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Israel-Palestine: A Land in Fragments
A film by American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)-- 2 minutes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ewF7AXn3dg
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Resolution regarding an IVAW Position Statement on Afghanistan
http://ivaw.org/afghanistan/resolution
Whereas, Iraq Veterans Against the War is an organization that has opened its membership to veterans of the war in Afghanistan;
Whereas, the war in Afghanistan is continuing into its seventh year with rising casualties among the Afghan people, and with U.S. and Coalition forces facing their deadliest year since the invasion;
Whereas a primary motivation for the prolonged occupation of Afghanistan is competition between the U.S., Russia and China for control of oil and natural gas resources in Central Asia and the Caspian Sea;
Whereas, the military occupation is creating tension and resentment among the Afghan people, to include Afghan women, many of whom are calling for the removal of all foreign occupying troops;
Whereas, the Afghanistan war dehumanizes the Afghan people and denies them their right to self-determination;
Whereas, our military is being exhausted by involuntary extensions, and activations of the Reserve, National Guard and Individual Ready Reserve, and by repeated deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan;
Whereas, service members are facing serious health consequences due to our government's negligence in Iraq and Afghanistan and mismanagement of the Department of Veterans Affairs;
Whereas, there is no battlefield solution to terrorism, and any escalation of the war in Afghanistan will only serve to exacerbate the plight of the Afghan people, destabilize the region, and further the breakdown of our military;
Therefore, be it resolved that Iraq Veterans Against the War calls for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all occupying forces in Afghanistan and reparations for the Afghan people, and supports all troops and veterans working towards those ends.
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RESISTING INDIVIDUAL READY RESERVE (IRR) RECALL
Courage to Resist.
Dear Friends,
Courage to Resist has published an IRR overview that contains critical
information for anyone nearing the end of their military enlistment and the
hundreds of thousands of recently discharged veterans still eligible for
involuntary recall. I don't believe this information exists anywhere else,
so I'm hoping you might be able to help distribute, link and share this as
broadly as possible so that those who need it the most might find it.
Jeff Paterson
Courage to Resist Project Director
RESISTING INDIVIDUAL READY RESERVE (IRR) RECALL
Courage to Resist. January 3, 2009
Online version:
http://couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/658/1/
PDF leaflet:
http://couragetoresist.org/x/images/stories/pdf2/irr-leaflet.pdf
Additional related IRR information from Courage to Resist:
http://couragetoresist.org/irr
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Fourth Al-Awda West Coast Regional Conference
Sunday February 8, 2009 at The University of California in San Diego (UCSD)
hosted by Students for Justice in Palestine
Save the Date! Mark Your Calendars! Plan to Attend!
The Palestine Right to Return Coalition's Al-Awda chapters in Los Angeles, Orange County, Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego thank all who took part in the Mass Rally and March in Los Angeles yesterday January 10 as part of the Let Gaza Live National Emergency Day of Mass Action and Protest that took place around the country. Thousands took to the streets demanding an immediate end to the carnage that is being carried out by the 'Israeli' military against our people in the Gaza Strip, and to demand an end to the political, economic and military support it has received from the US administration.
As announced at the protests, please take note that the Fourth Al-Awda West Coast Regional Conference, LET GAZA LIVE!, will take place Sunday February 8, 2009 at The University of California in San Diego (UCSD). This conference will be hosted by Students for Justice in Palestine. All members and supporters of the Right to Return movement on the West Coast are urged to participate in this important and timely one day conference.
Save the Date, Mark Your Calendars, and Plan to Attend.
Further details will be posted over the next few days and as soon as they become available.
Until Return,
Al-Awda Chapters in Southern California
The Palestine Right to Return Coalition
PO Box 131352
Carlsbad, CA 92013, USA
Tel: 760-918-9441
Fax: 760-918-9442
E-mail: info@al-awda.org
WWW: http://al-awda.org
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition (PRRC) is the largest network of grassroots activists and students dedicated to Palestinian human rights. We are a not for profit tax-exempt educational and charitable 501(c)(3) organization as defined by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of the United States of America. Under IRS guidelines, your donations to PRRC are tax-deductible.
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You're invited to join Bay Area CODEPINK in February for exciting actions and informative events. This month we'd like to highlight an event CODEPINKer Tamara has organized with Iraqi author Nadje Al-Ali who will speak on her new book, "What Kind of Liberation: Women and the Occupation of Iraq". Nadje was with CODEPINK on the national Iraqi women's speaking tour around International Women's Day in 2006 and returns to the US from London to share this excellent new book. Join us at The First Unitarian Universalist Society of SF (The Murdock Room, 1187 Franklin Street at Geary, SF) on Thursday, February 12 for this special event.
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Celebrate Black History Month
Come To the ILWU Rally!
Racism, Repression
and Rebellion:
The Lessons of Labor Defense
12 Noon,
Saturday, 14 February 2009
ILWU Local 10 Hall, 400 North Point (at Mason)
near Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco
SPEAKERS:
ANGELA DAVIS UC Santa Cruz Professor,
former Black Panther, witch-hunted by FBI
MARTINA CORREIA Sister of Troy Davis on Georgia's death row
Rev Cecil Williams Glide Memorial Church
Robert R Bryan lead attorney for Mumia Abu-Jamal,
on Pennsylvania death row
Gerald Smith former Black Panther,
Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
Pierre LaBossiere founding member, Haiti Action Committee
JR Prisoners of Conscience Committee, Minister of Information
Richard Brown former Black Panther, San Francisco 8
Cultural presentations:
Jack Hirschman, SF Poet Laureate;
Tayo Aluko, Nigerian actor portraying Paul Robeson: and
Upsurge! Jazz/Poetry Music
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) was born out of the militant 1934 strike in which police killed two strikers in San Francisco, shooting them in the back. Still today police are banned from membership in Local 10. The union has a legacy of defending those under attack by the government, in particular reds and blacks, from Harry Bridges and Paul Robeson, to Angela Davis, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Troy Davis. For Black History Month, Local 10 is organizing this rally to teach the lessons of the need for unity of action to defend against government repression and racist profiling. These lessons are never more necessary than today, as evidenced by the brutal murder by BART police of Oscar Grant, who was lying face-down when shot.
Racism, Repression
and Rebellion:
The Lessons of Labor Defense
12 Noon, Saturday, 14 February 2009
ILWU Local 10 Hall, 400 North Point (at Mason)
near Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco
MORE INFO: (510) 501-7080
- from Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222 Oakland CA 94610 LACFreeMumia@aol.com
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MARCH 21 "MARCH ON THE PENTAGON" PLANNING MEETING FOR SAN FRANCISCO PROTEST HAS LAUNCHED THE MARCH 21 COALITION!
MASS COMMUNITY OUTREACH TO BUILD MARCH 21
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 11:00 A.M.
NEXT PLANNING MEETING, SUNDAY, MARCH 1, 2:00 P.M.
AT:
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO (UPSTAIRS)
474 VALENCIA STREET (NEAR 16TH STREET)
SAN FRANCISCO
Check out the new MARCH 21 Coalition Website:
http://www.pephost.org/site/PageServer?pagename=M21_homepage
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National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations
CALL FOR ENDORSEMENTS FOR MARCH 21:
Greetings:
The March on the Pentagon and the demonstrations in San Francisco, Los Angeles and other cities scheduled for Saturday, March 21 – marking the beginning of the 7th year of war and occupation of Iraq – are now only weeks away. This is a time for peace activists across the country to go all-out in helping to publicize and build these actions. You can start by endorsing March 21, if you and your organization have not done so already.
A mass movement in the streets is needed now more than ever if we are to succeed in getting U.S. troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, ending U.S. support for Israel's occupation of Palestine, preventing further attacks on Pakistan, and stopping a war against Iran. The occupation of Iraq continues with every indication that the new administration intends to stay there indefinitely. Meanwhile, 30,000 additional U.S. troops are to be sent to Afghanistan. The whole world watched with horror as Israel massacred thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, using weapons of mass destruction provided by Washington. And only days after the inauguration, orders were given to bomb Pakistan, resulting in 21 deaths, most of them women and children.
March 21 provides concerned people throughout the country an opportunity to let the world know that opposition to these U.S. policies of war, occupation, intervention and expansionism exists and is determined to be heard. It lets the beleaguered people in those countries where the U.S. is an oppressor know that there is an American antiwar movement that does not forget their needs for peace and national sovereignty. That is a message we must also send to the new administration. The size of the turnout on the 21st will be critical if we are to help make a difference. So we count on you to do whatever you can to build highly visible mass actions and to ensure that they are as large, vocal and spirited as possible.
There are March 21 committees and coalitions already formed or being formed in many areas working to publicize the event and send people to one of the demonstration sites. We encourage you to join or organize such a grouping in your locale. The National Assembly, as one of many initiators of March 21, is going all out to make the actions as large as possible.
Please send endorsements to our website at www.natassembly.org, where an endorsement form is provided, or by writing natassembly@aol.com. While we would like to have these endorsements for our records so that we can keep everyone updated regarding National Assembly activities, we will also forward them to the March 21 National Coalition website at www.PentagonMarch.org, where the latest list of endorsers can be viewed.
In solidarity,
Jerry Gordon
Secretary, National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
www.natassembly.org
216-736-4704 for more info
P.S. Check out the National Assembly website to see our statement on Gaza, get information on March 21st organizing, learn about our July 10-12 national antiwar conference in Pittsburgh, make a donation, and participate in our discussion blog.
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) This Could Be Another Jenna
February 6th, 2009
By James, Gabriel, Clarissa, William, Dani, and the rest of the team at:
ColorOfChange.org
2) Disappearing Jobs
Editorial
February 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/opinion/07sat1.html
3) U.S. Aided a Failed Plan to Rout Ugandan Rebels
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and ERIC SCHMITT
February 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/world/africa/07congo.html?ref=world
4) U.S. Military Violated Security Agreement Twice in 2 Weeks, Iraqi Leaders Say
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
February 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/world/middleeast/07iraq.html?ref=world
5) Israel Deports Activists From Intercepted Vessel
By ETHAN BRONNER and ISABEL KERSHNER
February 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/world/middleeast/07mideast.html?ref=world
6) Florida’s Crossroads of Foreclosure and Despair
By DAMIEN CAVE
February 8, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/us/08lehigh.html?ref=us
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1) This Could Be Another Jenna
February 6th, 2009
By James, Gabriel, Clarissa, William, Dani, and the rest of the team at:
ColorOfChange.org
On December 8th, 17-year-old Billey Joe Johnson died from a gunshot wound to the head. Police say he killed himself with a shotgun after being stopped for a simple traffic violation in Lucedale, Mississippi.1 Several things seem to cast doubt on the official story, including an independent investigation that concluded it would have been impossible for the shot that killed Johnson to have been self-inflicted.
Many on the ground smell a murder and a cover-up. We don't have all the answers, but it's clear that in the racially divided town of Lucedale, all the ingredients exist for a miscarriage of justice.
Your voice can help ensure that the District Attorney feels the presence of a national spotlight when he presents his findings to a grand jury on Monday. Let him know that anything short of a thorough investigation will result in massive attention and a call for outside intervention.
Can you lend your voice to demand justice for Billey Joe?
http://colorofchange.org/billeyjoe/?id=1968-349563
From the beginning, the District Attorney has treated the investigation of Billey Joe's death as a suicide or the result of an accidental self-inflicted injury. Based on his public statements and interactions with Billey Joe's family, it appears that the District Attorney hasn't looked into whether Billey Joe was killed by an officer or someone else. Again, we don't have all the answers, but here's what we do know:
Billey Joe was at his former girlfriend's house minutes before the killing.2 He never entered the house, but police were called to respond to an attempted burglary there.3 This fact was not a part of the original story given by the police.
Billey Joe's family says that his ex-girlfriend had been staying at her father's house because her mother threw her out for dating Billey Joe (she is White and Billey Joe was Black). They said Billey Joe knew to only go to the house when the girl's father was not present, that the two of them were on good terms even after they had broken up, and that the breakup was largely because of pressure from her father. The family also claims that there is a relationship between the officer present at the scene of Billey Joe's death and the girl's father.
A witness heard two shots, not one, at the scene where Billey Joe died, according to an independent investigation launched by the Mississippi NAACP. The pathologist in that investigation has indicated that it would be impossible for a bullet from a self-inflicted shot to enter in the manner that it did. He also said that given the length of Billey Joe's arms and the length of the shotgun, it would have been impossible for him to hold the weapon and fire it at himself.
Billey Joe was a star athlete with scholarship offers from more than half a dozen schools. No one--including family, friends, and coaches--could think of a reason that Billey Joe would want to end his life.4,5,6
A true investigation would sort out fact from rumor. But we can't be sure that Johnson's family will get the investigation it deserves. In the case of the Jena 6 we saw a District Attorney and a judge incapable of carrying out justice in a racially charged environment. In the recent case of the murder of Oscar Grant by police (and many like it), we see how unlikely it is for District Attorneys to do their job when the suspect is an officer of the law. But in both these cases, public pressure has made all the difference by shining a spotlight on local authorities.
In the case of Billey Joe Johnson, we're looking for the truth and for justice. A minute of your time can help ensure his family gets both:
http://colorofchange.org/billeyjoe/?id=1968-349563
Thanks and Peace,
-- James, Gabriel, Clarissa, William, Dani, and the rest of the ColorOfChange.org team
February 6th, 2009
References:
1. "Mississippi family looks for answers in son's death," USA Today, 12-22-08
http://tinyurl.com/aul9hd
2. "Autopsy not completed in football star's death," The Sun Herald, 1-06-09
http://www.sunherald.com/local/story/1050689.html
3. Police report and radio logs detailing events leading up to Johnson's death, posted on WKRG-TV website
http://www.wkrg.com/news/flash_paper/12_19_08_billy_joe_johnson/
4. "CNN Newsroom: Mystery Death in Mississippi," CNN, 12-17-08
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0812/17/cnr.07.html
5. "Mississippi running back Billey Joe Johnson, Jr. ran for 1,559 yards and 24 touchdowns before his death in December," Collin Mickle-Press-Register, 1-11-09
http://tinyurl.com/cs7cjm
6. "Player's death report leaves many puzzled," The Sun Herald, 12-21-08
http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_11280331
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2) Disappearing Jobs
Editorial
February 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/opinion/07sat1.html
It was impossible to argue with President Obama on Friday when he said that the dismal new jobs report — the largest loss in 13 consecutive months of decline — made it all the more urgent for Congress to pass the economic stimulus and recovery package.
Our only objection was that he didn’t go further: In fact, the jobs report underscored the need for an even bigger boost than is contemplated by the measure, now clocking in at roughly $800 billion.
One of Mr. Obama’s goals for the stimulus is to create three million to four million jobs. That is more or less in line with official job losses thus far in the recession: Employers shed 598,000 jobs in January, bringing the number of jobs axed since the recession began in December 2007 to 3.6 million. But as the Economic Policy Institute pointed out in a research note on Friday, the economy needed to have added about 1.7 million jobs over the past 13 months just to keep up with population growth. As a result, the economy already is coming up short by more than five million jobs.
Other data in January’s report are also worse than meets the eye. The unemployment rate rose from 7.2 percent in December to 7.6 percent, which works out to 11.6 million unemployed workers. The larger the ranks of the unemployed, the harder it becomes to find a job, leading to longer stretches of unemployment and a bigger hit to families’ finances.
Those are not the only manifestation of deepening job gloom. The underemployment rate, which includes part-time workers who need full-time jobs and jobless workers who have given up looking because their prospects are so dim, plunged deeper into double-digit territory in January, reaching 13.9 percent — or 21.7 million workers — up from 13.5 percent in December.
Rising unemployment and underemployment means that the need for unemployment benefits and income support — such as help in paying for health care — are rising faster than Congress can get its act together to provide relief.
Though both the House and Senate versions of the stimulus package currently include bolstered unemployment pay, the January numbers should compel lawmakers to do more when they write the final version of the bill. Currently, the bills boost unemployment benefits by $25 a week. That easily could be increased.
Similarly, aid to states, which preserves and creates jobs for government employees as well as private contractors — while meeting vital needs for health care and education — should be a prime area for more federal support, not less, as Senate Republicans were clamoring for this week.
Some of the more baldly partisan Republicans seemed to have decided to put the nation’s economic health in grave jeopardy so they can replay a fight they lost big in the 2008 elections. Dragging out the tired economic theories that destroyed Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress and then sank Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign, they were even calling for ending the whole discussion about a real stimulus package and just cutting taxes instead.
Fearful Democrats, instead of standing firm on their principles with Mr. Obama’s backing, spent the week cutting here and cutting there to make it look as if they were being more careful about the stimulus and recovery package.
This is the reality: Jobs are being cut and unemployment is rising in virtually all sectors of the economy and among virtually all demographic groups. At the same time, families’ housing values and retirement savings have been pummeled; fully 13.6 million Americans now owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth, and retirement accounts have collectively lost more than $2 trillion in little more than a year. And by all indications, there is worse yet to come.
The real work will come next week when the House and Senate try to reconcile their different versions of the economic package. No lawmaker has constituents who are unaffected, if not in distress, perhaps severe distress. No lawmaker has an excuse to delay or diminish the help Americans need now.
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3) U.S. Aided a Failed Plan to Rout Ugandan Rebels
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and ERIC SCHMITT
February 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/world/africa/07congo.html?ref=world
DUNGU, Congo — The American military helped plan and pay for a recent attack on a notorious Ugandan rebel group, but the offensive went awry, scattering fighters who carried out a wave of massacres as they fled, killing as many as 900 civilians.
The operation was led by Uganda and aimed to crush the Lord’s Resistance Army, a brutal rebel group that had been hiding out in a Congolese national park, rebuffing efforts to sign a peace treaty. But the rebel leaders escaped, breaking their fighters into small groups that continue to ransack town after town in northeastern Congo, hacking, burning, shooting and clubbing to death anyone in their way.
The United States has been training Ugandan troops in counterterrorism for several years, but its role in the operation has not been widely known. It is the first time the United States has helped plan such a specific military offensive with Uganda, according to senior American military officials. They described a team of 17 advisers and analysts from the Pentagon’s new Africa Command working closely with Ugandan officers on the mission, providing satellite phones, intelligence and $1 million in fuel.
No American forces ever got involved in the ground fighting in this isolated, rugged corner of Congo, but human rights advocates and villagers here complain that the Ugandans and the Congolese troops who carried out the operation did little or nothing to protect nearby villages, despite a history of rebel reprisals against civilians.
The troops did not seal off the rebels’ escape routes or deploy soldiers to many of the nearby towns where the rebels slaughtered people in churches and even tried to twist off toddlers’ heads.
“The operation was poorly planned and poorly executed,” said Julia Spiegel, a Uganda-based researcher for the Enough Project, which campaigns against genocide. The massacres were “the L.R.A.’s standard operating procedure,” she said. “And the regional governments knew this.”
American officials conceded that the operation did not go as well as intended, and that villagers had been left exposed.
“We provided insights and alternatives for them to consider, but their choices were their choices,” said one American military official who was briefed on the operation, referring to the African forces on the ground. “In the end, it was not our operation.”
Maj. Felix Kulayigye, a Ugandan military spokesman, declined to discuss the American involvement and simply said, “There was no way to prevent these massacres.”
The Lord’s Resistance Army is now on the loose, moving from village to village, seemingly unhindered, leaving a wake of scorched huts and crushed skulls. Witnesses say the fighters have kidnapped hundreds of children and marched them off into the bush, the latest conscripts in their slave army.
In Dungu, a 10-year-old girl lay comatose on a metal hospital cot, her face glazed with sweat, her pulse hammering in her neck. She had been sexually assaulted in a nearby village and shot in both legs, bullet through bone.
“The people who did this,” said her nurse, Rosa Apamato, “are demons.”
This used to be a tranquil, bountiful spot where villagers grew corn, beans and peanuts, more or less untouched by the violence that has plagued Congo’s east. But thousands have recently fled, and the town is now crawling with soldiers, aid workers and United Nations personnel, the movable cast that marks the advent of a serious problem.
The villagers who remain are terrified and confused. The Lord’s Resistance Army is not a Congolese movement. It is from Uganda. But once again, it seems that foreign armies are settling their scores in Congo, and the Congolese are paying the price. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Congo became the battlefield for more than a dozen armies and rebel groups from neighboring African countries, and several million Congolese died.
Even now, Rwandan troops are battling militants hundreds of miles south of here. Congo invited the Rwandans in to go after a different rebel group and its commander, much in the same way it allowed Ugandan soldiers to cross the border and hunt down the Lord’s Resistance Army.
“Who are these L.R.A.?” asked Bertrand Bangbe, who had been axed in the head and left for dead. “Why are they here? Why are they killing us?”
There are few answers. The Lord’s Resistance Army may have had some legitimate grievances when it started more than 20 years ago as a cultish rebellion to overthrow the Ugandan government. The fighters hailed their leader, Joseph Kony, as a prophet and a savior for the historically oppressed Acholi people. The movement even proclaimed to be fighting for the Ten Commandants.
But it soon devolved into something more sinister. The Lord’s Resistance Army killed tens of thousands of people in northern Uganda, slicing off lips and terrorizing children, before the Ugandan Army drove it out about five years ago. Mr. Kony then marched his prepubescent death squads and dozens of teenage brides to Garamba National Park, a vast reserve of elephants and swamps near the border of Uganda and Sudan.
The Ugandan government has tried coaxing Mr. Kony out. But the International Criminal Court in The Hague has indicted him on charges of crimes against humanity, and he has long insisted the charges be dropped. In November, as he has many times before, Mr. Kony refused to sign a peace treaty.
After that, Major Kulayigye said, “the only option left open to us was the military option.”
The Ugandan government asked the American Embassy in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, for help, and the request was sent up the chain of command in November to President Bush, who personally authorized it, a former senior Bush administration official said.
The American advisers and Ugandan officers used satellite imagery and Ugandan field intelligence reports to triangulate where they believed Mr. Kony and his fighters were hiding. The plan was for the Ugandan military to bomb his camp and then cut off his 700 or so fighters with more than 6,000 Ugandan and Congolese ground troops. On Dec. 13, the day before the attack, several American advisers traveled to a staging site near the Uganda-Congo border for a final coordination meeting, a senior American military official said.
Thick fog delayed the attack by several hours, Ugandan officials said, and they lost the element of surprise. By the time Ugandan helicopters bombed Mr. Kony’s hut, it was empty. Ugandan foot soldiers, hiking many miles through the bush, arrived several days later and recovered a few satellite phones and some guns.
The Ugandans say they have destroyed the rebels’ control center and food supplies, rescued around 100 abducted children and killed several fighters, including some commanders. But the operation has been widely criticized by human rights groups as essentially swatting a hornet’s nest.
On Dec. 25, villagers in Faradje, a town near the national park, walked out of church as 50 to 70 armed men emerged from the bush. Most villagers had no idea who they were. Some Congolese towns had been attacked before the offensive, yet the raids were not so widespread that word would have trickled back to remote places like Faradje.
The armed men spoke a strange language, probably Acholi, but there was no misunderstanding them after the first machete was swung. Whoever could run, did. Christine Ataputo, who owns the one restaurant in town, watched from the forest floor as the rebels raped, burned and butchered. She was lying on her belly when she saw that her 18-year-old daughter, Chantal, had been captured.
“They took her away on a rope,” she said.
Chantal has not been seen since, and even more than a month later, Faradje still has the whiff of char. Around 150 people were killed Christmas Day. Several other villages, some more than 100 miles away, were simultaneously attacked. In one town, after the rebels killed 80 churchgoers, they ate the villagers’ Christmas feast and then dozed among the corpses, according to Human Rights Watch, which documented the massacre.
“These guys are just moving around, doing whatever they want, killing, raping, whatever,” said Charles Gaudry, a field coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, which says more than 50 villages in the area where it works have been attacked. “There’s zero protection.”
The United Nations has more than 16,000 peacekeepers in Congo, including about 250 in Dungu. But United Nations officials said they were spread too thin in other war-racked parts of eastern Congo to take on the Lord’s Resistance Army. At the time of the nearby massacres, the peacekeepers in Dungu were guarding the airfield.
Villagers across the area are now banding together in local self-defense forces, arming themselves with ancient shotguns and rubber slingshots. In the past in Congo, home-grown militias have only complicated the dynamic and led to more abuses.
Even where there are Congolese troops, there is not necessarily protection. The family of the 10-year-old girl in the hospital said she might have been shot by a Congolese soldier who missed the rebel who was assaulting her.
The other night, by the light of a flashlight, a young doctor took one look at the girl and ordered her evacuation to Goma, a city along the Congo-Rwanda border. She may lose a leg, he said. But at least in Goma there is a special hospital to treat girls who have been raped. In eastern Congo, there are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of them.
Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Dungu, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
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4) U.S. Military Violated Security Agreement Twice in 2 Weeks, Iraqi Leaders Say
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
February 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/world/middleeast/07iraq.html?ref=world
BAGHDAD — Iraqi leaders in Kirkuk Province have charged that twice in the last two weeks the American military violated the hard-won security agreement signed in November by attacking Iraqi criminal suspects without coordinating with Iraqi security forces.
The first episode occurred last month, when American soldiers fatally shot an Iraqi couple in their home near Kirkuk after the wife reached for a pistol hidden under a mattress, American and Iraqi officials said. The couple’s 8-year-old daughter was wounded. The shooting was reported at the time, but the charges of failure to coordinate emerged on Friday, hours after an American raid in which a 58-year-old man was shot and killed outside of Kirkuk.
The two episodes highlight the difficulties the Americans and Iraqis are encountering as they try to comply with the security agreement’s requirement that American troops have “full coordination with Iraqi authorities,” particularly in places where there are still active counterinsurgency operations.
In some places, Iraqi and American special forces are conducting many of the raids, but it appears that they do not necessarily contact units stationed in the field. Interviews with witnesses to the Friday raid, including the 58-year-old man’s son, suggested it did not involve the military units that regularly patrol in the area.
The son, Nihad Muhammad Hassan al-Bachary, 16, described a sudden, brutal invasion of the family home. “The American forces stormed into our house, and they handcuffed me, my two brothers and my uncle,” the son said. “When my father came out of his room, they opened fire on him point blank and then they stuffed his body in a large, black plastic bag.”
The soldiers who came in were directed by an American in a military uniform, the son said, but unlike most soldiers, he had a beard. The other armed men with him were wearing masks and Iraqi commando uniforms and speaking in “Kurdish and inaccurate Arabic,” the son said. He said that his father was an Agriculture Ministry employee, and that several other family members were detained elsewhere in the village at the same time.
The police chief of the nearby city of Hawija said that he had not been warned of the raid, and that when his officers tried to enter the village, they were stopped by American soldiers. “An American force told us that, ‘There is a special force in there,’ ” said the police chief, Ibrahim al-Juboori.
“The police department for Hawija District had no knowledge of the operation,” he said. “The people who were arrested and the one that was killed were not known as terrorists.”
Hawija was a onetime stronghold for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown insurgent group that American intelligence believes has foreign leadership. Hussein Ali Saleh al-Juboori, a powerful local politician and the founder of the Hawija Awakening Council, which chased Al Qaeda from the area, warned that such episodes ran the risk of inspiring insurgents. “Hawija will become a center for resistance, not terrorism as it was before,” the politician said. “I have spoken with the Americans in Bachary and Kirkuk and the Joint Coordination Center, and they have no knowledge of what happened.
“There have been repeated breaches after the signing of the strategic agreement,” he said, citing the January case “when a man and his wife were killed and his daughter was injured. We demand immediate investigation.”
Iraqi Army commanders underscored the coordination problem. Speaking on condition of anonymity, they said that the men who were detained and the man who was killed were suspected of manufacturing explosives, and that they had resisted arrest. But they said such considerations did not exempt Americans from the requirement to coordinate.
Col. Jassim Saadon, head of the Hawija force in the Iraqi Army, said that he, too, knew nothing of the raid until afterward. “There is a lack of coordination between the forces that execute the orders and the local forces,” he said.
Angriest was a high-ranking Iraqi commander. He said that the Americans had apologized, but said, “Upsetting and violating the families will not help the process at all. And though the Americans came down here to apologize for the incident, we said that we did not want an apology but precoordination.” He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press on this subject.
In the future, he said, military forces undertaking raids outside the city of Kirkuk without coordinating with his division would be treated as “hostile forces.” The only exceptions, he said, were “situations where a terrorist is arrested wearing an explosive belt or planting a bomb.”
An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Kirkuk.
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5) Israel Deports Activists From Intercepted Vessel
By ETHAN BRONNER and ISABEL KERSHNER
February 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/world/middleeast/07mideast.html?ref=world
JERUSALEM — Israeli officials said on Friday that they had deported most of the activists on a Gaza-bound cargo ship with humanitarian aid intercepted a day earlier by the Israeli Navy. The officials said Israel had sent on to Gaza 1,000 units of donated blood found aboard.
A military official said that some 15 of the people on board the ship were either Lebanese or Syrian and had been driven to Israel’s border areas with those two countries on Thursday night and sent across. The handful of remaining activists, citizens of European countries, were to be deported soon, the official said.
Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the military’s civil affairs department, said that apart from 1,000 liters of blood that had already been sent to Gaza, there were toys, food and medicine that would be handed over to a charity group and sent to Gaza on Sunday or Monday.
The boat, called The Brotherhood Ship, remained docked in the Israeli port of Ashdod and was to be sent back to Lebanon. The navy had stopped the boat out of what it called security concerns. A search found no weapons aboard.
Meanwhile, two rockets were shot from Gaza into southern Israel on Friday morning. Both landed in open areas and caused no injuries or damage, the military reported.
Israel has maintained a strict blockade of Gaza since Hamas took power there in a brief civil war with its secular rival, Fatah, in June 2007. In late December, Israel mounted a three-week military assault in Gaza that left more than 1,300 Palestinians dead. Thirteen Israelis, including three civilians, also died.
Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from the United Nations.
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6) Florida’s Crossroads of Foreclosure and Despair
By DAMIEN CAVE
February 8, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/us/08lehigh.html?ref=us
LEHIGH ACRES, Fla. — Desperation has moved into this once-middle-class exurb of Fort Myers, where hammers used to pound.
Its straight-ahead stare was hidden amid the chatter of 221 families waiting for free bread at Faith Lutheran Church on a recent Friday morning; and it appeared a block away a few days earlier, as laid-off construction workers in flannel shirts scavenged through trash bags at a home foreclosure, grabbing wires, CDs, anything that could be sold.
“I knew it was coming,” said Gloria Chilson, 56, the former owner of the house, as she watched strangers pick through her belongings. “You take what you can; you try not to care.”
Welcome to the American dream in high reverse. Lehigh Acres is one of countless sprawling exurbs that the housing boom drastically reshaped, and now the bust is testing whether the experience of shared struggle will pull people together or tear them apart.
The changes in these mostly unincorporated areas outside cities like Charlotte, N.C., Las Vegas and Sacramento have been swift and vivid. Their best economic times have been immediately followed by their worst, as they have generally been the last to crest and the first to crash.
In Lehigh Acres, homes are selling at 80 percent off their peak prices. Only two years after there were more jobs than people to work them, fast-food restaurants are laying people off or closing. Crime is up, school enrollment is down, and one in four residents received food stamps in December, nearly a fourfold increase since 2006.
President Obama is scheduled to visit Fort Myers on Tuesday to promote his economic stimulus plan. But residents here tend to view it as the equivalent of an herbal remedy — it can’t hurt but it probably won’t heal. Instead, in church groups and offices, people call for “industry” and repeat one telling question: “What do we want to be when we grow up?”
“That’s one of things we struggle with: What is our identity?” said Joseph Whalen, 37, president of the Lehigh Acres Chamber of Commerce. “We don’t want to be the bedroom community of southwest Florida; we don’t want to be the foreclosure capital.”
A Legacy of the ’50s
Lehigh Acres, like much of Florida and many suburbs nationwide, was born with speculation in its DNA.
The area got its start in the 1950s when a Chicago pest control baron, Lee Ratner, and several partners bought thousands of acres of farmland and plotted about 100,000 lots. With Fort Myers, 15 miles to the west, developers left little room for schools, parks or even businesses.
What they sold was sun and quiet living.
“They used to bring 20 busloads a day,” said Bob Elliott, a former salesman for Mr. Ratner’s company who struck out on his own in 1982. “We had 300 customers, seven days a week.”
By 2000, the lots had been sold, but most stayed empty. Only about 30,000 people were living in an area roughly four times the size of Manhattan. The builders really started to arrive in 2004, setting up model homes on Lee Boulevard next to Mr. Elliott’s office with the faded wooden sign that said “$50 lots.”
Bill Spikowski, a city planning consultant in Fort Myers, said that because Lehigh Acres had so many parcels and few restrictions on what could be built, smaller companies battled for customers. From 2004 to the end of 2006, developers completed 13,183 units in Lehigh Acres — nearly doubling the total stock of 15,216 that existed in 2000, according to Lee County figures.
Residents remember the boom for its noise, with dump trucks lining the streets and power tools heard in nearly every neighborhood. Housing prices doubled, then tripled, and jobs were plentiful, nearly all of them tied to real estate.
Signs of trouble were ignored. “Sometimes houses would sell three or four times in a few months, and no one would move in,” Mr. Elliott said.
Then in 2007, it all went quiet. Houses stopped selling. Foreclosures multiplied. The median home price in the Fort Myers area dropped to $215,200 in December 2007, from a peak of $322,300 in December 2005. It had fallen to $106,900 two months ago.
Work disappeared with the profits. According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, Lee County lost a higher percentage of jobs (8.8 percent) from June 2007 to June 2008 than any other county in the nation. Unemployment in the county rose to 9.8 percent in November, from 3.5 percent in March 2007.
Lehigh Acres was particularly hard hit because it relied on construction. This was where the carpenters and exterminators of southwest Florida lived because it was more affordable or close to work. And by last spring, life as they knew it had come to an end.
The Downward Spiral
Trinkets for $1 were an early sign of trouble. Early last year, garage sales and estate auctions became more common in Lehigh Acres as families sold what they could to survive. No one seemed interested in buying whole houses, and foreclosures soon gave way to empty homes that became magnets for crime.
Thieves stole air conditioner parts for scrap. And on distant roads with only a few new homes and faded blue street signs from the ’50s — on Narcissus Boulevard, on Prospect Avenue — drug dealers moved in.
In 2007 and 2008, the Lee County Sheriff’s Department shut down more than 100 houses in Lehigh Acres where marijuana was being grown. In 2008, the police confiscated nearly 3,000 plants valued at nearly $7 million.
Last winter, Charlotte Rae Nicely, executive director of Lehigh Community Services, noticed something else. More people were going hungry. Demand was increasing at the food pantry she runs at a nondescript office park, with dozens of new faces appearing week after week, even as the population was declining.
Wondering what other social service agencies were experiencing, she decided to form a group that would coordinate assistance. It was the first sign that Lehigh Acres was fighting the recession in an organized way, and the group’s mission appeared in its name: Team Rescue.
The monthly meetings now include about a half-dozen churches, nonprofit groups, business owners and representatives from county government, including the sheriff’s office.
Discussion at one recent gathering centered on the host of troubles that follow unemployment — issues that until recently had rarely been seen in new American suburbs. Hunger was chief among them.
The organizations offering food in Lehigh Acres have seen demand increase by as much as 75 percent in the last year. And the people being served are no longer just the chronic poor.
The line at Faith Lutheran included a mix of ages, races and former income levels.
Luis Oquendo, 38, said he had been showing up for his weekly bread allotment since last fall, after full-time construction work disappeared.
Fred Csifortos, 62, a retiree surviving on $650 a month in disability payments, said the free food left more money for his medications.
Megan Brown, standing in line with her well-dressed daughters, Kayley, 2, and Sydney, 4, had come because she feared the worst. Her husband still had his job, she said, “but things are getting more and more tight.”
Team Rescue, of which Faith Lutheran is a member, considers itself successful, not just because it has helped more families but also because organizers believe that the links they are forming will be the foundation of a tighter community.
Ms. Nicely said she was especially encouraged by the Sheriff’s Department’s new “weed and seed” program, intended to revive Lehigh’s most troubled neighborhoods by involving residents in community policing and cleanup.
And home sales in Lee County are picking up, running roughly even with foreclosures.
“Six months ago, you might get one out of 20 houses with a multiple offer,” said Kevin Williamson, a real estate agent who has lived in Lehigh Acres for 22 years. “A couple of weeks ago, I had one with 13 offers.”
But no one here would describe Lehigh Acres as out of the woods. Real estate agents said the homes that are selling here typically go for only about $45,000, a third of what they cost to build. They predict that foreclosures will continue to keep prices low for two more years.
Job growth is also still nonexistent. Randy Burns, 50, the gregarious owner of Lehigh Discount Furniture, says he now receives 15 to 20 calls a week from people asking him to buy their furniture or help them move out of town — and he said he planned to leave, too.
“Until there’s jobs and foreclosures stop,” he said, “nothing’s going to change.”
The Latest Battle
Creating a community in a deepening recession, many here now say, feels harder than dealing with a Category 5 hurricane. Panic is a powerful headwind.
Voters defeated a proposal last year to incorporate Lehigh Acres, partly because residents feared higher taxes. And Team Rescue, for all its strength as a unified front, is still trying to figure out how to curb the spread of desperation.
Most recently the group has been struggling with a growing wave of families that either visit multiple food pantries using aliases or return the food to supermarkets for money or other items.
Ms. Nicely, at Lehigh Community Services, said that in November she started using a magic marker to blacken UPC symbols on cans so grocery stores would not accept them as returns.
“We even had to do that on the toys for Christmas,” Ms. Nicely said. Without such limits, she said, the neediest families might not be served.
Still, she often feels torn, saying, “I can’t be sure I wouldn’t do the same thing if I was a single parent and my kids were hungry.”
“The needs are so strong now,” she added, noting that there were more canned peas than peanut butter on her shelves because of growing demand. “They’ve never been this big before.”
A similar struggle between cohesion and chaos was also evident at a recent evangelical men’s meeting, where 8 of the 15 members said they had been laid off in the last year. Even as the group had helped some of the men cope, others said their families had been broken up by the stress.
And then there is Ms. Chilson. She lost her house partly because of the boom (if not for easy credit, she might not have refinanced her mortgage a few years ago), the bust (which led to her husband being laid off from his pest control job) and overspending (which led to more than $20,000 in credit card debt).
She and her husband had lived in their simple green ranch house for 18 years, and the night they were kicked out, they stayed across the street with an elderly man whom Ms. Chilson had often helped with his medication.
Ms. Chilson put her couch in an old friend’s house, her frozen steaks in another. And as she scrambled to find work and a place to rent, she decided to thank those she could.
At one point, she tried to vacuum a neighbor’s house as an act of appreciation.
But the vacuum stayed quiet. Ms. Chilson discovered that the electricity had been turned off because the bill had not been paid. Any day now, she said, her neighbor will be leaving Lehigh Acres with all the others.
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Saturday, February 07, 2009
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
BAUAW NEWSLETTER - WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2009
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RESISTING INDIVIDUAL READY RESERVE (IRR) RECALL
Courage to Resist.
Dear Friends,
Courage to Resist has published an IRR overview that contains critical
information for anyone nearing the end of their military enlistment and the
hundreds of thousands of recently discharged veterans still eligible for
involuntary recall. I don't believe this information exists anywhere else,
so I'm hoping you might be able to help distribute, link and share this as
broadly as possible so that those who need it the most might find it.
Jeff Paterson
Courage to Resist Project Director
RESISTING INDIVIDUAL READY RESERVE (IRR) RECALL
Courage to Resist. January 3, 2009
Online version:
http://couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/658/1/
PDF leaflet:
http://couragetoresist.org/x/images/stories/pdf2/irr-leaflet.pdf
Additional related IRR information from Courage to Resist:
http://couragetoresist.org/irr
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Fourth Al-Awda West Coast Regional Conference
Sunday February 8, 2009 at The University of California in San Diego (UCSD)
hosted by Students for Justice in Palestine
Save the Date! Mark Your Calendars! Plan to Attend!
The Palestine Right to Return Coalition's Al-Awda chapters in Los Angeles, Orange County, Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego thank all who took part in the Mass Rally and March in Los Angeles yesterday January 10 as part of the Let Gaza Live National Emergency Day of Mass Action and Protest that took place around the country. Thousands took to the streets demanding an immediate end to the carnage that is being carried out by the 'Israeli' military against our people in the Gaza Strip, and to demand an end to the political, economic and military support it has received from the US administration.
As announced at the protests, please take note that the Fourth Al-Awda West Coast Regional Conference, LET GAZA LIVE!, will take place Sunday February 8, 2009 at The University of California in San Diego (UCSD). This conference will be hosted by Students for Justice in Palestine. All members and supporters of the Right to Return movement on the West Coast are urged to participate in this important and timely one day conference.
Save the Date, Mark Your Calendars, and Plan to Attend.
Further details will be posted over the next few days and as soon as they become available.
Until Return,
Al-Awda Chapters in Southern California
The Palestine Right to Return Coalition
PO Box 131352
Carlsbad, CA 92013, USA
Tel: 760-918-9441
Fax: 760-918-9442
E-mail: info@al-awda.org
WWW: http://al-awda.org
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition (PRRC) is the largest network of grassroots activists and students dedicated to Palestinian human rights. We are a not for profit tax-exempt educational and charitable 501(c)(3) organization as defined by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of the United States of America. Under IRS guidelines, your donations to PRRC are tax-deductible.
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You're invited to join Bay Area CODEPINK in February for exciting actions and informative events. This month we'd like to highlight an event CODEPINKer Tamara has organized with Iraqi author Nadje Al-Ali who will speak on her new book, "What Kind of Liberation: Women and the Occupation of Iraq". Nadje was with CODEPINK on the national Iraqi women's speaking tour around International Women's Day in 2006 and returns to the US from London to share this excellent new book. Join us at The First Unitarian Universalist Society of SF (The Murdock Room, 1187 Franklin Street at Geary, SF) on Thursday, February 12 for this special event.
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Celebrate Black History Month
Come To the ILWU Rally!
Racism, Repression
and Rebellion:
The Lessons of Labor Defense
12 Noon,
Saturday, 14 February 2009
ILWU Local 10 Hall, 400 North Point (at Mason)
near Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco
SPEAKERS:
ANGELA DAVIS UC Santa Cruz Professor,
former Black Panther, witch-hunted by FBI
MARTINA CORREIA Sister of Troy Davis on Georgia's death row
Rev Cecil Williams Glide Memorial Church
Robert R Bryan lead attorney for Mumia Abu-Jamal,
on Pennsylvania death row
Gerald Smith former Black Panther,
Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
Pierre LaBossiere founding member, Haiti Action Committee
JR Prisoners of Conscience Committee, Minister of Information
Richard Brown former Black Panther, San Francisco 8
Cultural presentations:
Jack Hirschman, SF Poet Laureate;
Tayo Aluko, Nigerian actor portraying Paul Robeson: and
Upsurge! Jazz/Poetry Music
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) was born out of the militant 1934 strike in which police killed two strikers in San Francisco, shooting them in the back. Still today police are banned from membership in Local 10. The union has a legacy of defending those under attack by the government, in particular reds and blacks, from Harry Bridges and Paul Robeson, to Angela Davis, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Troy Davis. For Black History Month, Local 10 is organizing this rally to teach the lessons of the need for unity of action to defend against government repression and racist profiling. These lessons are never more necessary than today, as evidenced by the brutal murder by BART police of Oscar Grant, who was lying face-down when shot.
Racism, Repression
and Rebellion:
The Lessons of Labor Defense
12 Noon, Saturday, 14 February 2009
ILWU Local 10 Hall, 400 North Point (at Mason)
near Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco
MORE INFO: (510) 501-7080
- from Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222 Oakland CA 94610 LACFreeMumia@aol.com
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MARCH 21 "MARCH ON THE PENTAGON" PLANNING MEETING FOR SAN FRANCISCO PROTEST HAS LAUNCHED THE MARCH 21 COALITION!
MASS COMMUNITY OUTREACH TO BUILD MARCH 21
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 11:00 A.M.
NEXT PLANNING MEETING, SUNDAY, MARCH 1, 2:00 P.M.
AT:
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO (UPSTAIRS)
474 VALENCIA STREET (NEAR 16TH STREET)
SAN FRANCISCO
Check out the new MARCH 21 Coalition Website:
http://www.pephost.org/site/PageServer?pagename=M21_homepage
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National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations
CALL FOR ENDORSEMENTS FOR MARCH 21:
Greetings:
The March on the Pentagon and the demonstrations in San Francisco, Los Angeles and other cities scheduled for Saturday, March 21 – marking the beginning of the 7th year of war and occupation of Iraq – are now only weeks away. This is a time for peace activists across the country to go all-out in helping to publicize and build these actions. You can start by endorsing March 21, if you and your organization have not done so already.
A mass movement in the streets is needed now more than ever if we are to succeed in getting U.S. troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, ending U.S. support for Israel's occupation of Palestine, preventing further attacks on Pakistan, and stopping a war against Iran. The occupation of Iraq continues with every indication that the new administration intends to stay there indefinitely. Meanwhile, 30,000 additional U.S. troops are to be sent to Afghanistan. The whole world watched with horror as Israel massacred thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, using weapons of mass destruction provided by Washington. And only days after the inauguration, orders were given to bomb Pakistan, resulting in 21 deaths, most of them women and children.
March 21 provides concerned people throughout the country an opportunity to let the world know that opposition to these U.S. policies of war, occupation, intervention and expansionism exists and is determined to be heard. It lets the beleaguered people in those countries where the U.S. is an oppressor know that there is an American antiwar movement that does not forget their needs for peace and national sovereignty. That is a message we must also send to the new administration. The size of the turnout on the 21st will be critical if we are to help make a difference. So we count on you to do whatever you can to build highly visible mass actions and to ensure that they are as large, vocal and spirited as possible.
There are March 21 committees and coalitions already formed or being formed in many areas working to publicize the event and send people to one of the demonstration sites. We encourage you to join or organize such a grouping in your locale. The National Assembly, as one of many initiators of March 21, is going all out to make the actions as large as possible.
Please send endorsements to our website at www.natassembly.org, where an endorsement form is provided, or by writing natassembly@aol.com. While we would like to have these endorsements for our records so that we can keep everyone updated regarding National Assembly activities, we will also forward them to the March 21 National Coalition website at www.PentagonMarch.org, where the latest list of endorsers can be viewed.
In solidarity,
Jerry Gordon
Secretary, National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
www.natassembly.org
216-736-4704 for more info
P.S. Check out the National Assembly website to see our statement on Gaza, get information on March 21st organizing, learn about our July 10-12 national antiwar conference in Pittsburgh, make a donation, and participate in our discussion blog.
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Cuba leads way in children rights
Cuba is the top-ranking developing country when it comes to protecting children’s rights, according to a new Child Development Index (CDI).
By: Tim Anderson
http://www.juventudrebelde.cip.cu/cuba/2009-01-29/cuba-leads-way-in-children-rights/
2) Bailouts for Bunglers
By PAUL KRUGMAN
February 2, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/opinion/02krugman.html
3) Sins of Omission: Help for the Beleaguered Homeowner
Editorial
February 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/opinion/02mon1.html
4) Obama and Key Democrat Voice Support for Daschle
By DAVID STOUT
February 3, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/us/politics/03daschle.html?hp
5) Greek Farmers Clash With Riot Police
By ANTHEE CARASSAVA
February 3, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/world/europe/03greece.html?ref=world
6) Welfare Aid Isn’t Growing as Economy Drops Off
By JASON DEPARLE
February 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/us/02welfare.html?ref=us
7) Border Agents Say They Had Arrest Quotas
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/us/02border.html?ref=us
8) To Close a School: A Decision Rooted in Data, but Colored by Nuance
By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ
February 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/education/02closed.html?ref=education
9) Rep: Foreclosed owners should squat in their own homes
Filed by David Edwards and Stephen C. Webster
01/30/2009 @ 9:26 am
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Rep_Foreclosed_owners_should_squat_in_0130.html
10) In Shattered Gaza Town, Roots of Seething Split
By ETHAN BRONNER and SABRINA TAVERNISE
February 4, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/world/middleeast/04gaza.html?ref=world
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1) Cuba leads way in children rights
Cuba is the top-ranking developing country when it comes to protecting children’s rights, according to a new Child Development Index (CDI).
By: Tim Anderson
http://www.juventudrebelde.cip.cu/cuba/2009-01-29/cuba-leads-way-in-children-rights/
This ranking reflects Cuba’s progress since the 1990s in child health, nutrition and education, despite considerable difficulties,
Save the Children UK, an independent children’s rights organisation, says it is “outraged that millions of children are still denied proper healthcare, food, education and protection”.
It has developed the CDI as part of its strategy to “hold governments to account for children’s wellbeing”.
The index is constructed from three indicators: health (a scaled probability of death under the age of five), nutrition (the percentage of under fives who are moderately or severely underweight) and education (the percentage of primary-school aged children who are not enrolled in school).
A low score indicates low child deprivation. Cuba’s progress in recent years raised it from second place in Latin America (after Argentina) in the 1990s to first place in the period 2000-06.
Latin America was also the region with greatest improvement in recent years, mostly from reductions in child mortality and increased school enrolments. East Asia was the second most improved region.
Costa Rica and Argentina were second and third in both the Latin American and the developing country lists.
While wealthy OECD countries topped the list, the US, by contrast, went backwards. It now ranks 23rd in the world on children’s rights — after Cuba, Costa Rica and Argentina.
The poor US performance was largely due to deterioration in primary school enrolments.
Save the Children UK observes that, worldwide, more than 9 million children under five die every year, one quarter of all children are underweight and 75 million primary school-aged children are not enrolled in school.
The group says that the basic rights of children all around the world “continue to be violated and denied’ and proposes “dramatic action” to reverse the slowdown in progress on child malnutrition, efforts to convert economic growth into benefits for children and “a significant effort” to promote girls’ education.
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2) Bailouts for Bunglers
By PAUL KRUGMAN
February 2, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/opinion/02krugman.html
Question: what happens if you lose vast amounts of other people’s money? Answer: you get a big gift from the federal government — but the president says some very harsh things about you before forking over the cash.
Am I being unfair? I hope so. But right now that’s what seems to be happening.
Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the Obama administration’s plan to support jobs and output with a large, temporary rise in federal spending, which is very much the right thing to do. I’m talking, instead, about the administration’s plans for a banking system rescue — plans that are shaping up as a classic exercise in “lemon socialism”: taxpayers bear the cost if things go wrong, but stockholders and executives get the benefits if things go right.
When I read recent remarks on financial policy by top Obama administration officials, I feel as if I’ve entered a time warp — as if it’s still 2005, Alan Greenspan is still the Maestro, and bankers are still heroes of capitalism.
“We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we’d like to do our best to preserve that system,” says Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary — as he prepares to put taxpayers on the hook for that system’s immense losses.
Meanwhile, a Washington Post report based on administration sources says that Mr. Geithner and Lawrence Summers, President Obama’s top economic adviser, “think governments make poor bank managers” — as opposed, presumably, to the private-sector geniuses who managed to lose more than a trillion dollars in the space of a few years.
And this prejudice in favor of private control, even when the government is putting up all the money, seems to be warping the administration’s response to the financial crisis.
Now, something must be done to shore up the financial system. The chaos after Lehman Brothers failed showed that letting major financial institutions collapse can be very bad for the economy’s health. And a number of major institutions are dangerously close to the edge.
So banks need more capital. In normal times, banks raise capital by selling stock to private investors, who receive a share in the bank’s ownership in return. You might think, then, that if banks currently can’t or won’t raise enough capital from private investors, the government should do what a private investor would: provide capital in return for partial ownership.
But bank stocks are worth so little these days — Citigroup and Bank of America have a combined market value of only $52 billion — that the ownership wouldn’t be partial: pumping in enough taxpayer money to make the banks sound would, in effect, turn them into publicly owned enterprises.
My response to this prospect is: so? If taxpayers are footing the bill for rescuing the banks, why shouldn’t they get ownership, at least until private buyers can be found? But the Obama administration appears to be tying itself in knots to avoid this outcome.
If news reports are right, the bank rescue plan will contain two main elements: government purchases of some troubled bank assets and guarantees against losses on other assets. The guarantees would represent a big gift to bank stockholders; the purchases might not, if the price was fair — but prices would, The Financial Times reports, probably be based on “valuation models” rather than market prices, suggesting that the government would be making a big gift here, too.
And in return for what is likely to be a huge subsidy to stockholders, taxpayers will get, well, nothing.
Will there at least be limits on executive compensation, to prevent more of the rip-offs that have enraged the public? President Obama denounced Wall Street bonuses in his latest weekly address — but according to The Washington Post, “the administration is likely to refrain from imposing tougher restrictions on executive compensation at most firms receiving government aid” because “harsh limits could discourage some firms from asking for aid.” This suggests that Mr. Obama’s tough talk is just for show.
Meanwhile, Wall Street’s culture of excess seems to have been barely dented by the crisis. “Say I’m a banker and I created $30 million. I should get a part of that,” one banker told The New York Times. And if you’re a banker and you destroyed $30 billion? Uncle Sam to the rescue!
There’s more at stake here than fairness, although that matters too. Saving the economy is going to be very expensive: that $800 billion stimulus plan is probably just a down payment, and rescuing the financial system, even if it’s done right, is going to cost hundreds of billions more. We can’t afford to squander money giving huge windfalls to banks and their executives, merely to preserve the illusion of private ownership.
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3) Sins of Omission: Help for the Beleaguered Homeowner
Editorial
February 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/opinion/02mon1.html
The Senate will debate its version of the mammoth stimulus and recovery package this week. As with last week’s version, passed by the House, there will be considerable argument between Democrats and Republicans over what belongs in the bill.
One serious disagreement has already taken place — between Senate leaders and the Obama administration — and it has been decided in a way that can only weaken the overall package. The senators had planned to make foreclosure relief part of the bill, by including a measure to let bankrupt homeowners have their mortgages modified under court protection.
But administration officials — who say they support the bankruptcy fix — rejected the idea of putting it in the bill out of fear that it would cause Republicans to delay or reject the package. So barring a free-for-all rewrite of the bill on the Senate floor, the fix is out and the relief will be postponed at least until the spring, when the measure could be attached to other legislation.
The delay is a shame. President Obama made concessions to Republicans in the House — and not one voted for urgent economic stimulus and recovery programs.
This economic crisis started with bad mortgage loans, and the resulting defaults and foreclosures have only worsened as house prices have plunged. The bankruptcy fix is the linchpin of effective foreclosure relief. Unless foreclosures are stanched, the economy will deteriorate further and faster than any stimulus can hope to overcome. That is because foreclosures are flooding the already glutted market with homes for sale at rock bottom prices, driving prices down virtually everywhere. The more prices fall, the more defaults rise, because homeowners with little or no equity have no cushion to fall back on if — for any reason — they have trouble making their payments.
Falling prices and rising defaults, in turn, perpetuate the credit crunch, because as long as loans are souring, banks will continue to suffer losses and constrain lending. Falling prices also contribute to the continuing collapse in consumer spending, which deepens the recession, because homeowners increasingly find themselves not only cash-short but house-poor as well. As a result, they are unable or disinclined to spend.
The upshot is that house-price declines and foreclosures are less a normal market correction and more the catalyst in a vicious downward spiral.
Voluntary efforts by lenders to modify troubled loans have failed to yield the types or numbers of modifications capable of slowing the pace of foreclosures. Bankruptcy protection, if it were applied to mortgage loans, could succeed where voluntary efforts have failed.
In cases where a homeowner is able and willing to pay more on a loan than could be recouped by foreclosing, a judge could impose a settlement. Opening the courthouse door to troubled homeowners would also spur more and better voluntary loan modifications. Lenders would know that a voluntary solution would stave off a court-imposed one.
The Obama administration has said that it plans to use a chunk of the bank bailout money, up to $100 billion, to provide foreclosure relief. That would be welcome, but it is not a substitute for bankruptcy reform. It is unfair to ask taxpayers to pay for foreclosure relief without enacting a bankruptcy fix, which costs them nothing. Besides, any relief effort — and the Obama team has not yet indicated what it has in mind — will attract more participation if lenders know that the alternative is to lose control of the process to a bankruptcy judge.
Bankruptcy reform is the stick to whatever carrots the taxpayer will be asked to pay for.
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4) Obama and Key Democrat Voice Support for Daschle
By DAVID STOUT
February 3, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/us/politics/03daschle.html?hp
WASHINGTON — President Obama and a key Democratic senator voiced unqualified support on Monday for Tom Daschle to become the head of the Health and Human Services Department, giving the contrite nominee a big boost toward confirmation.
When asked in a brief session with reporters at the White House whether he stood by Mr. Daschle in view of the nominee’s tax-related problems, the president replied, “Absolutely.”
Later, Mr. Obama’s chief spokeswoman, Robert Gibbs, expressed confidence that the Senate would weigh Mr. Daschle’s years of public service against the lapse on tax matters and would confirm the nominee. President Obama continues to believe Mr. Daschle is “the right person for the very important job” of revamping the health-care system, Mr. Gibbs said.
And Senator Max Baucus of Montana, the chairman of the Finance Committee, issued a statement backing Mr. Daschle’s confirmation without reservation.
“The ability to advance meaningful health reform is my top priority in confirming a secretary of health and human services, and I remain convinced that Senator Daschle would be an invaluable and expert partner in this effort,” Mr. Baucus said.
Mr. Baucus said his faith in Mr. Daschle’s “dedication and qualifications” had been bolstered by his conversations with the nominee in recent weeks. “I am eager to move forward together,” Mr. Baucus said.
Moreover, other Democratic members of the panel have reportedly sent signals that they are prepared to stand by Mr. Daschle, who was an early supporter of Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign.
Mr. Baucus released his statement in advance of a late-afternoon meeting of his panel, which will hear from Mr. Daschle in a private session. In advance, Mr. Daschle wrote a letter to Mr. Baucus and Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, in which he said he was “deeply embarrassed and disappointed” in himself over his failure to pay some $140,000 in back taxes and interest.
Senator Baucus’s statement on Monday morning in support of the nominee was significant because he and Mr. Daschle have sometimes had a rocky relationship. Mr. Baucus has at times seemed more comfortable negotiating with Republican senators on important issues — President Bush’s tax-cut proposals, for instance — than with his Democratic colleagues. In those cases, Mr. Baucus would sometimes put Mr. Daschle, then the Democratic leader in the Senate, in an awkward position. Mr. Daschle was unseated in 2004 by John R. Thune, who had been a popular Republican Congressman in South Dakota.
In his letter Mr. Daschle said his recently disclosed tax problems, related to income for consulting work and the use of a car made available to him by a close friend who is also a generous donor to Democratic causes, were unintentional.
“I apologize for the errors and profoundly regret that you have had to devote time to them,” Mr. Daschle wrote.
He is also likely to be asked about the more than $200,000 he has made in fees over the past two years for speaking to members of the health care industry that President Obama has vowed to change. Mr. Daschle’s spokeswoman, Jenny Backus, said those earnings do not pose a conflict of interest.
“He welcomed every opportunity to make his case to the American public at large and the health care industry in particular that America can’t afford to ignore the health care crisis any longer,” Ms. Backus told The Associated Press.
The speaking fees are but a portion of the millions Mr. Daschle has earned on consulting work since he left the Senate, following a well-worn path in Washington. His wife, Linda, is an influential lobbyist.
Tradition and simple math bode well for Mr. Daschle’s chances at confirmation. Much more often than not, a new president is given the team he wants when his Cabinet nominees are voted upon in the Senate, which now has 58 Democrats.
Carl Hulse contributed reporting.
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5) Greek Farmers Clash With Riot Police
By ANTHEE CARASSAVA
February 3, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/world/europe/03greece.html?ref=world
ATHENS — Two people were injured Monday when Greek riot police clashed with hundreds of farmers from the southern island of Crete who sailed to the Greek mainland and tried to drive tractors and farm vehicles to the capital to push demands for financial aid.
The clashes come at a time of growing social unrest in Greece, as the center-right government of Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis struggles to restore its credibility after student riots in December. Protests have spread across Europe — most recently in France and Britain — as the global economic crisis bites into jobs and incomes.
In the clashes on Monday, the farmers, who sailed into the port of Piraeus, made a convoy of some 300 tractors, trucks and other farming vehicles. Some of the vehicles tried to ram a police van that was blocking the port gates.
Live television broadcasts showed at least two people injured in the scuffle, including a female lawmaker who was knocked down by one of the tractors. Two protesters were arrested for pelting police officers with rocks, potatoes and tomatoes.
Heavy farming vehicles are barred from the capital’s motorways, and the authorities in Athens said they had advised the protesters to proceed on foot.
“All we wanted was to drive our tractors to the Agriculture Ministry in a peaceful, symbolic protest,” one farmer mounted on a red tractor festooned with two black flags told a private television broadcaster. He said the farmers would stay put until the authorities came to them.
Thousands of farmers have been protesting across Greece since Jan. 20, blockading the country’s main roads and starving the capital of food and medicine as they demand government aid and tax breaks following a harsh winter and a drop in commodity prices.
Most of the blockades eased last week after the government promised a $645 million aid package and Bulgaria’s truckers association vowed to take legal action against the Greek authorities for hampering trade.
But the farmers from Crete rejected the package, saying it offers too little for their region. Other agricultural groups are keeping a crucial border crossing with Bulgaria closed, complaining that the government assistance plan provides no long-term solution to their declining income.
Greek farmers’ income has shrunk by almost 24 percent in the last decade, according to their national labor union.
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6) Welfare Aid Isn’t Growing as Economy Drops Off
By JASON DEPARLE
February 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/us/02welfare.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON — Despite soaring unemployment and the worst economic crisis in decades, 18 states cut their welfare rolls last year, and nationally the number of people receiving cash assistance remained at or near the lowest in more than 40 years.
The trends, based on an analysis of new state data collected by The New York Times, raise questions about how well a revamped welfare system with great state discretion is responding to growing hardships.
Michigan cut its welfare rolls 13 percent, though it was one of two states whose October unemployment rate topped 9 percent. Rhode Island, the other, had the nation’s largest welfare decline, 17 percent.
Of the 12 states where joblessness grew most rapidly, eight reduced or kept constant the number of people receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the main cash welfare program for families with children. Nationally, for the 12 months ending October 2008, the rolls inched up a fraction of 1 percent.
The deepening recession offers a fresh challenge to the program, which was passed by a Republican Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996 amid bitter protest and became one of the most closely watched social experiments in modern memory.
The program, which mostly serves single mothers, ended a 60-year-old entitlement to cash aid, replacing it with time limits and work requirements, and giving states latitude to discourage people from joining the welfare rolls. While it was widely praised in the boom years that followed, skeptics warned it would fail the needy when times turned tough.
Supporters of the program say the flat caseloads may reflect a lag between the loss of a job and the decision to seek help. They also say the recession may have initially spared the low-skilled jobs that many poor people take.
But critics argue that years of pressure to cut the welfare rolls has left an obstacle-ridden program that chases off the poor, even when times are difficult.
Even some of the program’s staunchest defenders are alarmed.
“There is ample reason to be concerned here,” said Ron Haskins, a former Republican Congressional aide who helped write the 1996 law overhauling the welfare system. “The overall structure is not working the way it was designed to work. We would expect, just on the face it, that when a deep recession happens, people could go back on welfare.”
“When we started this, Democratic and Republican governors alike said, ‘We know what’s best for our state; we’re not going to let people starve,’ ” said Mr. Haskins, who is now a researcher at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “And now that the chips are down, and unemployment is going up, most states are not doing enough to help families get back on the rolls.”
The program’s structure — fixed federal financing, despite caseload size — may discourage states from helping more people because the states bear all of the increased costs. By contrast, the federal government pays virtually all food-stamp costs, and last year every state expanded its food-stamp rolls; nationally, the food program grew 12 percent.
The clashing trends in some states — more food stamps, but less cash aid — suggest a safety net at odds with itself. Georgia shrank the cash welfare rolls by nearly 11 percent and expanded food stamps by 17 percent. After years of pushing reductions, Congress is now considering a rare plan that would subsidize expansions of the cash welfare rolls. The economic stimulus bills pending in Congress would provide matching grants — estimated at $2.5 billion over two years — to states with caseload expansions.
Born from Mr. Clinton’s pledge to “end welfare as we know it,” the new program brought furious protests from people who predicted the poor would suffer. Then millions of people quickly left the rolls, employment rates rose and child poverty plunged.
But the economy of the late 1990s was unusually strong, and even then critics warned that officials placed too much stress on caseload reduction. With benefits harder to get, a small but growing share of families was left with neither welfare nor work and fell deeper into destitution.
“TANF is not an especially attractive option for most people,” said Linda Blanchette, a top welfare official in Pennsylvania, which cut its rolls last year by 6 percent. “People really do view it as a last resort.”
The data collected by The Times is the most recent available for every state and includes some similar programs financed solely by states, to give the broadest picture of cash aid. In a year when 1.1 million jobs disappeared, 18 states cut the rolls, 20 states expanded them, and caseloads in 12 states remained essentially flat, fluctuating less than 3 percent. (In addition, caseloads in the District of Columbia rose by nearly 5 percent.)
The rolls rose 7 percent in the West, stayed flat in the South, and fell in the Northeast by 4 percent and Midwest by 5 percent.
Seven states increased their rolls by double digits. Five states, including Texas and Michigan, made double-digit reductions. Of the 10 states with the highest child poverty rates, eight kept caseloads level or further reduced the rolls.
“This is evidence of a strikingly unresponsive system,” said Mark H. Greenberg, co-director of a poverty institute at the Georgetown University law school. Some administrators disagree.
“We’re still putting people to work,” said Larry Temple, who runs the job placement program for welfare recipients in Texas, where the rolls dropped 15 percent. “A lot of the occupations that historically we’ve been able to put the welfare people in are still hiring. Home health is a big one.”
Though some welfare recipients continue to find jobs, nationally their prospects have worsened. Joblessness among women ages 20 to 24 without a high school degree rose to 23.9 percent last year, from 17.9 percent the year before, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Some analysts offer a different reason for the Texas caseload declines: a policy that quickly halts all cash aid to recipients who fail to attend work programs.
“We’re really just pushing families off the program,” said Celia Hagert of the Center for Public Policy Priorities, a research and advocacy group in Austin, Tex.
Some officials predict the rolls will yet rise. “There’s typically a one- to two-year lag between an economic downturn and an uptick in the welfare rolls,” said David Hansell, who oversees the program in New York State, where the rolls fell 4 percent.
Indeed, as the recession has worsened in recent months, some states’ rolls have just started to grow. Georgia’s caseload fell until July 2008, but has since risen 5 percent. Still, as of October the national caseloads remained down 70 percent from their peak in the early 1990s under the predecessor program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
Nationally, caseloads fell every year from 1994 to 2007, to about 4.1 million people, a level last seen in 1964. The federal total for 2008 has not been published, but the Times analysis of state data suggests they remained essentially flat.
Some recent caseload reduction has been driven by a 2006 law that required states to place more recipients in work programs, which can be costly and difficult to run. It threatened states with stiff fines but eased the targets for states that simply cut the rolls.
“Some states decided they had to get tougher,” said Sharon Parrott of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington research and advocacy group.
Rhode Island was among them. Previously, the state had reduced but not eliminated grants to families in which an adult had hit a 60-month limit. Last year, it closed those cases, removing 2,200 children from the rolls.
Under the new federal accounting rules, that made it easier to meet statistical goals and protected the state from fines.
Michigan also imposed new restrictions, forcing applicants to spend a month in a job-search program before collecting benefits. Critics say the up-front requirement poses obstacles to the neediest applicants, like those with physical or mental illnesses.
“I think that’s a legitimate complaint,” said Ismael Ahmed, director of the Michigan Department of Human Services, though he blamed the federal rules. The program “was drawn for an economy that is not the economy most states are in.”
While food stamps usually grow faster than cash aid during recessions, the current contrast is stark. Many officials see cash aid in a negative light, as a form of dependency, while encouraging the use of food stamps and calling them nutritional support.
“Food assistance is not considered welfare,” said Donalda Carlson, a Rhode Island welfare administrator.
Nationally, the temporary assistance program gives states $16.8 billion a year — the same amount they received in the early 1990s, when caseloads were more than three times as high as they are now. Mr. Haskins, the program’s architect, said that obliged them to ensure the needy could return to the rolls. “States have plenty of money,” he said.
But most states have shifted the money into other programs — including child care and child welfare — and say they cannot shift it back without causing other problems.
Oregon expanded its cash caseload 19 percent last year, so far without major backlash. “That’s the purpose of the program — to be there for that need,” said Vic Todd, a senior state official. But California officials expressed ambivalence about a 6 percent rise in the cash welfare rolls in that state when it is facing a $40 billion deficit. “There’s some fine tuning of the program that needs to occur, to incentivize work,” said John Wagner, the state director of social services.
Among those sanguine about current caseload trends is Robert Rector, an analyst at the Heritage Foundation in Washington who is influential with conservative policy makers. He said the program had “reduced poverty beyond anyone’s expectations” and efforts to dilute its rigor would only harm the poor.
“We need to continue with the principle that you give assistance willingly, but you require the individual to prepare for self-sufficiency,” he said.
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7) Border Agents Say They Had Arrest Quotas
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/us/02border.html?ref=us
SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) — Border Patrol agents working about 100 miles north of the Mexican border say they have been given arrest quotas at odds with agency practices and threatened with punishment if they failed to meet the number.
Agents stationed in Riverside reported being ordered to make at least 150 arrests of suspected illegal immigrants in January, two of which must lead to prosecutions, said Lombardo Amaya, president of Local 2554 of the National Border Patrol Council.
“They were told if you don’t produce this, we will have to change your weekends off,” Mr. Amaya said, adding that he would discuss the matter Monday with the sector chief. “Sometimes, like in politics, this agency is about looking good.”
An agency spokesman in Washington, Lloyd Easterling, said quotas ran counter to agency practice, which does not set a minimum number of arrests.
“If we had quotas to fill and met those quotas,” Mr. Easterling said, “then would that mean we would be able to stop doing our job? No. Our job is to secure the border and detect, deter and apprehend anyone who is involved in illegal activity between the ports of entry.”
Jeffrey Calhoon, chief patrol agent for the El Centro sector, which covers Imperial and Riverside Counties, said he was not aware of any quotas.
“We would never structure our work environment to create quotas,” Mr. Calhoon said. “We have a union we have to negotiate with.”
The agents’ accusations came weeks after one of their colleagues at the Riverside station was fired over a dispute with local management.
The union has appealed the termination of the colleague, Tony Platell, who said he was dismissed for disobeying an order to remain at a desert freeway checkpoint where six suspected illegal immigrants were picked up. Mr. Platell said he wanted to take them to the station quickly because they looked dehydrated.
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8) To Close a School: A Decision Rooted in Data, but Colored by Nuance
By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ
February 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/education/02closed.html?ref=education
On a recent December morning, a trio of education higher-ups arrived unannounced in the principal’s office at Public School 90 in the Bronx. The school would be gradually shut down, they told the principal, Patricia West. Incredulous, Ms. West, who has been at P.S. 90’s helm for six years, asked them to repeat themselves.
“I knew we had to improve, but I was shocked,” she said. “It’s like being told you are arrested and you go to jail. Everybody says, ‘But I didn’t do it!’ ”
Parents and community members immediately questioned the decision. While P.S. 90 got an F this year on its report card from the city, 11 other schools had worse scores overall, and many of them were staying open.
Teachers and parents at the 13 other city schools marked for closing so far this year were similarly puzzled that their schools were chosen. A handful of the schools had earned B’s on the city’s inaugural report cards last school year and thought they were making progress. Some had even been praised by educators as models of successful reform.
But under New York City’s unbending accountability system, the schools were considered portraits of chronically failing institutions, decrepit programs that had failed to lift the most struggling students.
Since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s takeover of the school system in 2002, the city’s Education Department has ordered 95 low-performing schools shuttered to make way for reinvented programs. The break-you-down, build-you-up strategy is meant to rattle the system — to warn struggling schools to change or be changed — and open the door for new school leaders and staffs to rehabilitate some of the lowest-performing student populations in the city.
But the decision to close a school is inevitably subjective, based on a mishmash of factors like performance on standardized tests, situations of violence, student demand for the school and whether the school seems capable of turning around. As such, the city inevitably earns the fury of educators, parents and students asking, “Why our school?”
The city’s investigation into schools like P.S. 90 that fail to push up student scores on English and math tests from year to year can stretch months or even more than a year before a decision is made. A team sorts through years of test data and also looks at reports of routine classroom visits made by Education Department experts. Administrators who oversee groups of neighborhood schools also weigh in on school culture.
Garth Harries, who oversees the Department of Education office that decides which schools to close, said the symptoms of failure are not always reflected in a single report card grade.
“Different data points can have different significance in a different context,” he said, adding that the city’s process allows for more nuance than other districts. “It is a mark of respect to the school organizations to spend the time to look at this very deeply.”
In addition, the city must consider practical aspects of closing a school, such as whether nearby schools can handle any overflow of students (newer high schools, for instance, tend to be small and not accept as many incoming ninth graders as the schools they replace). Enrollment is also a factor: in general, the current administration is wary of large, failing schools’ ability to overcome the obstacles of an impersonal environment. [What? What? What? So they close schools with the most children then punish those very kids that had to endure them?????]
Once the decision to close a school is final, the city dispatches a team to each building to deliver the news and act as unofficial trauma counselors — fielding questions from jittery teachers and principals.
At the same time, the city embarks on a months-long process to decide how best to remake the school and determine which new programs to gradually phase in at the old building. In other words, schools are not so much closed as remade from the inside out. Principals and teachers are counseled as to how best handle the closing process and continue serving students as the old program is phased out, and the city gives extra funds to new schools as they launch their programs.
“This is not about shuttering buildings,” Mr. Harries said. “This is about recreating culture, recreating ambitions, recreating educational systems, and recreating a sense of hope in these buildings.”
But critics of the process say the city does not do enough to get an on-the-ground sense of school quality, and that it frequently closes schools despite credible signs of improvement.
They also say the city should listen more to community input before a final decision is made. When the city brought up the possibility late last year of replacing the old programs at Public School 194 in Harlem and Public School 150 in Brooklyn with charter schools, for example, the response from some parents was negative. (No final decisions on new schools will be made until later this month, and city officials said they factor community input into the design of any new school.)
Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said that as schools prepare for what could potentially be devastating budget cuts this year, the city should not spend money on closing and reopening schools. She also said, more broadly, that struggling schools should be given more of a chance to improve before they are closed, pointing to places like Middle School 399 in the Bronx, which showed increases in test scores with its lowest-performing students and was recently removed from the state’s list of persistently dangerous schools. Nonetheless, it was given a closing notice last month.
“Those kinds of things make one wonder about arbitrariness and capriciousness,” she said, adding that there should be an appeals process. “Here you have a track record that shows real promise, yet the Department of Education is still closing these schools.”
Ms. Weingarten noted that some schools marked for closing have shown significant improvement in their dying days. For example, at five schools that were marked to be phased out — a process that typically happens over several years to limit disruption for their students — students’ performance was so much improved that staff members were given cash bonuses this year; city officials explained that closed schools are often able to foster better relationships with students as enrollment dwindles.
Eric A. Hanushek, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who studies school accountability systems, said the inherent danger in closing schools is its potential negative effect on the most vulnerable students. Inevitably, he said, new schools will spend a few years tinkering with their programs.
“Closing schools has good publicity value,” he said, “but to me the first priority is trying to take care of the kids who are in a school that has been declared to be bankrupt.” He suggested providing students at schools being reinvented with vouchers for private schools or preference for enrollment at more successful public schools.
Since the federal No Child Left Behind law was passed in 2001, districts across the country have made restructuring — and in some cases, closing — failing schools a centerpiece of reform efforts. Many districts, however, do not go as far as New York, taking a piecemeal approach to reinvention by replacing ineffective school leaders or teachers.
Ms. West, principal of P.S. 90, on Sheridan Avenue in Morrisania, said she has accepted the city’s decision. Like a student with poor grades waiting to be chewed out by her parents, she knew her bosses would take some action after the school got an F on its report card in the fall. The school has failed to boost the scores of its large population of students struggling with English, who make up about a third of its 1,153 students from kindergarten through fourth grade.
Two new schools will open at P.S. 90 in September, initially serving kindergarten through second grade, and expanding to fourth grade by September 2011.
But Ms. West, who began as a substitute teacher in 1979 and is retiring this spring, believes education officials should have made more frequent visits to the school, where 97 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, to get a better sense of its promise.
Now, in the school’s final months, she said is focused on rallying her staff and students. “If this is our last hurrah,” she said, “we have to go out high.”
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9) Rep: Foreclosed owners should squat in their own homes
Filed by David Edwards and Stephen C. Webster
01/30/2009 @ 9:26 am
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Rep_Foreclosed_owners_should_squat_in_0130.html
If you're poor and the bank is coming for your home, Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur has a plan for you.
Just squat, she says.
Yes, this Ohio Democrat is actually encouraging her financially distressed constituents whose homes have been foreclosed upon, to simply stay put.
In a Friday report, CNN's Drew Griffin explored the case of Ohioan Andrea Geiss, whose home was foreclosed upon in April.
"Behind in payments, out of work, a husband sick, she had nowhere to go," said Griffin. "So, she decided to follow the advice of her Congresswoman and go nowhere."
In Lucas County, Ohio, over 4,000 properties were foreclosed upon in 2008, reports CNN.
"So I say to the American people, you be squatters in your own homes," said Congresswoman Kaptur before the House of Representatives. "Don't you leave."
She's called on all of her foreclosed-upon constituents to stay in their homes and refuse to leave without "an attorney and a fight," said CNN.
"If they've had no legal representation of a high quality, I tell them stay in their homes," Kaptur told Griffin.
Kaptur is a high-profile advocate of an increasingly popular mode of fighting foreclosures best known for it's key phrase: "Produce the note."
By telling a bank to "produce the note," a homeowner can delay foreclosure by forcing the lender to prove the suing institution is actually the same which owns the debt.
"During the lending boom, most mortgages were flipped and sold to another lender or servicer or sliced up and sold to investors as securitized packages on Wall Street," explains the Consumer Warning Network. "In the rush to turn these over as fast as possible to make the most money, many of the new lenders did not get the proper paperwork to show they own the note and mortgage. This is the key to the produce the note strategy."
And Friday's segment on this growing foreclosure fighting "movement" was not the network's first. Earlier in January, CNN explored one person's strategy in demanding her bank "produce the note," only to find that the lender had "lost or destroyed" the evidence of debt ownership. Such a revelation can significantly strengthen a homeowner's position when asking to renegotiate a mortgage.
That these banks, many of which received billions of dollars in government bailout funds, continue to boot defaulted owners from their homes, makes them "vultures" says Kaptur.
"They prey on our property assets," she said. "I guess the reason I'm so adamant on this is because I know property law and its power to protect the individual homeowner. And I believe that 99.9 percent of our people have not had good legal representation in this."
The video is from CNN's American Morning, broadcast Jan. 30, 2009 and can be viewed at:
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Rep_Foreclosed_owners_should_squat_in_0130.html
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10) In Shattered Gaza Town, Roots of Seething Split
By ETHAN BRONNER and SABRINA TAVERNISE
February 4, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/world/middleeast/04gaza.html?ref=world
EL ATATRA, Gaza — The phosphorus smoke bomb punched through the roof in exactly the spot where much of the family had taken refuge — the upstairs hall away from the windows.
The bomb, which international weapons experts identified as phosphorus by its fragments, was intended to mask troop movements outside. Instead it breathed its storm of fire and smoke into Sabah Abu Halima’s hallway, releasing flaming chemicals that clung to her husband, baby girl and three other small children, burning them to death.
The Israeli military says that it is unaware of the family’s disaster, or of any other civilian deaths in this farming village in northwest Gaza. While residents say that 11 other civilians were killed during the first few days of Israel’s ground invasion, Israel says that its soldiers killed gunmen and militants in this village, which it considers a Hamas stronghold. At least four Israeli soldiers were wounded in the fight.
The war in El Atatra tells the story of Israel’s three-week offensive in Gaza, with each side giving a very different version. Palestinians here describe Israeli military actions as a massacre, and Israelis attribute civilian casualties to a Hamas policy of hiding behind its people.
In El Atatra, neither version appears entirely true, based on 50 interviews with villagers and four Israeli commanders. The dozen or so civilian deaths seem like the painful but inevitable outcome of a modern army bringing war to an urban space. And while Hamas fighters had placed explosives in a kitchen, on doorways and in a mosque, they did not seem to be forcing civilians to act as shields.
The gaps reflect not only a desire to shape public opinion, but also something more significant: a growing distance between two peoples who used to have daily interactions, but who are being forced apart by violence, mutual demonization and a policy of separation.
Palestinians almost never question the legitimacy of firing rockets at Israeli civilians as a form of resistance, and seemed shocked that Israel would go to war over it. Meanwhile, Israel sent a double message.
On one hand, it made clear that it was furious over the years of rocket fire and would not restrain its reaction. On the other, it argued that it took an exceptionally humane approach to the civilians of Gaza, in contrast to what it saw as its bloodthirsty enemy, Hamas.
Unlike most Gazans, many people in this village are not refugees from the 1948 independence war, but farmers and landowners, who for years sold strawberries to Israel until an embargo against the Hamas-run territory began a few years ago. Israel warned residents, in leaflets, radio broadcasts and telephone calls to leave, but many thought that the Israeli incursion did not threaten them.
“I figured it would be like all the other times when they dropped leaflets, so we went inside and waited,” said Rafiq Gambour, 45, a car mechanic who worked in Israel for years, including in Sderot, where Hamas rockets have taken the biggest toll.
So when disaster struck at the Abu Halima house on Jan. 4, a Sunday, many did the only thing they thought might save them: They got on the phone with their Israeli friends. As the sun set and the bodies burned, a crowd of panicked villagers waited as a village elder and farmer, Mahmoud Khlaiyel, and another farmer made frantic phone calls to merchants on the other side of the border.
“There was no one I didn’t call,” Mr. Khlaiyel said.
A man who identified himself as Danny Batua, a 54-year-old Israeli Jewish businessman whose family has been friends with the Abu Halima family for years, said by telephone that he believed the Abu Halimas were not involved with Hamas, and that their suffering was a result of inaccurate intelligence on the part of the Israeli military.
“What can I tell you?” Mr. Batua said. “The army has no idea.”
But according to Captain E., an Israeli military commander whose men took the western sector of the village on the first night of the ground war, most houses in that area were empty of civilians. What is more, he said, militants had remained and had begun gun battles with his soldiers.
The military made the commander available for an interview in Israel, but limited his identification to the initial of his first name.
“We faced fire mostly from snipers,” he said. “We found tunnels, maps, Kalashnikovs, uniforms from our army and many large explosives throughout the houses we searched,” he added, showing photographs of what his men had collected. “We also found a bucket of grenades inside a mosque.”
Some of what the army contends is clearly real. Rockets were launched from near the town’s elementary school, and from many of its fields, Israeli commanders and several residents said.
Hamas leaders were in the village and Israeli commanders displayed evidence of four tunnels throughout the village, though not the extensive network that higher-level commanders had reported. The militants also had weapons, but while the commanders said they had destroyed houses that corresponded only to weapons caches, that did not always seem to have been true.
“My principle for blowing up houses was not to destroy a house that just had one AK-47, but only if we found real infrastructure or large amounts of explosives,” said the brigade commander for the area, Col. Herzl Halevy, by telephone from Israel.
“I checked this out personally,” he added. Between 40 and 50 houses were destroyed.
But when the platoon of another commander, Captain Y., took over the neighborhood where a family named Ghanem lived, it blew up their house without going inside, he made clear in a phone interview. A search of it two weeks later by a correspondent for The New York Times joined by a 20-year veteran of the British Army, Chris Cobb-Smith, a weapons consultant for Amnesty International, showed no evidence of explosive material or of a secondary blast.
So why was the house destroyed?
“We had advance intelligence that there were bombs inside the house,” Captain Y. said. “We looked inside from the doorway and saw things that made us suspicious. I didn’t want to risk the lives of my men. We ordered the house destroyed.”
That seemed to be the guiding principle for a number of the operations in El Atatra: avoid Israeli casualties at all cost.
The elementary school was a similar story. Intelligence suggested that there were explosives inside, and an F-16 dropped a bomb on it, producing a house-size hole. When the Israelis inspected later, they found written material from Hamas but no explosives, Captain Y. said. Now the school is unusable, its giant metal flower decorations lying on their sides.
For the Ghanem family’s 23-year-old son, Bakr, the act will not easily be forgotten.
“A house is something physical, but also something in your heart,” he said as he stood outside his collapsed home, taken over by cats and putrid odors. “The place in our heart has also been injured. There can be no peace after this.”
This talk pains some of the older villagers, like Tamam Abu Halima, 65, who wants to return to the past she shared with Israeli neighbors, when she would fix dinners of fish and figs, and accepting an invitation was as easy as getting in the car.
Her grandson, Hamza, who grew up in a time when boundaries were stricter, has no fond memories of Israelis.
“The only ones I know shoot and kill,” he said.
Many here believe that Israelis feel the same about them, and that they were treated with suspicion and contempt, as would-be fighters. That might help explain what happened, they say, when Omar Abu Halima and his two teenage cousins tried to take the burned body of his baby sister and two other living but badly burned girls to the hospital on that Sunday.
The boys were taking the girls and six others on a tractor, when, according to several accounts from villagers, Israeli soldiers told them to stop. According to their accounts, they got down, put their hands up, and suddenly rounds were fired, killing two teenage boys: Matar Abu Halima, 18, and Muhamed Hekmet, 17.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said that soldiers had reported that the two were armed and firing. Villagers strongly deny that. The tractor that villagers say was carrying the group is riddled with 36 bullet holes.
The villagers were forced to abandon the bodies of the teenage boys and the baby, and when rescue workers arrived 11 days later, the baby’s body had been eaten by dogs, her legs two white bones, captured in a gruesome image on a relative’s cellphone. The badly burned girls and others on the tractor had fled to safety.
Matar’s mother, Nabila Abu Halima, said she had been shot through the arm when she tried to move toward her son. Her left arm bears a round scar. Her son came back to her in pieces, his body crushed under tank treads.
“Those who came this time were not Israelis,” Mr. Gambour, the car mechanic, said of the attackers. “They were not even human.”
The question of how Israel handled civilians in this war has become a matter of keen controversy. Human rights groups are crisscrossing Gaza, documenting what they believe will form the basis for war crimes proceedings aimed at demonstrating that Israel used disproportionate force.
Israeli officers said they took special care not to harm civilians.
“I can promise you that throughout the war, there were many times that civilians walked by us and we never shot at them,” said a commanding officer in a part of El Atatra, Major E.
That statement draws a hollow laugh from villagers.
“They think everybody in Gaza is a terrorist,” said Bekker Abu Halima, who had driven a truck with other bodies and said it was fired on.
Both sides engage in their own denials.
Israelis argue that this war was especially tough because they had waited so long before taking action in response to the thousands of rockets fired from Gaza over eight years.
Yet after Israelis withdrew their settlers and soldiers from Gaza in late 2005, they killed, over the next three years in numerous military actions here, the same number of Gazans as those killed in this war — about 1,275.
For their part, few Palestinian villagers even acknowledged the existence of fighters here. Hamas is now asserting that it achieved a victory.
But here in the ruins of El Atatra, perhaps the biggest damage has been to any memory of a shared past and any thought of a shared future.
“We used to tell fighters not to fire from here,” said Nabila Abu Halima, looking over a field through her open window. “Now I’ll invite them to do it from my house.”
Taghreed El-Khodary and Nadim Audi contributed reporting.
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RESISTING INDIVIDUAL READY RESERVE (IRR) RECALL
Courage to Resist.
Dear Friends,
Courage to Resist has published an IRR overview that contains critical
information for anyone nearing the end of their military enlistment and the
hundreds of thousands of recently discharged veterans still eligible for
involuntary recall. I don't believe this information exists anywhere else,
so I'm hoping you might be able to help distribute, link and share this as
broadly as possible so that those who need it the most might find it.
Jeff Paterson
Courage to Resist Project Director
RESISTING INDIVIDUAL READY RESERVE (IRR) RECALL
Courage to Resist. January 3, 2009
Online version:
http://couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/658/1/
PDF leaflet:
http://couragetoresist.org/x/images/stories/pdf2/irr-leaflet.pdf
Additional related IRR information from Courage to Resist:
http://couragetoresist.org/irr
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Fourth Al-Awda West Coast Regional Conference
Sunday February 8, 2009 at The University of California in San Diego (UCSD)
hosted by Students for Justice in Palestine
Save the Date! Mark Your Calendars! Plan to Attend!
The Palestine Right to Return Coalition's Al-Awda chapters in Los Angeles, Orange County, Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego thank all who took part in the Mass Rally and March in Los Angeles yesterday January 10 as part of the Let Gaza Live National Emergency Day of Mass Action and Protest that took place around the country. Thousands took to the streets demanding an immediate end to the carnage that is being carried out by the 'Israeli' military against our people in the Gaza Strip, and to demand an end to the political, economic and military support it has received from the US administration.
As announced at the protests, please take note that the Fourth Al-Awda West Coast Regional Conference, LET GAZA LIVE!, will take place Sunday February 8, 2009 at The University of California in San Diego (UCSD). This conference will be hosted by Students for Justice in Palestine. All members and supporters of the Right to Return movement on the West Coast are urged to participate in this important and timely one day conference.
Save the Date, Mark Your Calendars, and Plan to Attend.
Further details will be posted over the next few days and as soon as they become available.
Until Return,
Al-Awda Chapters in Southern California
The Palestine Right to Return Coalition
PO Box 131352
Carlsbad, CA 92013, USA
Tel: 760-918-9441
Fax: 760-918-9442
E-mail: info@al-awda.org
WWW: http://al-awda.org
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition (PRRC) is the largest network of grassroots activists and students dedicated to Palestinian human rights. We are a not for profit tax-exempt educational and charitable 501(c)(3) organization as defined by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of the United States of America. Under IRS guidelines, your donations to PRRC are tax-deductible.
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You're invited to join Bay Area CODEPINK in February for exciting actions and informative events. This month we'd like to highlight an event CODEPINKer Tamara has organized with Iraqi author Nadje Al-Ali who will speak on her new book, "What Kind of Liberation: Women and the Occupation of Iraq". Nadje was with CODEPINK on the national Iraqi women's speaking tour around International Women's Day in 2006 and returns to the US from London to share this excellent new book. Join us at The First Unitarian Universalist Society of SF (The Murdock Room, 1187 Franklin Street at Geary, SF) on Thursday, February 12 for this special event.
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Celebrate Black History Month
Come To the ILWU Rally!
Racism, Repression
and Rebellion:
The Lessons of Labor Defense
12 Noon,
Saturday, 14 February 2009
ILWU Local 10 Hall, 400 North Point (at Mason)
near Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco
SPEAKERS:
ANGELA DAVIS UC Santa Cruz Professor,
former Black Panther, witch-hunted by FBI
MARTINA CORREIA Sister of Troy Davis on Georgia's death row
Rev Cecil Williams Glide Memorial Church
Robert R Bryan lead attorney for Mumia Abu-Jamal,
on Pennsylvania death row
Gerald Smith former Black Panther,
Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
Pierre LaBossiere founding member, Haiti Action Committee
JR Prisoners of Conscience Committee, Minister of Information
Richard Brown former Black Panther, San Francisco 8
Cultural presentations:
Jack Hirschman, SF Poet Laureate;
Tayo Aluko, Nigerian actor portraying Paul Robeson: and
Upsurge! Jazz/Poetry Music
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) was born out of the militant 1934 strike in which police killed two strikers in San Francisco, shooting them in the back. Still today police are banned from membership in Local 10. The union has a legacy of defending those under attack by the government, in particular reds and blacks, from Harry Bridges and Paul Robeson, to Angela Davis, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Troy Davis. For Black History Month, Local 10 is organizing this rally to teach the lessons of the need for unity of action to defend against government repression and racist profiling. These lessons are never more necessary than today, as evidenced by the brutal murder by BART police of Oscar Grant, who was lying face-down when shot.
Racism, Repression
and Rebellion:
The Lessons of Labor Defense
12 Noon, Saturday, 14 February 2009
ILWU Local 10 Hall, 400 North Point (at Mason)
near Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco
MORE INFO: (510) 501-7080
- from Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222 Oakland CA 94610 LACFreeMumia@aol.com
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MARCH 21 "MARCH ON THE PENTAGON" PLANNING MEETING FOR SAN FRANCISCO PROTEST HAS LAUNCHED THE MARCH 21 COALITION!
MASS COMMUNITY OUTREACH TO BUILD MARCH 21
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 11:00 A.M.
NEXT PLANNING MEETING, SUNDAY, MARCH 1, 2:00 P.M.
AT:
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO (UPSTAIRS)
474 VALENCIA STREET (NEAR 16TH STREET)
SAN FRANCISCO
Check out the new MARCH 21 Coalition Website:
http://www.pephost.org/site/PageServer?pagename=M21_homepage
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National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations
CALL FOR ENDORSEMENTS FOR MARCH 21:
Greetings:
The March on the Pentagon and the demonstrations in San Francisco, Los Angeles and other cities scheduled for Saturday, March 21 – marking the beginning of the 7th year of war and occupation of Iraq – are now only weeks away. This is a time for peace activists across the country to go all-out in helping to publicize and build these actions. You can start by endorsing March 21, if you and your organization have not done so already.
A mass movement in the streets is needed now more than ever if we are to succeed in getting U.S. troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, ending U.S. support for Israel's occupation of Palestine, preventing further attacks on Pakistan, and stopping a war against Iran. The occupation of Iraq continues with every indication that the new administration intends to stay there indefinitely. Meanwhile, 30,000 additional U.S. troops are to be sent to Afghanistan. The whole world watched with horror as Israel massacred thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, using weapons of mass destruction provided by Washington. And only days after the inauguration, orders were given to bomb Pakistan, resulting in 21 deaths, most of them women and children.
March 21 provides concerned people throughout the country an opportunity to let the world know that opposition to these U.S. policies of war, occupation, intervention and expansionism exists and is determined to be heard. It lets the beleaguered people in those countries where the U.S. is an oppressor know that there is an American antiwar movement that does not forget their needs for peace and national sovereignty. That is a message we must also send to the new administration. The size of the turnout on the 21st will be critical if we are to help make a difference. So we count on you to do whatever you can to build highly visible mass actions and to ensure that they are as large, vocal and spirited as possible.
There are March 21 committees and coalitions already formed or being formed in many areas working to publicize the event and send people to one of the demonstration sites. We encourage you to join or organize such a grouping in your locale. The National Assembly, as one of many initiators of March 21, is going all out to make the actions as large as possible.
Please send endorsements to our website at www.natassembly.org, where an endorsement form is provided, or by writing natassembly@aol.com. While we would like to have these endorsements for our records so that we can keep everyone updated regarding National Assembly activities, we will also forward them to the March 21 National Coalition website at www.PentagonMarch.org, where the latest list of endorsers can be viewed.
In solidarity,
Jerry Gordon
Secretary, National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
www.natassembly.org
216-736-4704 for more info
P.S. Check out the National Assembly website to see our statement on Gaza, get information on March 21st organizing, learn about our July 10-12 national antiwar conference in Pittsburgh, make a donation, and participate in our discussion blog.
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Cuba leads way in children rights
Cuba is the top-ranking developing country when it comes to protecting children’s rights, according to a new Child Development Index (CDI).
By: Tim Anderson
http://www.juventudrebelde.cip.cu/cuba/2009-01-29/cuba-leads-way-in-children-rights/
2) Bailouts for Bunglers
By PAUL KRUGMAN
February 2, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/opinion/02krugman.html
3) Sins of Omission: Help for the Beleaguered Homeowner
Editorial
February 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/opinion/02mon1.html
4) Obama and Key Democrat Voice Support for Daschle
By DAVID STOUT
February 3, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/us/politics/03daschle.html?hp
5) Greek Farmers Clash With Riot Police
By ANTHEE CARASSAVA
February 3, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/world/europe/03greece.html?ref=world
6) Welfare Aid Isn’t Growing as Economy Drops Off
By JASON DEPARLE
February 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/us/02welfare.html?ref=us
7) Border Agents Say They Had Arrest Quotas
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/us/02border.html?ref=us
8) To Close a School: A Decision Rooted in Data, but Colored by Nuance
By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ
February 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/education/02closed.html?ref=education
9) Rep: Foreclosed owners should squat in their own homes
Filed by David Edwards and Stephen C. Webster
01/30/2009 @ 9:26 am
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Rep_Foreclosed_owners_should_squat_in_0130.html
10) In Shattered Gaza Town, Roots of Seething Split
By ETHAN BRONNER and SABRINA TAVERNISE
February 4, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/world/middleeast/04gaza.html?ref=world
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1) Cuba leads way in children rights
Cuba is the top-ranking developing country when it comes to protecting children’s rights, according to a new Child Development Index (CDI).
By: Tim Anderson
http://www.juventudrebelde.cip.cu/cuba/2009-01-29/cuba-leads-way-in-children-rights/
This ranking reflects Cuba’s progress since the 1990s in child health, nutrition and education, despite considerable difficulties,
Save the Children UK, an independent children’s rights organisation, says it is “outraged that millions of children are still denied proper healthcare, food, education and protection”.
It has developed the CDI as part of its strategy to “hold governments to account for children’s wellbeing”.
The index is constructed from three indicators: health (a scaled probability of death under the age of five), nutrition (the percentage of under fives who are moderately or severely underweight) and education (the percentage of primary-school aged children who are not enrolled in school).
A low score indicates low child deprivation. Cuba’s progress in recent years raised it from second place in Latin America (after Argentina) in the 1990s to first place in the period 2000-06.
Latin America was also the region with greatest improvement in recent years, mostly from reductions in child mortality and increased school enrolments. East Asia was the second most improved region.
Costa Rica and Argentina were second and third in both the Latin American and the developing country lists.
While wealthy OECD countries topped the list, the US, by contrast, went backwards. It now ranks 23rd in the world on children’s rights — after Cuba, Costa Rica and Argentina.
The poor US performance was largely due to deterioration in primary school enrolments.
Save the Children UK observes that, worldwide, more than 9 million children under five die every year, one quarter of all children are underweight and 75 million primary school-aged children are not enrolled in school.
The group says that the basic rights of children all around the world “continue to be violated and denied’ and proposes “dramatic action” to reverse the slowdown in progress on child malnutrition, efforts to convert economic growth into benefits for children and “a significant effort” to promote girls’ education.
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2) Bailouts for Bunglers
By PAUL KRUGMAN
February 2, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/opinion/02krugman.html
Question: what happens if you lose vast amounts of other people’s money? Answer: you get a big gift from the federal government — but the president says some very harsh things about you before forking over the cash.
Am I being unfair? I hope so. But right now that’s what seems to be happening.
Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the Obama administration’s plan to support jobs and output with a large, temporary rise in federal spending, which is very much the right thing to do. I’m talking, instead, about the administration’s plans for a banking system rescue — plans that are shaping up as a classic exercise in “lemon socialism”: taxpayers bear the cost if things go wrong, but stockholders and executives get the benefits if things go right.
When I read recent remarks on financial policy by top Obama administration officials, I feel as if I’ve entered a time warp — as if it’s still 2005, Alan Greenspan is still the Maestro, and bankers are still heroes of capitalism.
“We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we’d like to do our best to preserve that system,” says Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary — as he prepares to put taxpayers on the hook for that system’s immense losses.
Meanwhile, a Washington Post report based on administration sources says that Mr. Geithner and Lawrence Summers, President Obama’s top economic adviser, “think governments make poor bank managers” — as opposed, presumably, to the private-sector geniuses who managed to lose more than a trillion dollars in the space of a few years.
And this prejudice in favor of private control, even when the government is putting up all the money, seems to be warping the administration’s response to the financial crisis.
Now, something must be done to shore up the financial system. The chaos after Lehman Brothers failed showed that letting major financial institutions collapse can be very bad for the economy’s health. And a number of major institutions are dangerously close to the edge.
So banks need more capital. In normal times, banks raise capital by selling stock to private investors, who receive a share in the bank’s ownership in return. You might think, then, that if banks currently can’t or won’t raise enough capital from private investors, the government should do what a private investor would: provide capital in return for partial ownership.
But bank stocks are worth so little these days — Citigroup and Bank of America have a combined market value of only $52 billion — that the ownership wouldn’t be partial: pumping in enough taxpayer money to make the banks sound would, in effect, turn them into publicly owned enterprises.
My response to this prospect is: so? If taxpayers are footing the bill for rescuing the banks, why shouldn’t they get ownership, at least until private buyers can be found? But the Obama administration appears to be tying itself in knots to avoid this outcome.
If news reports are right, the bank rescue plan will contain two main elements: government purchases of some troubled bank assets and guarantees against losses on other assets. The guarantees would represent a big gift to bank stockholders; the purchases might not, if the price was fair — but prices would, The Financial Times reports, probably be based on “valuation models” rather than market prices, suggesting that the government would be making a big gift here, too.
And in return for what is likely to be a huge subsidy to stockholders, taxpayers will get, well, nothing.
Will there at least be limits on executive compensation, to prevent more of the rip-offs that have enraged the public? President Obama denounced Wall Street bonuses in his latest weekly address — but according to The Washington Post, “the administration is likely to refrain from imposing tougher restrictions on executive compensation at most firms receiving government aid” because “harsh limits could discourage some firms from asking for aid.” This suggests that Mr. Obama’s tough talk is just for show.
Meanwhile, Wall Street’s culture of excess seems to have been barely dented by the crisis. “Say I’m a banker and I created $30 million. I should get a part of that,” one banker told The New York Times. And if you’re a banker and you destroyed $30 billion? Uncle Sam to the rescue!
There’s more at stake here than fairness, although that matters too. Saving the economy is going to be very expensive: that $800 billion stimulus plan is probably just a down payment, and rescuing the financial system, even if it’s done right, is going to cost hundreds of billions more. We can’t afford to squander money giving huge windfalls to banks and their executives, merely to preserve the illusion of private ownership.
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3) Sins of Omission: Help for the Beleaguered Homeowner
Editorial
February 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/opinion/02mon1.html
The Senate will debate its version of the mammoth stimulus and recovery package this week. As with last week’s version, passed by the House, there will be considerable argument between Democrats and Republicans over what belongs in the bill.
One serious disagreement has already taken place — between Senate leaders and the Obama administration — and it has been decided in a way that can only weaken the overall package. The senators had planned to make foreclosure relief part of the bill, by including a measure to let bankrupt homeowners have their mortgages modified under court protection.
But administration officials — who say they support the bankruptcy fix — rejected the idea of putting it in the bill out of fear that it would cause Republicans to delay or reject the package. So barring a free-for-all rewrite of the bill on the Senate floor, the fix is out and the relief will be postponed at least until the spring, when the measure could be attached to other legislation.
The delay is a shame. President Obama made concessions to Republicans in the House — and not one voted for urgent economic stimulus and recovery programs.
This economic crisis started with bad mortgage loans, and the resulting defaults and foreclosures have only worsened as house prices have plunged. The bankruptcy fix is the linchpin of effective foreclosure relief. Unless foreclosures are stanched, the economy will deteriorate further and faster than any stimulus can hope to overcome. That is because foreclosures are flooding the already glutted market with homes for sale at rock bottom prices, driving prices down virtually everywhere. The more prices fall, the more defaults rise, because homeowners with little or no equity have no cushion to fall back on if — for any reason — they have trouble making their payments.
Falling prices and rising defaults, in turn, perpetuate the credit crunch, because as long as loans are souring, banks will continue to suffer losses and constrain lending. Falling prices also contribute to the continuing collapse in consumer spending, which deepens the recession, because homeowners increasingly find themselves not only cash-short but house-poor as well. As a result, they are unable or disinclined to spend.
The upshot is that house-price declines and foreclosures are less a normal market correction and more the catalyst in a vicious downward spiral.
Voluntary efforts by lenders to modify troubled loans have failed to yield the types or numbers of modifications capable of slowing the pace of foreclosures. Bankruptcy protection, if it were applied to mortgage loans, could succeed where voluntary efforts have failed.
In cases where a homeowner is able and willing to pay more on a loan than could be recouped by foreclosing, a judge could impose a settlement. Opening the courthouse door to troubled homeowners would also spur more and better voluntary loan modifications. Lenders would know that a voluntary solution would stave off a court-imposed one.
The Obama administration has said that it plans to use a chunk of the bank bailout money, up to $100 billion, to provide foreclosure relief. That would be welcome, but it is not a substitute for bankruptcy reform. It is unfair to ask taxpayers to pay for foreclosure relief without enacting a bankruptcy fix, which costs them nothing. Besides, any relief effort — and the Obama team has not yet indicated what it has in mind — will attract more participation if lenders know that the alternative is to lose control of the process to a bankruptcy judge.
Bankruptcy reform is the stick to whatever carrots the taxpayer will be asked to pay for.
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4) Obama and Key Democrat Voice Support for Daschle
By DAVID STOUT
February 3, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/us/politics/03daschle.html?hp
WASHINGTON — President Obama and a key Democratic senator voiced unqualified support on Monday for Tom Daschle to become the head of the Health and Human Services Department, giving the contrite nominee a big boost toward confirmation.
When asked in a brief session with reporters at the White House whether he stood by Mr. Daschle in view of the nominee’s tax-related problems, the president replied, “Absolutely.”
Later, Mr. Obama’s chief spokeswoman, Robert Gibbs, expressed confidence that the Senate would weigh Mr. Daschle’s years of public service against the lapse on tax matters and would confirm the nominee. President Obama continues to believe Mr. Daschle is “the right person for the very important job” of revamping the health-care system, Mr. Gibbs said.
And Senator Max Baucus of Montana, the chairman of the Finance Committee, issued a statement backing Mr. Daschle’s confirmation without reservation.
“The ability to advance meaningful health reform is my top priority in confirming a secretary of health and human services, and I remain convinced that Senator Daschle would be an invaluable and expert partner in this effort,” Mr. Baucus said.
Mr. Baucus said his faith in Mr. Daschle’s “dedication and qualifications” had been bolstered by his conversations with the nominee in recent weeks. “I am eager to move forward together,” Mr. Baucus said.
Moreover, other Democratic members of the panel have reportedly sent signals that they are prepared to stand by Mr. Daschle, who was an early supporter of Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign.
Mr. Baucus released his statement in advance of a late-afternoon meeting of his panel, which will hear from Mr. Daschle in a private session. In advance, Mr. Daschle wrote a letter to Mr. Baucus and Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, in which he said he was “deeply embarrassed and disappointed” in himself over his failure to pay some $140,000 in back taxes and interest.
Senator Baucus’s statement on Monday morning in support of the nominee was significant because he and Mr. Daschle have sometimes had a rocky relationship. Mr. Baucus has at times seemed more comfortable negotiating with Republican senators on important issues — President Bush’s tax-cut proposals, for instance — than with his Democratic colleagues. In those cases, Mr. Baucus would sometimes put Mr. Daschle, then the Democratic leader in the Senate, in an awkward position. Mr. Daschle was unseated in 2004 by John R. Thune, who had been a popular Republican Congressman in South Dakota.
In his letter Mr. Daschle said his recently disclosed tax problems, related to income for consulting work and the use of a car made available to him by a close friend who is also a generous donor to Democratic causes, were unintentional.
“I apologize for the errors and profoundly regret that you have had to devote time to them,” Mr. Daschle wrote.
He is also likely to be asked about the more than $200,000 he has made in fees over the past two years for speaking to members of the health care industry that President Obama has vowed to change. Mr. Daschle’s spokeswoman, Jenny Backus, said those earnings do not pose a conflict of interest.
“He welcomed every opportunity to make his case to the American public at large and the health care industry in particular that America can’t afford to ignore the health care crisis any longer,” Ms. Backus told The Associated Press.
The speaking fees are but a portion of the millions Mr. Daschle has earned on consulting work since he left the Senate, following a well-worn path in Washington. His wife, Linda, is an influential lobbyist.
Tradition and simple math bode well for Mr. Daschle’s chances at confirmation. Much more often than not, a new president is given the team he wants when his Cabinet nominees are voted upon in the Senate, which now has 58 Democrats.
Carl Hulse contributed reporting.
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5) Greek Farmers Clash With Riot Police
By ANTHEE CARASSAVA
February 3, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/world/europe/03greece.html?ref=world
ATHENS — Two people were injured Monday when Greek riot police clashed with hundreds of farmers from the southern island of Crete who sailed to the Greek mainland and tried to drive tractors and farm vehicles to the capital to push demands for financial aid.
The clashes come at a time of growing social unrest in Greece, as the center-right government of Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis struggles to restore its credibility after student riots in December. Protests have spread across Europe — most recently in France and Britain — as the global economic crisis bites into jobs and incomes.
In the clashes on Monday, the farmers, who sailed into the port of Piraeus, made a convoy of some 300 tractors, trucks and other farming vehicles. Some of the vehicles tried to ram a police van that was blocking the port gates.
Live television broadcasts showed at least two people injured in the scuffle, including a female lawmaker who was knocked down by one of the tractors. Two protesters were arrested for pelting police officers with rocks, potatoes and tomatoes.
Heavy farming vehicles are barred from the capital’s motorways, and the authorities in Athens said they had advised the protesters to proceed on foot.
“All we wanted was to drive our tractors to the Agriculture Ministry in a peaceful, symbolic protest,” one farmer mounted on a red tractor festooned with two black flags told a private television broadcaster. He said the farmers would stay put until the authorities came to them.
Thousands of farmers have been protesting across Greece since Jan. 20, blockading the country’s main roads and starving the capital of food and medicine as they demand government aid and tax breaks following a harsh winter and a drop in commodity prices.
Most of the blockades eased last week after the government promised a $645 million aid package and Bulgaria’s truckers association vowed to take legal action against the Greek authorities for hampering trade.
But the farmers from Crete rejected the package, saying it offers too little for their region. Other agricultural groups are keeping a crucial border crossing with Bulgaria closed, complaining that the government assistance plan provides no long-term solution to their declining income.
Greek farmers’ income has shrunk by almost 24 percent in the last decade, according to their national labor union.
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6) Welfare Aid Isn’t Growing as Economy Drops Off
By JASON DEPARLE
February 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/us/02welfare.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON — Despite soaring unemployment and the worst economic crisis in decades, 18 states cut their welfare rolls last year, and nationally the number of people receiving cash assistance remained at or near the lowest in more than 40 years.
The trends, based on an analysis of new state data collected by The New York Times, raise questions about how well a revamped welfare system with great state discretion is responding to growing hardships.
Michigan cut its welfare rolls 13 percent, though it was one of two states whose October unemployment rate topped 9 percent. Rhode Island, the other, had the nation’s largest welfare decline, 17 percent.
Of the 12 states where joblessness grew most rapidly, eight reduced or kept constant the number of people receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the main cash welfare program for families with children. Nationally, for the 12 months ending October 2008, the rolls inched up a fraction of 1 percent.
The deepening recession offers a fresh challenge to the program, which was passed by a Republican Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996 amid bitter protest and became one of the most closely watched social experiments in modern memory.
The program, which mostly serves single mothers, ended a 60-year-old entitlement to cash aid, replacing it with time limits and work requirements, and giving states latitude to discourage people from joining the welfare rolls. While it was widely praised in the boom years that followed, skeptics warned it would fail the needy when times turned tough.
Supporters of the program say the flat caseloads may reflect a lag between the loss of a job and the decision to seek help. They also say the recession may have initially spared the low-skilled jobs that many poor people take.
But critics argue that years of pressure to cut the welfare rolls has left an obstacle-ridden program that chases off the poor, even when times are difficult.
Even some of the program’s staunchest defenders are alarmed.
“There is ample reason to be concerned here,” said Ron Haskins, a former Republican Congressional aide who helped write the 1996 law overhauling the welfare system. “The overall structure is not working the way it was designed to work. We would expect, just on the face it, that when a deep recession happens, people could go back on welfare.”
“When we started this, Democratic and Republican governors alike said, ‘We know what’s best for our state; we’re not going to let people starve,’ ” said Mr. Haskins, who is now a researcher at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “And now that the chips are down, and unemployment is going up, most states are not doing enough to help families get back on the rolls.”
The program’s structure — fixed federal financing, despite caseload size — may discourage states from helping more people because the states bear all of the increased costs. By contrast, the federal government pays virtually all food-stamp costs, and last year every state expanded its food-stamp rolls; nationally, the food program grew 12 percent.
The clashing trends in some states — more food stamps, but less cash aid — suggest a safety net at odds with itself. Georgia shrank the cash welfare rolls by nearly 11 percent and expanded food stamps by 17 percent. After years of pushing reductions, Congress is now considering a rare plan that would subsidize expansions of the cash welfare rolls. The economic stimulus bills pending in Congress would provide matching grants — estimated at $2.5 billion over two years — to states with caseload expansions.
Born from Mr. Clinton’s pledge to “end welfare as we know it,” the new program brought furious protests from people who predicted the poor would suffer. Then millions of people quickly left the rolls, employment rates rose and child poverty plunged.
But the economy of the late 1990s was unusually strong, and even then critics warned that officials placed too much stress on caseload reduction. With benefits harder to get, a small but growing share of families was left with neither welfare nor work and fell deeper into destitution.
“TANF is not an especially attractive option for most people,” said Linda Blanchette, a top welfare official in Pennsylvania, which cut its rolls last year by 6 percent. “People really do view it as a last resort.”
The data collected by The Times is the most recent available for every state and includes some similar programs financed solely by states, to give the broadest picture of cash aid. In a year when 1.1 million jobs disappeared, 18 states cut the rolls, 20 states expanded them, and caseloads in 12 states remained essentially flat, fluctuating less than 3 percent. (In addition, caseloads in the District of Columbia rose by nearly 5 percent.)
The rolls rose 7 percent in the West, stayed flat in the South, and fell in the Northeast by 4 percent and Midwest by 5 percent.
Seven states increased their rolls by double digits. Five states, including Texas and Michigan, made double-digit reductions. Of the 10 states with the highest child poverty rates, eight kept caseloads level or further reduced the rolls.
“This is evidence of a strikingly unresponsive system,” said Mark H. Greenberg, co-director of a poverty institute at the Georgetown University law school. Some administrators disagree.
“We’re still putting people to work,” said Larry Temple, who runs the job placement program for welfare recipients in Texas, where the rolls dropped 15 percent. “A lot of the occupations that historically we’ve been able to put the welfare people in are still hiring. Home health is a big one.”
Though some welfare recipients continue to find jobs, nationally their prospects have worsened. Joblessness among women ages 20 to 24 without a high school degree rose to 23.9 percent last year, from 17.9 percent the year before, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Some analysts offer a different reason for the Texas caseload declines: a policy that quickly halts all cash aid to recipients who fail to attend work programs.
“We’re really just pushing families off the program,” said Celia Hagert of the Center for Public Policy Priorities, a research and advocacy group in Austin, Tex.
Some officials predict the rolls will yet rise. “There’s typically a one- to two-year lag between an economic downturn and an uptick in the welfare rolls,” said David Hansell, who oversees the program in New York State, where the rolls fell 4 percent.
Indeed, as the recession has worsened in recent months, some states’ rolls have just started to grow. Georgia’s caseload fell until July 2008, but has since risen 5 percent. Still, as of October the national caseloads remained down 70 percent from their peak in the early 1990s under the predecessor program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
Nationally, caseloads fell every year from 1994 to 2007, to about 4.1 million people, a level last seen in 1964. The federal total for 2008 has not been published, but the Times analysis of state data suggests they remained essentially flat.
Some recent caseload reduction has been driven by a 2006 law that required states to place more recipients in work programs, which can be costly and difficult to run. It threatened states with stiff fines but eased the targets for states that simply cut the rolls.
“Some states decided they had to get tougher,” said Sharon Parrott of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington research and advocacy group.
Rhode Island was among them. Previously, the state had reduced but not eliminated grants to families in which an adult had hit a 60-month limit. Last year, it closed those cases, removing 2,200 children from the rolls.
Under the new federal accounting rules, that made it easier to meet statistical goals and protected the state from fines.
Michigan also imposed new restrictions, forcing applicants to spend a month in a job-search program before collecting benefits. Critics say the up-front requirement poses obstacles to the neediest applicants, like those with physical or mental illnesses.
“I think that’s a legitimate complaint,” said Ismael Ahmed, director of the Michigan Department of Human Services, though he blamed the federal rules. The program “was drawn for an economy that is not the economy most states are in.”
While food stamps usually grow faster than cash aid during recessions, the current contrast is stark. Many officials see cash aid in a negative light, as a form of dependency, while encouraging the use of food stamps and calling them nutritional support.
“Food assistance is not considered welfare,” said Donalda Carlson, a Rhode Island welfare administrator.
Nationally, the temporary assistance program gives states $16.8 billion a year — the same amount they received in the early 1990s, when caseloads were more than three times as high as they are now. Mr. Haskins, the program’s architect, said that obliged them to ensure the needy could return to the rolls. “States have plenty of money,” he said.
But most states have shifted the money into other programs — including child care and child welfare — and say they cannot shift it back without causing other problems.
Oregon expanded its cash caseload 19 percent last year, so far without major backlash. “That’s the purpose of the program — to be there for that need,” said Vic Todd, a senior state official. But California officials expressed ambivalence about a 6 percent rise in the cash welfare rolls in that state when it is facing a $40 billion deficit. “There’s some fine tuning of the program that needs to occur, to incentivize work,” said John Wagner, the state director of social services.
Among those sanguine about current caseload trends is Robert Rector, an analyst at the Heritage Foundation in Washington who is influential with conservative policy makers. He said the program had “reduced poverty beyond anyone’s expectations” and efforts to dilute its rigor would only harm the poor.
“We need to continue with the principle that you give assistance willingly, but you require the individual to prepare for self-sufficiency,” he said.
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7) Border Agents Say They Had Arrest Quotas
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/us/02border.html?ref=us
SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) — Border Patrol agents working about 100 miles north of the Mexican border say they have been given arrest quotas at odds with agency practices and threatened with punishment if they failed to meet the number.
Agents stationed in Riverside reported being ordered to make at least 150 arrests of suspected illegal immigrants in January, two of which must lead to prosecutions, said Lombardo Amaya, president of Local 2554 of the National Border Patrol Council.
“They were told if you don’t produce this, we will have to change your weekends off,” Mr. Amaya said, adding that he would discuss the matter Monday with the sector chief. “Sometimes, like in politics, this agency is about looking good.”
An agency spokesman in Washington, Lloyd Easterling, said quotas ran counter to agency practice, which does not set a minimum number of arrests.
“If we had quotas to fill and met those quotas,” Mr. Easterling said, “then would that mean we would be able to stop doing our job? No. Our job is to secure the border and detect, deter and apprehend anyone who is involved in illegal activity between the ports of entry.”
Jeffrey Calhoon, chief patrol agent for the El Centro sector, which covers Imperial and Riverside Counties, said he was not aware of any quotas.
“We would never structure our work environment to create quotas,” Mr. Calhoon said. “We have a union we have to negotiate with.”
The agents’ accusations came weeks after one of their colleagues at the Riverside station was fired over a dispute with local management.
The union has appealed the termination of the colleague, Tony Platell, who said he was dismissed for disobeying an order to remain at a desert freeway checkpoint where six suspected illegal immigrants were picked up. Mr. Platell said he wanted to take them to the station quickly because they looked dehydrated.
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8) To Close a School: A Decision Rooted in Data, but Colored by Nuance
By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ
February 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/education/02closed.html?ref=education
On a recent December morning, a trio of education higher-ups arrived unannounced in the principal’s office at Public School 90 in the Bronx. The school would be gradually shut down, they told the principal, Patricia West. Incredulous, Ms. West, who has been at P.S. 90’s helm for six years, asked them to repeat themselves.
“I knew we had to improve, but I was shocked,” she said. “It’s like being told you are arrested and you go to jail. Everybody says, ‘But I didn’t do it!’ ”
Parents and community members immediately questioned the decision. While P.S. 90 got an F this year on its report card from the city, 11 other schools had worse scores overall, and many of them were staying open.
Teachers and parents at the 13 other city schools marked for closing so far this year were similarly puzzled that their schools were chosen. A handful of the schools had earned B’s on the city’s inaugural report cards last school year and thought they were making progress. Some had even been praised by educators as models of successful reform.
But under New York City’s unbending accountability system, the schools were considered portraits of chronically failing institutions, decrepit programs that had failed to lift the most struggling students.
Since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s takeover of the school system in 2002, the city’s Education Department has ordered 95 low-performing schools shuttered to make way for reinvented programs. The break-you-down, build-you-up strategy is meant to rattle the system — to warn struggling schools to change or be changed — and open the door for new school leaders and staffs to rehabilitate some of the lowest-performing student populations in the city.
But the decision to close a school is inevitably subjective, based on a mishmash of factors like performance on standardized tests, situations of violence, student demand for the school and whether the school seems capable of turning around. As such, the city inevitably earns the fury of educators, parents and students asking, “Why our school?”
The city’s investigation into schools like P.S. 90 that fail to push up student scores on English and math tests from year to year can stretch months or even more than a year before a decision is made. A team sorts through years of test data and also looks at reports of routine classroom visits made by Education Department experts. Administrators who oversee groups of neighborhood schools also weigh in on school culture.
Garth Harries, who oversees the Department of Education office that decides which schools to close, said the symptoms of failure are not always reflected in a single report card grade.
“Different data points can have different significance in a different context,” he said, adding that the city’s process allows for more nuance than other districts. “It is a mark of respect to the school organizations to spend the time to look at this very deeply.”
In addition, the city must consider practical aspects of closing a school, such as whether nearby schools can handle any overflow of students (newer high schools, for instance, tend to be small and not accept as many incoming ninth graders as the schools they replace). Enrollment is also a factor: in general, the current administration is wary of large, failing schools’ ability to overcome the obstacles of an impersonal environment. [What? What? What? So they close schools with the most children then punish those very kids that had to endure them?????]
Once the decision to close a school is final, the city dispatches a team to each building to deliver the news and act as unofficial trauma counselors — fielding questions from jittery teachers and principals.
At the same time, the city embarks on a months-long process to decide how best to remake the school and determine which new programs to gradually phase in at the old building. In other words, schools are not so much closed as remade from the inside out. Principals and teachers are counseled as to how best handle the closing process and continue serving students as the old program is phased out, and the city gives extra funds to new schools as they launch their programs.
“This is not about shuttering buildings,” Mr. Harries said. “This is about recreating culture, recreating ambitions, recreating educational systems, and recreating a sense of hope in these buildings.”
But critics of the process say the city does not do enough to get an on-the-ground sense of school quality, and that it frequently closes schools despite credible signs of improvement.
They also say the city should listen more to community input before a final decision is made. When the city brought up the possibility late last year of replacing the old programs at Public School 194 in Harlem and Public School 150 in Brooklyn with charter schools, for example, the response from some parents was negative. (No final decisions on new schools will be made until later this month, and city officials said they factor community input into the design of any new school.)
Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said that as schools prepare for what could potentially be devastating budget cuts this year, the city should not spend money on closing and reopening schools. She also said, more broadly, that struggling schools should be given more of a chance to improve before they are closed, pointing to places like Middle School 399 in the Bronx, which showed increases in test scores with its lowest-performing students and was recently removed from the state’s list of persistently dangerous schools. Nonetheless, it was given a closing notice last month.
“Those kinds of things make one wonder about arbitrariness and capriciousness,” she said, adding that there should be an appeals process. “Here you have a track record that shows real promise, yet the Department of Education is still closing these schools.”
Ms. Weingarten noted that some schools marked for closing have shown significant improvement in their dying days. For example, at five schools that were marked to be phased out — a process that typically happens over several years to limit disruption for their students — students’ performance was so much improved that staff members were given cash bonuses this year; city officials explained that closed schools are often able to foster better relationships with students as enrollment dwindles.
Eric A. Hanushek, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who studies school accountability systems, said the inherent danger in closing schools is its potential negative effect on the most vulnerable students. Inevitably, he said, new schools will spend a few years tinkering with their programs.
“Closing schools has good publicity value,” he said, “but to me the first priority is trying to take care of the kids who are in a school that has been declared to be bankrupt.” He suggested providing students at schools being reinvented with vouchers for private schools or preference for enrollment at more successful public schools.
Since the federal No Child Left Behind law was passed in 2001, districts across the country have made restructuring — and in some cases, closing — failing schools a centerpiece of reform efforts. Many districts, however, do not go as far as New York, taking a piecemeal approach to reinvention by replacing ineffective school leaders or teachers.
Ms. West, principal of P.S. 90, on Sheridan Avenue in Morrisania, said she has accepted the city’s decision. Like a student with poor grades waiting to be chewed out by her parents, she knew her bosses would take some action after the school got an F on its report card in the fall. The school has failed to boost the scores of its large population of students struggling with English, who make up about a third of its 1,153 students from kindergarten through fourth grade.
Two new schools will open at P.S. 90 in September, initially serving kindergarten through second grade, and expanding to fourth grade by September 2011.
But Ms. West, who began as a substitute teacher in 1979 and is retiring this spring, believes education officials should have made more frequent visits to the school, where 97 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, to get a better sense of its promise.
Now, in the school’s final months, she said is focused on rallying her staff and students. “If this is our last hurrah,” she said, “we have to go out high.”
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9) Rep: Foreclosed owners should squat in their own homes
Filed by David Edwards and Stephen C. Webster
01/30/2009 @ 9:26 am
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Rep_Foreclosed_owners_should_squat_in_0130.html
If you're poor and the bank is coming for your home, Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur has a plan for you.
Just squat, she says.
Yes, this Ohio Democrat is actually encouraging her financially distressed constituents whose homes have been foreclosed upon, to simply stay put.
In a Friday report, CNN's Drew Griffin explored the case of Ohioan Andrea Geiss, whose home was foreclosed upon in April.
"Behind in payments, out of work, a husband sick, she had nowhere to go," said Griffin. "So, she decided to follow the advice of her Congresswoman and go nowhere."
In Lucas County, Ohio, over 4,000 properties were foreclosed upon in 2008, reports CNN.
"So I say to the American people, you be squatters in your own homes," said Congresswoman Kaptur before the House of Representatives. "Don't you leave."
She's called on all of her foreclosed-upon constituents to stay in their homes and refuse to leave without "an attorney and a fight," said CNN.
"If they've had no legal representation of a high quality, I tell them stay in their homes," Kaptur told Griffin.
Kaptur is a high-profile advocate of an increasingly popular mode of fighting foreclosures best known for it's key phrase: "Produce the note."
By telling a bank to "produce the note," a homeowner can delay foreclosure by forcing the lender to prove the suing institution is actually the same which owns the debt.
"During the lending boom, most mortgages were flipped and sold to another lender or servicer or sliced up and sold to investors as securitized packages on Wall Street," explains the Consumer Warning Network. "In the rush to turn these over as fast as possible to make the most money, many of the new lenders did not get the proper paperwork to show they own the note and mortgage. This is the key to the produce the note strategy."
And Friday's segment on this growing foreclosure fighting "movement" was not the network's first. Earlier in January, CNN explored one person's strategy in demanding her bank "produce the note," only to find that the lender had "lost or destroyed" the evidence of debt ownership. Such a revelation can significantly strengthen a homeowner's position when asking to renegotiate a mortgage.
That these banks, many of which received billions of dollars in government bailout funds, continue to boot defaulted owners from their homes, makes them "vultures" says Kaptur.
"They prey on our property assets," she said. "I guess the reason I'm so adamant on this is because I know property law and its power to protect the individual homeowner. And I believe that 99.9 percent of our people have not had good legal representation in this."
The video is from CNN's American Morning, broadcast Jan. 30, 2009 and can be viewed at:
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Rep_Foreclosed_owners_should_squat_in_0130.html
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10) In Shattered Gaza Town, Roots of Seething Split
By ETHAN BRONNER and SABRINA TAVERNISE
February 4, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/world/middleeast/04gaza.html?ref=world
EL ATATRA, Gaza — The phosphorus smoke bomb punched through the roof in exactly the spot where much of the family had taken refuge — the upstairs hall away from the windows.
The bomb, which international weapons experts identified as phosphorus by its fragments, was intended to mask troop movements outside. Instead it breathed its storm of fire and smoke into Sabah Abu Halima’s hallway, releasing flaming chemicals that clung to her husband, baby girl and three other small children, burning them to death.
The Israeli military says that it is unaware of the family’s disaster, or of any other civilian deaths in this farming village in northwest Gaza. While residents say that 11 other civilians were killed during the first few days of Israel’s ground invasion, Israel says that its soldiers killed gunmen and militants in this village, which it considers a Hamas stronghold. At least four Israeli soldiers were wounded in the fight.
The war in El Atatra tells the story of Israel’s three-week offensive in Gaza, with each side giving a very different version. Palestinians here describe Israeli military actions as a massacre, and Israelis attribute civilian casualties to a Hamas policy of hiding behind its people.
In El Atatra, neither version appears entirely true, based on 50 interviews with villagers and four Israeli commanders. The dozen or so civilian deaths seem like the painful but inevitable outcome of a modern army bringing war to an urban space. And while Hamas fighters had placed explosives in a kitchen, on doorways and in a mosque, they did not seem to be forcing civilians to act as shields.
The gaps reflect not only a desire to shape public opinion, but also something more significant: a growing distance between two peoples who used to have daily interactions, but who are being forced apart by violence, mutual demonization and a policy of separation.
Palestinians almost never question the legitimacy of firing rockets at Israeli civilians as a form of resistance, and seemed shocked that Israel would go to war over it. Meanwhile, Israel sent a double message.
On one hand, it made clear that it was furious over the years of rocket fire and would not restrain its reaction. On the other, it argued that it took an exceptionally humane approach to the civilians of Gaza, in contrast to what it saw as its bloodthirsty enemy, Hamas.
Unlike most Gazans, many people in this village are not refugees from the 1948 independence war, but farmers and landowners, who for years sold strawberries to Israel until an embargo against the Hamas-run territory began a few years ago. Israel warned residents, in leaflets, radio broadcasts and telephone calls to leave, but many thought that the Israeli incursion did not threaten them.
“I figured it would be like all the other times when they dropped leaflets, so we went inside and waited,” said Rafiq Gambour, 45, a car mechanic who worked in Israel for years, including in Sderot, where Hamas rockets have taken the biggest toll.
So when disaster struck at the Abu Halima house on Jan. 4, a Sunday, many did the only thing they thought might save them: They got on the phone with their Israeli friends. As the sun set and the bodies burned, a crowd of panicked villagers waited as a village elder and farmer, Mahmoud Khlaiyel, and another farmer made frantic phone calls to merchants on the other side of the border.
“There was no one I didn’t call,” Mr. Khlaiyel said.
A man who identified himself as Danny Batua, a 54-year-old Israeli Jewish businessman whose family has been friends with the Abu Halima family for years, said by telephone that he believed the Abu Halimas were not involved with Hamas, and that their suffering was a result of inaccurate intelligence on the part of the Israeli military.
“What can I tell you?” Mr. Batua said. “The army has no idea.”
But according to Captain E., an Israeli military commander whose men took the western sector of the village on the first night of the ground war, most houses in that area were empty of civilians. What is more, he said, militants had remained and had begun gun battles with his soldiers.
The military made the commander available for an interview in Israel, but limited his identification to the initial of his first name.
“We faced fire mostly from snipers,” he said. “We found tunnels, maps, Kalashnikovs, uniforms from our army and many large explosives throughout the houses we searched,” he added, showing photographs of what his men had collected. “We also found a bucket of grenades inside a mosque.”
Some of what the army contends is clearly real. Rockets were launched from near the town’s elementary school, and from many of its fields, Israeli commanders and several residents said.
Hamas leaders were in the village and Israeli commanders displayed evidence of four tunnels throughout the village, though not the extensive network that higher-level commanders had reported. The militants also had weapons, but while the commanders said they had destroyed houses that corresponded only to weapons caches, that did not always seem to have been true.
“My principle for blowing up houses was not to destroy a house that just had one AK-47, but only if we found real infrastructure or large amounts of explosives,” said the brigade commander for the area, Col. Herzl Halevy, by telephone from Israel.
“I checked this out personally,” he added. Between 40 and 50 houses were destroyed.
But when the platoon of another commander, Captain Y., took over the neighborhood where a family named Ghanem lived, it blew up their house without going inside, he made clear in a phone interview. A search of it two weeks later by a correspondent for The New York Times joined by a 20-year veteran of the British Army, Chris Cobb-Smith, a weapons consultant for Amnesty International, showed no evidence of explosive material or of a secondary blast.
So why was the house destroyed?
“We had advance intelligence that there were bombs inside the house,” Captain Y. said. “We looked inside from the doorway and saw things that made us suspicious. I didn’t want to risk the lives of my men. We ordered the house destroyed.”
That seemed to be the guiding principle for a number of the operations in El Atatra: avoid Israeli casualties at all cost.
The elementary school was a similar story. Intelligence suggested that there were explosives inside, and an F-16 dropped a bomb on it, producing a house-size hole. When the Israelis inspected later, they found written material from Hamas but no explosives, Captain Y. said. Now the school is unusable, its giant metal flower decorations lying on their sides.
For the Ghanem family’s 23-year-old son, Bakr, the act will not easily be forgotten.
“A house is something physical, but also something in your heart,” he said as he stood outside his collapsed home, taken over by cats and putrid odors. “The place in our heart has also been injured. There can be no peace after this.”
This talk pains some of the older villagers, like Tamam Abu Halima, 65, who wants to return to the past she shared with Israeli neighbors, when she would fix dinners of fish and figs, and accepting an invitation was as easy as getting in the car.
Her grandson, Hamza, who grew up in a time when boundaries were stricter, has no fond memories of Israelis.
“The only ones I know shoot and kill,” he said.
Many here believe that Israelis feel the same about them, and that they were treated with suspicion and contempt, as would-be fighters. That might help explain what happened, they say, when Omar Abu Halima and his two teenage cousins tried to take the burned body of his baby sister and two other living but badly burned girls to the hospital on that Sunday.
The boys were taking the girls and six others on a tractor, when, according to several accounts from villagers, Israeli soldiers told them to stop. According to their accounts, they got down, put their hands up, and suddenly rounds were fired, killing two teenage boys: Matar Abu Halima, 18, and Muhamed Hekmet, 17.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said that soldiers had reported that the two were armed and firing. Villagers strongly deny that. The tractor that villagers say was carrying the group is riddled with 36 bullet holes.
The villagers were forced to abandon the bodies of the teenage boys and the baby, and when rescue workers arrived 11 days later, the baby’s body had been eaten by dogs, her legs two white bones, captured in a gruesome image on a relative’s cellphone. The badly burned girls and others on the tractor had fled to safety.
Matar’s mother, Nabila Abu Halima, said she had been shot through the arm when she tried to move toward her son. Her left arm bears a round scar. Her son came back to her in pieces, his body crushed under tank treads.
“Those who came this time were not Israelis,” Mr. Gambour, the car mechanic, said of the attackers. “They were not even human.”
The question of how Israel handled civilians in this war has become a matter of keen controversy. Human rights groups are crisscrossing Gaza, documenting what they believe will form the basis for war crimes proceedings aimed at demonstrating that Israel used disproportionate force.
Israeli officers said they took special care not to harm civilians.
“I can promise you that throughout the war, there were many times that civilians walked by us and we never shot at them,” said a commanding officer in a part of El Atatra, Major E.
That statement draws a hollow laugh from villagers.
“They think everybody in Gaza is a terrorist,” said Bekker Abu Halima, who had driven a truck with other bodies and said it was fired on.
Both sides engage in their own denials.
Israelis argue that this war was especially tough because they had waited so long before taking action in response to the thousands of rockets fired from Gaza over eight years.
Yet after Israelis withdrew their settlers and soldiers from Gaza in late 2005, they killed, over the next three years in numerous military actions here, the same number of Gazans as those killed in this war — about 1,275.
For their part, few Palestinian villagers even acknowledged the existence of fighters here. Hamas is now asserting that it achieved a victory.
But here in the ruins of El Atatra, perhaps the biggest damage has been to any memory of a shared past and any thought of a shared future.
“We used to tell fighters not to fire from here,” said Nabila Abu Halima, looking over a field through her open window. “Now I’ll invite them to do it from my house.”
Taghreed El-Khodary and Nadim Audi contributed reporting.
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