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Money for Human Needs not War and Banker Bailouts
March to demand immediate withdrawal of all U.S. and allied troops and contractors from Iraq and Afghanistan Now!
The San Francisco march will assemble at Justin Herman Plaza (Embarcadero) at the foot of Market St. at 11 a.m. After an opening rally, we will march up Market St. to the Civic Center where a second rally will take place.
Volunteers are needed at both sites starting at 9 a.m. to distribute placards and flyers, staff tables, help with set-up and be march monitors.
For more information, call the ANSWER office at 415-821-6545.
Mass outreach this week to build March 21 Demonstration:
Posters, flyers and stickers are available at the ANSWER office.
Call 415-821-6545 for convenient pick-up times. All are encouraged
to view outreach and talking to your neighbors as crucial
to building this action.
Check out the new MARCH 21 Coalition Website
(An extensive endorsement list is posted here):
http://www.pephost.org/site/PageServer?pagename=M21_homepage
A March 21 Labor Rally and contingent to March 21
will be held in the grassy area just South of Market
Street in Justin Herman Plaza
Saturday, March 21
Rally at 10:30 a.m. // Form contingent to march at 11:45 a.m.
http://uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?id=18479
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It is time for JROTC to go.
San Francisco School Board
Tuesday, March 24, 2009 - 6:00 pm
555 Franklin Street at McAllister
The San Francisco Board of Education voted over two years ago to phase out the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. JROTC is run by the Pentagon and their hand-picked military instructors. It is scheduled to end this June.
But the Pentagon and their allies are trying to overturn the school board decision and preserve their beachhead in our schools. At next Tuesday’s school board meeting, Jill Wynns is introducing a resolution to keep the military program.
The school board voted to phase out JROTC because San Franciscans do not want the military in our schools, a military that preys on working class youth, particularly from communities of color. Nor do San Franciscans support a program that won’t hire openly LGBT instructors in line with the Pentagon’s "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" policy. JROTC targets children as young as 14 and 15.
JROTC costs school district taxpayers one million dollars per year. Why should we fund a military program when teachers are facing mass layoffs?
Last November, downtown and military money funded the “Yes on V” campaign, supposedly aimed at supporting JROTC, but really aimed at creating a “wedge issue” to defeat progressive candidates for the Board of Supervisors. They poured $200,000 into this campaign, gained a small victory with Prop V, but lost every Supervisor campaign. Despite being out-spent 15 to 1, the anti-JROTC and pro-people forces got nearly 150,000 votes.
Come to the School Board meeting on Tuesday, March 24, and help give the boot to the military!
510-326-1961
NoJROTC@yahoo.com
www.NoMilitaryRecruitmentinOurSchools.org
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Celebrate the release of the new book by Mumia Abu-Jamal:
"Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners vs. the USA"
Friday, April 24th (Mumia's birthday!), 6:30 P.M.
Humanist Hall
411 - 28th Street, Oakland
$25.00 donation or what you can afford.
Featuring:
Angely Y. Davis
Mistah F.A.B.
Lynne Stewart
Tory Serra
Avotcja
Kiilu Nyasha
JR Minister of Information POCC
Ed Mead
Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia
Molotov Mouths
Prison Radio, 415-648-4505
www.prisonradio.org
www.mumia.org
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Donate to Courage to Resist
A message from Army Spc. Agustín Aguayo,
Iraq War veteran and war resister
Since the day I surrendered to military custody after refusing to return to Iraq, Courage to Resist has been there for me and my family as a constant fountain of support. This support has come in many forms, from a friendly call, to organizing a campaign to cover my legal expenses and basic needs. I believe only an organization with altruistic motives that truly cares would have done this. As someone who has felt the enormous relief of having a strong support group behind me, it is a privilege now as a member of Courage to Resist to help others as I have been helped.
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/21/26/
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STOP THE EVICTIONS
For your information, I just got this via email. This is a heart-breaking documentary of evictions being carried out against families. What kind of an insane society dumps families out into the street and leaves homes vacant to rot?:
Watch the video:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/28303876#28303876
UPDATE:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/28303876#29684262
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) At A.I.G., Good Luck Following the Money
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
Fair Game
March 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/business/15gret.html?hp
2) Has the Economy Hit Bottom Yet?
By VIKAS BAJAJ
March 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/weekinreview/15vikas.html?hp
3) Administration Is Open to Taxing Health Benefits
By JACKIE CALMES and ROBERT PEAR
March 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/us/politics/15health.html?hp
4) Arrests of 3 Dissidents in Ulster Killings Stir Riots
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/world/europe/15ulster.html?hp
5) The Blackout of the March 21 Mobilizations
Redbaiting on the Left
By JOHN WALSH
March 16, 2009
http://counterpunch.com/walsh03162009.html
6) Race may be factor in police shooting of unarmed elderly man
By Howard Witt
Tribune correspondent
"A 2005 Bureau of Justice Statistics survey, the most recent available, found that blacks are nearly four times as likely as whites to be subjected to force during police interactions."
"If I see three or four young black men walking down the street, I have to stop them and check their names," said Mills [Russel Mills, Homer, Louisiana Police Chief], who is white. "I want them to be afraid every time they see the police that they might get arrested. We're not out there trying to abuse and harass people-we're trying to protect the law-abiding citizens locked behind their doors in fear."
March 13, 2009
The article and a video interview with witnesses and correspondent Howard Witt at this site:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-race-shootings-webmar13,0,7686526.story
7) Shot that hit Grand Valley State University student was fired by Ottawa deputy, state police say
by The Grand Rapids Press
Thursday March 12, 2009, 9:39 AM
UPDATE: GVSU student shot by police during drug investigation was not armed, police reveal
http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2009/03/update_shot_that_hit_grand_val.html
8) Derek Copp family hires lawyer; Fred Dilley questions police tactics
by John Agar | The Grand Rapids Press
Monday March 16, 2009, 10:07 AM
http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2009/03/derek_copp_family_hires_lawyer.html
10) Find out if there is a Rachel Corrie Remembrance Day event near you by clicking here. If not, plan an emergency vigil and let others know by posting your event here. A flyer for use at your vigil can be found here.
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=wWPR6SBiQZx3qbTxYhj0lA7xTCA4xcSe
For more information about Tristan's shooting and updates on his condition, including links to news articles, see the website of the International Solidarity Movement. Please note that the video on this website is graphic and disturbing.
http://www.endtheoccupation.org/(http://palsolidarity.org/2009/03/5324
11) STOP THE EVICTIONS
From the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter
March 16, 2009,
http://activistnewsletter.blogspot.com/
Watch the video:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/28303876#28303876
12) Bracing for a Backlash Over Wall Street Bailouts
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
News Analysis
March 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/us/politics/16assess.html?ref=us
13) The mysterious case of Mohamed al-Dainy
The authorities claim he planned a suicide bombing in parliament. His allies insist the Iraqi MP is a respected human rights campaigner. But no one knows what has happened to him.
By Robert Fisk
Saturday, 14 March 2009
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-mysterious-case-of-mohamed-aldainy-1644905.html
14) The Gift That Keeps on Giving
Editorial
March 17, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/opinion/17tue1.html
15) Drones Are Weapons of Choice in Fighting Qaeda
"The Guard members, along with Air Force crews at a base in the Nevada desert, are 7,000 to 8,000 miles away from the planes they are flying. Most of the crews sit at 1990s-style computer banks filled with screens, inside dimly lit trailers. Many fly missions in both Iraq and Afghanistan on the same day."
By CHRISTOPHER DREW
March 17, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/business/17uav.html?ref=world
16) Soldiers’ Accounts of Gaza Killings Raise Furor in Israel
By ETHAN BRONNER
March 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/world/middleeast/20gaza.html?hp
17) A Prison of Words
By NOAH FELDMAN
March 19, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/opinion/19feldman.html
18) Workers Protest Across France
"A poll conducted this week for the magazine Paris Match by IFOP found that 78 percent of the French support the strikers, the highest rate in a decade."
By MATTHEW SALTMARSH and DAVID JOLLY
March 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/world/europe/20france.html?ref=europe
France: Protests Against Sarkozy Start
By REUTERS
French rail workers walked off their jobs on Wednesday to kick off 24 hours of nationwide strikes and protests to denounce President Nicolas Sarkozy’s handling of the economy. As many as 2.5 million people took to the streets on Jan. 29 in a first such day of action, and union leaders said they hoped for even more participation in rallies planned for Thursday.
March 19, 2009
World Briefing | Europe
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/world/europe/19briefs-PROTESTSAGAI_BRF.html?ref=world
19) U.S. Plans Vastly Expanded Afghan Security Force
By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT
March 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/us/politics/19military.html?ref=world
20) A Day of Protests, Against Iraq War and A.I.G.
By Jennifer Mascia AND Jason Grant
March 19, 2009, 5:50 pm
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/nyregion/index.html
21) Further Accounts of Gaza Killings Released
By ETHAN BRONNER
March 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/world/middleeast/21gaza.html?ref=world
22) Workers Protest Across France
By MATTHEW SALTMARSH and DAVID JOLLY
March 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/world/europe/20france.html?ref=world
23) The Great Shame
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
March 21, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/21/opinion/21herbert.html
24) Young and Old Are Facing Off for Jobs
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
March 21, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/21/business/21age.html?ref=business
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1) At A.I.G., Good Luck Following the Money
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
Fair Game
March 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/business/15gret.html?hp
WE return this week to the subject of the American International Group, the giant insurer that has received $170 billion in taxpayer guarantees, because the clamor over its rescue continues to grow. Of concern to those on both Capitol Hill and Main Street is the secrecy surrounding the $50 billion funneled to A.I.G.'s counterparties since it nearly collapsed last fall.
Now that we live in bailout nation, why does the A.I.G. rescue rub so many the wrong way? Here is a hypothesis: Even as investors, employees, communities and taxpayers have been battered by the crippled financial system, A.I.G.'s counterparties were saved from losses on deals they struck with the insurer.
Add the fact that the government has resisted revealing these companies' identities or how much federal money they received, and it's easy to see why resentment boils. As a result of the A.I.G. rescue, taxpayers own almost 80 percent of the company. (Friday evening, as this column was going to press, rumors were swirling that A.I.G. might be releasing a list of all of its counterparties.)
Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, said she had twice asked for a full accounting from Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, which arranged the A.I.G. rescue. She has not received it.
"They have told others it is proprietary information," Ms. Maloney said in an interview. "But we are the proprietors now. Taxpayers own the store, and we should be able to see the books."
A.I.G., at one time the world's largest insurer, sold contracts to these sophisticated counterparties that theoretically protected them from losing money if the debt they had purchased defaulted. Known as credit default swaps, the contracts offer the same kind of protection a homeowner receives from an insurance policy against fires and other unforeseen calamities.
The arrangements behind the deals produced fees for A.I.G. while the firms buying the contracts got peace of mind. No one thought A.I.G. might have to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in claims. Until, that is, A.I.G. came under financial pressure last year.
When the government stepped in to rescue A.I.G., its main and very reasonable concern was that a collapse of the insurer would drag down with it other big financial companies that were its customers. So the government shoveled taxpayers' money into A.I.G., beginning with an $85 billion loan last September.
Then the rescuer went mum.
Officials at the Fed, who continue to oversee the A.I.G. rescue, have taken the position that the terms of the insurers' contracts are confidential and that it would be wrong for the government to break those promises by naming recipients of taxpayer money. Another concern may have been that disclosures of A.I.G.'s counterparties might make investors and depositors uneasy about the well-being of the firms getting the money.
According to people briefed on the situation who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about it, the counterparties that taxpayers have bailed out include Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and two French banks, Calyon and Société Générale. Along with other unidentified entities, the counterparties have received 30 percent of the $170 billion allocated to A.I.G. (Goldman has said that it had insulated itself from any financial damage that might have resulted from an A.I.G. collapse.)
Even A.I.G.'s own independent directors haven't been told which of the counterparties were paid, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter who requested anonymity because of confidentiality agreements.
SUCH secrecy raised hackles because the insurance claims were paid off in full, even though widespread defaults on the underlying debt have not occurred. Why, many people wonder, did the Fed make A.I.G.'s counterparties whole on losses that have not happened yet? Why didn't it force these financial companies to close out the contracts at a discount, making them take what is known on Wall Street as a "haircut"?
Robert Arvanitis, chief executive of Risk Finance Advisors in Westport, Conn., and an expert in insurance, speculated that the United States was afraid that A.I.G.'s foreign bank counterparties would suffer large hits to their capital cushions, the amount they must set aside in case of losses.
"If somebody takes away the A.I.G. guarantee, all of a sudden the banks' capital ratios look bad," he said. "It might have stretched some of these banks."
Still, Mr. Arvanitis said, it is not clear that the government had to pay out 100 percent of the contracts' value to all the counterparties. Healthier institutions could have been persuaded to take a haircut, he said. "That is what tough negotiators do," he added.
The government installed Edward M. Liddy as chief executive of A.I.G. when the company was bailed out. A former chief executive of Allstate, Mr. Liddy was also a director at Goldman Sachs before he joined A.I.G.
And in January, the Fed appointed three trustees to oversee the insurer. Their job is to maximize the company's ability to repay amounts owed to the government and to ensure that A.I.G. is managed "in a manner that will not disrupt financial market conditions," according to the Fed.
The trustees are Jill M. Considine, former chairman of the Depository Trust Company and a former director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Chester B. Feldberg, a former New York Fed official who was chairman of Barclays Americas from 2000 to 2008; and Douglas L. Foshee, chief executive of the El Paso Corporation and chairman of the Houston branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
The trustees have already rankled a big A.I.G. shareholder. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees pension plan, which owns 18,000 shares of A.I.G. common stock, had put forward a shareholder proposal on executive pay that it hoped would be put to a vote at the company's annual meeting in May.
The proposal asked the company to adopt a policy requiring senior executives at A.I.G. to retain a significant percentage of the shares they received as compensation until two years after they left the company. Such a policy would help reward performance based on long-term value creation for shareholders, the pension plan said.
But Richard Ferlauto, the director of corporate governance and pension investment at Afscme, said A.I.G. trustees have indicated they oppose the proposal. But Kevin F. Barnard, a lawyer at Arnold & Porter who represents the trustees, said they were still considering the proposal. "To my knowledge, they are batting ideas back and forth but have not made fixed decisions," he said.
Mr. Ferlauto said the compensation debate at A.I.G. would be yet another indication of how A.I.G. sees its relationship with those who continue to bail it out of trouble: taxpayers.
"If they do vote against a reasonable compensation reform," he said, "then it would be an appalling breach of faith with the American taxpayer."
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2) Has the Economy Hit Bottom Yet?
By VIKAS BAJAJ
March 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/weekinreview/15vikas.html?hp
The economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said, "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."
Still, we have to ask: was that the bottom we just hit?
After months of punishing economic news, the gloom seemed to lift last week if only for a moment. The stock market shot up 12 percent in four days. Two of the nation's biggest banks said they had returned to profitability. General Motors said it wouldn't need another $2 billion in government help this month. And retail sales were better than expected.
Then again, perhaps that's what passes for good news these days.
The market is still down by more than 50 percent since its high 17 months ago. Yes, the banks made money, but for just two months, and never mind the billions of bad assets that remain on their books. G.M. will still, in all likelihood, need billions in taxpayer help down the road and there's no guarantee it will survive. And those retail sales numbers? They were still bad, just not as bad as analysts were expecting.
Still, there was a sense among some economists and Wall Street analysts that if the bottom was not touched, perhaps the freefall was at least slowing. No less than Lawrence Summers, President Obama's top economic adviser, said on Friday that while the economic crisis would not end anytime soon, there were early signs that it was easing.
Which leads to a question: When we do hit the bottom - this year or years from now - how will we know?
There's no easy answer.
Mr. Galbraith was not the first or last economist to acknowledge fallibility at predicting turning points. (Just think back to assurances by top government officials in early 2007 that the growing problems with subprime mortgages were "contained.")
Forecasting the end of the current recession is even more difficult because it will hinge on how quickly and efficiently governments resolve the crisis in the banking system. Many investors continue to worry that the world's biggest financial institutions are insolvent, despite assurances from Washington that those firms have plenty of capital.
How political leaders diagnose and fix the banks will be critical. Analysts say misguided and erratic government responses exacerbated Japan's "lost decade" in the 1990s and the Depression of the 1930s. "The things that can screw it up are bad policies," said Thomas F. Cooley, dean of the Stern School of Business at New York University.
In the end, there's probably no way to know for sure that we've hit bottom until we're on the rebound. Still, analysts say there are some key indicators that might help in spotting a bottom and recovery at a time when it can be hard to see past the despair.
STOCKS
History shows that the stock market usually hits bottom before the economy does.
In October, Warren E. Buffett, one of the world's most successful investors, said he was buying American stocks because they usually rise "well before either sentiment or the economy." But even he acknowledged not having "the faintest idea" what would happen in the next month or year.
Since then, stocks have dropped by another 20 percent, and with the market at levels last seen in 1997, stocks are cheap by historical standards. The price-to-earnings ratio - which investors use to gauge how much they are paying for each dollar of corporate profit - is around 13, about 20 percent lower than the average of the last 130 years.
But many investors remain on the sidelines. Money market funds have swollen to $3.8 trillion, up from $2.4 trillion two years ago. And the cash banks are holding in their vaults and at the Federal Reserve has more than doubled in the last nine months.
What has made the current recession so pernicious is the eroding pressure of deflation, the general decline in prices that has hurt both businesses and consumers. They earn less and the value of their businesses and homes has fallen, yet they still owe as much as they did before, said Russell Napier, a consultant with Credit Lyonnais and author of "Anatomy of the Bear: Lessons From Wall Street's Four Great Bottoms."
He said he believed stocks would not rise until deflation ended and businesses could charge higher prices to pay off debts. Early indications suggest that this may be happening and that the stock market may be near the bottom, Mr. Napier said. He pointed to three indicators that often signal that economic growth and inflation are on the way - the prices of copper, corporate bonds and inflation-protected Treasury securities. Prices for all three are higher today than they were in November.
"All the indicators suggest you should be buying and not selling," he said. Still, Mr. Napier acknowledged that stocks, while cheap, could fall further. Measured by their 10-year price-to-earnings ratio, stocks were a lot less expensive in the early 1980s, when the ratio fell to less than seven, and in the 1930s, when it was below six.
Nouriel Roubini, the economics professor from New York University who predicted much of the current crisis, has warned that corporate earnings and stock prices could continue to fall, perhaps precipitously.
HOME PRICES
To determine whether home prices are still inflated, economist use ratios that compare the cost of buying a home to renting or to median family income. If the ratios move sharply higher, as they did in recent years, it suggests home prices might be inflated. When they are falling, as they are across the country and particularly in places like San Diego, Phoenix and Tampa, owning a home becomes more affordable.
Barry Ritholtz, a professional investor who writes the popular economics blog The Big Picture, has a simpler, more subjective, approach: Assume a young couple earning two modest incomes is looking to buy a two- or three-bedroom starter home in a middle-income neighborhood in your city. Can they qualify for a mortgage and afford to buy it?
"If the answer is no, then you are not at a bottom in housing," said Mr. Ritholtz, who estimates that the decline in national home prices is only half-complete.
Just as prices in the bubble did not go up uniformly in all parts of the country, they will not reach bottom together, said Ronald J. Peltier, chief executive of Home Services of America, a real estate brokerage firm.
In places like Riverside, Calif., and Miami, where homes are selling for half or less than what they sold for three or four years ago, real estate may be close to the bottom. One telling sign is that first-time home buyers and investors are snapping up homes, though they are mostly buying from banks selling foreclosed properties at deep discounts. Sales of existing homes in California jumped by more than 50 percent in January from a year earlier. But the median price was down more than 40 percent, to $224,000.
At the same time, prices have come down a lot less in urban areas like Manhattan and, not surprisingly, the number of homes being sold is down by as much as 50 percent from a year ago. Prices in these urban areas will have to fall much more before many young couples can afford starter homes.
Of course, those who bought at the peak of the market will suffer the greatest pain if they are forced to sell. But Mr. Peltier and other specialists say the current dismal market will only be resolved by lower prices, easier lending and an improving economy.
CONSUMER SPENDING
Americans like to buy things, and for at least the last decade, many economists assumed they would continue to spend on cars, clothes and the latest digital toy, good times or not. Consumer spending has rarely declined in the post-World-War-II era and when it has, it bounced back quickly.
The current recession is severely testing that article of faith. Personal consumption fell by about 1 percent in the second half of last year - the first sustained decline since 1980. Economists say consumption will be slow to recover because debt-saddled Americans are saving more or paying down debt. The savings rate - the amount of money consumers did not spend - jumped to about 3 percent late last year, from practically zero, still far below its postwar average of 7 percent.
A sign that consumption has hit bottom may come when the savings rate begins to flatten. Spending should then rebound as pent-up demand gives way. Car sales, for instance, have fallen to levels last seen in 1981, when the population of the United States was about three-quarters of what it is today. Many families are deferring car purchases and making do with what they have. Eventually, however, they will have to replace their aging vehicles.
In a study of economic cycles, Edward E. Leamer, an economist at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California at Los Angeles, found that auto sales and home building tended to lead recoveries.
An increase in international trade would be another early indicator that consumer spending here and abroad has hit the floor and begun to rebound.
After growing at an average of 7 percent a year for most of this decade, global trade was little changed from March to September last year, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Many large economies including the United States, Japan and China have reported a sharp drop in exports and imports in recent months. There was more bad news on Friday, when the Commerce Department reported that exports from and imports to the United States fell by about 12 percent in January.
"Seeing global trade pick up would be a very positive sign," said Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and now a professor at Harvard.
Tobias Levkovich, chief United States equity strategist at Citigroup, has another indicator for spotting when we have hit bottom: When we stop behaving like children in the backseat of the car asking their parents, "Are we there yet?"
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3) Administration Is Open to Taxing Health Benefits
By JACKIE CALMES and ROBERT PEAR
March 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/us/politics/15health.html?hp
WASHINGTON - The Obama administration is signaling to Congress that the president could support taxing some employee health benefits, as several influential lawmakers and many economists favor, to help pay for overhauling the health care system.
The proposal is politically problematic for President Obama, however, since it is similar to one he denounced in the presidential campaign as "the largest middle-class tax increase in history." Most Americans with insurance get it from their employers, and taxing workers for the benefit is opposed by union leaders and some businesses.
In television advertisements last fall, Mr. Obama criticized his Republican rival for the presidency, Senator John McCain of Arizona, for proposing to tax all employer-provided health benefits. The benefits have long been tax-free, regardless of how generous they are or how much an employee earns. The advertisements did not point out that Mr. McCain, in exchange, wanted to give all families a tax credit to subsidize the purchase of coverage.
At the time, even some Obama supporters said privately that he might come to regret his position if he won the election; in effect, they said, he was potentially giving up an important option to help finance his ambitious health care agenda to reduce medical costs and to expand coverage to the 46 million uninsured Americans. Now that Mr. Obama has begun the health debate, several advisers say that while he will not propose changing the tax-free status of employee health benefits, neither will he oppose it if Congress does so.
At a recent Congressional hearing, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat whose own health plan would make benefits taxable, asked Peter R. Orszag, the president's budget director, about the issue. Mr. Orszag replied that it "most firmly should remain on the table."
Mr. Orszag, an economist who has served as director of the Congressional Budget Office, has written favorably of taxing some employer-provided health benefits and using the revenue savings for other health-related incentives. So has another Obama adviser, Jason Furman, the deputy director of the White House National Economic Council.
They, like other proponents, cite evidence that tax-free benefits encourage what Mr. McCain called "gold-plated" policies, resulting in inefficient and costly demands for health care and pressure on employers to hold down workers' pay as insurance expenses rise. And, they say, the policy discriminates against those - many of whom are low-income workers - who do not have employer-provided coverage.
When Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, advocated taxing benefits at a recent hearing of the Finance Committee, which he leads, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner assured him that the administration was open to all ideas from Congress. Mr. Geithner did, however, allude to the position that Mr. Obama had taken as a candidate.
The administration's receptivity to the idea is owed partly to the advocacy of Mr. Baucus, whose committee has jurisdiction over tax policy and health programs, and to support from Republicans. There is less enthusiasm among Democrats in the House, though the health debate is at an early stage and no comprehensive plans are on the table.
Also, Mr. Obama's own idea for raising revenues for health care - limiting the income tax deductions that the most affluent taxpayers claim - has run into opposition not only from Mr. Baucus but also from his counterpart in the House, Representative Charles B. Rangel, Democrat of New York, who is chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.
Mr. Obama's proposed limit on deductions would raise an estimated $318 billion over 10 years, or half of his proposed "health care reserve fund." That is a fraction of the revenues that could be raised from taxing employer-provided health benefits.
In the campaign, Mr. McCain estimated that taxing all health benefits would raise $3.6 trillion over a decade - "a multitrillion-dollar tax hike," one Obama advertisement said.
The Congressional Budget Office says that including health benefits in taxable income could mean $246 billion in additional revenue for a single year. Stopping short of full taxation, as Mr. Baucus and others suggest, would mean less new revenue.
The latest government figures, for 2007, show that 70 percent of the 253 million people with health insurance received at least some of their coverage through employers. Employment-based insurance covers three-fifths of the population under 65.
Those who want to tax benefits in whole or in part make two main arguments. They say the tax exclusion is a generous subsidy that insulates employees from the true costs of health care, leading them to demand more of it and driving up overall costs. Critics also say the policy is unfair because it favors higher-income people. "It's too regressive," Mr. Baucus said. "It just skews the system."
But in a blueprint for health legislation that he issued last November, Mr. Baucus said taking the exclusion on health benefits out of the tax code would go "too far" and "cause widespread disruption in employer-based health benefits." Mr. Obama has also said he wants to preserve employer-provided coverage. Mr. Baucus, in his paper, cited other options, like taxing benefits above some value, taxing only wealthy employees or both.
However the proposal is devised, advocates will not have an easy time selling it.
Republicans, like Mr. McCain and former President George W. Bush before him, tend to favor taxing the benefits to finance other incentives for people to buy their own insurance. But given Mr. Obama's use of the issue in his campaign, Republicans are unlikely to support a change unless the president himself proposes it, a senior adviser to Senate Republicans said.
Many Democrats, especially House liberals, are opposed. "It's a dumb idea," said Representative Pete Stark of California, chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health. "We have to maintain as much as we can of the employer payments."
Administration officials often say they will not repeat the mistakes of former President Bill Clinton, whose plan for universal health insurance collapsed in 1994. But Frank B. McArdle, a health policy expert at Hewitt Associates, a benefits consulting firm, said, "If President Obama agrees to cut back the tax break for employee health benefits, he will risk repeating one of Mr. Clinton's errors by disrupting health insurance for people who have it and like it."
Some big businesses consider nontaxable employment benefits a tool for recruiting and retaining workers. The United States Chamber of Commerce opposes eliminating the exclusion on health benefits, but James P. Gelfand, senior manager of health policy, said the group had not taken a position on limiting it.
Organized labor, a pillar of the Democratic Party base, considers the benefits among the union movement's historic achievements for the middle class. But a split could be developing between the manufacturing unions, which have negotiated rich benefit packages, and the growing service employees unions, which include many low-wage workers without generous benefits.
Alan V. Reuther, legislative director of the United Automobile Workers, said: "These proposals would represent a tax increase on working families. They would undermine good health care coverage."
But at the Service Employees International Union, which was an early supporter of Mr. Obama, Dennis Rivera, the coordinator of the union's health care campaign, said that while his organization was "predisposed not to agree to the taxing of health benefits," he would wait to pass judgment. The union, Mr. Rivera said, wants to see how any tax changes fit into the overall effort to revamp the health care system. "We need to see the total picture," he said.
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4) Arrests of 3 Dissidents in Ulster Killings Stir Riots
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/world/europe/15ulster.html?hp
LURGAN, Northern Ireland (AP) - Irish nationalist gangs hurled gasoline bombs at police officers on Saturday after three suspected Irish Republican Army dissidents were arrested on suspicion of killing two British soldiers in an attack designed to stir up wider violence in Northern Ireland.
Police officers in armored cars and flame-retardant suits said no members of their force were injured during the rising mob violence in the Irish Catholic end of Lurgan, a religiously divided town southwest of Belfast. Rioters also blocked the main railroad that goes between Belfast and Dublin, which runs alongside the town's hard-line Kilwilkie district.
The police also said they arrested a 37-year-old man and 30-year-old woman, and seized a gun and ammunition in the neighboring town of Craigavon, where I.R.A. dissidents shot to death a police officer on Monday.
The police would not say whether those arrests and the arms were connected to the March 7 shooting of the soldiers or the killing of the police officer.
The unrest came in direct response to the arrest on Saturday of Colin Duffy, 41, who was a top I.R.A. figure. The police arrested two other suspected I.R.A. dissidents in the overwhelmingly Catholic village of Bellaghy - all on suspicion of shooting to death the two soldiers.
The police arrested two teenage rioters and advised drivers to stay away from the Catholic north side of Lurgan to avoid having their cars seized and burned as road barricades.
The police long considered Mr. Duffy the I.R.A. godfather of Lurgan and twice charged him with murders in the town in the run-up to the I.R.A.'s 1997 cease-fire, which breakaway factions are now trying to destroy.
Mr. Duffy was convicted of killing a former soldier in Lurgan in 1993, but he was freed on appeal three years later after the main witness against him was identified as a member of an outlawed Protestant gang.
He was back in jail within a year after the police identified him as the gunman who committed the I.R.A.'s last two killings before its cease-fire.
The prosecutors' case against Mr. Duffy collapsed after the main witness withdrew her testimony.
The arrests on Saturday came a week after the Real I.R.A. splinter group fired more than 60 bullets at several unarmed, off-duty soldiers outside an army base as they collected pizzas, the first of two deadly gun attacks against British security forces.
Two soldiers died and four other people were seriously wounded, including two deliverymen.
The I.R.A. dissidents next struck Monday when Constable Stephen Carroll, 48, was shot fatally in Craigavon. A different splinter group, the Continuity I.R.A., claimed responsibility.
A 17-year-old boy and two men have been arrested since Tuesday on suspicion of involvement in the killing of the police officer.
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5) The Blackout of the March 21 Mobilizations
Redbaiting on the Left
By JOHN WALSH
March 16, 2009
http://counterpunch.com/walsh03162009.html
The War on Iraq drags on with no clear end in sight. The war on Afghanistan is being escalated. The war on Pakistan has also been stepped up, a war undeclared by Congress, therefore unconstitutional and the basis for an impeachment. All this has happened since Obama took office.
And yet with one exception, no national antiwar demonstration has been called. Worse, to a large degree the one demonstration called, for this coming weekend, March 21, has been blacked out on the "respectable Left." This ugly fact was brought home to me quite strikingly yesterday at a meeting of single-payer activists, most also antiwar activists. No one with whom I spoke knew about the coming demonstration! Part of the reason is that some have tried to characterize this action as a fringe event, because it has been called by A.N.S.W.E.R., about which more below and with which this writer is not affiliated.
This mobilization has a list of endorsers which are cannot readily be dismissed. For starters: Cindy Sheehan, Code Pink, Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), Ron Kovic, Edward Asner, Mimi Kennedy, Ramsey Clark, School of the Americas Watch, San Francisco Labor Council (AFL-CIO) and many other labor locals as well as Green Party locals.
Despite this, the official peace movement, sock puppets of the Democrat Party, like MoveOn and UFPJ, is refusing to join or even to publicize this effort in any substantial way.
And this was predicted some time back by no less a monster than neocon McCarthyite David Horowitz who wrote in the Wall Street Journal not so many weeks ago as he gazed fondly on Obama's inauguration:
"Consider: When President Obama commits this nation to war against the Islamic terrorists, as he already has in Afghanistan, he will take millions of previously alienated and disaffected Americans with him, and they will support our troops in a way that most of his party has refused to support them until now. When another liberal, Bill Clinton went to war from the air, there was no anti-war movement in the streets or in his party's ranks to oppose him. That is an encouraging fact for us.
And so it has come to pass.
Now some in UFPJ have characterized A.N.S.W.E.R. as loony lefties because a leading member is a group calling itself "Marxist-Leninist." Zowie, kids! That is really scary! I remind such people that Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King were not deterred from allying with "Marxist-Leninists," nor were any of those who joined in the fight against Nazism and Colonialism. What is the big deal? If A.N.S.W.E.R. is the only group willing to organize a loud and clear street opposition to the Obama version of war and empire, I for one will not be deterred from joining in by a pathetic bit of redbaiting. And if only those who call themselves "Marxists-Leninists" are willing to call such an action, then perhaps there is something in the wisdom of Marx, and Lenin, that remains of value.
So the question really is, Which side are you on? That of the Obamanation and the Democrat Party version of war and empire? Or on the side of public, mass opposition to the war? I hope that as many as possible choose the latter course - in D.C., L.A or S.F.
John Walsh can be reached at John.Endwar@gmail.com
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6) Race may be factor in police shooting of unarmed elderly man
By Howard Witt
Tribune correspondent
"A 2005 Bureau of Justice Statistics survey, the most recent available, found that blacks are nearly four times as likely as whites to be subjected to force during police interactions."
"If I see three or four young black men walking down the street, I have to stop them and check their names," said Mills [Russel Mills, Homer, Louisiana Police Chief], who is white. "I want them to be afraid every time they see the police that they might get arrested. We're not out there trying to abuse and harass people-we're trying to protect the law-abiding citizens locked behind their doors in fear."
March 13, 2009
The article and a video interview with witnesses and correspondent Howard Witt at this site:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-race-shootings-webmar13,0,7686526.story
HOMER, La.-On the last afternoon of his life, Bernard Monroe was hosting a cookout for family and friends in front of his dilapidated home on Adams Street in this small northern Louisiana town.
Throat cancer had robbed the 73-year-old retired electric utility worker of his voice years ago, but family members said Monroe was clearly enjoying the commotion of a dozen of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren cavorting around him in the dusty, grassless yard.
Then the Homer police showed up, two white officers whose arrival caused the participants at the black family gathering to quickly fall silent.
Within moments, Monroe lay dead, shot by one of the officers as his family looked on.
Now the Louisiana State Police, the FBI and the U.S. Justice Department are swarming over this impoverished lumber town of 3,800, drawn by the allegations of numerous witnesses that police killed an unarmed, elderly black man without justification-and then moved a gun to make it look like the man had been holding it.
"We are closely monitoring the events in Homer," said Donald Washington, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Louisiana. "I understand that a number of allegations are being made that, if true, would be serious enough for us to follow up on very quickly."
Yet the Feb. 20 Homer incident was not an isolated case. Across the nation, in four cases in recent months, white police officers have been accused of unprovoked shootings of African Americans in what civil rights leaders say are illustrations of the potentially deadly consequences of racial profiling by police.
In the mostly white Houston suburb of Bellaire, a 23-year-old black man sitting in his own SUV in the driveway of his parents' home was shot and wounded on New Year's Eve by police who mistakenly believed he had stolen the vehicle. The case is under investigation.
In Oakland, a transit police officer has been charged with murder for allegedly shooting an unarmed black man in the back while he was restrained and lying face down on a train platform on New Year's Day.
In New Orleans, nine police officers are under investigation in the New Year's Day death of a 22-year-old black man who was struck by 14 bullets after an undercover team stopped his car. The police say the man raised a gun and fired at them, but the man's family disputes that.
"All the anecdotal information demonstrates that African Americans are the most frequent victims of zealous, inappropriate police activity that often winds up in a shooting," said Reggie Shuford, a senior attorney with the racial justice program at the American Civil Liberties Union. "It's a shoot first, ask questions later approach to policing."
The evidence is not merely anecdotal. The most recent national analysis from the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that blacks and Hispanics were nearly three times as likely as whites to be searched by police-and blacks were almost four times as likely as whites to be subjected to the use of force.
Psychologists are stepping up research into the implicit, unconscious racial biases that may be driving such statistics and affecting police behavior.
"If in fact police have implicit biases-if they automatically associate blacks with crime-then that would be relevant to an officer in a split-second, shoot-or-don't-shoot situation," said Lorie Fridell, a criminology professor at the University of South Florida who is creating a new anti-bias police training program with funding from the Justice Department. "Is the officer more inclined to believe he sees a gun in the hand of a black person, rather than a cell phone? I think that is possible."
In Monroe's case, friends and family members say they still don't understand why the beloved neighborhood patriarch ended up dead.
Four witnesses told the Tribune that Monroe was sitting outside his home in the late afternoon of Feb. 20, clutching a large sports-drink bottle, when two police officers pulled up and summoned Monroe's son, Shawn, for a conversation.
Shawn Monroe has a long record of arrests and convictions for assault and battery, and even though he was not wanted on any current warrants, he took off running into the house. One of the officers, a new hire named Tim Cox who had been on Homer's police force for only a few weeks, chased after him, reappearing moments later in the doorway.
Meanwhile, the witnesses said, the elder Monroe had started walking toward the front door, carrying only his drink bottle, to try to intervene. When Monroe got to the first step on the front porch, the witnesses said, Cox opened fire, striking him several times as adults and children stood nearby.
"He just shot him through the screen door," said Denise Nicholson, a family friend who said she was standing a few feet from Monroe. "After [Monroe] was on the ground, we kept asking the officer to call an ambulance, but all he did was get on his radio and say, 'Officer in distress.' "
As Monroe lay dying, the witnesses said, the second police officer, who has not been publicly identified, picked up a handgun that Monroe, an avid hunter, always kept in plain sight on the porch for protection. Using a police-issue blue latex glove, the officer grasped the gun by its handle, the witnesses said, and then ordered everyone to back away from the scene. The next thing they said they saw was the gun on the ground next to Monroe's body.
"I saw him pick up the gun off the porch," said Marcus Frazier, another witness. "I said, 'What are you doing?' The cop told me, 'Shut the hell up, you don't know what you're talking about.' "
The Homer police maintain that Monroe was holding a loaded gun when he was shot, but they are not commenting further on the case.
At least one fact surrounding the shooting is not in dispute: It took place amid long-standing tensions between Homer police and the residents of Monroe's crime-plagued black neighborhood.
"People here are afraid of the police," said Terry Willis, vice president of the Homer NAACP branch. "They harass black people, they stop people for no reason and rough them up without charging them with anything."
That is how it should be, responded Russell Mills, Homer's police chief, who noted the high rates of gun and drug arrests in the neighborhood.
"If I see three or four young black men walking down the street, I have to stop them and check their names," said Mills, who is white. "I want them to be afraid every time they see the police that they might get arrested. We're not out there trying to abuse and harass people-we're trying to protect the law-abiding citizens locked behind their doors in fear."
hwitt@tribune.com
Copyright (c) 2009, Chicago Tribune
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7) Shot that hit Grand Valley State University student was fired by Ottawa deputy, state police say
by The Grand Rapids Press
Thursday March 12, 2009, 9:39 AM
UPDATE: GVSU student shot by police during drug investigation was not armed, police reveal
http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2009/03/update_shot_that_hit_grand_val.html
An Ottawa County sheriff's deputy fired the shot that injured a Grand Valley State University student Wednesday night at his off-campus apartment, a top investigator confirmed this morning.
The deputy was among at least five officers executing a search warrant for drugs when he fired the shot through an open sliding door at the rear of the apartment, said Capt. Gary Gorski, district commander for the Michigan State Police.
The 20-year-old student was in stable condition at Spectrum Health Butterworth Hospital in Grand Rapids, police said.
"I don't yet know all the details that occurred," Gorski said. "Preliminary indications are the individual was going toward the door. A shot was fired, striking him."
Ottawa County Undersheriff Greg Steigenga said the deputy is a 12-year member of the department, assigned the past two years to the West Michigan Enforcement Team.
The team investigates drug crimes and includes members of many police agencies.
The 9 p.m. shooting at Campus View Apartments caused police to lock down the building, but residents were not evacuated and were never in danger, Gorski said.
GVSU's Web site said police were entering the student's apartment at 10255 42nd Ave. at the time of the gunfire.
Gorski said the warrant was part of a drug investigation conducted with the Ottawa County Sheriff's Department and other agencies.
This is the second shooting involving an Ottawa County deputy in less than a month.
On Feb. 22, a deputy shot and killed a man inside a home he set on fire, a half-hour after the man repeatedly stabbed his estranged wife at her workplace.
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8) Derek Copp family hires lawyer; Fred Dilley questions police tactics
by John Agar | The Grand Rapids Press
Monday March 16, 2009, 10:07 AM
http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2009/03/derek_copp_family_hires_lawyer.html
GRAND RAPIDS -- The family of injured shooting victim Derek Copp has hired a lawyer who is questioning why the Grand Valley State University student was shot by police and the basis of a search warrant to look for marijuana in his off-campus apartment.
"We have some very important questions about what appears to be some shocking police activity," Grand Rapids attorney Fred Dilley told The Press this morning.
Dilley questioned the safety and necessity of raiding a student's apartment, entering through a rear slider, and "manner in which it was served and executed."
"The question is, is that a sufficient basis to use deadly force to enter the apartment? Is that a sufficient basis to use deadly force to enter the apartment when there was no resistance and the officer was in no apparent danger? ... If there was marijuana in the apartment, is that a sufficient basis to use deadly force?"
Copp, 20, who is recovering at Spectrum Health Butterworth Campus, was shot in the chest Wednesday night in his Georgetown Township apartment as the West Michigan Enforcement Team, or WEMET, executed a search warrant. The bullet entered his upper right chest, traveled down and hit his lung and liver, lodging in his back. Doctors removed the bullet.
Copp was unarmed when shot, police say. His family disputes any notion he sold drugs.
Dilley would not say if police found any drugs.
His client was shot by a 12-year Ottawa County sheriff's deputy who was assigned to WEMET, comprised of police from Allegan, Ottawa and Muskegon counties.
"Someone apparently said there was marijuana in the apartment," Dilley said.
Dilley said he is still trying to determine exactly what happened, and said he has confidence that state police will conduct a thorough review.
He would not disclose contents of a search-warrant affidavit. In most affidavits, police use information from confidential informants to get warrants signed by judges.
Dilley represented Joseph O'Brien, who was paid a $1.2 million settlement after a 1987 standoff with Grand Rapids police left him paralyzed after he was shot. Dilley is a long-time president of the Western Michigan Federal Bar Association.
He said that police have to be held accountable.
"The service of a search warrant is a key element of law enforcement, no question about it. When it's done properly and safely, it' s an important law enforcement tool. When it's not done properly, it's a tremendous invasion of people's constitutional rights."
E-mail John Agar: jagar@grpress.com
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9) Feds investigate Inglewood police after officer-involved shootings
The U.S. Justice Department launches a review after officers last year shot and killed four people -- three unarmed -- within four months.
By Ari B. Bloomekatz and Jack Leonard
From the Los Angeles Times
March 13, 2009
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-me-inglewood-police13-2009mar13,0,7818388.story
The U.S. Department of Justice has launched an investigation into the Inglewood Police Department in the wake of several officer-involved shootings of unarmed suspects and other incidents in which the agency has been accused of using excessive force.
A Justice Department spokeswoman described the investigation as a "pattern or practice" inquiry into the Police Department that is being handled by the federal agency's civil rights division in Washington.
The probe marks the second ongoing investigation into the department, which was the focus of community protests last year when officers shot and killed four people -- three of them unarmed -- in the span of four months. The L.A. County Office of Independent Review, which monitors the Sheriff's Department, began probing the Police Department's tactics last year at the request of the city.
The announcement also comes less than three months after a Times investigation found that Inglewood police officers repeatedly resorted to physical or deadly force in the last several years against suspects who were unarmed or accused of minor offenses.
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), who was among several politicians who called for an outside investigation into possible police misconduct, said she was gratified by the Justice Department's decision.
"I have been extremely concerned about the alarming number of police-involved shootings in Inglewood," she said in a statement Thursday.
City officials said federal investigators plan to examine past procedures and tactics involving force used by Inglewood officers.
"We will cooperate completely in all aspects of this investigation," Inglewood Police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks said in a statement. "We have been at work for months in implementing reforms aimed at improving how our officers go about their jobs."
The Justice Department alerted the city by letter Wednesday afternoon that the agency was beginning a review of the department, Lt. Mike McBride said.
The purpose of such reviews is to ensure proper management and oversight at police departments and, if needed, to bring federal lawsuits to pressure local authorities into reforming their operations.
The L.A. County district attorney's office is also reviewing each of the shootings for possible criminal charges against the officers -- as it does for all police shootings in the county that result in injuries or death.
Since 2003, Inglewood police have shot and killed 11 people, five of them unarmed, according to law enforcement records reviewed by The Times. Among them was Jule Dexter.
Dexter was shot in the back and the head in June 2005 after being detained for drinking in public. The officer who fired the shots said Dexter was slow to obey an order to remove his hands from his pockets and appeared to fumble with what the officer feared was a weapon.
But witnesses said Dexter, 27, was shot as he reached to pull up his slipping pants. The city paid $725,000 to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit brought by Dexter's family. The officer was suspended for 16 days.
That shooting, along with others, prompted some officers to complain about the department's policy on when to shoot and about a lack of training.
In addition, the department has been criticized over its use of electric stun guns. The Times found that two Inglewood officers were involved in shooting unarmed suspects with Tasers four times in five weeks.
Waters called on the Justice Department to intervene after the Aug. 31 killing of Eddie Felix Franco, a 56-year-old homeless man who had a realistic-looking toy gun in his waistband. Authorities said officers fired at least 47 rounds at Franco when he appeared to reach for the gun. A nearby motorist was struck and grazed in the head by one of the bullets.
Franco was the fourth person killed in as many months. The others were:
* Michael Byoune, 19, who was killed on Mother's Day, May 11, after he went to a hamburger stand with friends. Police officials said officers believed they had come under fire when they killed Byoune and wounded his two friends. None of the men were armed.
* Ruben Walton Ortega, 23, an alleged gang member who was shot and killed July 1 by an officer who said Ortega reached into his waistband as he ran from police. He was unarmed. Last week, prosecutors concluded that the officer "honestly believed he was in imminent danger" when he opened fire.
* Kevin Wicks, 38, a postal worker who was killed inside his home July 21 when police said he raised a gun at Officer Brian Ragan, who was responding to a report of a family disturbance in Wicks' apartment complex. Ragan was also one of two officers involved in Byoune's shooting and remains on paid leave, McBride said.
Inglewood Councilman Daniel Tabor said he believed the Justice Department would find that the city had taken swift measures to reform police training after last year's shootings.
About 70% of the agency's 191 officers have been enrolled in a 120-hour training program to improve tactics, according to the department.
Adrianne Sears, chairwoman of the Inglewood Citizen Police Oversight Commission, said she hoped that the Justice Department's investigation would "help to restore the public's trust in our department."
ari.bloomekatz@latimes.com
jack.leonard@latimes.com
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10) Find out if there is a Rachel Corrie Remembrance Day event near you by clicking here. If not, plan an emergency vigil and let others know by posting your event here. A flyer for use at your vigil can be found here.
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=wWPR6SBiQZx3qbTxYhj0lA7xTCA4xcSe
For more information about Tristan's shooting and updates on his condition, including links to news articles, see the website of the International Solidarity Movement. Please note that the video on this website is graphic and disturbing.
http://www.endtheoccupation.org/(http://palsolidarity.org/2009/03/5324
Everyday, there is more sad and terrible news of people injured or killed in the occupied territories of Palestine. On Friday, just days before the anniversary of the killing of Rachel Corrie by Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza, we heard of the serious injury inflicted by the IDF on Tristan Anderson during a protest in the West Bank. Just like Rachel, Tristan is a young person from the U.S. working to end the Israeli Occupation.
Please join the vigils being organized by -- or plan your own vigil as part of -- the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation's solidarity actions.
Take care,
Judith LeBlanc
UFPJ Organizing Coordinator
Below is the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation's email to its members this morning:
On March 13, 2009, Tristan Anderson, a U.S. citizen from Oakland, CA, was critically injured when he was shot in the head by a high-velocity tear gas canister fired by the Israeli army.
Tristan was shot while photographing a weekly demonstration against the building of the Apartheid Wall in the West Bank village of Ni'lin. The Wall, which was declared to be illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004, cuts off Ni'lin from much of its agricultural lands. Since 2008, Israel has killed four unarmed Palestinians during these weekly protests: Yousef Amira (17), Ahmed Mousa (10), Arafat Rateb Khawaje (22), and Mohammed Khawaje (20).
This incident comes almost exactly six years after the death of U.S. peaceactivist Rachel Corrie. Rachel was killed by the Israeli military with a Caterpillar bulldozer as she was nonviolently trying to protect a Palestinian home from being destroyed on March 16, 2003.
Tristan's family has released a statement informing supporters that Tristan's condition has stabilized and that he has been moved from emergency care to specialized neurological intensive care unit in the Tel Hashomer hospital outside of Tel Aviv. The family is "deeply hopeful that Tristan will recover" and is "looking forward to when he is stable enough that he can return home to the care and comfort of his family and community."
"In the meantime, we are deeply appreciative of the excellent care he's receiving, the amazing support that Gaby [his girlfriend] and his friends are providing, and the thoughts and prayers of those around the world who are holding him in their hearts and minds. It matters tremendously as we all hold faith for Tristan to recover and return home. Again, we are so very grateful for the outpouring of love and support for Tristan and our family."
Cindy and Craig Corrie, the parents of Rachel Corrie, have released a statement on the 6th anniversary of their daughter's death: "On this anniversary, Rachel would want us all to hold Tristan Anderson and his family and these Palestinians [killed in Ni'lin] and their families in our thoughts and prayers, and we ask everyone to do so?.[The] attacks on all the people of Gaza and the recent one on Tristan Anderson in Ni'lin cry out for investigation and accountability."
TAKE ACTION
Across the country, organizations and individuals have planned vigils and actions today to commemorate Rachel Corrie. We call on supporters to join these events and to call for justice and accountability for all innocent victims of Israeli occupation.
Find out if there is a Rachel Corrie Remembrance Day event near you by clicking here. If not, plan an emergency vigil and let others know by posting your event here. A flyer for use at your vigil can be found here.
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=wWPR6SBiQZx3qbTxYhj0lA7xTCA4xcSe
For more information about Tristan's shooting and updates on his condition, including links to news articles, see the website of the International Solidarity Movement. Please note that the video on this website is graphic and disturbing.
http://www.endtheoccupation.org/(http://palsolidarity.org/2009/03/5324
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11) STOP THE EVICTIONS
From the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter
March 16, 2009,
http://activistnewsletter.blogspot.com/
Watch the video:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/28303876#28303876
STOP THE EVICTIONS!
As the U.S. government spends trillions of dollars to bail out the bankers
and investors whose greed has plunged our country and the world into the
Great Recession, and while companies such as A.I.G. are paying fat bonuses
to executives with taxpayer bailout money, millions of American families
are being evicted from their mortgaged or rental homes and apartments.
MSNBC videographers recently followed the police in various cities as they
evicted some of these families. It's sad to watch it but it is a view of
the often concealed tragedy being inflicted upon our people, and should be
watched. This tragedy is the responsibility of an economic system that sees
human beings as little more than cogs in its productive machinery,
consumers of its products, the source of its profits and, when their usefulness ends,
as disposable trash.
Watch the video:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/28303876#28303876
STOP THE EVICTIONS
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12) Bracing for a Backlash Over Wall Street Bailouts
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
News Analysis
March 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/us/politics/16assess.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON - The Obama administration is increasingly concerned about a populist backlash against banks and Wall Street, worried that anger at financial institutions could also end up being directed at Congress and the White House and could complicate President Obama's agenda.
The administration's sharp rebuke of the American International Group on Sunday for handing out $165 million in executive bonuses - Lawrence H. Summers, director of the president's National Economic Council, described it as "outrageous" on "This Week" on ABC - marks the latest effort by the White House to distance itself from abuses that could feed potentially disruptive public anger.
"We've got enormous problems that need to be addressed," David Axelrod, Mr. Obama's senior adviser, said in an interview. "And it's hard to address because there's a lot of anger about the irresponsibility that led us to this point."
"This has been welling up for a long time," he said.
Mr. Obama's aides said any surge of such a sentiment could complicate efforts to win Congressional approval for the additional bailout packages that Mr. Obama has signaled will be necessary to stabilize the banking system.
As it is, there have already been moves in Congress to limit compensation to executives at banks and Wall Street firms that are receiving government help to survive.
Beyond that, a shifting political mood challenges Mr. Obama's political skills, as he seeks to acknowledge the anger without becoming a target of it. A central question for Mr. Obama is whether his cool style - "in a time of crisis, we cannot afford to govern out of anger," he said in his address to Congress last month - will prove effective when the country may be feeling more emotional.
Even as Mr. Summers was denouncing A.I.G. for the bonuses, he suggested that there was little if anything the government could do to stop them, seconding the conclusion of Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. But even if their reasoning was legally sound, they also risked having the administration look ineffectual in the face of what Mr. Summers said was the worst financial abuse of the last 18 months, since the economy began turning down in earnest.
"Never underestimate the capacity of angry populism in times of economic stress," said Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and labor secretary under President Bill Clinton. "A big challenge for President Obama will be to maintain a rational and tactical public discussion in the midst of this severe downturn. The desire for culprits at times like this is strong."
In a further development, A.I.G. on Sunday named dozens of financial institutions that benefited from its huge rescue loan from the Federal Reserve last fall. The list included Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Wachovia.
On Monday, the White House is expected to unveil proposals to help small businesses, an effort to make clear that the administration is not only focusing its attentions on Wall Street and big corporations like the automakers.
But the financial crisis is the most acute problem facing the administration, one it will not be able to play down. Christina D. Romer, the White House's chief economist, said Sunday on "Meet the Press" on NBC that the administration was close to unveiling details of its plan to remove the worst of the bad assets from the books of banks, a move sure to refocus attention on winners and losers from bailouts.
The disclosure that A.I.G., which has received $170 billion in government assistance to remain afloat and avert a cascade of failures in the financial system, is paying bonuses to its executives is the latest in a series of episodes that Mr. Obama's aides said seemed to be feeding a resurgence of public anger.
The public responded angrily to previous disclosures of large bonuses on Wall Street, to auto executives who flew on corporate jets to Washington for Congressional bailout hearings, and to last week's face-off between Jon Stewart of "The Daily Show" and Jim Cramer, the CNBC financial commentator, over the network's reporting on the crisis.
"There's unquestionably a strong populist surge out there," said Joel Benenson, Mr. Obama's pollster, citing his own polls and focus groups. "It's been brewing for close to four years. For the last two years, Americans were clearly indicating that they believe that one of the biggest obstacles to progress on America's toughest challenges - notably health care and energy independence - was the influence of special interests and corporate interests on the agenda in Washington."
A New York Times/CBS News Poll in February found that 83 percent of respondents said the government should cap the amount of compensation earned by executives of companies that are getting federal assistance.
Mr. Obama's advisers argued that to at least some extent, this was a sentiment they could tap to push through his measures in Congress, including raising taxes on the wealthy. They pointed out that in his speech to Congress, Mr. Obama denounced corporations that "use taxpayer money to pad their paychecks or buy fancy drapes or disappear on a private jet."
"The president has been very clear about this," Mr. Axelrod said. "There is reason for anger, but we also have to solve the problem. We need a functioning credit system. That's our responsibility, and he intends to meet it."
Still, aides acknowledged the risks of a backlash as Mr. Obama tries to signal that he shares American anger but pushes for more bail-out money for banks and Wall Street.
For all his political skills and his capturing of the nation's desire for change in the 2008 election, Mr. Obama, a product of Harvard Law School who calls upscale Hyde Park in Chicago home, has shown little inclination to strike a more populist tone. The danger, aides said, is that if he were to become identified as an advocate for the banks and Wall Street, people could take out their anger on him.
"The change now is you have a free-floating economic anxiety that has expressed itself in a kind of lashing out at those being bailed out and people who are bailing out," Michael Kazin, a professor at Georgetown University who has written extensively on populism. "There's not really a sense of what the solution is."
"I do think there's a potential for a 'damn everybody in power' kind of sentiment," Mr. Kazin said.
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13) The mysterious case of Mohamed al-Dainy
The authorities claim he planned a suicide bombing in parliament. His allies insist the Iraqi MP is a respected human rights campaigner. But no one knows what has happened to him.
By Robert Fisk
Saturday, 14 March 2009
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-mysterious-case-of-mohamed-aldainy-1644905.html
Where is Mohamed al-Dainy? In prison in Baghdad? On the run? Or is this Sunni Muslim Iraqi member of parliament and human rights defender facing torture or even death in his own country? Certainly that is what his brother Ahmed fears. "We are afraid for his life and the lives of our family members in Baghdad," he says from the safety of Damascus. "The whole family fears they are in direct threat from the Iraqi government."
Robert Fisk's World: The West should feel shame over its collusion with torturers
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government denies that it has arrested or imprisoned the disappeared man - even though government agents tried to detain him at Baghdad airport on 25 February after his flight to Amman was ordered to return to Iraq when it was almost halfway to Jordan with an Iraqi parliamentary delegation.
The authorities have alleged that he planned a suicide bombing in the Iraqi parliament on 12 April 2007, which killed eight people including a colleague from his own political party, a claim that the Geneva-based human rights group Alkarama, which is also fearful for Mr al-Dainy's safety, says is "politically motivated" because of the missing man's exposure of secret prisons and torture in Iraq.
Many Iraqis have stories of illegal prisons, mistreatment and even rape by security forces nominally controlled by al-Maliki's government - some true, some highly exaggerated - but Mr al-Dainy is a respected human rights investigator who last year flew to Geneva as a guest of Alkarama, which covers the Arab world, to discuss his work with UN officials, the International Red Cross and several NGOs. In Switzerland, he presented a 16-minute documentary which included video footage he had himself taken in "secret" prisons.
His disappearance last month was as frightening as the charges laid against him by the government. After his flight returned to Baghdad airport, government agents boarded the aircraft and formally arrested Mr al-Dainy in front of his fellow parliamentarians and other passengers. First reports said that he was taken from the airport in a convoy of security vehicles. Later information suggested that he left the airport with fellow MPs and asked to be let out of his car on the airport road to avoid arrest at a government checkpoint. Mr al-Dainy's bodyguards were supposedly arrested for their part in his "escape".
Those close to his family suggest that he was captured and detained in the Kadimiya prison, then later transferred to Jadriya jail, although the authorities deny all knowledge of this. Family members say security forces have raided their homes in Baghdad and that the missing man's 85-year-old father has been arrested. Mr al-Dainy denied government claims of involvement in the 2007 suicide bombing, saying that a nephew and his own senior security guard had been tortured before "confessing" on television that he had been behind the killings.
Alkarama believes the whole affair started after Mr al-Dainy issued a statement in Geneva on 30 October last year in which he appealed for international help to end the suffering of Iraqis held in prisons across the country. "Through my work, I have access to many official documents," he said. "I have many people and officials from within the government secretly giving me documents ... I have many, many documents from official ministries which confirm extra-judicial killings in the detention centres, the problem of systematic rape in the women's prisons and about the ... human rights situation in Iraq."
Mr al-Dainy also condemned America's "massive killings" in Fallujah, adding that George Bush's 2003 invasion was illegal and that Iraq remains under occupation.
In more detailed allegations, Mr al-Dainy stated that 26,000 people were detained by US forces in Iraq - but that a further 40,000 are held in 37 official government-controlled prisons. "In one secret prison I visited, hundreds of prisoners were crammed into each of the six rooms. There are all kinds of people, men, women and children. In one prison, there were 23 minors." He condemned the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (Unami) as ineffective and complained that officials wanting to investigate human rights abuses were not being granted permission to visit prisons.
Mr al-Dainy, like many other Sunnis, is highly critical of Iranian involvement in Iraq and warned officials in Geneva of Iran's influence over the Maliki government - but he says that he himself managed as an MP to visit 13 jails, three of them jointly controlled by US and Iraqi forces. "I'm an MP and this puts me in danger," he told his audience in Geneva. "But I'm going back to Baghdad and it will not stop us."
Prescient words. As his brother Ahmed al-Dainy told The Independent: "We can do nothing with the government because they are refusing to talk or deal with us. Any contact we make, by phone or in person, is cut off immediately.
"The most important work that can now be done is from international human rights organisations and whatever international pressure can be put on the Iraqi government."
Dal LaMagna,
1918 17th Street NW
Washington, DC 20009
In DC - 202-483-1918
DC fax 202-483-0576
cell:202-441-9500
email: dallamagna@gmail.com
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14) The Gift That Keeps on Giving
Editorial
March 17, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/opinion/17tue1.html
After four bailouts totaling some $170 billion, the American International Group has finally answered some of the questions about where the money went. Unfortunately, the answers have only succeeded in raising many more questions.
On Saturday, Americans learned that A.I.G. planned to pay $165 million in bonuses to executives and employees in the very division that caused the problems that led to the federal bailouts. Taxpayers have every right to be outraged, and President Obama was right to acknowledge that outrage on Monday, when he vowed to try to stop the payments.
Mr. Obama's tough talk, however, contrasted with comments made by his top economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, and by the Treasury Department. They had already expressed dismay but said that legally they could do nothing to stop the bonuses, which, in fact, had already mostly been paid on Friday.
It is frustrating enough for Americans to try to figure out which part of that mixed message reflects the administration's true position. But the bigger issue is that the bonuses are something of a distraction. Seen by themselves, the payments are huge, but they are less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the money already committed to the A.I.G. bailout.
Which brings us to the second disclosure of recent days. It was common knowledge that most of the A.I.G. bailout money had been funneled to the company's trading partners - banks and other financial firms that would have lost big if A.I.G. were allowed to fail. On Sunday, after much prodding by Congress and the public, A.I.G. finally released the partners' identities, along with amounts paid thus far to make them whole.
The largest single recipient was Goldman Sachs ($12.9 billion). The amount - hardly chump change even by Wall Street standards - appears to contradict earlier assertions by Goldman that its exposure to risk from A.I.G. was "not material" and that its positions were offset by collateral or hedges. If so, why didn't the hedges pay up instead of the American taxpayers?
Other recipients include 20 European banks that received a total of $58.8 billion and Merrill Lynch ($6.8 billion), Bank of America ($5.2 billion) and Citigroup ($2.3 billion).
Altogether, the disclosures account for $107.8 billion in A.I.G. bailout money. Which leaves us wondering about the rest of the money. Another $30 billion was added to the A.I.G. bailout pot this month and must be accounted for as soon as it is spent. That leaves some $32 billion unaccounted for. Where did it go?
Taxpayers also need to be told the precise nature of the banks' dealings with A.I.G. Appearing on "60 Minutes" on Sunday, Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, described A.I.G. as a company "that made all kinds of unconscionable bets." Well, on the other side of those bets are the banks that received the bailout money. It is possible that one side of a bet is acting unconscionably and that another side is acting in good faith. But it's also possible that both sides are trying to play an unseemly game to their own advantage.
Congress must investigate, and the new disclosures give them enough to get started. Untangling all the entanglements is not only essential to understanding how the system became so badly broken, but also to restoring faith in the government that it is up to the task of fixing it.
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15) Drones Are Weapons of Choice in Fighting Qaeda
"The Guard members, along with Air Force crews at a base in the Nevada desert, are 7,000 to 8,000 miles away from the planes they are flying. Most of the crews sit at 1990s-style computer banks filled with screens, inside dimly lit trailers. Many fly missions in both Iraq and Afghanistan on the same day."
By CHRISTOPHER DREW
March 17, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/business/17uav.html?ref=world
A missile fired by an American drone killed at least four people late Sunday at the house of a militant commander in northwest Pakistan, the latest use of what intelligence officials have called their most effective weapon against Al Qaeda.
And Pentagon officials say the remotely piloted planes, which can beam back live video for up to 22 hours, have done more than any other weapons system to track down insurgents and save American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The planes have become one of the military's favorite weapons despite many shortcomings resulting from the rush to get them into the field.
An explosion in demand for the drones is contributing to new thinking inside the Pentagon about how to develop and deploy new weapons systems.
Air Force officials acknowledge that more than a third of their unmanned Predator spy planes - which are 27 feet long, powered by a high-performance snowmobile engine, and cost $4.5 million apiece - have crashed, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Pilots, who fly them from trailers halfway around the world using joysticks and computer screens, say some of the controls are clunky. For example, the missile-firing button sits dangerously close to the switch that shuts off the plane's engines. Pilots are also in such short supply that the service recently put out a call for retirees to help.
But military leaders say they can easily live with all that.
Since the height of the cold war, the military has tended to chase the boldest and most technologically advanced solution to every threat, leading to long delays and cost overruns that result in rarely used fighter jets that cost $143 million apiece, and plans for a $3 billion destroyer that the Navy says it can no longer afford.
Now the Pentagon appears to be warming up to Voltaire's saying, "The perfect is the enemy of the good."
In speeches, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has urged his weapons buyers to rush out "75 percent solutions over a period of months" rather than waiting for "gold-plated" solutions.
And as the Obama administration prepares its first budget, officials say they plan to free up more money for simpler systems like drones that can pay dividends now, especially as fighting intensifies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
A rare behind-the-scenes look at the use of the Predator shows both the difficulties and the rewards in pushing out weapons more quickly.
"I'll be really candid," said Col. Eric Mathewson, who directs the Air Force's task force on unmanned aerial systems. "We're on the ragged edge."
He said the service has been scrambling to train more pilots, who fly the drones via satellite links from the western United States, to keep up with a near-tripling of daily missions in the last two years.
Field commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the Air Force is in charge of the Predators, say their ability to linger over an area for hours, streaming instant video warnings of insurgent activity, has been crucial to reducing threats from roadside bombs and identifying terrorist compounds. The C.I.A. is in charge of drone flights in Pakistan, where more than three dozen missiles strikes have been launched against Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders in recent months.
Considered a novelty a few years ago, the Air Force's fleet has grown to 195 Predators and 28 Reapers, a new and more heavily armed cousin of the Predator. Both models are made by General Atomics, a contractor based in San Diego. Including drones that the Army has used to counter roadside bombs and tiny hand-launched models that can help soldiers to peer past the next hill or building, the total number of military drones has soared to 5,500, from 167 in 2001.
The urgent need for more drones has meant bypassing usual procedures. Some of the 70 Predator crashes, for example, stemmed from decisions to deploy the planes before they had completed testing and to hold off replacing control stations to avoid interrupting the supply of intelligence.
"The context was to do just the absolute minimum needed to sustain the fight now, and accept the risks, while making fixes as you go along," Colonel Mathewson said.
It is easier, of course, for the military to take more risks with unmanned planes.
Complaints about civilian casualties, particularly from strikes in Pakistan, have stirred some concerns among human rights advocates. Military officials say the ability of drones to observe targets for lengthy periods makes strikes more accurate. They also said they do not fire if they think civilians are nearby.
The Predators were still undergoing basic testing when they were rushed into use in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s and then hastily armed with missiles after the September 2001 terrorist attacks.
But it was only after the military turned to new counterinsurgency techniques in early 2007, that demand for drones became almost insatiable. Since then, Air Force Lt. Gen. Gary North, the air-component commander for the combined forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, said the service has gone to "amazing lengths" to increase their use.
The Predators and Reapers are now flying 34 surveillance patrols each day in Iraq and Afghanistan, up from 12 in 2006. They are also transmitting 16,000 hours of video each month, some of it directly to troops on the ground.
The strains of these growing demands were evident on a recent visit to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Ariz., one of four bases where Air National Guard units have been ordered to full-time duty to help alleviate crew shortages.
The Guard members, along with Air Force crews at a base in the Nevada desert, are 7,000 to 8,000 miles away from the planes they are flying. Most of the crews sit at 1990s-style computer banks filled with screens, inside dimly lit trailers. Many fly missions in both Iraq and Afghanistan on the same day.
On a recent day, at 1:15 p.m. in Tucson - 1:15 the next morning in Afghanistan - a pilot and sensor operator were staring at gray-toned video from the Predator's infrared camera, which can make even the darkest night scene surprisingly clear.
The crew was scanning a road, looking for - but not finding - signs of anyone planting improvised explosive devices or lying in wait for a convoy.
As the Predator circled at 16,000 feet, the dark band of a river and craggy hills came into view, along with ribbons of farmland.
"We spend 70 to 80 percent of our time doing this, just scanning roads," said the pilot, Matthew Morrison.
At other times, the crews monitor insurgent compounds and watch over troops in battle. "When you're on the radio with a guy on the ground, and he is out of breath and you can hear the weapons fire in the background, you are every bit as engaged as if you were actually there," Major Morrison said.
When Predators spot possible targets, officers monitoring video at command centers in Iraq and Afghanistan decide whether to order an attack.
Col. Gregg A. Davies, commander of the group that flies Predators for the Arizona Guard, said fighter planes with bigger bombs are often sent in to make the strikes. In all, the Air Force says, Predators and Reapers shot missiles on 244 of the 10,949 missions in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008.
Air Force officials said a few crew members have had a difficult time watching the strikes. And some pilots said it can be hard to transition from being a computer-screen warrior to dinner at home or their children's soccer games.
Another problem has been that few pilots wanted to give up flying fighter jets to operate drones. Given the shortages, the Air Force has temporarily blocked transfers out of the program. It also has begun training officers as drone pilots who have had little or no experience flying conventional planes.
Colonel Mathewson, director of the Air Force's task force on unmanned aerial systems, said that while upgrades have been made to control stations, the service plans to eventually shift to simpler and more intuitive ground systems that could allow one remote pilot to control several drones. Now, pilots say, it takes up to 17 steps - including entering data into pull-down windows - to fire a missile.
And even though 13 of the 70 Predator crashes have occurred over the last 18 months, officials said the accident rate has fallen as flying hours have shot up.
All told, 55 have been lost because of equipment failure, operator errors or weather. Four were shot down in Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq; 11 were lost in combat situations, like running out of fuel while protecting troops under fire.
Given the demand for video intelligence, the Air Force is equipping 50 manned turbo-prop planes with similar cameras.
And it is developing new camera systems for Reapers that could vastly expand the intelligence each plane can collect.
P. W. Singer, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution, said the Predators have already had "an incredible effect," though the remote control raised obvious questions about whether the military could become "more cavalier" about using force.
Still, he said, "these systems today are very much Model T Fords. These things will only get more advanced."
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16) Soldiers’ Accounts of Gaza Killings Raise Furor in Israel
By ETHAN BRONNER
March 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/world/middleeast/20gaza.html?hp
JERUSALEM — In the two months since Israel ended its military assault on Gaza, Palestinians and international rights groups have accused it of excessive force and wanton killing in that operation, but the Israeli military has said it followed high ethical standards and took great care to avoid civilian casualties.
Now testimony is emerging from within the ranks of soldiers and officers alleging a permissive attitude toward the killing of civilians and wanton destruction of property that is sure to inflame the domestic and international debate about the army’s conduct in Gaza. On Thursday, the military’s chief advocate general ordered an investigation into a soldier’s account of a sniper killing a woman and her two children who walked too close to a designated no-go area by mistake, and another account of a sharpshooter who killed an elderly woman who came within 100 yards of a commandeered house.
When asked why that elderly woman was killed, a squad commander was quoted as saying: “What’s great about Gaza — you see a person on a path, he doesn’t have to be armed, you can simply shoot him. In our case it was an old woman on whom I did not see any weapon when I looked. The order was to take down the person, this woman, the minute you see her. There are always warnings, there is always the saying, ‘Maybe he’s a terrorist.’ What I felt was, there was a lot of thirst for blood.”
The testimonies by soldiers, leaked to the newspapers Maariv and Haaretz, appeared in a journal published by a military preparatory course at the Oranim Academic College in the northern town of Tivon. The newspapers promised to release more such anecdotal accounts on Friday, without saying how many.
The academy’s director, Dany Zamir, told Israel Radio, “Those were very harsh testimonies about unjustified shooting of civilians and destruction of property that conveyed an atmosphere in which one feels entitled to use unrestricted force against Palestinians.”
Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio that he believed such incidents to be exceptions, adding, “The Israeli Army is the most moral in the world, and I know what I’m talking about because I know what took place in the former Yugoslavia, in Iraq.”
It was clear that Mr. Zamir felt that his concerns, which he had raised earlier in a letter to the military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, had not been taken seriously and that was why he published the testimonies.
Since the war ended, others have raised similar questions, generating a heated debate within military circles.
“According to the code, a soldier has to do his utmost to avoid civilian casualties and that involves taking some risk,” said Moshe Halbertal, a Jewish philosophy professor at Hebrew University who, along with three others, rewrote the military ethics code eight years ago. “That is the question we have to struggle with. From the testimonies of these soldiers, it sounds like they didn’t practice this norm.”
Amir Marmor, a 33-year-old history graduate student in Jerusalem and a military reservist, said in an interview with The New York Times that he was stunned to discover the way civilian casualties were discussed in training discussions before his tank unit entered Gaza in January. "Shoot and don’t worry about the consequences,” was the message from the top commanders, he said. Speaking of a lieutenant colonel who briefed the troops, Mr. Marmor said, “His whole demeanor was extremely gung ho. This is very, very different from my usual experience. I have been doing reserve duty for 12 years, and it was always an issue how to avoid causing civilian injuries. He said in this operation we are not taking any chances. Morality aside, we have to do our job. We will cry about it later.”
Some 1,300 people were killed in the Gaza war, but how many of them were combatants remains a matter of controversy. Israel lost about 10 soldiers [at least four of the ten were killed by friendly fire: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/129352] in Gaza, some because of fire by its own forces.
The Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which has documented the Gaza deaths, says that about two-thirds of the 1,300 were civilians, among them 121 women and 288 children, which it defines as anyone 18 and younger.
But the Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Israel said Thursday that it had analyzed the Palestinian center’s names and found that some that it listed as civilians were identified as combatants on Hamas-related Web sites. Some listed as children were 17-year-olds with guns, it said, adding that more than 500 of those described by the center as civilians it considered “unknowns” because most were men of combat age whose activities could not be easily traced.
It argued that the proportion of women and children among the dead was relatively low, showing that Israel had not killed in an indiscriminate fashion.
Thursday’s revelations caused an immediate uproar here, with some soldiers and reservists said they did not recognize the stories being told as accurate.
Gur Rosenblat, a company commander during the Gaza operation, said in an interview: “To say that people were killed without justification — the opposite was true. We put soldiers at risk to prevent harming their civilians.”
Israeli experts noted that Palestinian women had served as suicide bombers in the past so that soldiers in Gaza did not always know when a woman was approaching whether she was a threat.
One of the soldiers’ testimonies involved the killing of a family. The soldier said: “We had taken over the house, and the family was released and told to go right. A mother and two children got confused and went left. The sniper on the roof wasn’t told that this was O.K. and that he shouldn’t shoot. You can say he just did what he was told.”
Much of what happened in Gaza, some military experts said, was in reaction to the way events unfolded in the second Lebanon war in 2006 when Hezbollah caused many Israeli casualties.
In that war, when Israeli soldiers took over a house, they sometimes found themselves shot from a house next door. The result was that in Gaza, many houses next to those commandeered by troops were destroyed to avoid that risk.
Still, Israeli ethicists say they are troubled by what they have heard.
“Unfortunately, I think that selective use of killing civilians has been very much on the agenda for fighting terror,” said Yaron Ezrahi, a political scientist at Hebrew University who has been lecturing at defense colleges. “The army believes that a weak spot of Israeli deterrence is its strong commitment not to kill civilians, and there has grown the sense that it might have to temporarily overcome that weakness in order to restore deterrence.”
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17) A Prison of Words
By NOAH FELDMAN
March 19, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/opinion/19feldman.html
Cambridge, Mass.
HAS the Obama administration changed the legal rules for detaining suspects in the war on terrorism, or is it continuing in the footsteps of the Bush administration?
We got a clue last week when the Justice Department filed an important document “refining” the government’s position in lawsuits over those held at Guantánamo Bay. Hailed by supporters as a leap forward, yet criticized by human rights groups as being little different from what came before, the filing reveals a distinctive approach to constitutional law. Cautious and modest where George W. Bush was ambitious and brash, Mr. Obama still claims the authority necessary to sustain almost everything his predecessor did.
Perhaps what’s most important here is what Mr. Obama’s lawyers do not say. The Bush White House long insisted that the president had inherent power as commander in chief to do whatever it took to defend the country — including overriding American and international law. The Obama filing, however, is silent on the topic of inherent executive power. Indeed, the magic words “commander in chief” never even appear.
Technically, the Obama lawyers have not abandoned the argument for broad presidential power, just implied that such authority is unnecessary to get them what they want.
Yet omitting the claim to unfettered executive authority shows respect for Congress and international standards. In effect, the Obama administration is saying to the courts that if the detainees cannot be held as a matter of federal or international law, judges should release them. This approach is brave — so brave it might even prove foolhardy if the courts, sick of nearly a decade of detention, decide to clear the decks.
The filing argues that the authorization for the use of military force passed by Congress after 9/11 — the contemporary equivalent of a declaration of war — gives the president the powers any sovereign would have under the general principles of the international law of war. Relying on international law to make sense of Congress’s grant of power has deep roots in our constitutional tradition.
In the context of America’s present global military posture, however, the rediscovery of this notion is little short of astonishing. The laws of war, mostly designed for old-fashioned struggles between sovereign states, often do not fit today’s circumstances. The Bush administration saw this mismatch as an occasion to treat the Geneva conventions as “quaint” (in the words of Alberto Gonzales, the former White House counsel).
The Obama lawyers, however, seem to believe that the international law of war is flexible enough to serve their interests — and even to expand the president’s power to detain suspects beyond the strict language used by Congress when it gave President Bush authority to carry out his war on terrorism.
Here is where the law gets complicated: In 2001, Congress told the president he could make war on anyone who had “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the Sept. 11 attacks. The Bush administration, though, went further; it claimed the power to detain any “enemy combatant,” defined to include “anyone who is part of or supporting Taliban or Al Qaeda forces or associated forces.” In an unfortunate legal overreach, one administration lawyer said the government could detain a “little old lady in Switzerland” whose donation to an Afghan orphanage ended up in the hands of Al Qaeda.
In place of the “enemy combatant” definition, the Obama administration now claims the right to detain anyone who “substantially supported” terrorists. Thankfully, the Obama standard would free the little old Swiss lady. But the words “substantial support” do not come from international law any more than Bush’s “enemy combatant” did.
The administration lawyers suggest in their brief that “substantial support” of terrorists could be defined by some unspecified analogy to the laws of detention in traditional armed conflict. Yet the details are left to the imagination; and when push comes to shove, this language might well include all the Guantánamo detainees, including those who never belonged to a terrorist group.
The upshot is that the Obama approach is potentially broad enough to continue detaining everyone whom the Bush administration put in Guantánamo in the first place. The legal theories are subtler, and the reliance on international law may prove more attractive to our allies. But President Obama is stuck with the detainees Mr. Bush left him, and some may pose a real danger. Faced with this conundrum, and pressed for answers by judges who are rightfully impatient, the administration is hurrying to reframe existing powers in new legal doctrines.
The true test of whether Mr. Obama has improved on the Bush era lies in how his administration justifies its decisions on the 241 remaining Guantánamo detainees, whose cases will now be evaluated internally and reviewed by the courts. If the new legal arguments actually affect who goes free and who stays in custody, then they will amount to meaningful change. Without real-world effects, though, even the most elegant new legal arguments are nothing but words.
Noah Feldman is a law professor at Harvard, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing writer to The Times Magazine.
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18) Workers Protest Across France
"A poll conducted this week for the magazine Paris Match by IFOP found that 78 percent of the French support the strikers, the highest rate in a decade."
By MATTHEW SALTMARSH and DAVID JOLLY
March 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/world/europe/20france.html?ref=europe
PARIS — Rail service, airports, utilities and the public sector were hit Thursday by work stoppages, the second major strike in two months, as French unions mobilized against the government’s response to the global economic crisis.
Two-thirds of the country’s high-speed TGV trains were canceled. Air France said most of its flights were operating normally from Roissy Charles de Gaulle International Airport, while about one-third of its flights from Orly Airport had been canceled. Traffic on the Paris Métro and bus networks were close to normal, according to transit officials, but suburban rail line service was disrupted.
In a joint statement, the country’s largest unions said that President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government “had categorically refused to increase the statutory minimum wage, to alter his policies in the field of public service employment,” and that the official response to the crisis was wholly inadequate.
They called on the government to safeguard jobs, to fight against labor insecurity and to protect workers’ purchasing power.
More than 200 demonstrations were expected across France, according to unions. There was no initial comment from the government about the extent of the action.
The country faces mounting dissatisfaction amid job cuts. Mirroring trends in other European countries, the number of job seekers in France rose in January by 90,200, the highest increase on record, and the fourth-quarter unemployment rate rose to 8.2 percent.
The tire maker Continental is closing a plant in the Oise region which employs 1,120 people. Total, the largest French energy company, announced last week that it planned to shed some 250 jobs in the French refining sector as it cuts capacity at Gonfreville in the northwest of the country.
Faced with expectations that the French economy will contract by nearly 2 percent this year, Mr. Sarkozy announced a $35 billion stimulus plan in December.
But he has held back from announcing further measures, apart from support packages for the auto industry and banks. He recently criticized Britain for seeking to bolster consumption by cutting the value added tax.
Unions want more tax breaks and the opposition Socialist Party has called for a consumption-driven approach to restarting growth.
A poll conducted this week for the magazine Paris Match by IFOP found that 78 percent of the French support the strikers, the highest rate in a decade.
But among passengers waiting for a train to Paris at a station about 15 miles west of the capital, it was hard to find such support. “France is a bit like a sinking boat, and these strikers are just adding more holes,” said Maurice Bataille, 34.
Unsurprisingly, French business leaders expressed frustration at the strike. “It’s a big sign that people don’t know where they are; they don’t know what they want,” Christophe de Margerie, the chief executive of Total, said Wednesday. “They are lost.”
He defended the decision to cut refining jobs as something that “should have been done one or two years ago” and said that the company would keep investing and adding jobs in other areas. Union officials said production had stopped Thursday at six Total refineries, but the company said the impact on production was “limited,” according to Reuters.
Two major demonstrations were planned for central Paris later Thursday in fine spring weather. On Jan. 29, more than a million marched in cities across the country, and the following day, Mr. Sarkozy made some concessions to worker demands.
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19) U.S. Plans Vastly Expanded Afghan Security Force
By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT
March 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/us/politics/19military.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON — President Obama and his advisers have decided to significantly expand Afghanistan’s security forces in the hope that a much larger professional army and national police force could fill a void left by the central government and do more to promote stability in the country, according to senior administration and Pentagon officials.
A plan awaiting final approval by the president would set a goal of about 400,000 troops and national police officers, more than twice the forces’ current size, and more than three times the size that American officials believed would be adequate for Afghanistan in 2002, when the Taliban and Al Qaeda appeared to have been routed.
The officials said Mr. Obama was expected to approve a version of the plan in coming days as part of a broader Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy. But even members of Mr. Obama’s national security team appeared taken aback by the cost projections of the program, which range from $10 billion to $20 billion over the next six or seven years.
By comparison, the annual budget for the entire Afghan government, which is largely provided by the United States and other international donors, is about $1.1 billion, which means the annual price of the program would be about twice the cost of operating the government of President Hamid Karzai.
Those figures include only the cost of training and establishing the forces, and officials are still trying to determine what the cost would be to sustain the security forces over the long term.
Administration officials also express concerns that an expanded Afghan Army could rival the corruption-plagued presidency of Mr. Karzai. The American commanders who have recommended the increase argued that any risk of creating a more powerful Afghan Army was outweighed by the greater risks posed by insurgent violence that could threaten the central government if left unchecked.
At present, the army fields more than 90,000 troops, and the Afghan National Police numbers about 80,000 officers. The relatively small size of the security forces has frustrated Afghan officials and American commanders who wanted to turn security over to legitimate Afghan security forces, and not local warlords, at a faster pace.
After resisting the idea for several years, the Bush administration last summer approved an increase that authorized the army to grow to 134,000 over the next three years, in a program that would cost about $12 billion.
The resistance had been a holdover from the early months after the rout of Taliban and Qaeda fighters in 2001, when it appeared that there was little domestic or external threat that required a larger security force.
The new proposal would authorize a doubling of the army, after the increase approved last summer, to about 260,000 soldiers. In addition, it would increase the number of police officers, commandos and border guards to bring the total size of the security forces to about 400,000. The officials who described the proposal spoke on condition of anonymity because they had not been authorized to discuss it publicly in advance of final approval by Mr. Obama.
Some European countries have proposed the creation of an Afghan National Army Trust Fund, which would seek donations from oil kingdoms along the Persian Gulf and other countries to pay for Afghanistan’s security forces.
Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, which would have to approve new American spending, endorsed the goal of expanding Afghan security forces, and urged commanders to place Afghans on the front lines to block the border with Pakistan to insurgents and terrorists.
“The cost is relatively small compared to the cost of not doing it — of having Afghanistan either disintegrate, or fall into the hands of the Taliban, or look as though we are dominating it,” Mr. Levin said in an interview late on Tuesday.
Administration officials and military experts cited recent public opinion polls in Afghanistan showing that the Afghan Army had eclipsed the respect given the central government, which has had difficulty exerting legitimacy or control much beyond the capital.
“In the estimation of almost all outside observers, the Ministry of Defense and the Afghan National Army are two of the most highly functional and capable institutions in the country,” said Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, who is retired and commanded American and coalition forces in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005.
General Barno, currently the director of Near East and South Asian security studies at National Defense University, dismissed concerns that the army or the Ministry of Defense would challenge the authority of elected officials in Kabul.
“They are respectful of civil governance,” he said. “If the government of Afghanistan is going to effectively extend security and the rule of law, it has to have more army boots on the ground and police shoes on the ground.”
Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the Obama administration now appeared “willing to accept risks and accept downsides it might not otherwise” have considered had the security situation not deteriorated.
Military analysts cite other models in the Islamic world, like Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey, where the United States supports democratically elected civilian governments but raises no objection to the heavy influence wielded by military forces that remain at least as powerful as those governments.
Martin Strmecki, a member of the Defense Policy Board and a former top Pentagon adviser on Afghanistan, told a Senate committee last month that the Afghan Army should increase to 250,000 soldiers and the national police force should add more than 100,000 officers. Mr. Strmecki said that only when Afghan security forces reached those numbers would they achieve “the level necessary for success in counterinsurgency.”
Military officers also see an added benefit to expanding Afghanistan’s security forces, if its growing rosters can offer jobs to unemployed young men who now take up arms for the insurgency for money, and not ideology.
“We can try and outbid the Taliban for ‘day workers’ who are laying I.E.D.’s and do not care about politics,” Mr. Biddle said, referring to improvised explosive devices. “But if we don’t control that area, the Taliban can come in and cut off the hands of anybody who is taking money from us.”
C.I.A. Chief in Overseas Trip
The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon E. Panetta, is traveling to India and Pakistan this week to discuss the investigation into the Mumbai terrorist attacks, improved information-sharing to combat violent extremists and other intelligence issues, an American official said Wednesday.
Making his first overseas trip as C.I.A. director, Mr. Panetta was in India on Wednesday and was expected to travel to Pakistan and possibly another country in the following days, the official said.
David E. Sanger contributed reporting.
Correction: March 19, 2009
A previous version of this article said that Martin Strmecki was a member of the Defense Science Board. He is a member of the Defense Policy Board.
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20) A Day of Protests, Against Iraq War and A.I.G.
By Jennifer Mascia AND Jason Grant
March 19, 2009, 5:50 pm
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/nyregion/index.html
Updated, 6:31 p.m. | On the eve of the sixth anniversary of the United States’ invasion of Iraq, hundreds of protesters in New York City made it clear on Thursday that while they welcomed the change in American political leadership, they would not relent in urging President Obama to accelerate the withdrawal of combat forces from Iraq.
The protests were perhaps more muted than the massive demonstrations of years past, but no less fervent.
In Union Square, where about 120 people huddled together under the awning of a subway station, staying out of the rain, some protesters said that Mr. Obama, the new president, who as an Illinois state senator had opposed the war, had continued some of the Bush administration’s most controversial policies.
Debra Sweet, 57, one of the protest organizers, said the Obama administration had continued the policy of secret renditions of terrorism suspects, and she called for “righteous anger at this occupation.” Many in the crowd were high-school students.
“We’re not putting everything on Obama, whether it be hope or condemnation,” she said of the new president. She said of the high-school students around her: “They understand they have no voice. They’re too young to vote but they will be the ones to foot the bill for this war and they know it.”
Another protester, Sonsara Taylor, said she was also angered by American policies on Gaza and Pakistan and called for the investigation, and possible prosecution, of members of the Bush administration who argued for the Iraq war.
Matthif Chiroux, a 25-year-old Army veteran from Alabama who said he has served in Germany, Japan and Afghanistan, but faced disciplinary proceedings because he refused to serve in Iraq, expressed impatience with the new president.
“Obama’s policies just confirmed to me that the president may have changed, but the war is the same,” Mr. Chiroux said. “Just because we have a black president now, doesn’t mean that we don’t have a racist war.”
Elsewhere in the crowd, a group of rapped together into the a microphone, “Show me what democracy looks like.” An elderly woman looked up at the heavens and implored, “Why must it rain on our parade.”
The plan was to march to Times Square and they are in the process of doing this right now. The photographer is following them there. They are stopping at local high schools first. They are trying to get the students to walk out, again the photographer is with them.
Meanwhile, in Times Square in the late afternoon, about 25 antiwar protesters stood in front of the Armed Forces Career Center, some of them carrying signs that read, “Stop Occupation and Torture for Empire! The World Can’t Wait!” Others wore black garb and white, ghostly-looking masks, solemnly held up signs listing the number of citizens killed in both war-torn countries.
“We haven’t closed our eyes to what’s going on,” said Heather LaMastro, 33, a protester. “Change of administration doesn’t mean anything to us, really, because we’re seeing the same policies carried over.” For instance, she said, President Obama has continued enforcement of the Patriot Act, and has altered the time frame he’d promised for for removing troops from Iraq.
The antiwar demonstrations were not the only protests of the day. Around 4:30 p.m., 100 to 150 people gathered in Lower Manhattan around 70 Pine Street, the headquarters of the American International Group, to protest the bonuses the troubled insurance giant, which is mostly owned by the government, has given to executives.
The protesters, who also chanted slogans outside the Goldman Sachs building, stood in front of the A.I.G. tower for 20 minutes, while organizers from the Service Employees International Union gave a speech. People shouted: “A.I.G.! Shame on you!”
John Adler, who studies private equity firms for the union, said in an interview: “We’re here to say to A.I.G. and Goldman Sachs and other bailout banks, ‘You can’t take bailout money and hand it to executives.’”
Kwame Patterson, 28, a spokesman for the union, added: “We’re not aiming it at everybody in the building. We’re aiming it at the institution. This is aimed at the executives who were irresponsible in the first place.”
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21) Further Accounts of Gaza Killings Released
By ETHAN BRONNER
March 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/world/middleeast/21gaza.html?ref=world
JERUSALEM — An Israeli newspaper gave a fuller account on Friday of testimonies by soldiers alleging loose rules of engagement in Israel’s war in Gaza, which they said led to civilian deaths and wanton property destruction. One soldier asserted that extremist rabbis had told troops they were fighting a holy war.
The soldier was quoted as saying that the rabbis had “brought in a lot of booklets and articles,” adding, “their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle. God brought us back to this land, and now we need to fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land.”
He said that as a commander, he had tried to explain to his men that “not everyone who is in Gaza is Hamas,” and that “this war was not a war for the sanctification of the holy name, but rather one to stop the Qassam rockets.”
The account, in the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper, expanded on shorter excerpts printed Thursday in Haaretz and Maariv, a center-right newspaper, and came from a taped conversation among Gaza war veterans at an institute that prepares soldiers before their service. After the materials were published, the military advocate general began an investigation into the allegations.
The director of the institute where the discussion occurred, Dany Zamir, published the accounts in his newsletter and leaked them to the newspapers to draw attention to what he considered to be troubling revelations. Mr. Zamir is known to be on the left of Israel’s political spectrum.
He is quoted in the excerpts as saying to the soldiers who spoke: “I think it would be important for parents to sit here and hear this discussion. I think it would be an instructive discussion, and also very dismaying and depressing. You are describing an army with very low norms of value, that’s the truth.”
Earlier excerpts included an account of the killing of an elderly woman by a sharpshooter and the killing of a woman and two children by another sniper.
The testimonies published Friday also spoke of the ease with which some houses were damaged.
Another soldier said: “We got an order one day — all of the equipment, all of the furniture, just clean out the whole house. We threw everything, everything out of the windows to make room. The entire contents of the house went flying out the windows.”
The soldier also alleged that when entering buildings, “we were supposed to go up floor by floor, and any person we identified, we were supposed to shoot. I initially asked myself, where is the logic in this?
“From above they said it was permissible, because anyone who remained in the sector and inside Gaza City was in effect condemned, a terrorist, because they hadn’t fled. I didn’t really understand. On one hand they don’t really have anywhere to flee to, but on the other hand they’re telling us they hadn’t fled so it’s their fault.”
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22) Workers Protest Across France
By MATTHEW SALTMARSH and DAVID JOLLY
March 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/world/europe/20france.html?ref=world
PARIS — France’s airports, trains and utilities were hit by work stoppages on Thursday, as unions mobilized against President Nicolas Sarkozy’s economic policies and his government’s response to the global recession.
Protesters marched in the streets of France’s biggest cities — Paris, Marseille and Lyon — in fine spring weather, in the second major strike in two months.
An estimated 2.6 million people joined 213 demonstrations across France, according to the Confédération Générale du Travail, one of the nation’s largest unions. The national police, however, put the number of protesters at 1.2 million.
The largest unions said in a statement that Mr. Sarkozy’s response to the financial crisis had been inadequate, and they called on the government to do more to safeguard jobs and to improve workers’ purchasing power.
“Salaried workers won’t any longer accept being the victims of this crisis, which they had nothing to do with,” said Bernard Thibault, secretary of the workers’ confederation, BFM Radio reported.
Mr. Sarkozy, who was in Brussels at a European Union meeting, did not comment on the demonstrations.
Although France has a long tradition of strikes and demonstrations by public unions, the protesters who marched on Thursday and during similar protests on Jan. 29 came from both the public and private sectors, union officials said. Some union leaders called the protests in late January, in which they said an estimated 2.5 million people had participated, the largest nationwide demonstrations in 20 years.
But some political analysts played down the potential effect of the strike. “I don’t think it’s going to have a concrete political impact,” said Zaki Laïdi, a professor of political science at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris.
France faces mounting dissatisfaction amid rising unemployment. French companies shed the most jobs in 40 years during the fourth quarter of last year.
Faced with expectations that the economy will sharply contract this year, Mr. Sarkozy announced a $35 billion economic stimulus plan in December. But he has held back from proposing additional broad measures, apart from support for the auto industry and banks.
According to the Education Ministry, about 30 percent of France’s teachers were on strike Thursday. Utilities, ports and refineries were also disrupted. Air France said most of its flights were operating normally from Charles de Gaulle Airport, while about one-third of its flights from Orly Airport had been canceled.
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23) The Great Shame
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
March 21, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/21/opinion/21herbert.html
I had a conversation several weeks ago with a former Army officer, a woman, who had been attacked in her bed a few years ago by a superior officer, a man, who was intent on raping her.
The woman fought the man off with a fury. When she tried to press charges against him, she was told that she should let the matter drop because she hadn’t been hurt. When she persisted, battalion officials threatened to bring charges against her.
“They were talking about charging me with assault,” she said, her voice still tinged with anger and a sense of disbelief. “I’m no longer in the Army,” she added dryly.
Tia Christopher, a 27-year-old woman who lives in California and works with victims of sexual assault in the military, told me about the time that she was raped when she was in the Navy. She was attacked by another sailor who had come into her room in the barracks.
“He was very rough,” she said. “The girls next door heard my head hitting the wall, and he made quite a mess. When he left, he told me that he’d pray for me and that he still thought I was pretty.”
Ms. Christopher left the Navy. As she put it: “My military career ended. My assailant’s didn’t.”
Rape and other forms of sexual assault against women is the great shame of the U.S. armed forces, and there is no evidence that this ghastly problem, kept out of sight as much as possible, is diminishing.
New data released by the Pentagon showed an almost 9 percent increase in the number of sexual assaults reported in the last fiscal year — 2,923 — and a 25 percent increase in such assaults reported by women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Try to imagine how bizarre it is that women in American uniforms who are enduring all the stresses related to serving in a combat zone have to also worry about defending themselves against rapists wearing the same uniform and lining up in formation right beside them.
The truly chilling fact is that, as the Pentagon readily admits, the overwhelming majority of rapes that occur in the military go unreported, perhaps as many as 80 percent. And most of the men accused of attacking women receive little or no punishment. The military’s record of prosecuting rapists is not just lousy, it’s atrocious.
Louise Slaughter, a Democratic congresswoman from upstate New York, said: “I know of women victims, women in the military, who said to me that the first response they would get if they tried to report a rape was, ‘Oh, you don’t want to ruin that young man’s career, do you?’ ”
Ms. Slaughter has been trying for many years to get the military to really crack down on these crimes. “Very, very few cases result in court-martials,” she said, “and there are not that many that are even adjudicated.”
The Department of Defense has taken a peculiarly optimistic view of the increase in the number of reported sexual attacks. The most recent data is contained in the annual report that the department is required to submit to Congress. The report says that “the overall increase in reports of sexual assault in the military is encouraging,” and goes on to explain:
“It should be noted that increased reports of sexual assault do not reflect a rise in annual incidents of sexual assault. Sexual assault is one of the most under-reported crimes in the United States. Estimates suggest that only a small percentage of sexual assaults are ever reported to the police. The department suspects that the same is true for military society as well. An increase in the number of reported cases means that the department is capturing a greater proportion of the cases occurring each year.”
How’s that for viewing hideous statistics through rose-colored glasses? If the number of reported cases of rape goes sky-high over the next fiscal year, that will mean that the military is doing an even better job!
The military is one of the most highly controlled environments imaginable. When there are rules that the Pentagon absolutely wants followed, they are rigidly enforced by the chain of command. Violations are not tolerated. The military could bring about a radical reduction in the number of rapes and other forms of sexual assault if it wanted to, and it could radically improve the overall treatment of women in the armed forces.
There is no real desire in the military to modify this aspect of its culture. It is an ultra-macho environment in which the overwhelming tendency has been to see all women — civilian and military, young and old, American and foreign — solely as sexual objects.
Real change, drastic change, will have to be imposed from outside the military. It will not come from within.
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24) Young and Old Are Facing Off for Jobs
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
March 21, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/21/business/21age.html?ref=business
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — This city has become a front line in a generational battle for jobs, as older workers increasingly compete against applicants in their 20s for positions at supermarkets, McDonald’s and dozens of other places. And older workers seem to be winning.
With unemployment at a 26-year high and many older workers chasing entry-level jobs like those they held a half-century ago, 70 has become the new 20, as one economist put it.
Millions of older Americans have delayed retirement because of plummeting 401(k)s, soaring health costs, a sense that Social Security benefits alone are too little to live on or all of the above. This delay, economists say, has made it harder for millions of young workers to climb onto the first rung or two of the career ladder, especially since many employers favor hiring applicants with a track record.
“The boomers are staying in the system longer, and that’s clogging the system,” said Mason Jackson, president of Workforce One, a federally funded agency that helps Broward County’s unemployed. “Many want to retire, but they can’t.”
He characterized the dominant attitude among employers now as: “In with the old and out with the new.”
Along the ocean beaches and the Intracoastal Waterway here, retirees in condominiums have long coexisted with a much younger generation, but in the depressed job market, tensions have swelled as each group complains that employers improperly favor the other.
Since losing his job as a carpenter 13 months ago, Arnold Stone has applied, without success, for jobs as diverse as grocery bagger and construction worker. In his mobile home one recent morning, Mr. Stone, 69, tanned and vigorous, displayed hundreds of résumés.
“I’m sure age comes into play,” he said. “The problem is with seniors, nobody wants to hire them.”
That same week, Farah Titus, 25, crisscrossed Broward County in her 11-year-old Toyota on her daily job search. She pointed out a J. C. Penney store, a Macy’s and a Wal-Mart where she has applied to no avail.
“It’s hard to break in,” said Ms. Titus, a part-time nursing student who said she hated asking her father for money. “If you have experience, they put you on the top of the pile.”
The latest reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics buttress her view. The number of employed workers ages 16 to 24 has fallen by two million over the last two years, to 18.3 million, while the number of Americans 65 and over who are working has risen by 700,000, to 6 million.
“In a bad labor market, different groups perceive that they’re being discriminated against when the real problem is they’re being mistreated by the overall economy,” said Teresa Ghilarducci, an economics professor at the New School of Social Research and author of “When I’m Sixty-Four.”
The proportion of older Americans who hold jobs has also risen strongly — 16 percent of Americans 65 and over had jobs last month, up from 11 percent 10 years earlier. But for workers age 16 to 24 the percentage with jobs has fallen to 49 percent, from 59 percent a decade ago. As for Americans age 25 to 29, 74 percent now have jobs, down from 81 percent a decade ago.
“Younger people are taking an extreme pounding,” said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. “It’s worrisome because they’re not developing the experience and the soft skills that they’ll need and the nation’s economy will need.”
The greatest employment losses, he said, are for young males with little or no college. Many found jobs when the economy was robust, but they were often laid off first in the downturn, and they are having an especially hard time landing jobs now.
“I’m applying for low-wage jobs, and anyone should be O.K. for them, but I’m not getting to first base,” Jose Nieves, 19, said of the restaurant jobs he has applied for.
But many older workers say they suffer age discrimination, too. Mr. Stone is convinced that employers favor the young because they want to make sure their investments in training pay off for years to come.
Mr. Stone said he wishes he could retire but his retirement savings have nearly disappeared. He invested heavily in Enron before it went bankrupt, and his wife has had sizable medical bills.
“I need a job because at the end of the month, I’m lucky if we have $450 left,” said Mr. Stone, who worked 20 years as a carpenter and once even owned a construction company.
“People say there is no work to be had,” he added. “But if you’re over 50, you really have a problem, and if you’re 70, it’s especially hard.”
Eva Coffey, 60, from Springfield, Va., said that when she applied for a job as a bookkeeper and receptionist for an auto dealer, her interviewer showed no interest. The next person to be interviewed, she said, was an attractive woman in her 20s, and the interviewer was keenly interested.
“I’m not some young thing,” Ms. Coffey said. “When you go for an interview now, you’re always trying to come across younger because they’re concerned about your age. It’s a hard obstacle to overcome.”
Federico Barker, 76, a former real estate developer, has applied for so many jobs unsuccessfully that his friends urged him to lie about his age and change dates on his résumé. They are certain that employers favor younger workers.
Mahalia Joseph, 21, disagrees. She lost her job at a check-cashing company four months ago and has been rejected repeatedly for jobs in customer service and at hospitals.
“With the economy the way it is, they don’t want to hire people they have to train,” said Ms. Joseph, who plans to take courses to be trained as a hospital assistant. “They want people who are hands-on right away.”
Every day, young and old job seekers swarm to Mr. Jackson’s Workforce One offices, searching computer databases for jobs. Employers see strengths and weaknesses in each group, he said.
“Many businesses prefer older workers,” Mr. Jackson said. “They know they’re dependable, reliable. They show up, and somewhere along the line, developed customer service skills. Older workers take less sick days. Most sick days have nothing to do with being sick. Many nice days people call in sick to go to the beach.”
One category where young people have an advantage is technology jobs, he said. “If it’s a technology job, young people take to it as fish to water,” he said.
One of his assistants, Kelly Allen, chimed in that young people were used to communicating electronically — she held up an imaginary Blackberry and maneuvered her thumbs wildly. “Employers like that older workers are used to dealing with people face to face,” she said.
Maria Brous, communications director for Publix, one of Florida’s largest supermarket chains, said older workers had important expertise, but younger workers had technical skills and were creative problem-solvers. Publix hires both young and old employees, she said, because they complement each other.
Wendy Smith, 23, says she has seen yet another type of discrimination in applying for administrative jobs. Potential employers tell her she needs three or four years of experience.
“They don’t want you to be too young, and they don’t want you to be too old,” she said. “They want you to be just right.”
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