com/scott/2009/10/07/is-medea-benjamin-confused/
Interview recorded October 7, 2009. Listen to the interview.
When I heard that there would be antiwar protests across the country on October 7, 2009, mourning the 8th anniversary of the start of the invasion of Afghanistan, I immediately picked up the phone to get one of the great anti-warrior women of Code Pink to join me on Antiwar Radio for the occasion.
Imagine my shock at seeing this story in the Christian Science Monitor describing the new, post-trip-to-Afghanistan-position of Code Pink's co-founder and most famous leader, Medea Benjamin.
"'We would leave with the same parameters of an exit strategy but we might perhaps be more flexible about a timeline,' says Benjamin. 'That's where we have opened ourselves, being here, to some other possibilities. We have been feeling a sense of fear of the people of the return of the Taliban. So many people are saying that, 'If the U.S. troops left the country, would collapse. We'd go into civil war.' A palpable sense of fear that is making us start to reconsider that.'"
"Did you just read that right?" said one half of my brain to the other. Is this reporting accurate? Has Code Pink turned pro-war?
Well, the interview took place, as scheduled, and this is the result:
Scott Horton: For Antiwar.com and KAOS Radio 95.9 FM in Austin Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio. We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at KAOSRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.Com/Radio. And we've got an action-packed show lined up for you today. Four interviews. Starting right now with our first guest, the director, president, leader? I forget, I'm sorry, of the exact title, of Code Pink, Medea Benjamin. Welcome to the show.
Medea Benjamin: Hi. Thanks for having me on and I guess you should call me co-founder. We don't have much of a hierarchy in Code Pink.
Horton: Oh, I see, Co-founder. Okay, there we go. But you're the famous one.
Benjamin: Well, I'm one of the ones.
Horton: You're the one we all know of. We've seen your picture in the newspaper and so-forth, right?
Benjamin: Well luckily there're a lot of us. So some people know one person and some people know another.
Horton: Right. Well I got to meet some great ladies from Code Pink in 2005 when I was up at Camp Casey for the Cindy Sheehan protest. And to tell you the honest truth, the reason I wanted to bring you on the show today was to talk about all the antiwar protests going on around the country, and I guess I just assumed you guys would be involved with that. And yet I'm reading in the Christian Science Monitor that you're rethinking your call for a pullout from Afghanistan, and that you've had your mind changed about the Afghanistan war due to a recent trip that you took there. Can you elaborate on that?
Benjamin: I don't think that piece really reflects our thinking. We took a delegation there and just got back yesterday. And we 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. Not the one that was implied in the Christian Science Monitor.
Horton: Well, and you know I actually considered setting up the first question that way. This is probably sloppy reporting. I can't imagine that you guys just flip-flop. But again, you sort of seem to be saying, well this is what the people in Afghanistan told you and now that's your position. Is that it?
Benjamin: Well actually, there were many different opinions in Afghanistan and unfortunately because of the security situation we were very limited in who we talked to. We didn't get out to the countryside, we didn't talk to people who had been the targets of U.S. bombing, we didn't talk to people who lived under Taliban control. We, in a week, got to talk to an amazing variety of people, but they were all working inside Kabul, many of them coming from outside Kabul. We are putting up on our Web site interviews with some of the women who did tell us that they thought more U.S. troops would mean more civilian casualties and more recruits for the Taliban. And they said it very clearly. One of the women is a member of parliament. She comes from Wardak province, she's a medical doctor, and she says that this is the best way to recruit the Taliban is to send more troops, that it's time for another approach.
Horton: Hmm... Well, I appreciate that about you're going ahead and stating that you were basically stuck in Kabul, you weren't allowed to go around and see what it's like on the other side. You know, it's interesting the way you kind of gave it... especially in your first answer... "Well, we talked to people who said this and we talked to people who said that." And the way the Christian Science Monitor article is written is that these are all the reasons why you were convinced to change your mind to what they're saying, when really it sort of sounds like you're basically just reporting what you were told and then you have your own thing that you want to say that's not necessarily - you know, [that is] separate from that in its own way. Right?
Benjamin: Well as in all discussions with people, it really depends on how you phrase the question. If you say to people, "Do you want 40,000 more troops, or would you like that money to go to economic development, healthcare, education?" They almost always said the latter. So people told us that war was not the answer. That after eight years of U.S. presence and billions of dollars being thrown into this conflict that the lives of people, especially those living outside of Kabul have virtually stayed the same, and that even women who know that the Taliban has had a very retrograde position in terms of women's rights, even they told us that, look, the majority of Taliban are just poor villagers who don't have another way to earn a living. We've got to reintegrate them into society, we've got to have peace talks and we've got to find ways other than through guns and bombs that we solve this conflict.
Horton: Well now there is a real problem here in a sense of, well, I'll take another example from history, not too far in the past, but where, and this is the "catastrophe in waiting," the worst case scenario, is when the Belgians pulled out of Rwanda and left a minority group that they and propped up in power all along high and dry, and the majority came and got their revenge, and it was an absolute bloody mess, and of course everybody, especially the Right wing warmongers like to say that, you know, we can't have a repeat of Vietnam where the people that we were there to help end up being left high and dry to be slaughtered by the bad guys and that kind of thing. But I guess my question is, whether anybody really thinks that at some point the people that we are supporting, whether outright militarily with bombings from the sky or with reconstruction money or however you phrase it; training up their troops or whatever. Aren't we doing nothing but put off that same kind of situation? I mean ultimately whoever goes along with the Americans in Afghanistan is never going to be the majority of the country, right? Not even by a long shot.
Benjamin: There's also the problem in that the Karzai government is very corrupt and has lost a lot of legitimacy. These last elections were horrendous and it's also known that there are warlords who committed terrible crimes, including terrible crimes against women who are in the government. And Karzai brought back people like General Dostum so he could win some more votes. Somebody who's responsible for the deaths of many, many people both in Northern Afghanistan as well as in Kabul. So this is a government that's full of unsavory characters already. So yes: the U.S. pulls out and there could be tremendous chaos because of the lack of authentic support for this government. That's why I feel we have to have a responsible exit strategy that includes pressure on this government to get rid of people who were responsible for crimes, to build up a justice system that can actually function. People say that in the Taliban areas there's immediate, in quotes, swift "justice" but that there's nothing, no justice done within the Karzai government because of tremendous corruption. I don't know that Taliban justice is the kind of justice that we or the majority of the Afghan people want to see. But the point is that there is work to be done to support institutions within Afghanistan that could then function as a real country and not just the city of Kabul.
Horton: Well Medea, as you know, America has been adopting Taliban justice and destroying our own rule of law. And I wonder how well you think that this government can export a rule of law that we've abandoned to a country like Afghanistan. I mean if they get rid of Dostum and the heroin dealers and the worst of Karzai's allies, maybe even Karzai, who's to replace them with? I mean, it's like, you know, the coup against Diem. Well now who's going to be the puppet dictator of South Vietnam? You know?
Benjamin: Yeah, well that's a good question. There are a lot of great people in Afghanistan and many of them working inside the government. The women that we've met who are members of parliament are really extraordinary. A number of them are medical doctors, they are professionals, they are putting their lives at risk just by being members of the parliament, both by targets that they might be from the Taliban as well as targets inside the government, inside the parliament itself where...
Horton: Right. But so the question is does it make any sense to prop up a bunch of western educated female doctors to be the rulers of this country when they have no indigenous support whatsoever? It's like this is a fantasy being played out in a sociology class somewhere in an American college or something.
Benjamin: Well, you just assume that these were western educated and didn't have support. One of the doctors we met is from Wardak province and she said that it was actually her villagers who forced her to run, that she wasn't interested in running. She didn't spend a penny on her campaign and she was elected by a great majority from her area because people really wanted her to get into government. So what I'm saying is there are some good people. But your questions are good questions. What do you have when you have an outside foreign force, i.e., the U.S. and NATO that has been propping up a government that's full of people who have in the past and continue to commit crimes, live off of drug money? You don't have a very pretty picture and that also means that a lot of the soldiers don't have great reasons to fight.
Horton: Right. And of course fight is just a euphemism for killing people, which is what's been going on there for eight years now. And of course Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are already doing their best to spread the war into Pakistan. So far they hired the prime minister there, Zadari, to start a civil war. They created three million refugees. When you talk about women's rights, how about women with their little baby daughters in their arms being forced out of their homes by the millions, by America?
Benjamin: Well, I don't think that war is the answer, that drones is the answer. Every time we drop a bomb we create more people who join the insurgency and want to attack us and it's an endless vicious cycle and it's got to end.
Horton: So we need occupation, but without soldiers.
Benjamin: Where are you getting that from?
Horton: Well, I mean I'm just trying to understand. Because you're saying we need to build up their court system and we need to do all these things to have a proper exit... a responsible exit strategy rather than just leaving and letting them call their own shots, work out their own problems. And I just wonder how these things all go together. We're supposed to occupy the country, but without killing anybody. And we're supposed to have soldiers to protect women's rights, but not to, whatever it is that they're actually doing there, which of course has nothing to do with women's rights in the first place. You follow me?
Benjamin: Yeah. I don't think the soldiers are protecting women's rights. We did hear a lot of people say that they fear the Taliban coming back in. We spoke to a lot of women who lived under the Taliban times who couldn't go to school, who couldn't do their jobs, were stuck inside their homes. And I think we have to recognize that. But on the other hand there is supposedly only about 5 or 10% of the Taliban that are ideologically motivated. So my point is that we have been shoring up the Taliban with their policies of occupation, that as part of an exit strategy has to be peace talks, that women are at the table, and they have to figure out how people who have joined the Taliban out of economic desperation and joined the Taliban out of revenge because their loved ones have been killed by foreign forces, how they can be brought back into their villages and live productive lives.
Horton: Um, okay. Well, I guess, you know, I'm for that. You know, I'm an individualist and a libertarian and I believe in natural rights for all people no matter where they are. It's just a question of, you know, who's going to do the guaranteeing of them. And it just sort of seems far-fetched to me. Especially at this point that somehow there's going to be a proper nation building exercise. The very best bureaucrats in the Obama administration don't care about those people as much as you do and wouldn't know how to do things right. You know I talked with Jean McKenzie from GlobalPost.com. Great reporter. She's been there for five years. And when I first talked to her she said, "Well we can't just leave because all of our quislings will be slaughtered, you know? We can't do it," and whatever. I talked to her a few weeks ago and she's throwing up her hands. She says there's nothing that can be done except withdraw and let these people work out their own problems. So I guess back to the original question. I mean do you really think it's possible to use American government, military, or I guess you're saying not military, I guess State Department power or something, to build up Afghan society and include the people who are now fighting on the side of the Taliban, include enough of them in the government that somehow this becomes some sort of pluralistic, federalistic type place where we can rest assured that a civil war isn't going to break out when we leave or something like that. Is that basically what you're saying?
Benjamin: I don't think we can be ever sure of what's going to happen in a place like Afghanistan because it's such a complex culture. But I do think that we have thrown ourselves into this quagmire and we've got to extricate ourselves in a way that is as responsible as possible. And that part of that is trying to support those people within Afghanistan who want to see peace talks, who want to get the other nations in the region involved and who do feel that they need a police system, they need people inside their country that are going to somehow promote justice and communities, that they don't want to be left in chaos. So I do think that there is something to be worked out in terms of an exit strategy. I don't say the U.S. has to do these things or is in the position or really even has the moral authority to do it. There are other countries. For example, when we asked who should do the training of the Afghan military, many of the answers said they should be from countries like Turkey, that are Muslim countries that are closer to their culture and more acceptable to their people. So all I'm saying is, I think as part of an exit strategy these things have to be worked out.
Horton: And you think Hillary Clinton ought to be in charge of working that out? Or Holbrooke?
Benjamin: I don't think Holbrooke has done anything that's useful and he certainly didn't have a good reputation among anybody that we talked to there.
Horton: As you would have expected, right? I mean there's nothing surprising about that. Again, we're getting back to the thing about Code Pink doesn't get to run the occupation and make it right. We're dealing with, we have a world run by Democrats. You know what I mean? That's the best we have.
Benjamin: Yeah, and unfortunately they say one thing and do another. I mean you have constantly people saying, including General Petraeus, that there is no military solution, that so much of the problem in places like Afghanistan are economic problems. And we've contributed to those economic problems by increasing the violence and the destruction. And yet over 90% of the money that we spend there goes to the military.
Horton: And see, I guess this is why... I don't really want to fight with you. It seems like you and I must already agree so much that it's just got to be a communication breakdown here somewhere or something. I mean I'm not phrasing it right. Well, okay: Remember a few weeks ago when some locals stole a German fuel truck and the Germans called in an airstrike and the Americans blew up the fuel truck all over a bunch of civilians. A hundred or so who were lined up to get some fuel and burned them to death.
Benjamin: Mm-hmm.
Horton: I wonder how many more of those before you say, "You know what? The U.S. government must get out of Afghanistan yesterday, that's it. And whatever happens after this, at least it won't be our government burning little kids to death."
Benjamin: Well I certainly say that the U.S. should stop the airstrikes and I think that the U.S. should be doing the opposite than what McChrystal says. He wants them to be out in the communities and the people that we talked to said that they aren't able to protect Afghans, that they should be in their bases while this exit strategy and peace process is worked out. I think the only difference in what you're saying and what I'm saying is that I did feel a palpable fear among many of the women that they don't want the Taliban to take over again.
Horton: Yeah. Well, and see here's the thing too though: The Taliban at this point, what does that even mean? You know what I mean? It was a very small number of people. A lot of them were killed years and years ago. It basically seems to be the NATO, U.S. government, U.S. media euphemism for anybody in Afghanistan who resists our occupation.
Benjamin: Well that's why I think as part of the exit strategy is the peace process. And if there are 20,000 Taliban at the most, the vast majority of them are people who are not ideologically driven who want to go back to their villages, would probably much prefer to do something other than be shooting at people. And that if we gave them the opportunity for that by announcing that we were going to be leaving, that we were going to be helping to allow their community leaders to reincorporate them into society, then you would be basically taking away the strength of the Taliban.
Horton: Yeah. Well, I certainly think that's true. We saw the same thing in Iraq where the occupation is a perpetual motion machine. In fact I was just reading a little something about American occupations in Central America, I think in, I forget if it was in Nicaragua. Way back in the day, you know, 80 years ago or something, where of course the longer they stayed the more the people resisted and that was the excuse for staying, and we can't just leave with Nicaragua in such a mess and all these people fighting each other and whatever, when of course the occupation is the basis of in the first place. And I think, wasn't Code Pink's argument about Iraq not "We have to leave responsibly but we've got to get the hell out of there because staying there is irresponsible"?
Benjamin: Yeah, in the case of Iraq I think it was a little bit different. It was absolutely clear our troops should never been there beginning and you didn't have a Taliban like government...
Horton: Yeah, but I mean Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri escaped eight years ago. They haven't been in Afghanistan for eight years.
Benjamin: But you do have the Taliban in Afghanistan and you have...
Horton: Yeah, but what did the Taliban ever do?
Benjamin: Well the Taliban...
Horton: To us.
Benjamin: Huh?
Horton: What did they ever do to the United States?
Benjamin: Well see, if your perspective is just from the United States. My perspective is also from what they did to the women of Afghanistan. But if your perspective is truly from the United States, what people say is that if we allow the Taliban to take over Afghanistan then that will be a safe haven for Al Qaeda.
Horton: Yeah, but that's no different is it than the National Review saying, you know, Saddam Hussein was really bad to the people in Iraq. I think this is why all over Facebook today they're saying, "Ha, ha, and again, for those tuning in late, she did say, it's Medea Benjamin from Code Pink. She did say the Christian Science Monitor's reporting was not altogether accurate here. But all over Facebook they're saying, "Ha, ha, I guess she'll have to apologize to Condoleezza Rice now. And "Ha, ha, I guess this proves that obviously that McChrystal is right. If Code Pink and McChrystal both agree that the occupation has got to be better in order to quell the violence, then by golly we know it's right." Like when Bill Clinton and George Bush agree about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.
Benjamin: Well I think it's just full of distortions, because what we say is we want a responsible pulling out of U.S. troops and we certainly are against what McChrystal is calling for. We're against sending in more troops, we're against troops being visibly present in the villages because we think their presence is more of a threat to people there and puts them at risk. And we want our troops to pull out. We just want to do it in a way that is not going to lead to a Taliban takeover that will put women back inside the home.
Horton: Alright everybody, that's Medea Benjamin from Code Pink. And I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Benjamin: Okay, thanks for having me on.
Transcript provided thanks to A.J. Processing.
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10) Gay Rights Marchers Press Cause in Washington
By JEREMY W. PETERS
October 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/us/politics/12protest.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON - Impatient and discouraged by what they see as a certain detachment by President Obama on their issues, gay rights supporters took to the streets Sunday in the largest demonstration for gay rights here in nearly a decade.
The rally was primarily the undertaking of a new generation of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender advocates who have grown disillusioned with the movement's leadership.
Known as Stonewall 2.0 or the Prop. 8 Generation (a reference to the galvanizing effect that the repeal of California's same-sex marriage law had on many young people), these activists, in their 20s and 30s, are at odds with advocates urging patience as Mr. Obama grapples with other pieces of his domestic agenda like the health care overhaul and the economic recovery.
"I think this march represents the passing of the torch," said Corey Johnson, 27, an activist and blogger for the gay-themed Web site Towleroad.com. "The points of power are no longer in the halls of Washington or large metropolitan areas. It's decentralized now. You have young activists and gay people from all walks of life converging on Washington not because a national organization told them to, but because they feel the time is now."
The rally on Sunday and a black-tie gala on Saturday hosted by the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay rights advocacy group, made for a glaring dichotomy. Mr. Obama, who spoke at the dinner, had the crowd on its feet reiterating his pledge to end the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy and declaring his commitment to gay rights as "unwavering."
But at the rally, some gave the speech low marks for lacking anything new and failing to acknowledge several major issues confronting the movement. In the words of Billie Myers, a musician who spoke to an eager crowd of tens of thousands on the west lawn of the Capitol, "I'm sorry, but I didn't like your speech."
The president did not lay out a timetable to repeal the ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in the military, voice support for any of the battles going on at state levels to allow same-sex couples more recognition under the law nor mention the march.
"He knows this march is happening, and he can't even acknowledge it?" said Robin McGehee, 36, a co-director of the march. Ms. McGehee took issue with people she believes are giving the president a pass.
"In our community, there are people working hard to build a relationship with the president and people screaming in the streets for their rights," she said. "There is an urgency with the people on the streets and a sense of 'Oh, he'll come around' with the people who ate dinner with him."
The Human Rights Campaign, which helped organize the last gay rights march on Washington in 2000 but had virtually no involvement in Sunday's event, stirred up some controversy over the weekend after its president, Joe Solmonese, wrote a letter to supporters urging them to take Mr. Obama at his word. "It's not January 19, 2017," he wrote, referring to what would be the last day of Mr. Obama's presidency if he were to win a second term.
While generally supportive of the president, many marchers said they felt that he had not delivered on campaign promises he made to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans.
"I think he has a lot on his plate," said Rachael McIntosh, 25, of Worcester, Mass. "But I'd hoped we'd be a priority." Ms. McIntosh raised a sign that read "Nobel Peace Prize. Earn It!"
Organizers of the march encountered considerable opposition from within gay political circles and from those who argued that it was hastily planned and would divert resources from campaigns at the state level.
Representative Barney Frank called the march "emotional satisfaction" for its organizers and said of their intention to pressure the Obama administration, "The only thing they're going to put pressure on is the grass."
The organizers were rating the march a success, saying that at least 150,000 people had attended, though the authorities gave no official estimate of the crowd size.
The marchers included many who were not gay but attended to support gay friends.
Lisa Kimmey, 25, drove all night with gay friends from Chicago so she could attend the march with them. "If I can get married, if I can get my partner's health insurance, then everyone else in this country should be able to. It's 2009, and it's unbelievable to me that they don't have that," Ms. Kimmey said.
Dave Valk, 22, the student outreach coordinator for the march, said he believed that many people his age were embracing gay rights as the civil rights struggle of their time. "There are a lot of people getting involved not just because it's a gay rights movement but because it's a generational movement," he said. "People feel like they're part of a shift, that this is important."
Ashley Southall contributed reporting.
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11) For Long-Term Unemployed, Payments Near End
By PATRICK McGEEHAN
October 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/nyregion/12jobless.html?ref=nyregion
Tens of thousands of New Yorkers have had the unfortunate distinction of collecting unemployment benefits longer than anyone in the state's history. But last week, state officials began warning the long-term unemployed that Congress has not approved another extension of unemployment insurance payments.
That lapse will leave about 37,000 residents of the state, like Robert C. Brannigan, without benefits this week, and will force others to contemplate applying for food stamps or other forms of welfare that they had never considered.
Mr. Brannigan, a 26-year-old construction worker from Mastic, received his final weekly payment of $430 last week, but he still is No. 20 on a waiting list for jobs assigned by his union in Manhattan. When he checked the State Labor Department's Facebook page for news about a pending extension, he found a video explaining how to apply for food stamps and other assistance from the state.
"That was weird to me," Mr. Brannigan said. "I don't want food stamps. I want what I paid for and what I will continue to pay for when I go back to work. Unemployment is unemployment. It's not welfare."
But unemployment insurance was created as a stopgap, a short bridge to the next paycheck. In New York, it already has been stretched out for a longer period - 79 weeks - than in any previous recession, according to state labor officials.
Senate Democrats in Washington agreed on Thursday to extend payments for an additional 20 weeks in states with high unemployment rates, including New York, whose rate rose to 9 percent in August. If enacted, the extension would make it possible for some New Yorkers to collect for 99 weeks, or nearly four times as long as basic unemployment benefits are supposed to last.
The Democrats' proposal is a compromise intended to appease senators from states with relatively low unemployment. It would make extended benefits available for 14 weeks in every state, plus an additional six weeks in states whose unemployment rates, averaged over three months, exceeded 8.5 percent.
But Senate Republicans prevented a quick approval of the proposal last week. The measure, which is expected to be brought to the floor for a vote, would be effective immediately upon its enactment. But that will not be in time to prevent a gap in payments to the long-term unemployed in New York - even though they would be eligible to resume receiving benefits.
The National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group for the unemployed, estimates that 400,000 Americans have already exhausted their benefits during this recession and that an additional 900,000 would by the end of the year.
But not all of those at or near the end of their benefits would get a reprieve from another extension. Some unemployed New Yorkers, like Karin Gehm Barrett, are not eligible for extended benefits because they did not lose their jobs soon enough.
Ms. Barrett, who lives with her husband in Bayside, Queens, said she lost her job as a human resources manager at an advertising firm in Manhattan more than a year ago. The last of her benefits are scheduled to run out in January, but because she was on disability for several weeks after being laid off, she did not begin collecting unemployment until November 2008. Extended benefits have been available only to those who started collecting regular benefits before Oct. 27, 2008.
Ms. Barrett, 47, said she was already concerned about exhausting her benefits in a few months. In three previous bouts of unemployment, she was able to land a new job within three or four months, she said. But this time, the closest she came was being hired as a part-time consultant by her previous employer, she said.
"If in nine months I haven't been successful, it's a little daunting that in the next to two to three months I will have success," Ms. Barrett said. "It really is tough out there. I put on my calendar at least two to three hours a day to dedicate to my job search. There's not enough out there to devote that much more time."
Still, Ms. Barrett, whose husband has a union job as a phone technician, is much better off than some New Yorkers whose benefits are running out.
Ruby Sievers, 47, a construction laborer who lives in Binghamton, said she had not been able to find work for two years. She collected the last of her extended benefits of $430 a week on Wednesday and feared that she might again have to resort to temporary assistance from the state to pay her rent and feed herself and her 11-year-old son, she said.
Ms. Sievers said she received welfare benefits this year during a lapse in unemployment benefits in New York. She has been impatiently awaiting word that Congress will pass the extension to limit the gap in her income.
"If it doesn't, I'm not going to be in real good shape," Ms. Sievers said. "I couldn't even get $7 an hour if I wanted to. It's just not there."
Like Ms. Sievers, Mr. Brannigan said he had applied in vain for a variety of jobs at stores and companies near his home.
"I've been to every store at the Tanger outlet mall," he said. "I've been to every deli around here."
Foremost, he hopes to be called in to work by his union, Local 20 of the Cement and Concrete Workers. His best bet, he said, is a job as a flag waver on a job site, but he is 20th on the waiting list for one of those spots.
"If they call me in for anything, I don't care what it is, I'll run right there," Mr. Brannigan said. "If they tell me I got to stand on a pole and juggle, I'll do that. I want to work."
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12) Behind the Laughter
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
October 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/opinion/13herbert.html
Conan O'Brien has been making some pretty rough jokes about Newark, which has led to a (mostly) mock feud between the late-night host and Newark Mayor Cory Booker.
O'Brien joked that the mayor was establishing a program to improve the health of the city's residents, then deadpanned: "The health care program would consist of a bus ticket out of Newark."
He did a video bit in which he praised the city's "thriving arts scene" (while showing a graffiti-scarred wall); its "four-star lodging" (shots of abandoned, gutted, rusting vehicles); and its "world-class live theater" (a peep show).
He threatened to form an alliance with the mayors of nearby municipalities, thus "creating a geographic toilet seat around the city of Newark," making it possible to flush the city down the figurative bowl.
The mayor came up with his own YouTube videos in response and, believe it or not, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton weighed in at one point as a mock peace negotiator.
Conan seems like a nice fellow, and I doubt that he harbors any malice toward Newark. But he and his audience are having fun taunting a city that, like many others across the U.S., is in a desperately tragic situation: poverty-stricken, run down, often unsafe, its children and teenagers in too many instances going nowhere fast.
Whether it's Newark, Detroit, parts of Chicago, South-Central Los Angeles, Camden, N.J. - take your pick - we've looked the other way for decades as the residents of hard-core inner-city neighborhoods struggled with overwhelming, life-threatening problems and a chronic shortage of resources, financial and otherwise.
We're having an intense national debate over whether to move ahead with nation-building in Afghanistan and to continue protecting the population in places like Kabul and Kandahar while all but ignoring the violence that is consuming the lives of boys and girls in Chicago, America's third-largest city.
Dozens of boys and girls of school-age and younger are murdered in Chicago every year. One hundred were killed there last year, according to the police. The blood of the young is spattered daily on the stoops, sidewalks and streets of American cities from coast to coast, and we won't even take notice unless, for example, we can engage in the ghoulish delight of watching the murder played over and over again on video.
In Newark, where some of the streets do look as bad as the scenes that were part of Conan's comedy bit, the unemployment rate is 14.7 percent. Keeping kids in high school long enough to graduate is difficult. Drug dealing is a fallback employment option for men and boys who can't find legitimate work.
Other cities have the same problems, some to a greater degree. So what are we doing? While mulling the prospect of sending up to 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, we've stood idly by, mute as a stone, as school districts across the nation have bounced 40,000 teachers out of their jobs over the past year.
That should tell you all you need to know about twisted national priorities.
Even as teachers by the tens of thousands are walking the plank to unemployment, we're learning, as The Times reported last week, that one in every 10 young male dropouts is locked up in jail or juvenile detention. As if that weren't gruesome enough, we find that the figure for blacks is one in four. What would it take to get the perpetual crisis facing these young people onto the radar screens of the rest of America?
Conan was just trying to be funny, but the reality behind his late-night humor is horrifying. In Detroit, the median sale price of a house has hovered around $8,000. Seventy percent of all murders in the Motor City go unsolved. Joblessness is off the charts. The school system is a catastrophe.
I remember driving around Camden, which is right outside of Philadelphia, on a rainy afternoon. Young people with nothing to do - they had dropped out of school and had little or no chance of finding a job - were gathered on porches, saying little, staring the hours away. I had on a suit and was driving a nice car. More than one person that I approached thought I was either buying or selling drugs.
The inner cities have been in a recession for decades. They're in a depression now. Myriad issues desperately need to be addressed: employment, education, the foreclosure crisis, crime, alcohol and drug abuse, health care (including mental health treatment and counseling), child care for working parents and on and on and on.
Conan's jokes would carry a silver lining if they could somehow prompt more people to think more seriously about what's really going on in cities like Newark.
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13) Cleansing the Air at the Expense of Waterways
By CHARLES DUHIGG
October 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/us/13water.html?hp
MASONTOWN, Pa. - For years, residents here complained about the yellow smoke pouring from the tall chimneys of the nearby coal-fired power plant, which left a film on their cars and pebbles of coal waste in their yards. Five states - including New York and New Jersey - sued the plant's owner, Allegheny Energy, claiming the air pollution was causing respiratory diseases and acid rain.
So three years ago, when Allegheny Energy decided to install scrubbers to clean the plant's air emissions, environmentalists were overjoyed. The technology would spray water and chemicals through the plant's chimneys, trapping more than 150,000 tons of pollutants each year before they escaped into the sky.
But the cleaner air has come at a cost. Each day since the equipment was switched on in June, the company has dumped tens of thousands of gallons of wastewater containing chemicals from the scrubbing process into the Monongahela River, which provides drinking water to 350,000 people and flows into Pittsburgh, 40 miles to the north.
"It's like they decided to spare us having to breathe in these poisons, but now we have to drink them instead," said Philip Coleman, who lives about 15 miles from the plant and has asked a state judge to toughen the facility's pollution regulations. "We can't escape."
Even as a growing number of coal-burning power plants around the nation have moved to reduce their air emissions, many of them are creating another problem: water pollution. Power plants are the nation's biggest producer of toxic waste, surpassing industries like plastic and paint manufacturing and chemical plants, according to a New York Times analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data.
Much power plant waste once went into the sky, but because of toughened air pollution laws, it now often goes into lakes and rivers, or into landfills that have leaked into nearby groundwater, say regulators and environmentalists.
Officials at the plant here in southwest Pennsylvania - named Hatfield's Ferry - say it does not pose any health or environmental risks because they have installed equipment to limit the toxins the facility releases into the Monongahela River and elsewhere.
But as the number of scrubbers around the nation increases, environmentalists - including those in Pennsylvania - have become worried. The Environmental Protection Agency projects that by next year, roughly 50 percent of coal-generated electricity in the United States will come from plants that use scrubbers or similar technologies, creating vast new sources of wastewater.
Yet no federal regulations specifically govern the disposal of power plant discharges into waterways or landfills. Some regulators have used laws like the Clean Water Act to combat such pollution. But those laws can prove inadequate, say regulators, because they do not mandate limits on the most dangerous chemicals in power plant waste, like arsenic and lead.
For instance, only one in 43 power plants and other electric utilities across the nation must limit how much barium they dump into nearby waterways, according to a Times analysis of E.P.A. records. Barium, which is commonly found in power plant waste and scrubber wastewater, has been linked to heart problems and diseases in other organs.
Even when power plant emissions are regulated by the Clean Water Act, plants have often violated that law without paying fines or facing other penalties. Ninety percent of 313 coal-fired power plants that have violated the Clean Water Act since 2004 were not fined or otherwise sanctioned by federal or state regulators, according to a Times analysis of Environmental Protection Agency records. (An interactive database of power plant violations around the nation is available at www.nytimes.com/coalplants.)
Fines for Plants Modest
Other plants have paid only modest fines. For instance, Hatfield's Ferry has violated the Clean Water Act 33 times since 2006. For those violations, the company paid less than $26,000. During that same period, the plant's parent company earned $1.1 billion.
"We know that coal waste is so dangerous that we don't want it in the air, and that's why we've told power plants they have to install scrubbers," said Senator Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. "So why are they dumping the same waste into people's water?"
Though the Environmental Protection Agency promised earlier this decade to consider new regulations on power plant waste - and reiterated that pledge after a Tennessee dam break sent 1.1 billion gallons of coal waste into farms and homes last year - federal regulators have yet to issue any major new rules.
One reason is that some state governments have long fought new federal regulations, often at the behest of energy executives, say environmentalists and regulators.
The counties surrounding Hatfield's Ferry, which are home to multiple universities, are an example of what hangs in the balance as this debate plays out.
Last year, when Hatfield's Ferry asked the state for permission to dump scrubber wastewater into the Monongahela River, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection approved the request with proposed limits on some chemicals.
But state officials placed no limits on water discharges of arsenic, aluminum, boron, chromium, manganese, nickel or other chemicals that have been linked to health risks, all of which have been detected in the plant's wastewater samples, according to state documents.
Records show, and company officials concede, that Hatfield's Ferry is already dumping scrubber wastewater into the Monongahela that violates the state's few proposed pollution rules. Moreover, those rules have been suspended until a judge decides on the plant's appeal of the proposed limits.
"You can get used to the plant, and the noise and soot on your cars," said Father Rodney Torbic, the priest at the St. George Serbian Orthodox Church, across the road from Hatfield's Ferry. "But I see people suffering every day because of this pollution."
Officials at Hatfield's Ferry say there is no reason for residents to be concerned. They say that lawsuits against the plant are without merit, and that they have installed a $25 million water treatment plant that removes many of the toxic particles and solids from scrubber wastewater. The solids are put into a 106-acre landfill that contains a synthetic liner to prevent leaks.
Officials say that the plant's pollution does not pose any risk. Limits on arsenic, aluminum, barium, boron, cadmium, chromium, manganese and nickel are not appropriate, the company wrote in a statement, because the plant's wastewater is not likely to cause the Monongahela River to exceed safety levels for those contaminants.
"Allegheny has installed state-of-the-art scrubbers, state-of-the-art wastewater treatment, and state-of-the-art synthetic liners," the company wrote in a statement. "We operate to be in compliance with all environmental laws and will continue to do so."
The plant's water treatment facility, however, does not remove all dissolved metals and chemicals, many of which go into the river, executives concede. An analysis of records from other plants with scrubbers indicates that such wastewater often contains high concentrations of dissolved arsenic, barium, boron, iron, manganese, cadmium, magnesium and other heavy metals that have been shown to contribute to cancer, organ failures and other diseases. Company officials say the emissions by the plant will not pose health risks, because they will be diluted in the river.
Though synthetic liners are generally considered effective at preventing leaks, environmentalists note that the Hatfield's Ferry landfill is less than a mile uphill from the river, and that over time, other types of liners have proven less reliable than initially hoped.
The Environmental Protection Agency, in a statement last month, said it planned to revise standards for water discharges from coal-fired power plants like Hatfield's Ferry. Agency studies have concluded that "current regulations, which were issued in 1982, have not kept pace with changes that have occurred in the electric power industry," officials wrote.
But some environmentalists and lawmakers say that such rules will not be enough, and that new laws are needed that force plants to use more expensive technologies that essentially eliminate toxic discharges.
Cleaning Up Pollution
"It's really important to set a precedent that tells power plants that they need to genuinely clean up pollution, rather than just shift it from the air to the water," said Abigail Dillen, a lawyer with the law firm Earthjustice, which represents two advocacy organizations, the Environmental Integrity Project and the Citizens Coal Council, in asking a Pennsylvania court to toughen regulations on Hatfield's Ferry.
Ms. Dillen, like other environmentalists, has urged courts and lawmakers to force plants to adopt "zero discharge" treatment facilities, which are more expensive but can eliminate most pollution.
State officials say they have established appropriate water pollution limits for Hatfield's Ferry, and have strict standards for landfill disposal.
"We asked the plant for estimates on how much of various pollutants they are likely to emit, and based on those estimates, we set limits that are protective of the Monongahela," said Ron Schwartz, a state environmental official. "We have asked them to monitor some chemicals, including arsenic, and if levels grow too high, we may intervene."
However, environmental groups have argued in court documents and interviews that Hatfield's Ferry probably will emit dangerous chemicals, and that they fear the state is unlikely to intervene.
Similar problems have emerged elsewhere. Twenty-one power plants in 10 states, including Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina and Ohio, have dumped arsenic into rivers or other waters at concentrations as much as 18 times the federal drinking water standard, according to a Times analysis of E.P.A. data.
In Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin and elsewhere, power plants have dumped other chemicals at dangerous concentrations. Few of those plants have ever been sanctioned for those emissions, nor were their discharge permits altered to prevent future pollution.
Records indicate that power plant landfills and other disposal practices have polluted groundwater in more than a dozen states, contaminating the water in some towns with toxic chemicals. A 2007 report published by the E.P.A. suggested that people living near some power plant landfills faced a cancer risk 2,000 times higher than federal health standards.
Lobbyists Block Controls
In 2000, Environmental Protection Agency officials tried to issue stricter controls on power plant waste. But a lobbying campaign by the coal and power industries, as well as public officials in 13 states, blocked the effort. In 2008 alone, according to campaign finance reports, power companies donated $20 million to the political campaigns of federal lawmakers, almost evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans.
In interviews, E.P.A. officials said that toughening pollution rules for power plants was among their top priorities. Last month, the agency announced it was moving forward on new rules regulating greenhouse gas emissions from hundreds of power plants and other large industrial facilities. Lisa P. Jackson, who was confirmed to head the agency in January, has said she would determine by the end of the year whether certain power plant byproducts should be treated as hazardous waste, which would subject them to tougher regulations.
But for now, there are no new rules on power plant waste. And many states are trying to dissuade Ms. Jackson from creating new regulations, according to state and federal regulators, because they worry that new rules will burden overworked regulators, and because power plants have pressured local politicians to fight greater regulation.
For instance, Pennsylvania has opposed designating the waste from Hatfield's Ferry and other power plants as hazardous. In a statement, the Department of Environmental Protection said the state had "sufficient state and federal laws and regulations at our disposal to control wastewater discharges at levels protective of the environment and public health."
But residents living near power plants disagree.
"Americans want cheap electricity, but those of us who live around power plants are the ones who have to pay for it," Mr. Coleman said. "It's like being in the third world."
Karl Russell contributed reporting.
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14) Code Pink Returns From Kabul
By James Dao
October 12, 2009, 4:04 pm
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/code-pink-in-kabul/
With the debate over what to do in Afghanistan in full bloom, leaders of one antiwar group returned from Kabul offering this advice: Don't send more troops. But don't pull out precipitously, either.
Medea Benjamin, a founder of the group, Code Pink, said in an interview on Friday that most of the 150 Afghans she and seven colleagues had met with told them, "We're afraid of the Taliban coming back in, we're afraid of more civil war, we're afraid of more chaos."
"They talked about responsible withdrawal," Ms. Benjamin said.
Medea BenjaminMatthew Cavanaugh/European Pressphoto Agency Medea Benjamin of Code Pink interrupts Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, during his remarks to a joint meeting of Congress in July 2006.
But those same people also made clear that they considered NATO troops magnets for violence whose presence incited anti-foreign sentiment and encouraged impoverished villagers to pick up weapons for the insurgency.
"Everybody we talked to said that most of the Taliban are poor rural people, $10-a-day Taliban, who are doing this for economic reasons," she said. "If you want to encourage people to stop fighting, encourage them to work."
A Christian Science Monitor article about the Code Pink trip, which described Ms. Benjamin as rethinking her views, caused a buzz in antiwar circles, with some antiwar bloggers wondering whether Code Pink had become "pro-war."
Ms. Benjamin sharply disputed the notion that her views of the war had changed. But she acknowledged that the nearly two-week trip had given the group "a lot more depth of understanding" about the complexity of the war and the depth of Afghanistan's needs.
She said the group would continue to support legislation in Congress requiring the Obama administration to come up with an exit strategy. She said they would also push for peace talks with elements of the Taliban, with women at the table, and for increased economic aid to the country.
And she said she planned to meet with leaders of women's organizations that support the American military mission in Afghanistan to make the case that the presence of American troops was not making life better for Afghan women.
She added, however, that she did not expect "bold action" by Congress. "So many Democrats in Congress don't want to be against what Barack Obama calls for," she said. "Especially now that he has won the Nobel Peace Prize."
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15) Texas: Inmate Set Free Because of Unfair Trial
By RACHEL MARCUS
National Briefing | Southwest
October 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/us/13brfs-INMATESETFRE_BRF.html?ref=us
A Dallas man convicted of murder in 1995 was released from prison after a judge ruled that his trial was unfair because the defense was never told of another man's confession. The man, Richard Miles, 34, left, walked out of prison after serving 15 years for a shooting that left one man dead and another disabled. Mr. Miles was set free after a prisoner's advocacy group uncovered evidence of an anonymous telephone call made to the police by a woman whose boyfriend had confessed to the shooting. In addition, the Dallas County District Attorney's Office acknowledged that defense lawyers were never told of an altercation between the victims and another man five days before the shooting.
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