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STOP SPENDING TRILLIONS ON THE WARS! BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
BAIL OUT THE PEOPLE OF HAITI NOT THE BANKSTERS!
U.S. OUT OF IRAQ & AFGHANISTAN!
FREE PALESTINE!
MONEY FOR HEALTHCARE, JOBS AND EDUCATION!
U.S. HANDS OFF LATIN AMERICA!
SAN FRANCISCO MARCH AND RALLY
SATURDAY, MARCH 20, 11:00 A.M., CIVIC CENTER
GET THE WORD OUT ABOUT MARCH 20!
1. Thursday January 14th
5pm postering (7pm cancelled unless someone wants to do it)
meet at ANSWER office (2489 mission st., # 24 @ 21st st.)
2. Saturday January 16th
12noon postering, meet at ANSWER office
2pm tabling, meet at Whole Foods on 24th st btwn Sanchez and Noe
3. Monday January 18th
5pm tabling, meet at 24th and Mission BART
4. Tuesday January 19th
7pm postering, meet at ANSWER office
NEXT MARCH 20 COALITION MEETING:
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2010, 2:00 P.M.
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO
474 VALENCIA STREET
Between 16th and 15th Streets, SF)
For more information call: 415-821-6545
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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Table of Contents:
A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
C. ARTICLES IN FULL
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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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Demand justice for Oscar Grant: Jan. 13 in Oakland
Today marks a year since Oakland erupted in rebellion that got a cop charged with murder for the first time ever in California . And that same night the cops called themselves retaliating by arresting our own Minister of Information JR for the bogus crime of felony arson of a trash can. Not only didn't he do it, but there's no trace on the trash can that it was ever on fire!
Every one of us has a role to play in this historic drama - to ensure that triggerman Johannes Mehserle, who executed Oscar Grant in cold blood, is convicted even though his trial's been moved from Oakland to LA (our thanks to LA activists for their fast and masterful organizing!), and to ensure that JR, whose trial starts Feb. 22, is acquitted. If you're in LA or the Bay Area, your presence is needed at these events - details at Demand justice for Oscar Grant: Jan. 13 in Oakland:
Wednesday, Jan. 13, 7 p.m., Black Dot Café, 1195 Pine St. West Oakland: fundraiser for the last two of the Oakland 100 arrested during the Oakland Rebellions still facing charges, Minister of Information JR and punk rock artist Holly Works, featuring the screening of "Operation Small Axe," which has just been accepted by the Pan African Film Festival in LA - special guest: former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney!
These young activists need and deserve all the help you can give them. Both need funds for their legal defense, and JR needs to replace his camera, which the Oakland PD still refuses to return.
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Message from sister of Leonard Bradley Jr.,
Killed by San Pablo Police
oct22bayarea@gmail.com
Hello Everyone,
I hope this note reaches you all in the best of spirits. My name is Lyn-Tise Bradley,
Some of you may know and some of you may not know but on Saturday, November 14, 2009, my little brother, Leonard Bradley Jr. (also known as Lil L) was shot and killed by San Pablo Police. My brother was unarmed and fleeing the scene from a stolen car when the San Pablo police chased him into grassy field and killed him.
We would like for you all to be a part of our march for our little brother. As well as possibly forwarding this message to everyone in your database. I am unfamiliar with planning protests, but I am willing to do whatever it takes for justice to be served on behalf of my little brother.
Please see the details below.
Thank you in advance for your help.
My family is still trying to bounce back from such a traumatic experience. We miss my brother and will not let him go without a fight. We are asking if everyone could please plan to join us in marching for Leonard. Please see the information below. Post it on your facebook, myspace, and please e-mail it to everyone you know.
Date: January 18, 2009
TIME: 12:00 1:30 pm
CONTACT INFO: Lyn-Tise Bradley (415) 283-9905
We will peacefully assemble in front of the San Pablo Police Department at 13880 San Pablo Ave.
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Take A Stand For Economic Human Rights!
JOIN HOUSING RIGHTS COMMITTEE IN DEMANDING MORE FEDERAL FUNDING FOR HOUSING!
in support of the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP).
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010, 11:00AM
Justin Herman Plaza
(1 Market St., SF, CA; across street from Ferry Building)
In cities, towns, and rural communities across the country, truly affordable housing is disappearing at alarming rates and resources are increasingly being used to criminalize poverty. We demand: "HOUSE KEYS, NOT HANDCUFFS!"
For more information call 415-621-2533 or visit www.wraphome.org. Email us at wrap@wraphome.org
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NEXT MARCH 20 COALITION MEETING:
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2010, 2:00 P.M.
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO
474 VALENCIA STREET
Between 16th and 15th Streets, SF)
For more information call: 415-821-6545
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National Call for March 4 Strike and Day of Action To Defend Public Education
By Elly
http://defendcapubliceducation.wordpress.com/?blogsub=confirmed#subscribe-blog
California has recently seen a massive movement erupt in defense of public education -- but layoffs, fee hikes, cuts, and the re-segregation of public education are attacks taking place throughout the country. A nationwide resistance movement is needed.
We call on all students, workers, teachers, parents, and their organizations and communities across the country to massively mobilize for a Strike and Day of Action in Defense of Public Education on March 4, 2010. Education cuts are attacks against all of us, particularly in working-class communities and communities of color.
The politicians and administrators say there is no money for education and social services. They say that "there is no alternative" to the cuts. But if there's money for wars, bank bailouts, and prisons, why is there no money for public education?
We can beat back the cuts if we unite students, workers, and teachers across all sectors of public education - Pre K-12, adult education, community colleges, and state-funded universities. We appeal to the leaders of the trade union movement to support and organize strikes and/or mass actions on March 4. The weight of workers and students united in strikes and mobilizations would shift the balance of forces entirely against the current agenda of cuts and make victory possible.
Building a powerful movement to defend public education will, in turn, advance the struggle in defense of all public-sector workers and services and will be an inspiration to all those fighting against the wars, for immigrants rights, in defense of jobs, for single-payer health care, and other progressive causes.
Why March 4? On October 24, 2009 more than 800 students, workers, and teachers converged at UC Berkeley at the Mobilizing Conference to Save Public Education. This massive meeting brought together representatives from over 100 different schools, unions, and organizations from all across California and from all sectors of public education. After hours of open collective discussion, the participants voted democratically, as their main decision, to call for a Strike and Day of Action on March 4, 2010. All schools, unions and organizations are free to choose their specific demands and tactics -- such as strikes, rallies, walkouts, occupations, sit-ins, teach-ins, etc. -- as well as the duration of such actions.
Let's make March 4 an historic turning point in the struggle against the cuts, layoffs, fee hikes, and the re-segregation of public education.
- The California Coordinating Committee
To endorse this call and to receive more information contact:
march4strikeanddayofaction@gmail.com
and check out:
www.defendcapubliceducation.wordpress.com
Andy Griggs
andyca6@gmail.com
310-704-3217
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U.S. OUT OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN NOW!
FREE PALESTINE!
San Francisco March and Rally
on Saturday, March 20, 2010
11am, Civic Center Plaza
National March on Washington
on Saturday, March 20, 2010
Fri., March 19 Day of Action & Outreach in D.C.
People from all over the country are organizing to converge on Washington, D.C., to demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan and Iraq.
On Saturday, March 20, 2010, there will be a massive National March & Rally in D.C. A day of action and outreach in Washington, D.C., will take place on Friday, March 19, preceding the Saturday march.
There will be coinciding mass marches on March 20 in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
The national actions are initiated by a large number of organizations and prominent individuals. see below)
Click here to become an endorser:
http://answer.pephost.org/site/Survey?SURVEY_ID=5940&ACTION_REQUIRED=URI_ACTION_USER_REQUESTS&autologin=true&link=endorse-body-1
Click here to make a donation:
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Donation?ACTION=SHOW_DONATION_OPTIONS&CAMPAIGN_ID=2302&autologin=true&donate=body-1&JServSessionIdr002=2yzk5fh8x2.app13b
We will march together to say "No Colonial-type Wars and Occupations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine!" We will march together to say "No War Against Iran!" We will march together to say "No War for Empire Anywhere!"
Instead of war, we will demand funds so that every person can have a job, free and universal health care, decent schools, and affordable housing.
March 20 is the seventh anniversary of the criminal war of aggression launched by Bush and Cheney against Iraq. One million or more Iraqis have died. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops have lost their lives or been maimed, and continue to suffer a whole host of enduring problems from this terrible war.
This is the time for united action. The slogans on banners may differ, but all those who carry them should be marching shoulder to shoulder.
Killing and dying to avoid the perception of defeat
Bush is gone, but the war and occupation in Iraq still go on. The Pentagon is demanding a widening of the war in Afghanistan. They project an endless war with shifting battlefields. And a "single-payer" war budget that only grows larger and larger each year. We must act.
Both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were predicated on the imperial fantasy that the U.S. could create stable, proxy colonial-type governments in both countries. They were to serve as an extension of "American" power in these strategic and resource-rich regions.
That fantasy has been destroyed. Now U.S. troops are being sent to kill or be killed so that the politicians in uniform "the generals and admirals") and those in three-piece suits "our elected officials") can avoid taking responsibility for a military setback in wars that should have never been started. Their military ambitions are now reduced to avoiding the appearance of defeat.
That is exactly what happened in Vietnam! Avoiding defeat, or the perception of defeat, was the goal Nixon and Kissinger set for themselves when they took office in 1969. For this noble cause, another 30,000 young GIs perished before the inevitable troop pullout from Vietnam in 1973. The number of Vietnamese killed between 1969 and 1973 was greater by many hundreds of thousands.
All of us can make the difference - progress and change comes from the streets and from the grassroots.
The people went to the polls in 2008, and the enthusiasm and desire for change after eight years of the Bush regime was the dominant cause that led to election of a big Democratic Party majority in both Houses of Congress and the election of Barack Obama to the White House.
But it should now be obvious to all that waiting for politicians to bring real change - on any front - is simply a prescription for passivity by progressives and an invitation to the array of corporate interests from military contractors to the banks, to big oil, to the health insurance giants that dominate the political life of the country. These corporate interests work around the clock to frustrate efforts for real change, and they are the guiding hand behind the recent street mobilizations of the ultra-right.
It is up to us to act. If people had waited for politicians to do the right thing, there would have never been a Civil Rights Act, or unions, women's rights, an end to the Vietnam war or any of the profound social achievements and basic rights that people cherish.
It is time to be back in the streets. Organizing centers are being set up in cities and towns throughout the country.
We must raise $50,000 immediately just to get started. Please make your contribution today. We need to reserve buses, which are expensive $1,800 from NYC, $5,000 from Chicago, etc.). We have to print 100,000 leaflets, posters and stickers. There will be other substantial expenses as March 20 draws closer.
Please become an endorser and active supporter of the March 20 National March on Washington.
Please make an urgently needed tax-deductible donation today. We can't do this without your active support.
The initiators of the March 20 National March on Washington preceded by the March 19 Day of Action and Outreach in D.C.) include: the ANSWER Coalition; Muslim American Society Freedom; National Council of Arab Americans; Cynthia McKinney; Malik Rahim, co-founder of Common Ground Collective; Ramsey Clark; Cindy Sheehan; Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK; Deborah Sweet, Director, World Can't Wait; Mike Ferner, President, Veterans for Peace; Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition; Heidi Boghosian, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild; Ron Kovic, author of "Born on the 4th of July"; Juan Jose Gutierrez, Director, Latino Movement USA; Col. Ann Wright ret.); March Forward!; Partnership for Civil Justice; Palestinian American Women Association; Alliance for a Just and Lasting Peace in the Philippines; Alliance for Global Justice; Claudia de la Cruz, Pastor, Iglesia San Romero de Las Americas-UCC; Phil Portluck, Social Justice Ministry, Covenant Baptist Church, D.C.; Blase & Theresa Bonpane, Office of the Americas; Coalition for Peace and Democracy in Honduras; Comite Pro-Democracia en Mexico; Frente Unido de los Pueblos Americanos; Comites de Base FMLN, Los Angeles; Free Palestine Alliance; GABRIELA Network; Justice for Filipino American Veterans; KmB Pro-People Youth; Students Fight Back; Jim Lafferty, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild - LA Chapter; LEF Foundation; National Coalition to Free the Angola 3; Community Futures Collective; Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival; Companeros del Barrio; Barrio Unido for Full and Unconditional Amnesty, Bay Area United Against War.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.answercoalition.org/
info@internationalanswer.org
National Office in Washington DC: 202-265-1948
New York City: 212-694-8720
Los Angeles: 213-251-1025
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
Chicago: 773-463-0311
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The US Social Forum II
" June 22-26, 2010 "
Detroit, Michigan, USA
Another World Is Possible! Another US is Necessary!
http://www.ussf2010.org/
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B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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Urgent action needed to stop executions in CA
By Stephanie Faucher, Death Penalty Focus
January 8, 2009
stefanie@deathpenalty.org
Dear supporters,
Please take action today to stop executions from resuming in California. This is very urgent, without your help executions could occur in the near future.
Both Californians and non-Californians are encouraged to take action.
Letters must be received by January 20, 2010 at 5pm PDT.
BACKGROUND:
On January 4, 2010, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) proposed minor revisions to its lethal injection procedures in the form of amendments to its previously proposed procedures. CDCR set a fifteen-day comment period ending January 20, 2010 at 5:00 p.m. during which the public can submit written comments on the proposed amendments.
The amended regulations, which are virtually identical to the regulations proposed in May 2009, can be found here:
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=DsL2ekA4m2nB2qSfspkiCinFkqj%2BKN3u
The above link contains only those regulations that were amended. To see the full text of the proposed regulations proposed in May 2009, go to this link:
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=NHU2PZL0sQWgLuC6BWt%2BfynFkqj%2BKN3u
TAKE ACTION:
We have created a draft letter which you can personalize and send here:
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/1265/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=1988
A separate letter will also be sent the Governor of California.
Thank you for taking action!
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BAUAW responds:
Here is the letter I wrote as a representative of BAUAW:
I oppose the racist death penalty to its very core. There is no "humanitarian" way to murder someone. It's barbaric.
Already so many who have been on death row for decades have been proven to be innocent victims of gross forensic mistakes or blatant police frame-ups.
The poor are routinely afforded inferior and indifferent legal services that serve mainly as a go-between the prosecution and accused. It can hardly be called legal defense.
Justice is not served equally or fairly in the United States. Most other nations have done away with the death penalty. Here our "great minds of justice" debate the best way to kill.
Under these concrete circumstances, instead of limiting the appeals process for prisoners, the justice system should bend over backwards to hear and re-hear the evidence and set free those who have been convicted unfairly.
Death should never be our conscious choice as a nation.
I am also very concerned about the newly revised lethal injection procedures.
In particular, I have the following concerns:
* The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) added a news article from the Santa Rosa Press Democrat to the rulemaking file. The article mentions that the original creator of the three-drug lethal injection formula has suggested ways to reform the process, including keeping up with changing drugs and science and proper training of lethal injection team members. The recent experience of Romell Broom in Ohio reinforces a point raised in the article, that botched executions are a real possibility, especially in California, due to the limited training of the lethal injection team members and California's repeated failure to meaningfully change its protocol.
* CDCR's amended regulations continue to be wholly inadequate and inapplicable to female condemned inmates. The regulations now specify that a female condemned inmate shall be transported to San Quentin no sooner than 72 hours and no later than six hours prior to the scheduled execution, but contain no provisions to implement the required 45-day chronology of events prior to her arrival at San Quentin. CDCR also fails to address how and if the female condemned inmate will be in contact with her family members and her legal team during her transport, which may take place on the same day as her scheduled execution.
* Contrary to CDCR's claim, the amended regulations continue to treat the condemned prisoner's witnesses differently than the victim's witnesses. The victim's family is allowed an unlimited number of witnesses at the execution, whereas the prisoner scheduled to die is limited to five individuals other than her or his spiritual adviser. In the event of lack of space, the victim's family is provided with the option of remote viewing of the execution, while the same option is not extended to the inmate's family.
*The distinction drawn between Chaplains and "approved" Spiritual Advisors is confusing and it is unclear how and when a person may become a "pre-approved" Spiritual Advisor.
I expect that you will take these concerns very seriously.
Sincerely,
Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War, bauaw.org
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YouTube - SF Hotel Workers Rally With AFL-CIO Trumka And March On Hilton Hotel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzI8k5Ipwsk
On Jan 5, 2010 over 1,400 SF Hotel Workers Rallied and marched With AFL-CIO President Trumka and Unite-Here President Wilhelm for a contract for the 9,000 unionized hotel workers whose contracts have expired. Over 150 workers and supporters were arrested at the Hilton Hotel which the union is boycotting. For further information on the union go to www.unitehere2.org
Produced by The Labor Video Project
P.O. Box 720027
SF, CA 94172
laborvideo.blip.tv
www.laborvideo.org
(415)282-1908
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AMAZING SPEECH BY WAR VETERAN
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akm3nYN8aG8
The Unemployment Game Show: Are You *Really* Unemployed? - From Mint.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ulu3SCAmeBA
Video: Gaza Lives On
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU5Wi2jhnW0
ASSESSMENT - "LEFT IN THE COLD"- CROW CREEK - 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmfue_pjwho&feature=PlayList&p=217F560F18109313&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=5
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Tom Zaniello is a living, walking encyclopedia of films about labour.
I heard him speak at a conference once, but it wasn't so much a speech as a high-speed tour through dozens of film clips, lovingly selected, all aiming to make a point.
I don't know anyone who knows more about cinema and the labour movement than he does.
And Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff: An expanded guide to films about labor is his, well, encyclopedia about the subject.
It's a 434 page guide to 350 labour films from around the world, ranging from those you've heard of - Salt of the Earth, The Grapes of Wrath, Roger & Me - to those you've never heard of but will fall in love with once you see them.
Zaniello describes all the films in detail, tells you whether they're available for rental or purchase, and, if so, where.
Fiction and nonfiction, the films are about unions, labour history, working-class life, political movements, and the struggle between labour and capital.
Each entry includes critical commentary, production data, cast list, suggested related films, and annotated references to books and Web sites for further reading.
If you want to know more about labour films, buy this book.
And remember that every copy you purchase helps support LabourStart.
Thanks very much.
Eric Lee
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Letter from Lynne Stewart from behind bars:
Dear Sisters and Brothers, Friends and Supporters:
Well the moment we all hoped would never come is upon us. Good bye to a good cup of coffee in the morning, a soft chair, the hugs of grandchildren and the smaller pleasures in life. I must say I am being treated well and that is due to my lawyer team and your overwhelming support.
While I have received "celebrity" treatment here in MCC - high visibility - conditions for the other women are deplorable. Medical care, food, education, recreation are all at minimal levels. If it weren't for the unqualified bonds of sisterhood and the commissary it would be even more dismal.
My fellow prisoners have supplied me with books and crosswords, a warm it is cold in here most of the time) sweat shirt and pants, treats from the commissary, and of course, jailhouse humor. Most important many of them know of my work and have a deep reservoir of can I say it? Respect.
I continue to both answer the questions put to me by them, I also can't resist commenting on the T.V. news or what is happening on the floor - a little LS politics always! Smile) to open hearts and minds!
Liz Fink, my lawyer leader, believes I will be here at MCC-NY for a while - perhaps a year before being moved to prison. Being is jail is like suddenly inhabiting a parallel universe but at least I have the luxury of time to read! Tomorrow I will get my commissary order which may include an AM/FM Radio and be restored to WBAI and music classical and jazz).
We are campaigning to get the bladder operation scheduled before I came in to MCC) to happen here in New York City. Please be alert to the website I case I need some outside support.
I want to say that the show of support outside the Courthouse on Thursday as I was "transported" is so cherished by me. The broad organizational representation was breathtaking and the love and politics expressed the anger too) will keep me nourished through this.
Organize - Agitate, Agitate, Agitate! And write to me and others locked down by the Evil Empire.
Love Struggle, Lynne Stewart
FREE LYNNE STEWART NOW!
Lynne Stewart in Jail!
For further information contact: Jeff Mackler, Coordinator, West Coast Lynne Stewart Defense Committee 510-268-9429 jmackler@lmi.net
Mail tax free contributions payable to National Lawyers Guild Foundation. Write in memo box: "Lynne Stewart Defense." Mail to: Lynne Stewart Defense, P.O. Box 10328, Oakland, CA 94610.
SEND RESOLUTIONS AND STATEMENTS OF SUPPORT TO DEFENSE ATTORNEY JOSHUA L. DRATEL, ESQ. FAX: 212) 571 3792 AND EMAIL: jdratel@aol.com
SEND PROTESTS TO ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER:
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Department of Justice Main Switchboard - 202-514-2000
AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
Office of the Attorney General Public Comment Line - 202-353-1555
To send Lynne a letter, write:
Lynne Stewart
53504-054
MCC-NY
150 Park Row
New York, NY NY 10007
Lynne Stewart speaks in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOQ5_VKRf5k&feature=related
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With a New Smile, 'Rage' Fades Away [SINGLE PAYER NOW!!!]
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/12/08/health/20091208_Clinic/index.html?ref=us
FTA [F**k The Army] Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HlkgPCgU7g
Jon Stewart: Obama Is Channeling Bush VIDEO)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/03/jon-stewart-obama-is-chan_n_378283.html
US anti-war activists protest
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/12/200912283650408132.html
Buffy Sainte Marie - No No Keshagesh
[Keshagesh is the Cree word to describe a greedy puppy that wants to keep eating everything, a metaphor for corporate greed]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKmAb1gNN74&feature=player_embedded#
Buffy Sainte-Marie - No No Keshagesh lyrics:
http://www.lyricsmode.com/?i=print_lyrics&id=705368
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The Tar Sands Blow
Hi -
I just signed the Tar Sands Blow petition -- and I hope you'll do the same.
The Canadian tar sands produce the dirtiest oil on earth -- including five times the greenhouse gases of conventional oil. World leaders meet next month in Copenhagen to deal with climate change. Sign the petition -- so that we all don't get a raw deal.
http://ien.thetarsandsblow.org/
The Story of Mouseland: As told by Tommy Douglas in 1944
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqgOvzUeiAA
The Communist Manifesto illustrated by Cartoons
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KUl4yfABE4
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HELP VFP PUT THIS BOOK IN YOUR HIGH SCHOOL OR PUBLIC LIBRARY
For a donation of only $18.95, we can put a copy of the book "10 Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military" into a public or high school library of your choice. [Reason number 1: You may be killed]
A letter and bookplate will let readers know that your donation helped make this possible.
Putting a book in either a public or school library ensures that students, parents, and members of the community will have this valuable information when they need it.
Don't have a library you would like us to put it in? We'll find one for you!
https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/826/t/9311/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=4906
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This is a must-see video about the life of Oscar Grant, a young man who loved his family and was loved by his family. It's important to watch to understand the tremendous loss felt by his whole family as a result of his cold-blooded murder by BART police officers--Johannes Mehserle being the shooter while the others held Oscar down and handcuffed him to aid Mehserle in the murder of Oscar Grant January 1, 2009.
The family wants to share this video here with you who support justice for Oscar Grant.
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/07/21/18611878.php
WE DEMAND JUSTICE FOR OSCAR GRANT!
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Troy Anthony Davis is an African American man who has spent the last 18 years on death row for a murder he did not commit. There is no physical evidence tying him to the crime and seven out of nine witnesses have recanted. New evidence and new testimony have been presented to the Georgia courts, but the justice system refuses to consider this evidence, which would prove Troy Davis' innocence once and for all.
Sign the petition and join the NAACP, Amnesty International USA, and other partners in demanding justice for Troy Davis!
http://www.iamtroy.com/
For Now, High Court Punts on Troy Davis, on Death Row for 18 Years
By Ashby Jones
Wall Street Journal Law Blog
June 30, 2009
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/06/30/for-now-high-court-punts-on-troy-davis-on-death-row-for-18-years/
Take action now:
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&aid=12361&ICID=A0906A01&tr=y&auid=5030305
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Committee To Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 2012
New York, NY 10159-2012
New videos from April 24 Oakland Mumia event
http://abu-jamal-news.com/article?name=jlboak
Donations for Mumia's Legal Defense in the U.S. Our legal effort is the front line of the battle for Mumia's freedom and life. His legal defense needs help. The costs are substantial for our litigation in the U.S. Supreme Court and at the state level. To help, please make your checks payable to the National Lawyers Guild Foundation indicate "Mumia" on the bottom left). All donations are tax deductible under the Internal Revenue Code, section 501c)3), and should be mailed to:
It is outrageous and a violation of human rights that Mumia remains in prison and on death row. His life hangs in the balance. My career has been marked by successfully representing people facing death in murder cases. I will not rest until we win Mumia's case. Justice requires no less.
With best wishes,
Robert R. Bryan
Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal
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Short Video About Al-Awda's Work
The following link is to a short video which provides an overview of Al-Awda's work since the founding of our organization in 2000. This video was first shown on Saturday May 23, 2009 at the fundraising banquet of the 7th Annual Int'l Al-Awda Convention in Anaheim California. It was produced from footage collected over the past nine years.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiAkbB5uC0&eurl
Support Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, depends on your financial support to carry out its work.
To submit your tax-deductible donation to support our work, go to
http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html and follow the simple instructions.
Thank you for your generosity!
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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT!
FLASHPOINTS Interview with Innocent San Quentin Death Row Inmate
Kevin Cooper -- Aired Monday, May 18,2009
http://www.flashpoints.net/#GOOGLE_SEARCH_ENGINE
To learn more about Kevin Cooper go to:
savekevincooper.org
LINKS
San Francisco Chronicle article on the recent ruling:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/13/BAM517J8T3.DTL
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling and dissent:
http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2009/05/11/05-99004o.pdf
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COURAGE TO RESIST!
Support the troops who refuse to fight!
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/
Donate:
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/21/57/
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C. ARTICLES IN FULL
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1) U.S. Job Losses in December Dim Hopes for Quick Upswing
By PETER S. GOODMAN
January 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/09/business/economy/09jobs.html?hp
2) Sexual Abuse at Juvenile Centers
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Washington
January 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/us/08brfs-SEXUALABUSEA_BRF.html?ref=us
3) Invitation to Disaster
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
January 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/09/opinion/09herbert.html?hp
4) Unions Oppose Possible Health Insurance Tax
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
January 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/09/business/09union.html?hp
5) Hospital Cuts Dialysis Care for the Poor in Miami
By KEVIN SACK
January 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/health/policy/08dialysis.html?ref=health
6) Banks Prepare for Bigger Bonuses, and Public's Wrath
By LOUISE STORY and ERIC DASH
January 10, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/business/10pay.html?hp
7) Officials Hid Truth of Immigrant Deaths in Jail
"'Because ICE investigates itself there is no transparency and there is no reform or improvement,' Chris Crane, a vice president in the union that represents employees of the agency's detention and removal operations, told a Congressional subcommittee on Dec. 10."
By NINA BERNSTEIN
January 10, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/us/10detain.html?hp
8) Ballot Issues Attest to Anger in California
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
January 10, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/us/10calif.html?hp
9) The Count
With Jobs Few, Most Workers Aren't Satisfied
By PHYLLIS KORKKI
January 10, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/business/economy/10count.html?ref=business
10) 1 in 5 Working-Age American Men Don't Have A Job
By Shahien Nasiripour
01-8-10 11:59 AM
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/08/1-in-5-working-age-americ_n_415984.html
11) Military Is Awash in Data From Drones
By CHRISTOPHER DREW
January 11, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/11drone.html?hp
12) On Trial's Sidelines, Abortion Foes Are Divided
By MONICA DAVEY
January 11, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/us/11roeder.html?ref=us
13) Bringing Torture Home to Chicago's South Side
By PATRICK HEALY
January 11, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/theater/11conroy.html?ref=us
14) Large Price Jumps Reported for Small but Vital Drugs
"Most of the big price increases ranged from 100 percent to 499 percent, but some of the price increases were far larger, the investigators found. For instance, the prices of 26 brand-name drugs rose more than tenfold. The largest price increase found by the investigators was about 4,200 percent."
By GARDINER HARRIS
January 11, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/11price.html?ref=business
15) A Serious Proposal
[In this piece Time's most liberal op-ed contributor launches an attack on teachers. He places all the problems of public education on the plates of teachers who must work under the most devastating conditions of higher classroom size and increasingly stressed children whose parents are in financial crisis; while children's hunger rises astronomically to the point that half our children qualify for food aid. He makes no mention of these stresses and, clearly, how they hinder children's education. This is disgusting...bw]
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
January 12, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/opinion/12herbert.html
16) Local 743 Members Unite to Say "We Won't Go Back"
Teamster Reformers Ousted in Power Grab
By Staff
Tuesday January 12, 2010
http://www.fightbacknews.org/2010/1/11/teamster-reformers-ousted-power-grab
17) Tax Them Both
[This is like mice demanding that cat's regulate themselves...bw]
Editorial
January 13, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/opinion/13wed1.html?hp
18) Beverly Hills Blocks Outside Students
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
January 14, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/us/14beverly.html?hp
19) Deadly Protest in Afghanistan Highlights Tensions
"Also Tuesday, 16 people suspected of being insurgents were killed in a pair of Hellfire missile strikes launched by unmanned aerial vehicles, otherwise known as drones."
By DEXTER FILKINS
January 13, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/world/asia/13afghan.html?ref=world
20) A Year of Terror Plots, Through a Second Prism
"Exactly 14 of the approximately 14,000 murders in the United States last year resulted from allegedly jihadist attacks: 13 people shot at Fort Hood in Texas in November and one at a military recruiting station in Little Rock, Ark., in June."
By SCOTT SHANE
News Analysis
January 13, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/us/13intel.html?ref=us
21) Boy, 4, Chooses Long Locks and Is Suspended From Class
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
January 13, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/education/13hair.html?ref=us
22) Mumia faces new execution threat!
23) Stand with the people of Haiti!
What the U.S. government isn't telling you
ANSWER Coalition
http://answer.pephost.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ANS_homepage
24) Losing the Internet as We Know It
By Megan Tady
Blog Editor and Video Producer, Free Press
How much have you already used the Internet today?
JANUARY 14, 2010
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/megan-tady/losing-the-internet-as-we_b_420322.html
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1) U.S. Job Losses in December Dim Hopes for Quick Upswing
By PETER S. GOODMAN
January 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/09/business/economy/09jobs.html?hp
The American economy lost another 85,000 jobs in December and the unemployment rate remained at 10 percent, setting back hopes for a swift recovery from the worst downturn since the Great Depression.
The latest monthly snapshot of the national job market released by the Labor Department on Friday provided one potentially encouraging milestone: Data for November was revised to show that the economy gained 4,000 net jobs that month, in contrast to initial reports showing a loss of 11,000 jobs. That marked the first monthly improvement since the recession began two years ago.
But the December data failed to repeat the trend, and the report disappointed economists who had generally been expecting a decline of perhaps 10,000 jobs.
The report broadly confirmed that while the pace of job market deterioration has declined markedly in recent months, companies remain reluctant to hire, heightening the likelihood that scarce paychecks will remain a dominant feature of American life for many months.
"We're still losing jobs," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. "It's nothing like we had in the freefall of last winter, but we're not about to turn around. We're still looking at a really weak economy."
The report intensified pressures on the Obama administration to show progress for the $787 million spending bill it championed last year to stimulate the economy. In recent months, the administration has emphasized initiatives aimed at encouraging jobs, while cognizant that concerns about the federal deficit limit its ability to pursue further spending.
"It certainly isn't the best report, because we continue to lose jobs," the Labor secretary Hilda L. Solis, said. "But last year at this time we were losing over 700,000 jobs a month. The recovery act continues to help."
Some economists fixed on a potentially positive trend tucked within the data: For a fifth consecutive month, temporary help services expanded, adding 47,000 positions in December. The increase burnished the notion that companies are recognizing fresh opportunities and are inclined to add labor, even as they hold off on hiring full-time workers.
"We're going in the right direction," said Michael T. Darda, chief economist at MKM Partners, a research and trading firm in Greenwich, Conn. "If we just have a little bit of patience, we'll start see monthly increases of 200,000 to 300,000 jobs within six months."
But in millions of households still grappling with the bite of a wrenching downturn, patience has long been exhausted - along with savings, credit and cash to pay the bills.
In Charlotte, N.C., Kumar G. Navile, 33, has applied for 500 positions across the country since he lost his job as an engineer a year ago. Each month, he finds himself about $600 short in his monthly expenses after the $1,680 he secures in unemployment benefits. He pays the difference from a savings account, but expects that money to dry up in the next two months.
"You get up every day and say today will be different, but it is mentally challenging when you don't find opportunities," Mr. Navile said. "I performed well in school. I got a job the day I graduated. It's been a struggle, and it continues to be."
For those out of work, the market is bleaker than ever. Unemployed people had been jobless for an average of 29 weeks in December, the longest duration since the government began tracking such data in 1948. Roughly 4 in 10 unemployed workers had been jobless for six months or longer.
In recent weeks, the number of new claims for unemployment insurance benefits has tailed off sharply. But the persistence of double-digit unemployment underscored that companies remain unwilling to add payroll.
"There is almost no hiring going on outside the temporary help sector," said Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Project. "Just slowing layoffs is not enough to produce jobs."
Indeed, even as temporary workers increased, the average workweek for rank-and-file employees - roughly 80 percent of the work force - was essentially unchanged in December, at 33.2 hours.
Amid the usual parsing of data that accompanies the monthly jobs report, the spinning of forecasts and dueling outlooks, no complexity cloaked the simple fact that employment remains scarce. Experts assume the economy needs to add about 100,000 jobs a month just to keep pace with new people entering the work force.
"There's really no dynamism in this economy," Mr. Baker said. "Most people, they're not looking at the data. They're just asking, 'Can I get a job?' And that's not getting any easier."
The government's monthly jobs report is always important, yet in recent times it has emerged as the crucial indicator of economic health.
For years, ordinary households have spent in excess of incomes by borrowing against the value of homes, leaning on credit cards and tapping stock portfolios. But home prices have plummeted in much of the country. Stock holdings have diminished. Nervous banks have sliced credit even for healthy borrowers. That has left the paycheck as the primary source of household finance in an economy in which consumer spending comprises roughly 70 percent of all activity.
Economists have grown increasingly divided over the nation's economic prospects. Some argue that recent expansion on the American factory floor presages broader economic improvement that will eventually deliver large numbers of jobs.
The December report failed to deliver clear evidence for that scenario, even as it saw the pace of job losses continue to slow. Construction lost another 53,000 jobs and manufacturing saw 27,000 positions disappear. Despite a surprisingly strong holiday shopping season, retail trade gave up 10,000 jobs in December.
Health care remained a rare bright spot, expanding by 22,000 jobs.
Skeptics argue that the factory expansion merely reflects a rebuilding of inventories after many businesses slashed stocks during the panic that accompanied the fall of prominent financial institutions such as Lehman Brothers in the fall of 2008. Expansion has also been aided by $787 billion in federal spending aimed at stimulating economic growth, and by tax credits for homebuyers.
Once these factors fade in coming months, skeptics argue, the economy will confront the same challenges that have dogged it for more than two years - strapped households fretting about debts and weak job prospects, curtailing spending; banks still worrying about losses to come on mortgage holdings, reluctant to lend; businesses unwilling to hire.
Those with the gloomiest outlooks envision a so-called double dip recession, in which the economy resumes contracting. Others fear years of stagnant growth much like Japan's Lost Decade in the 1990s.
The one point of agreement among economists is that the nation cannot recover without millions of new jobs. Workers must gain fresh wages they can spend at other businesses, creating jobs for other workers - a virtuous cycle, in the parlance of economists.
Recent months have produced tentative signs that such a cycle might be unfolding, even as economists debate its sustainability. The December jobs report only added to the ambiguity that now grips economic forecasting.
"Standing still feels good when you've been used to falling backwards," said Stuart G. Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh. "But we want to move forward."
Javier Hernandez contributed reporting.
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2) Sexual Abuse at Juvenile Centers
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Washington
January 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/us/08brfs-SEXUALABUSEA_BRF.html?ref=us
A new government study found that 13 juvenile detention facilities around the country had high rates of sexual abuse and victimization, with nearly one of every three detainees reporting victimization. The Justice Department study found that nationwide, about 12 percent of youths in state-run, privately run, or local detention facilities reported some type of sexual victimization. Six sites had reported victimization rates of 30 percent or higher.
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3) Invitation to Disaster
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
January 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/09/opinion/09herbert.html?hp
We didn't pay attention to the housing bubble. We closed our eyes to warnings that the levees in New Orleans were inadequate. We gave short shrift to reports that bin Laden was determined to attack the U.S. And now we're all but ignoring the fiscal train wreck that is coming from states with budget crises big enough to boggle the mind.
The states are in the worst fiscal shape since the Depression. The Great Recession has caused state tax revenues to fall off a cliff. Some states - New York and California come quickly to mind - are facing prolonged budget nightmares. Across the country, critical state services are being chopped like firewood. More cuts are coming. Taxes and fees are being raised. Yet the budgets in dozens and dozens of states remain drastically out of balance.
This is an arrow aimed straight at the heart of a robust national recovery. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has pointed out that if you add up the state budget gaps that have recently been plugged (in most cases, temporarily and haphazardly) and those that remain to be dealt with, you'll likely reach a staggering $350 billion for the 2010 and 2011 fiscal years.
This is not a disaster waiting to happen. It's under way.
Without substantial new federal help, state cuts that are now merely drastic will become draconian, and hundreds of thousands of additional jobs will be lost. The suffering is already widespread. Some states have laid off or furloughed employees. Tens of thousands of teachers have been let go as cuts have been made to public schools and critically important preschool programs. California has bludgeoned its public higher education system, one of the finest in the world.
Michigan has cut some of the benefits it provided to middle-class families struggling with the costs of health care for severely disabled children - benefits that helped pay for such things as incontinence supplies and transportation to special care centers. The Grand Rapids Press quoted a state official who acknowledged that the cuts were "tough" and were hurting families. But he added, "The state simply doesn't have the money."
The collapse of state tax revenues caused by the recession is the sharpest on record. Steep budget cuts have not been enough to offset the unprecedented plunge in tax collections that resulted from unemployment and other aspects of the downturn. The shortfalls swept the nation. As the Rockefeller Institute of Government reported, "Total tax revenue declined in all 44 states for which comparable early data are available."
State governments are not without fault. Very few have been paragons of fiscal responsibility over the years. California is a well-known basket case. New York has a Legislature that is a laughingstock. But for the federal government to resist offering substantial additional help in the face of this growing crisis would be foolhardy. You can't have a healthy national economy while dozens of states are hooked up to life support.
The Center on Budget offered some insight into how the trouble in the states adds up to trouble for us all:
"Expenditure cuts are problematic policies during an economic downturn because they reduce overall demand and can make the downturn deeper. When states cut spending, they lay off employees, cancel contracts with vendors, eliminate or lower payments to businesses and nonprofit organizations that provide direct services, and cut benefit payments to individuals.
"In all of these circumstances, the companies and organizations that would have received government payments have less money to spend on salaries and supplies, and individuals who would have received salaries or benefits have less money for consumption. This directly removes demand from the economy."
The Obama administration has provided significant help to states through its stimulus program, and it has made a difference. It prevented the crisis from being much worse. But much of that assistance will run out by the end of the year and states are fashioning budgets right now that will absolutely hammer the quality of life for some of their most vulnerable residents.
New York's lieutenant governor, Richard Ravitch, has been trying to bring a measure of sanity to the state's budget process. But as he told me this week, without additional federal help, many states will have no choice but to impose extreme budget cuts, or raise taxes, or - most likely - do both.
We need more responsible and less wasteful fiscal behavior from all levels of government. But the country is still faced with a national economic emergency, with tens of millions out of work or underemployed. We can hardly afford any additional economic shocks. Turning our backs on the desperate trouble the states are in right now is nothing less than an utterly willful invitation to disaster.
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4) Unions Oppose Possible Health Insurance Tax
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
January 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/09/business/09union.html?hp
When millions of blue-collar workers were leaning toward John McCain during the 2008 campaign, labor unions moved many of them into Barack Obama's column by repeatedly hammering one theme: Mr. McCain wanted to tax their health benefits.
But now labor leaders are fuming that President Obama has endorsed a tax on high-priced, employer-sponsored health insurance policies as a way to help cover the cost of health care reform. And as Senate and House leaders seek to negotiate a final health care bill, unions are pushing mightily to have that tax dropped from the legislation. Or at the very least, they want the price threshold raised so that the tax would affect fewer workers.
Labor leaders say the tax would hit not only wealthy executives with expensive health benefits, but also many rank-and-file union members who have often settled for lower wage increases in exchange for more generous health benefits.
The tax would affect individual insurance policies with annual premiums above $8,500 and family policies above $23,000, which by one union survey would affect one in four union members.
The House bill does not contain such an excise tax, and many House Democrats oppose adding it to the combined House-Senate legislation. But the tax is a critical revenue component in the Senate's bill. If the bill does too little to cover its costs, it might be defeated. Many economists support the tax, saying it will help hold down costs.
With labor groups warning that the tax will infuriate a key part of the Democratic base - union members - President Obama has agreed to meet with several top labor leaders on Monday to address their concerns and try to defuse their anger. The group includes the presidents of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., Teamsters and the steelworkers' and service employees' unions.
But whether the tax is negotiable remains unclear. Not only has Mr. Obama specifically endorsed the idea, but the White House and Senate leaders see the tax as pivotal in paying for the health care overhaul and addressing runaway health care costs.
Many Democrats and union officials fear that if both sides dig in on the issue, it could create a rift between the White House and labor - with some union leaders hinting they might lobby aggressively against the entire health care bill if it contains such a tax.
Union leaders have repeatedly warned the White House about the strong rank-and-file dismay, which could hurt the Democrats in Congressional elections this fall, especially in battleground states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Ron Gay, an AT&T repairman in Youngstown, Ohio, who spent much of the summer of 2008 urging co-workers to vote for Mr. Obama, said, "If this passes in its current form, a lot of working people are going to feel let down and betrayed by our legislators and president."
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 19 percent of workers - or about 30 million employees - would be affected by the tax in 2016. Economists say most of them would be nonunion, although it is organized labor that has the lobbying clout to take a stand.
In recent days, labor's strategy has become clear. Unions are urging their members to flood their representatives with e-mail messages and phone calls in the hope that the House will stand fast and reject the tax. The A.F.L.-C.I.O., a federation of nine million union members, has declared next Wednesday "National Call-In Day" asking workers to call their lawmakers to urge them not to tax health benefits. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters is urging members to tell their representatives that "such a tax is simply a massive middle-class tax hike that this nation's working families should not be forced to endure."
Many Democrats fear that enacting the tax will hurt their re-election chances.
"This would really have a negative impact on the Democratic base," said Representative Joe Courtney, Democrat of Connecticut, who has enlisted 190 House Democrats to sign a letter opposing the tax. "As far as the message goes, it's a real toughie to defend."
While union leaders would prefer killing the tax, some say privately that they could live with it if the threshold is lifted to $27,000, say, or $30,000. They argue that many insurance policies above $23,000 are typical of the coverage in high-cost areas like New York or Boston, or policies that cover small businesses or employers with older workers.
According to a union survey, one in four members would be hit by a $23,000 threshold, but only one in 14 if the threshold were raised to $27,000.
White House officials, however, voice concern that raising the threshold that much would lose $50 billion of the $149 billion in revenue that the tax is expected to generate over 10 years.
Those officials and Senate leaders argue, moreover, that unions are wrong to fight the tax, saying that it will hold down health costs and that money employers save on health premiums will ultimately go to higher wages.
Some experts say the tax's main effect would be to deter insurers from continually raising premiums. "This is a tax on insurance companies, not on workers," said Erin Shields, an aide to Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and a chief sponsor of the excise tax.
"Health care costs are rising much faster than inflation," Ms. Shields said. "Imposing this tax will help hold down costs because it will give employers an incentive to find a plan that falls beneath the threshold and will give insurers an incentive to offer the best possible plan below the threshold."
Ms. Shields defended Mr. Obama, saying the excise tax he backs is far different from Senator McCain's proposal. Mr. McCain called for eliminating tax breaks for employer-sponsored health benefits, replaced with a tax credit to help consumers obtain health insurance, Ms. Shields said.
She added that the measure Mr. Obama supports would tax only that part of a family policy above the $23,000 threshold - which would be taxed at a 40 percent rate.
But union officials say the tax will cause employers to push higher co-payments and deductibles onto their employees. They argue that a fairer way to generate revenue would be to embrace the House bill, which imposes an income tax surcharge on couples earning more than $1 million.
Neither the House nor the Senate would seem to have much wiggle room on the issue.
Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, has said he would oppose any bill containing the House's surtax. His vote was crucial in enabling Senate Democrats to reach the 60 votes needed to pass the health bill over a potential Republican filibuster.
The House bill, meanwhile, passed by only a five-vote margin, and at least three Democrats who voted for it - Mr. Courtney, Phil Hare of Illinois and Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire - have said they would oppose a final bill if it contained an excise tax like the Senate version.
Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, predicted the excise tax would raise workers' wages from 2010 to 2019. "There are many academic studies showing that when health costs rise, wages fall," he said. "In the mid- and late 1990s, when we got health costs under control, wages rose nicely." But he added that other factors could have also lifted wages during that period.
Leo W. Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers, scoffed at arguments that by restraining health costs, the tax would lead to higher wages.
"The people who are promoting this tax say companies will make up for this with higher wages," Mr. Gerard said. "These people who say that have never been at the bargaining table. It doesn't work that way."
Robert Gleason, chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, said Mr. Obama had made an about-face that would badly hurt the president and other Democrats. "You remember when the first President Bush said, 'Read my lips, no new taxes,' and he raised taxes and he went down to defeat," he added. "This is the same thing."
Michael P. James, a 57-year-old steelworker with the Timken Company in Canton, Ohio, campaigned for Mr. Obama and is seething about the tax.
"I don't think we should be penalized by this bill," Mr. James said. "The president would be going back on his word. If he goes ahead and passes a bill with the excise tax, I won't be able to support him again."
David M. Herszenhorn contributed reporting.
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5) Hospital Cuts Dialysis Care for the Poor in Miami
By KEVIN SACK
January 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/health/policy/08dialysis.html?ref=health
To chip away at an overwhelming budget deficit, Miami's public hospital system stopped paying for kidney dialysis for the indigent this week, officials said, leaving some patients to rely on emergency rooms for their life-sustaining treatments.
A total of 175 patients were affected by the decision by Jackson Health System, which runs South Florida's largest charity hospital, Jackson Memorial, and a number of smaller hospitals and clinics.
The situation at Jackson is similar to that at Atlanta's public hospital, Grady Memorial, which closed its outpatient dialysis clinic in early October to curb costs.
At Jackson, officials said patients could come to the emergency room for treatment, and eight have this week. "That's the best we can do right now," said Dr. Eneida O. Roldan, Jackson's chief executive.
Federal law requires that emergency rooms treat patients in serious medical jeopardy, regardless of their ability to pay. For patients with end-stage kidney disease, going without dialysis can prove fatal in as little as two weeks.
To be treated in an emergency room, however, dialysis patients often must show up in severe distress. In an interview, Dr. Roldan said patients could be treated in Jackson's emergency room as often as three times a week, the national standard for continuing dialysis.
Dialysis provided through an emergency room admission is considerably more expensive than routine treatment at a clinic. But while Jackson was not reimbursed for treating uninsured patients at private clinics, it can receive emergency Medicaid payments for dialysis provided through emergency rooms.
The hospital's decision thus shifts the financial burden from Miami-Dade County taxpayers, who support Jackson's charity care through various levies, to the state and federal governments, which finance the Medicaid program.
Dr. Roldan said the hospital hoped that South Florida hospitals and dialysis providers would form a consortium to pay for the care of uninsured renal patients.
At Grady in Atlanta, most of the patients were illegal immigrants who were not eligible for Medicare and Medicaid. The hospital helped about 10 immigrants relocate to their home countries and paid for dialysis there for a transitional three-month period.
About 50 patients have remained in Atlanta because Grady offered to pay for their dialysis at commercial clinics until Jan. 3. This week, the hospital extended that deadline by a month.
Industry officials said they did not know of other hospitals that had ended dialysis services.
Unlike Grady, Jackson did not operate its own dialysis unit but rather paid private clinics to provide the service to indigent patients. The treatments run about $50,000 a year.
The hospital was losing more than $4 million a year on dialysis, contributing to a deficit approaching $200 million this fiscal year. Over the last year, the economy has generated a nearly 50 percent increase in uncompensated care, and the hospital is also closing two community clinics this week.
All but 41 of Jackson's 175 patients continue to be treated - at least for the short term - at the commercial clinics, hospital officials said.
Jackson discovered that some dialysis patients were eligible for government insurance. Others will be treated for a few more months because of contractual obligations.
Some clinics accepted small numbers of uninsurable patients as charity cases. One patient wed her boyfriend of two years to qualify for his health insurance, a clinic social worker said.
For the patients, including a dozen illegal immigrants, it is a time of worry. "My hair has been falling out," said one of them, Josefina Tello, 37, from Mexico. "From everything I'm seeing, the only choice is the emergency room."
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6) Banks Prepare for Bigger Bonuses, and Public's Wrath
By LOUISE STORY and ERIC DASH
January 10, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/business/10pay.html?hp
Everyone on Wall Street is fixated on The Number.
The bank bonus season, that annual rite of big money and bigger egos, begins in earnest this week, and it looks as if it will be one of the largest and most controversial blowouts the industry has ever seen.
Bank executives are grappling with a question that exasperates, even infuriates, many recession-weary Americans: Just how big should their paydays be? Despite calls for restraint from Washington and a chafed public, resurgent banks are preparing to pay out bonuses that rival those of the boom years. The haul, in cash and stock, will run into many billions of dollars.
Industry executives acknowledge that the numbers being tossed around - six-, seven- and even eight-figure sums for some chief executives and top producers - will probably stun the many Americans still hurting from the financial collapse and ensuing Great Recession.
Goldman Sachs is expected to pay its employees an average of about $595,000 apiece for 2009, one of the most profitable years in its 141-year history. Workers in the investment bank of JPMorgan Chase stand to collect about $463,000 on average.
Many executives are bracing for more scrutiny of pay from Washington, as well as from officials like Andrew M. Cuomo, the attorney general of New York, who last year demanded that banks disclose details about their bonus payments. Some bankers worry that the United States, like Britain, might create an extra tax on bank bonuses, and Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, is proposing legislation to do so.
Those worries aside, few banks are taking immediate steps to reduce bonuses substantially. Instead, Wall Street is confronting a dilemma of riches: How to wrap its eye-popping paychecks in a mantle of moderation. Because of the potential blowback, some major banks are adjusting their pay practices, paring or even eliminating some cash bonuses in favor of stock awards and reducing the portion of their revenue earmarked for pay.
Some bank executives contend that financial institutions are beginning to recognize that they must recalibrate pay for a post-bailout world.
"The debate has shifted in the last nine months or so from just 'less cash, more stock' to 'what's the overall number?' " said Robert P. Kelly, the chairman and chief executive of the Bank of New York Mellon. Like many other bank chiefs, Mr. Kelly favors rewarding employees with more long-term stock and less cash to tether their fortunes to the success of their companies.
Though Wall Street bankers and traders earn six-figure base salaries, they generally receive most of their pay as a bonus based on the previous year's performance. While average bonuses are expected to hover around half a million dollars, they will not be evenly distributed. Senior banking executives and top Wall Street producers expect to reap millions. Last year, the big winners were bond and currency traders, as well as investment bankers specializing in health care.
Even some industry veterans warn that such paydays could further tarnish the financial industry's sullied reputation. John S. Reed, a founder of Citigroup, said Wall Street would not fully regain the public's trust until banks scaled back bonuses for good - something that, to many, seems a distant prospect.
"There is nothing I've seen that gives me the slightest feeling that these people have learned anything from the crisis," Mr. Reed said. "They just don't get it. They are off in a different world."
The power that the federal government once had over banker pay has waned in recent months as most big banks have started repaying the billions of dollars in federal aid that propped them up during the crisis. All have benefited from an array of federal programs and low interest rate policies that enabled the industry to roar back in profitability in 2009.
This year, compensation will again eat up much of Wall Street's revenue. During the first nine months of 2009, five of the largest banks that received federal aid - Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley - together set aside about $90 billion for compensation. That figure includes salaries, benefits and bonuses, but at several companies, bonuses make up more than half of compensation.
Goldman broke with its peers in December and announced that its top 30 executives would be paid only in stock. Nearly everyone on Wall Street is waiting to see how much stock is awarded to Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman's chairman and chief executive, who is a lightning rod for criticism over executive pay. In 2007, Mr. Blankfein was paid $68 million, a Wall Street record. He did not receive a bonus in 2008.
Goldman put aside $16.7 billion for compensation during the first nine months of 2009.
Responding to criticism over its pay practices, Goldman has already begun decreasing the percentage of revenue that it pays to employees. The bank set aside 50 percent in the first quarter, but that figure fell to 48 percent and then to 43 percent in the next two quarters.
JPMorgan executives and board members have also been wrestling with how much pay is appropriate.
"There are legitimate conflicts between the firm feeling like it is performing well and the public's prevailing view that the Street was bailed out," said one senior JPMorgan executive who was not authorized to speak for the company.
JPMorgan's investment bank, which employs about 25,000 people, has already reduced the share of revenue going to the compensation pool, from 40 percent in the first quarter to 37 percent in the third quarter.
At Bank of America, traders and bankers are wondering how much Brian T. Moynihan, the bank's new chief, will be awarded for 2010. Bank of America, which is still absorbing Merrill Lynch, is expected to pay large bonuses, given the bank's sizable trading profits.
Bank of America has also introduced provisions that would enable it to reclaim employees' pay in the event that the bank's business sours, and it is increasing the percentage of bonuses paid in the form of stock.
"We're paying for results, and there were some areas of the company that had terrific results, and they will be compensated for that," said Bob Stickler, a Bank of America spokesman.
At Morgan Stanley, which has had weaker trading revenue than the other banks, managers are focusing on how to pay stars in line with the industry. The bank created a pay program this year for its top 25 workers, tying a fifth of their deferred pay to metrics based on the company's later performance.
A company spokesman, Mark Lake, said: "Morgan Stanley's board and management clearly understands the extraordinary environment in which we operate and, as a result, have made a series of changes to the firm's compensation practices."
The top 25 executives will be paid mostly in stock and deferred cash payments. John J. Mack, the chairman, is forgoing a bonus. He retired as chief executive at the end of 2009.
At Citigroup, whose sprawling consumer banking business is still ailing, some managers were disappointed in recent weeks by the preliminary estimates of their bonus pools, according to people familiar with the matter. Citigroup's overall 2009 bonus pool is expected to be about $5.3 billion, about the same as it was for 2008, although the bank has far fewer employees.
The highest bonus awarded to a Citigroup executive is already known: The bank said in a regulatory filing last week that the head of its investment bank, John Havens, would receive $9 million in stock. But the bank's chief executive, Vikram S. Pandit, is forgoing a bonus and taking a salary of just $1.
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7) Officials Hid Truth of Immigrant Deaths in Jail
"'Because ICE investigates itself there is no transparency and there is no reform or improvement,' Chris Crane, a vice president in the union that represents employees of the agency's detention and removal operations, told a Congressional subcommittee on Dec. 10."
By NINA BERNSTEIN
January 10, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/us/10detain.html?hp
Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation's immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how they died.
But behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.
The documents, obtained over recent months by The Times and the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, concern most of the 107 deaths in detention counted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since October 2003, after the agency was created within the Department of Homeland Security.
The Obama administration has vowed to overhaul immigration detention, a haphazard network of privately run jails, federal centers and county cells where the government holds noncitizens while it tries to deport them.
But as the administration moves to increase oversight within the agency, the documents show how officials - some still in key positions - used their role as overseers to cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.
As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the reporter's inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity.
In another case that year, investigators from the agency's Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that unbearable, untreated pain had been a significant factor in the suicide of a 22-year-old detainee at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, and that the medical unit was so poorly run that other detainees were at risk.
The investigation found that jail medical personnel had falsified a medication log to show that the detainee, a Salvadoran named Nery Romero, had been given Motrin. The fake entry was easy to detect: When the drug was supposedly administered, Mr. Romero was already dead.
Yet those findings were never disclosed to the public or to Mr. Romero's relatives on Long Island, who had accused the jail of abruptly depriving him of his prescription painkiller for a broken leg. And an agency supervisor wrote that because other jails were "finicky" about accepting detainees with known medical problems like Mr. Romero's, such people would continue to be placed at the Bergen jail as "a last resort."
In a recent interview, Benjamin Feldman, a spokesman for the jail, which housed 1,503 immigration detainees last year, would not say whether any changes had been made since the death.
In February 2007, in the case of the dying African man, the immigration agency's spokesman for the Northeast, Michael Gilhooly, rebuffed a Times reporter's questions about the detainee, who had suffered a skull fracture at the privately run Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey. Mr. Gilhooly said that without a full name and alien registration number for the man, he could not check on the case.
But, records show, he had already filed a report warning top managers at the federal agency about the reporter's interest and sharing information about the injured man, a Guinean tailor named Boubacar Bah. Mr. Bah, 52, had been left in an isolation cell without treatment for more than 13 hours before an ambulance was called.
While he lay in the hospital in a coma after emergency brain surgery, 10 agency managers in Washington and Newark conferred by telephone and e-mail about how to avoid the cost of his care and the likelihood of "increased scrutiny and/or media exposure," according to a memo summarizing the discussion.
One option they explored was sending the dying man to Guinea, despite an e-mail message from the supervising deportation officer, who wrote, "I don't condone removal in his present state as he has a catheter" and was unconscious. Another idea was renewing Mr. Bah's canceled work permit in hopes of tapping into Medicaid or disability benefits.
Eventually, faced with paying $10,000 a month for nursing home care, officials settled on a third course: "humanitarian release" to cousins in New York who had protested that they had no way to care for him. But days before the planned release, Mr. Bah died.
Among the participants in the conferences was Nina Dozoretz, a longtime manager in the agency's Division of Immigration Health Services who had won an award for cutting detainee health care costs. Later she was vice president of the Nakamoto Group, a company hired by the Bush administration to monitor detention. The Obama administration recently rehired her to lead its overhaul of detainee health care.
Asked about the conference call on Mr. Bah, Ms. Dozoretz said: "How many years ago was that? I don't recall all the specifics if indeed there was a call." She added, "I advise you to contact our public affairs office." Mr. Gilhooly, the spokesman who had said he had no information on the case, would not comment.
On the day after Mr. Bah's death in May 2007, Scott Weber, director of the Newark field office of the immigration enforcement agency, recommended in a memo that the agency take the unusual step of paying to send the body to Guinea for burial, to prevent his widow from showing up in the United States for a funeral and drawing news coverage.
Mr. Weber wrote that he believed the agency had handled Mr. Bah's case appropriately. "However," he added, "I also don't want to stir up any media interest where none is warranted." Helping to bury Mr. Bah overseas, he wrote, "will go a long way to putting this matter to rest."
In the agency's confidential files was a jail video showing Mr. Bah face down in the medical unit, hands cuffed behind his back, just before medical personnel sent him to a disciplinary cell. The tape shows him crying out repeatedly in his native Fulani, "Help, they are killing me!"
Almost a year after his death, the agency quietly closed the case without action. But Mr. Bah's name had shown up on the first list of detention fatalities, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and on May 5, 2008, his death was the subject of a front-page article in The Times.
Brian P. Hale, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an interview that the newly disclosed records represented the past, and that the agency's new leaders were committed to transparency and greater oversight, including prompt public disclosure and investigation of every death, and more attention to detainee care in a better-managed system.
But the most recent documents show that the culture of secrecy has endured. And the past cover-ups underscore what some of the agency's own employees say is a central flaw in the proposed overhaul: a reliance on the agency to oversee itself.
"Because ICE investigates itself there is no transparency and there is no reform or improvement," Chris Crane, a vice president in the union that represents employees of the agency's detention and removal operations, told a Congressional subcommittee on Dec. 10.
The agency has kept a database of detention fatalities at least since December 2005, when a National Public Radio investigation spurred a Congressional inquiry. In 2006, the agency issued standard procedures for all such deaths to be reported in detail to headquarters.
But internal documents suggest that officials were intensely concerned with controlling public information. In April 2007, Marc Raimondi, then an agency spokesman, warned top managers that a Washington Post reporter had asked about a list of 19 deaths that the civil liberties union had compiled, and about a dying man whose penile cancer had spread after going undiagnosed in detention, despite numerous medical requests for a biopsy.
"These are quite horrible medical stories," Mr. Raimondi wrote, "and I think we'll need to have a pretty strong response to keep this from becoming a very damaging national story that takes on long legs."
That response was an all-out defense of detainee medical care over several months, including statistics that appeared to show that mortality rates in detention were declining, and were low compared with death rates in prisons.
Experts in detention health care called the comparison misleading; it also came to light that the agency was undercounting the number of detention deaths, as well as discharging some detainees shortly before they died. In August, litigation by the civil liberties union prompted the Obama administration to disclose that more than one in 10 immigrant detention deaths had been overlooked and omitted from a list submitted to Congress last year.
Two of those deaths had occurred in Arizona, in 2004 and 2007, at the Eloy Detention Center, run by the Corrections Corporation of America. Eloy had nine known fatalities - more than any other immigration jail under contract to the federal government. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement was still secretive. When a reporter for The Arizona Republic asked about the circumstances of those deaths, an agency spokesman told him the records were unavailable.
According to records The Times obtained in December, one Eloy detainee who died, in October 2008, was Emmanuel Owusu. An ailing 62-year-old barber who had arrived from Ghana on a student visa in 1972, he had been a legal permanent resident for 33 years, mostly in Chicago. Immigration authorities detained him in 2006, based on a 1979 conviction for misdemeanor battery and retail theft.
"I am confused as to how subject came into our custody???" the Phoenix field office director, Katrina S. Kane, wrote to subordinates. "Convicted in 1979? That's a long time ago."
In response, a report on his death was revised to refer to Mr. Owusu's "lengthy criminal history ranging from 1977 to 1998." It did not note that except for the battery conviction, that history consisted mostly of shoplifting offenses.
A diabetic with high blood pressure, he had been detained for two years at Eloy while he battled deportation. He died of a heart ailment weeks after his last appeal was dismissed.
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8) Ballot Issues Attest to Anger in California
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
January 10, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/us/10calif.html?hp
LOS ANGELES - From San Diego to Mount Shasta, voters are expressing mounting disgust over California's fiscal meltdown and deteriorating services, and they are offering scores of voter initiatives that seek to change the way the state does business.
Over 30 such initiatives - among over 60 total initiatives so far - are now wending their way toward the ballot box. Every day, it seems another vexed voter adds a proposal to the fray.
Some verge on the radical, like one to establish the state's first constitutional convention in over a century, to rewrite California's most fundamental legislative rules. There are initiatives in circulation that would reduce the time the Legislature is in session, punish legislators for late budgets and criminalize "false statements about legislative acts."
Other states, of course, are also suffering through red ink, but none have quite the same mechanism as California's to let voters get involved with the process. Despite the fact that past initiatives helped get California into its budget crisis - forcing spending in some areas while limiting taxation in others - the pileup of new ones suggests that many voters still believe they hold the solution to the state's mess. Few seem to believe that elected officials are up to the job.
Some initiatives, in fact, could even limit the initiative process itself, or erase old ones.
The number of initiatives so far, while high, is not the largest in history. But the rage that underlies them has not been seen in decades, said lawmakers, pollsters, political consultants and the proponents.
"The feeling is one of revolt," said John Grubb, the campaign director for Repair California, a coalition behind a pair of initiatives to call a constitutional convention. "And come January, they will start negotiating the budget again, and there will be more fear and loathing. The feeling here is that California state government is broken, and we need not a little fix, but a big fix."
Most of the initiatives seek a spot on the November ballot, when voters will choose a new governor and other statewide officials. And while many of the measures will fail to get enough signatures to make it to Election Day, the sheer number of change-centered ideas reflects California voters' frustration.
In 2009, lawmakers struggled to close billions of dollars' worth of budget gaps. The net result was service reductions - from longer lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles to the loss of dental benefits for Medicaid recipients - as well as widespread furloughs for state workers and the rare use of i.o.u.'s issued to vendors and residents who were owed tax refunds.
But California is still projected to be $20 billion in the red over the next 18 months, and some state services are already showing the scars from their cuts.
The public university system, once the crown jewel of California, is struggling with layoffs, tuition increases and outright student and faculty revolts. In the public secondary schools, classroom sizes have swelled and program cuts are rampant.
And everything costs more: sales taxes went up last year, as did many user fees.
On Friday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger released his latest executive budget, with pay reductions for state workers and more draconian service cuts.
California voters are distinctly unimpressed with the roles played in the crisis by the governor and legislators. Many lawmakers cater to the fringe elements of their respective political parties and are beholden to special interests that finance their campaigns. A paltry 13 percent of registered voters approve of the job the Legislature does, according to a poll by the Public Policy Institute of California.
And so the efforts to take matters into their own hands.
"It is a very California moment," said Robert Hertzberg, co-chairman of California Forward, a group of business, political and academic leaders that seeks to change the state's budget processes. "It is almost like there are a bunch of weapons on the battlefield, and the bullets will be the funding of these initiatives."
The governor has embraced California Forward's proposals.
To get an initiative on the ballot, a person or group pays a $200 fee, gets approval of the text from the state attorney general's office, and then has 150 days to collect hundreds of thousands of signatures, which must be rigorously verified against voter registration records.
Throughout the decades, initiatives have followed the changing concerns of voters. In the 1930s, for instance, many dealt with liquor regulations, and in the 1970s and early '80s, taxation was a principal concern. The most famous initiative of that era was Proposition 13, which put a cap on property taxes. In the past 20 years, criminal justice and civil rights issues have often been on the ballot.
"Government reform has been a repeated theme over time," said Nicole Winger, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state's office, which manages the initiative process. "Now those measures are on the rise again."
The initiatives concerning the state budget are most in the spotlight, particularly the one that calls for a convention to rewrite the state's constitution. Delegates to such a convention would quite likely change the law requiring a two-thirds vote in the Legislature to pass a budget, and they could impose limitations on the initiative process and undo earlier initiatives that require spending for certain programs.
A constitutional convention could also alter the balance of power between state and local governments by giving cities greater control over their portion of the state budget. Many critics of the current system deplore Sacramento's centralized spending power and policy making for issues like education and local public safety.
Other ballot efforts would put stringent spending limits on the government, require a rainy-day fund and end $2 billion in corporate tax breaks.
Much of the anger in the ballot ideas is aimed straight at the Legislature. There are proposals to cut the pay of lawmakers in half and to prohibit them from voting on legislation that would have a financial impact on their contributors. (One that would force them to get drug tests recently failed to pass muster.)
Gabriella Holt, president of Citizens for California Reform, an advocacy group behind proposals to cut the pay of the Legislature and shorten its term, said, "We decided we should put the question to voters."
"I think people are very, very angry and very, very frustrated," Ms. Holt added, "and they want to send a message that they want to take back their government."
Placing the Legislature in the ballot cross hairs may be of questionable effectiveness. But last spring, the only one of six ballot measures to succeed was one that prevented lawmakers and other high-ranking officials from getting raises in times of fiscal distress.
One initiative would even redraw the boundaries of Congressional districts, in order to make those races more competitive.
"There is a great deal of voter unhappiness with the dysfunction of their Legislature generally," said the plan's proponent, Charles T. Munger, who donated more than $1 million toward a successful 2008 initiative to redraw state legislative districts, "and some of that is fueling the general voter's desire to see reform of the political process."
He added: "The gerrymandering of districts is a national problem. But this is my state, and I am trying to fix it here."
Whatever the outcome of these initiatives, the end of the year is almost certain to bring change to California, whether it is modest adjustments to the way the state passes its budget or a full-scale constitutional convention.
"Lots of people are unhappy, but for so many different and conflicting reasons that it is hard to envision where we will end up," said Bruce E. Cain, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. "It could be a chaotic jumble."
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9) The Count
With Jobs Few, Most Workers Aren't Satisfied
By PHYLLIS KORKKI
January 10, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/business/economy/10count.html?ref=business
Beneath the high unemployment rate lurks a simmering discontent - among people who still have jobs.
A new survey by the Conference Board found that only 45 percent of people were satisfied with their jobs, compared with 61 percent in 1987, the first year the survey was done.
It stands to reason that if fewer jobs are available, more people will be stuck in jobs they dislike. And the recession may indeed be a factor in the low number for 2009.
But job satisfaction has been trending downward through booms and busts, the Conference Board notes, and "no age or income group is immune."
Is American work inherently less satisfying now, or do more workers feel entitled to a job that seems like a walk in the park?
Whatever the reason, expect some turnover once the jobless rate falls and more workers feel free to release themselves from their current workplace shackles.
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10) 1 in 5 Working-Age American Men Don't Have A Job
By Shahien Nasiripour
01-8-10 11:59 AM
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/08/1-in-5-working-age-americ_n_415984.html
One in five working-age American men does not have a job, according to the latest federal employment numbers, an all-time high that illustrates the extraordinary toll this recession has taken on male-dominated professions in particular.
Men are more likely to work in sectors like manufacturing and construction that are more sensitive to economic downturns. But this downturn has been particularly brutal on those industries, leading some observers to call it a "mancession."
Only 80.3 percent of men age 25-54 had jobs in December -- the lowest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started collecting that data in 1948 -- at which point the figure was 94.4 percent. When the recession began in December 2007, less than 13 percent of men in this age bracket were out of work.
The numbers are derived from what the BLS calls its employment-to-population ratio. While the non-working number in this case includes men who have voluntarily chosen to stay out of the workforce, such as students and stay-at-home dads, in many ways it provides a clearer picture of the depth of the nation's unemployment situation.
The percentage of women age 25-54 who have work is also down, but not as dramatically. Some 69.1 percent of those women are employed, about the same as in 1998. Women dominate the fields such as education, health services and government. The health industry and government payrolls are booming, and are expected to continue growing, thanks to an aging population and recently-enacted stimulus programs to boost the economy, respectively.
Overall, the percentage of Americans over age 16 that holds a job continues to slide, reaching 58.2 percent. That's a 25-year-low.
"It is striking that we have managed to reverse more than 26 years of increasing labor force participation in this downturn," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research. "It will take a long time for workers to get over the effects of this recession."
The official unemployment rate, which doesn't include people who are underemployed or who have given up looking for work, remained at 10 percent.
Story continues below
According to the BLS, employers nationwide shed an additional 85,000 jobs in December. Analysts had predicted a decline of just 10,000 jobs.
The extent of the job losses indicates that the optimism generated by last month's slight dip in the unemployment rate (from 10.2 to 10 percent) may have been unfounded. Revised figures released today show an actual increase of 4,000 jobs in November - but that's now been offset 20 times over in December.
More than 6.3 million people are looking for jobs, according to the new figures, a 14 percent increase from December 2008.
Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, points out that 1.9 million workers have left the labor force since May. These are people who are either seeking work or working. More than 660,000 workers left the labor force between November and December alone.
"Absent this flight from the labor market the unemployment rate would have risen substantially in December, up 0.4 percent, rather than hold steady," he said in an e-mail.
Mishel also notes that the population has grown, which should have led to a rise in the labor force. Instead, just the opposite has happened. He writes:
"Over the last year, the working age population grew by 0.8 percent, so we would have expected a growth in the labor force, those working or seeking work, by 1.2 million people. Instead, the labor force fell 1.5 million, indicating that the labor force is missing 2.7 million people, more than half of whom abandoned the labor force. The erosion of the labor force started occurring after May, with 271,000 withdrawing each month for the last seven months. Two-thirds of those fleeing the labor market since May have been adult men."
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11) Military Is Awash in Data From Drones
By CHRISTOPHER DREW
January 11, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/11drone.html?hp
HAMPTON, Va. - As the military rushes to place more spy drones over Afghanistan, the remote-controlled planes are producing so much video intelligence that analysts are finding it more and more difficult to keep up.
Air Force drones collected nearly three times as much video over Afghanistan and Iraq last year as in 2007 - about 24 years' worth if watched continuously. That volume is expected to multiply in the coming years as drones are added to the fleet and as some start using multiple cameras to shoot in many directions.
A group of young analysts already watches every second of the footage live as it is streamed to Langley Air Force Base here and to other intelligence centers, and they quickly pass warnings about insurgents and roadside bombs to troops in the field.
But military officials also see much potential in using the archives of video collected by the drones for later analysis, like searching for patterns of insurgent activity over time. To date, only a small fraction of the stored video has been retrieved for such intelligence purposes.
Government agencies are still having trouble making sense of the flood of data they collect for intelligence purposes, a point underscored by the 9/11 Commission and, more recently, by President Obama after the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound passenger flight on Christmas Day.
Mindful of those lapses, the Air Force and other military units are trying to prevent an overload of video collected by the drones, and they are turning to the television industry to learn how to quickly share video clips and display a mix of data in ways that make analysis faster and easier.
They are even testing some of the splashier techniques used by broadcasters, like the telestrator that John Madden popularized for scrawling football plays. It could be used to warn troops about a threatening vehicle or to circle a compound that a drone should attack.
"Imagine you are tuning in to a football game without all the graphics," said Lucius Stone, an executive at Harris Broadcast Communications, a provider of commercial technology that is working with the military. "You don't know what the score is. You don't know what the down is. It's just raw video. And that's how the guys in the military have been using it."
The demand for the Predator and Reaper drones has surged since the terror attacks in 2001, and they have become among the most critical weapons for hunting insurgent leaders and protecting allied forces.
The military relies on the video feeds to catch insurgents burying roadside bombs and to find their houses or weapons caches. Most commanders are now reluctant to send a convoy down a road without an armed drone watching over it.
The Army, the Marines and the special forces are also deploying hundreds of smaller surveillance drones. And the C.I.A. uses drones to mount missile strikes against Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan.
Air Force officials, who take the lead in analyzing the video from Iraq and Afghanistan, say they have managed to keep up with the most urgent assignments. And it was clear, on a visit to the analysis center in an old hangar here, that they were often able to correlate the video data with clues in still images and intercepted phone conversations to build a fuller picture of the biggest threats.
But as the Obama administration sends more troops to Afghanistan, the task of monitoring the video will become more challenging.
Instead of carrying just one camera, the Reaper drones, which are newer and larger than the Predators, will soon be able to record video in 10 directions at once. By 2011, that will increase to 30 directions with plans for as many as 65 after that. Even the Air Force's top intelligence official, Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, says it could soon be "swimming in sensors and drowning in data."
He said the Air Force would have to funnel many of those feeds directly to ground troops to keep from overwhelming its intelligence centers. He said the Air Force was working more closely with field commanders to identify the most important targets, and it was adding 2,500 analysts to help handle the growing volume of data.
With a new $500 million computer system that is being installed now, the Air Force will be able to start using some of the television techniques and to send out automatic alerts when important information comes in, complete with highlight clips and even text and graphics.
"If automation can provide a cue for our people that would make better use of their time, that would help us significantly," said Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, the Air Force's chief of staff.
Officials acknowledge that in many ways, the military is just catching up to features that have long been familiar to users of YouTube and Google.
John R. Peele, a chief in the counterterrorism office at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which helps the Air Force analyze videos, said the drones "proliferated so quickly, and we didn't have very much experience using them.
"So we're kind of learning as we go along which tools would be helpful," he said.
But Mark A. Bigham, an executive at Raytheon, which designed the new computer system, said the Air Force had actually moved more quickly than most intelligence agencies to create Weblike networks where data could be shared easily among analysts.
In fact, it has relayed drone video to the United States and Europe for analysis for more than a decade. The operations, which now include 4,000 airmen, are headquartered at the base here, where three analysts watch the live feed from a drone.
One never takes his eyes off the monitor, calling out possible threats to his partners, who immediately pass alerts to the field via computer chat rooms and snap screenshots of the most valuable images.
"It's mostly through the chat rooms - that's how we're fighting these days," said Col. Daniel R. Johnson, who runs the intelligence centers.
He said other analysts, mostly enlisted men and women in their early 20s, studied the hundreds of still images and phone calls captured each day by U-2s and other planes and sent out follow-up reports melding all the data.
Mr. Bigham, the Raytheon executive, said the new system would help speed that process. He said it would also tag basic data, like the geographic coordinates and the chat room discussions, and alert officials throughout the military who might want to call up the videos for further study.
But while the biggest timesaver would be to automatically scan the video for trucks and armed men, that software is not yet reliable. And the military has run into the same problem that the broadcast industry has in trying to pick out football players swarming on a tackle.
So Cmdr. Joseph A. Smith, a Navy officer assigned to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which sets standards for video intelligence, said he and other officials had climbed into broadcast trucks outside football stadiums to learn how the networks tagged and retrieved highlight film.
"There are these three guys who sit in the back of an ESPN or Fox Sports van, and every time Tom Brady comes on the screen, they tap a button so that Tom Brady is marked," Commander Smith said, referring to the New England Patriots quarterback. Then, to call up the highlights later, he said, "they just type in: 'Tom Brady, touchdown pass.' "
Lt. Col. Brendan M. Harris, who is in charge of an intelligence squadron here, said his analysts could do that. He said the Air Force had just installed telestrators on its latest hand-held video receiver, and harried officers in the field would soon be able to simply circle the images of trucks or individuals they wanted the drones to follow.
But Colonel Harris also said that the drones often shot gray-toned video with infrared cameras that was harder to decipher than color shots. And when force is potentially involved, he said, there will be limits on what automated systems are allowed to do.
"You need somebody who's trained and is accountable in recognizing that that is a woman, that is a child and that is someone who's carrying a weapon," he said. "And the best tools for that are still the eyeball and the human brain."
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12) On Trial's Sidelines, Abortion Foes Are Divided
By MONICA DAVEY
January 11, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/us/11roeder.html?ref=us
When the trial of the man accused of murdering a doctor who performed late-term abortions begins on Monday in Wichita, Kan., Troy Newman, the leader of Operation Rescue, an anti-abortion group with headquarters a few miles from the courthouse, says he will most likely be at his desk, as usual, and certainly nowhere near the courtroom.
National groups like Mr. Newman's have publicly denounced the defendant, Scott Roeder, an abortion opponent accused of shooting the victim, Dr. George R. Tiller, as he served as an usher in his church last May.
"This trial isn't meaningful for the movement," Mr. Newman said last week. "What happened is antithetical to the Christian cause and to the stated foundation principles of pro-life."
But for a contingent of abortion opponents - those who argue that the killing of an abortion doctor can be considered justified by the abortions it prevents - Mr. Roeder's case has become a rallying point.
"He's a hero," said Regina Dinwiddie, a longtime abortion opponent from Kansas City, Kan., who was once ordered by a federal judge to stop using a bullhorn within 500 feet of abortion clinics. "His case is certainly the most important in my lifetime," added Ms. Dinwiddie, who said she and several others intended to travel to Wichita for the trial.
In a way, Mr. Roeder's trial would appear open and shut: prosecutors plan to call church members who say they saw Mr. Roeder walk into the church foyer, fire a gun into Dr. Tiller's head and run away. And though jurors may not be told as much in court, Mr. Roeder has admitted to the shooting in jailhouse interviews and, as recently as last week, in a 104-page legal memorandum he filed himself to the judge.
Yet Mr. Roeder, who has pleaded not guilty, and his supporters have made it clear that they hope the trial will focus less on who killed Dr. Tiller than why - in essence, an effort to send the jury on a broader examination of abortion and the practices of one of the few doctors in the country who was known to provide abortions into the third trimester of pregnancy.
The judge in the case, Warren Wilbert of Sedgwick County District Court, has said he will not allow the case to be transformed into a trial on abortion. But he also indicated late last week that he might allow jurors to consider a defense theory by which Mr. Roeder could be convicted of voluntary manslaughter if jurors were to conclude that Mr. Roeder had, as Kansas law defines it, "an unreasonable but honest belief that circumstances existed that justified deadly force."
Judge Wilbert rejected Mr. Roeder's efforts to present a so-called necessity defense, pursuing an acquittal on the basis that he was justified in his actions to prevent some greater harm. Still, the possibility now that jurors may be allowed to consider voluntary manslaughter, which carries a far shorter sentence than the life imprisonment he could face if convicted of first-degree murder, was seen as a victory for Mr. Roeder and a chance for his public defenders to lay out his views on abortion at the trial.
Advocates of abortion rights said that even allowing the argument to be presented in court was appalling and dangerous. In a statement, Katherine Spillar, executive vice president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, said allowing such a defense would "embolden anti-abortion extremists and could result in 'open season' on doctors across the country."
For the city of Wichita, the prospect of Mr. Roeder's trial, which may last as long as three weeks, marks an anxious final chapter in a fight that some residents said they wished had never begun. The conservative city of 357,000 has found itself at the volatile center of the abortion debate for three decades, in large part because of opposition to Dr. Tiller's clinic, which has closed since his death. Over the years, there were protests, violence (including a 1993 shooting that wounded Dr. Tiller in both arms) and trials, including one in early 2009 in which Dr. Tiller was acquitted of misdemeanor violations of the state's late-term abortion law. Mr. Roeder, 51 and a regular protester at clinics near his home in Kansas City, Mo., had attended part of that trial.
In one indication of the level of tension now, court officials announced late Friday that jury selection would be closed from public view. Even audio recordings of the proceedings will not be provided to the news media, a statement issued by the court said, "based on concerns over the chilling effect this might have on juror candor in the case." Prospective jurors are expected to be asked about their views on abortion, lawyers involved have said.
Security is expected to be tight, and some among those who could be ordered to attend the trial include figures well-known in the abortion fight here. Prosecutors have drawn up a list of hundreds of potential witnesses, including Shelley Shannon, who was imprisoned for the earlier shooting of Dr. Tiller. Among those subpoenaed by the defense is Phill Kline, the former attorney general of Kansas and a vehement abortion opponent who had vigorously investigated Dr. Tiller.
The case is certain to underscore divisions among some opponents of abortion - like those between Mr. Newman, of Operation Rescue, and Ms. Dinwiddie, who says she supports a "Defensive Action Statement," a 1990s-era public declaration in support of those who have committed violence against abortion doctors, arguing that such violence can be justified by the lives saved.
For his part, Mr. Newman discounts those opponents, describing their numbers as minute (a "handful of people," he says) and them as "loons" and "wing nuts" whose outlier views flatly conflict with advocacy of life.
Ms. Dinwiddie, meanwhile, calls anti-abortion leaders who, like Mr. Newman, denounce Mr. Roeder "abortion profiteers" who are "running like roaches" away from a crucial trial of their own cause. "He didn't murder the mailman," Ms. Dinwiddie said.
Dave Leach, an abortion opponent from Des Moines who drafted a new "Defensive Action Statement" in connection with Mr. Roeder's situation and has sought people willing to back it publicly, says he, too, hopes to attend Mr. Roeder's trial to offer his support. (He says about 20 people have signed on to his statement.)
Mr. Roeder's supporters tried to raise money for his defense with an auction of anti-abortion materials (including a Bible once owned by Ms. Shannon), but eBay would not allow it.
Mr. Leach said he talked to Mr. Roeder by phone from jail once or twice a week.
Mr. Newman said he, too, had heard from Mr. Roeder, in a letter from jail. "He was rebuking me for not being supportive, for 'being a hypocrite,' " said Mr. Newman, who said he had met Mr. Roeder before the shooting but barely knew him.
Mr. Newman said he had forwarded the letter to the prosecutor.
Joe Stumpe contributed reporting from Wichita.
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13) Bringing Torture Home to Chicago's South Side
By PATRICK HEALY
January 11, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/theater/11conroy.html?ref=us
CHICAGO - John Conroy spent 15 years writing investigative news articles about one of the darkest chapters of this city's Police Department, the allegations that some officers on the South Side regularly resorted to suffocation, electric shock and mock Russian roulette in the 1970s and '80s to obtain confessions from suspects.
But for all of the official inquiries and overturned convictions that resulted - a special state prosecutors' report in 2006 supported the accusations of scores of inmates, and the city paid out $20 million in settlements in a case that continues to reverberate today - Mr. Conroy never believed that the people of Chicago were truly outraged by the front-page headlines about police torture. And so, in the tradition of history and morality plays like "A Man for All Seasons" and last year's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, "Ruined," Mr. Conroy turned to theater as a means of provocation and catharsis.
"I wanted to indict the whole city of Chicago," Mr. Conroy said of his first outing as a playwright, the two-act "My Kind of Town," which he has developed with help from the Steppenwolf Theater Company here; a third reading is planned for March at Northwestern University.
"I wanted to get at the public indifference, to go up the ladder and look at not only the cops who chose to torture but also at families and society that seemed to accept that some criminals constituted a tortureable class of people," he added during an interview at a diner that he chose for its popularity with both police officers and suspected gang members.
While Mr. Conroy is a widely respected journalist who wrote for The Chicago Reader for many years, as well as an author (with one book about Northern Ireland and another about torture), creating a play has been full of challenges for him, he said. One was mastering the form and pacing of a multicharacter stage drama that spans 27 years; for that he studied plays like August Wilson's "Fences," which follows a family over several years.
Dramas based on historical events can sometimes have a bloodless quality, said Martha Lavey, the artistic director of Steppenwolf, and leave audiences feeling that they are being taught a lesson rather than being plunged into rich drama.
"What we've encouraged John to think about is how to keep the material feeling fresh and alive," Ms. Lavey said. "The question for a playwright is: How do you basically report history in such a way where something is at stake in the present? What's at stake in John's play can't just be the facts of the case but the relationships among the characters, the ways that the characters deal with eternal issues like truth and betrayal."
The play involves three interlocking stories: an African-American police officer and his ex-wife, whose son was tortured in custody; a young prosecutor who is haunted by the knowledge that she may have witnessed officers preparing to torture a criminal; and a police detective and his family torn apart by the scandal.
While the brutality is described but not shown, there are several wrenching moments, including a scene in which a convicted man recalls how he was sodomized with a cattle prod to force a confession to a murder - and then, minutes later, suffocated with a plastic bag when officers wanted him to confess to a second murder as well.
"And I thought I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die right here," the character says of the suffocation, continuing later, "And they took it off before I died and I hollered and then the light went back on and they're sitting in chairs, Gunther standing against the wall, like nothing happened. And one of them says, two murders, and I said nothing, I couldn't get enough air, I couldn't think hardly, and the light went out again and I hollered, 'Two murders.' Then the light went back on, they's all sitting like nothing happened, and they said, 'That's what we thought.' "
While Mr. Conroy said his play was a work of fiction, the character Gunther - a commander who oversees the officers applying the torture - is clearly inspired by a real-life former commander in the South Side Police Area 2, Jon Burge. A decorated Vietnam veteran and often-promoted police officer, Commander Burge was removed from the force in 1993 after the Chicago Police Board found him guilty of physically abusing an accused murderer in the 1980s. Mr. Burge is scheduled to go to court again in May, this time on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice; he is accused of lying about his involvement in torturing suspects.
Mr. Burge did not respond to an interview request made through one of his lawyers, Marc Martin. In a telephone interview Mr. Martin said of Mr. Conroy's play, "I'm glad he's representing it as fiction, because based on our investigation of this case, the allegations about Commander Burge are fiction."
From the Greeks to Shakespeare and Brecht the theater has a long if irregular history of morality plays. Some are about the life and death struggles of real people, like Thomas More and Anne Frank; more recent examined the clash of ideas and values of historical figures, like two Tony Award-winning plays of the last decade, Michael Frayn's "Copenhagen" and Tom Stoppard's "Coast of Utopia."
For "Ruined," the celebrated drama about emotionally and physically mutilated prostitutes in war-torn Congo, the playwright Lynn Nottage drew on interviews with women during trips to Africa in 2004 and 2005. Like Mr. Conroy, she said that she decided to create her own fictional version of the world rather than write a play based on the verbatim words of the women, because she wanted creative room to tell a story with an epic sweep. She also did not want to exploit their stories for any personal gain, she said.
Ms. Nottage said in an interview that writers working on history and morality plays have to make careful choices, to construct powerful narratives that audiences in any country or city can relate to.
"I spent a lot of time thinking about how to tell the story because I didn't want it to be preachy, didn't want to be up on the soapbox telling the audience how to feel or what to think," Ms. Nottage said. One choice she made was to have the characters perform songs that included some of the most pointed and emotionally direct lines in the play. "I think that when people are listening to music, they enter a certain kind of comfort zone where they are open to hearing things that they might reject otherwise."
Whatever his own personal views about Mr. Burge and the torture allegations, Mr. Conroy also had the audience partly in mind when he chose not to render many clear-cut judgments in "My Kind of Town." He said he preferred to shade most of the characters with moral ambiguities, an approach that he hoped would draw in Chicago audiences and stimulate conversations about their own feelings on torture.
"I'm not a 'gotcha' reporter, and I wasn't out to paint cops in any simplistic good-and-evil way," said Mr. Conroy, who grew up in a Chicago suburb, Skokie, and was an English major at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "And I didn't want to tell a story that said that the guilty cops have to be punished or the righteous have to win, but rather that these were real human beings who had to make choices that we as a society need to see - and that those choices had consequences that we as a society and city need to deal with."
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14) Large Price Jumps Reported for Small but Vital Drugs
"Most of the big price increases ranged from 100 percent to 499 percent, but some of the price increases were far larger, the investigators found. For instance, the prices of 26 brand-name drugs rose more than tenfold. The largest price increase found by the investigators was about 4,200 percent."
By GARDINER HARRIS
January 11, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/11price.html?ref=business
Prices for a small but growing number of brand-name drugs have risen more than twofold in recent years as drug makers seek to squeeze greater profits out of often small-selling but vital medicines, according to Congressional investigators.
Medicines like Adderall for attention deficit disorder, Inderal for chest pain and Sumycin for infections were among 416 brand-name drug products whose makers or distributors raised prices at least once by 100 percent or more from 2000 to 2008, investigators found.
These substantial price increases are becoming increasingly common, according to the Government Accountability Office, which conducted the inquiry. In 2000, prices for 28 drug products rose by 100 percent or more. In 2008, 71 had similar increases.
In response to the investigators' report, which will be released Monday, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America e-mailed a statement saying that drugs represent only 10 percent of the nation's overall spending on health care.
"Companies make price adjustments independently as a result of market forces, which include everything from patent expirations" to the substantial research costs associated with discovering medicines, the statement said.
In recent years, drug makers have paid greater attention to culling their ample portfolio of medicines. Marginally profitable medicines or small-selling drugs with particularly challenging manufacturing processes were often sold off by large drug makers to smaller companies, which paid for them by immediately increasing the drugs' prices.
Most of the big price increases ranged from 100 percent to 499 percent, but some of the price increases were far larger, the investigators found. For instance, the prices of 26 brand-name drugs rose more than tenfold. The largest price increase found by the investigators was about 4,200 percent.
Nearly a third of the drugs whose prices were substantially raised were intended to treat depression, anxiety and other disorders of the central nervous system, while many others were intended to treat infections or cardiovascular problems.
The price for a drug intended to treat a rare form of cancer went from $390 for a full course of treatment to more than $3,000, investigators found.
The drugs' makers were not always behind the price rises. In more than half of the cases disclosed by investigators, the price increases were made by a middleman that bought the medicines from manufacturers and repackaged them for hospitals or doctors.
With thousands of approved medicines, the market for drugs in the United States is enormously complicated. Myriad players - manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers and providers - often play some role in pricing. For some small-selling medicines, prices and availability can change significantly year to year.
But much of the money in the system goes to a relatively small number of huge-selling medicines whose prices start high and are made even higher by modest and frequent price increases. Last year, overall wholesale prices of brand-name drugs rose 9 percent even as the Consumer Price Index fell.
One reason for the price increases might be that drug makers are bracing for the effects of the health care overhaul effort in Congress. Another is that drug makers' labs have been unusually barren, and that without new products, drug makers view price increases as among the only ways to reliably increase profits.
"It is hard to find a good-faith explanation for why drug prices could go up this much," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. "This report will lead to a strong demand for action by Congress."
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15) A Serious Proposal
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
January 12, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/opinion/12herbert.html
The president of the American Federation of Teachers says she will urge her members to accept a form of teacher evaluation that takes student achievement into account and that the union has commissioned an independent effort to streamline disciplinary processes and make it easier to fire teachers who are guilty of misconduct.
In a speech to be delivered Tuesday in Washington, Randi Weingarten plans to call for more frequent and more rigorous evaluations of public schoolteachers, and she says she will assert that standardized test scores and other measures of student performance should be an integral part of the evaluation process. The use of student test scores to measure teacher performance has been anathema to many teachers. Ms. Weingarten is not proposing that they be the only - or even the primary - element in determining teacher quality.
But she told me in an interview over the weekend that she wants to "stop this notion" that her membership is in favor of keeping bad teachers in the classroom. "I will try to convince my members that, of course, we have to look at student test scores and student learning," she said.
The use of test scores, as Ms. Weingarten sees it, would be part of a new, enhanced process of teacher evaluation that would offer clear professional standards for teachers. It would replace current practices, which in many districts across the country are lax, haphazard and, in the words of Ms. Weingarten and others, often amount to little more than "drive-by" evaluations.
It is not uncommon for teachers to be observed in the classroom just a couple of times a year for only a few minutes each time and then get a satisfactory rating. Under those circumstances, hardly anything is learned about the quality or effectiveness of the teachers. Most teachers are routinely rated as satisfactory, and many are never evaluated at all.
Ms. Weingarten is urging school administrators to observe teachers more closely and more frequently. (The enhanced, clearly articulated professional standards she is calling for are already in use in some districts. There is no need to reinvent the wheel.) Experts trained in best practices and using a variety of objective data, including measures of student achievement, would do the evaluating. Teachers who are struggling would be given an opportunity to improve their performance. If, after remedial efforts, they still did not measure up, they would be fired, whether tenured or not.
As Ms. Weingarten put it, "We would have to say, 'Look, we helped you. We tried. You're just not cut out to be a teacher.' "
Ms. Weingarten also addresses the fact that it is sometimes scandalously difficult to remove teachers who have engaged in serious misconduct. While emphasizing the need for due process, she bluntly asserts, in a draft of her speech: "We recognize, however, that too often due process can become a glacial process. We intend to change that."
The union has asked Kenneth Feinberg, the federal government's so-called pay czar, to develop a more efficient protocol for disciplining - and when necessary, removing - teachers accused of misconduct.
This would be a big deal. Mr. Feinberg is highly respected and widely viewed as independent. He administered the government fund that compensated those who were injured and the families of those who were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks. He also administered a fund set up in the wake of the mass shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007.
He is not the kind of guy to go into the tank for the teachers' union. (John Ashcroft chose him to lead the 9/11 fund.) It will be very interesting to see whether the union actually goes along if Mr. Feinberg fashions a workable plan to streamline teacher discipline that is viewed favorably by school administrators.
"We look forward," said Ms. Weingarten, "to working with Mr. Feinberg on this critical undertaking."
If the union follows through on Ms. Weingarten's proposals, it would represent a significant, good-faith effort to cooperate more fully with state officials and school administrators in the monumental job of improving public school education. More than 90 percent of American youngsters go through the public schools. The schools were struggling and failing too many youngsters even before the latest economic downturn, which is taking a terrible toll.
My view is that America's greatest national security crisis is the crisis in its schools.
Ms. Weingarten's ideas for upgrading the teacher evaluation process are good ones and should be embraced and improved upon where possible by those in charge of the nation's schools. The point is not just to get rid of failing teachers, but to improve the skills and effectiveness of the millions of teachers who show up in the classrooms every day.
If the union chooses not to follow through on these proposals, its credibility will take a punishing and well-deserved hit.
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16) Local 743 Members Unite to Say "We Won't Go Back"
Teamster Reformers Ousted in Power Grab
By Staff
Tuesday January 12, 2010
http://www.fightbacknews.org/2010/1/11/teamster-reformers-ousted-power-grab
Chicago, IL - Chicago Teamster bosses ousted reformers Richard Berg and Gina Alvarez from union office today in a power struggle between grassroots reformers and old guard Teamster officials over one of the largest Teamster local unions in Chicago and the country.
Joint Council 25 officials suspended Richard Berg from union membership and removed him as president of Teamsters Local 743 on false charges that he violated Teamster procedures. Alvarez was also suspended from membership and removed as secretary-treasurer.
The 11,000 members of Local 743 voted Berg and his New Leadership Slate into office in 2007 on a reform platform. His election was bitterly opposed - for years - by Chicago's top Teamster officials, who used every means at their disposal to prevent a reform victory in Local 743.
Berg opponents were convicted of stealing a union vote to block his election. One of the vote-riggers is also serving jail time for using Local 743 as a front for drug trafficking. When Berg was nominated in June 2006 for International Vice President on the reform slate, while Chicago's top Teamster official John Coli ran on the old guard slate, Berg was assaulted at the Teamster Convention by former Local 743 president Richard Lopez. Joint Council 25 and International Union officials upheld the Local 743 election results that were stolen and overturned - but today voted to suspend Berg and Alvarez's union membership - a move that could disqualify them from running for re-election in Local 743.
Local 743 members plan to fight Berg and Alvarez's removal in federal court, where they were able to win a supervised election.
"They couldn't steal our election and they couldn't defeat us at the polls, so they used trumped up charges to oust Richard and Gina and hijack Local 743," said Joe Sexauer, Local 743 union representative who helped organize Berg's successful election. "But the union is about more than any one leader - it's about the members. We've defeated corrupt officials before, and we'll do it again."
Berg and his New Leadership Slate were elected to lead Local 743 in October 2007 in an election supervised by the Department of Labor - and Berg followed through on his reform platform. He cut his salary by $70,000 and shaved the union payroll by eliminating do-nothing jobs.
Not everyone was happy with Local 743's new direction, including some of the newly-elected officers. They agreed to run with Berg on a reform platform that included reducing the salaries of overpaid union officials. But they demanded higher salaries once they were in office. When members complained that some union representatives weren't doing their job, Berg investigated the complaints, took the cases to the union's Executive Board, and those union representatives were terminated.
Unhappy at the financial reforms and the demands for accountability of union staff some Local 743 officers teamed up with Berg's opponents in the Teamster hierarchy. They filed internal union charges falsely claiming that Berg had failed to present the terminations and other union matters to the Executive Board. Not a single one of the charges alleges that Berg or any other Local 743 reformer took a penny for personal gain.
Local 743 represents 11,000 members at the University of Chicago and U of C Hospital, Rush Presbyterian Hospital, Blue Cross and numerous shops, factories, offices and nursing homes.
"We elected him, and it's our choice, the membership to keep him or take him out in an election, not like this," said UC Medical Center worker Jean Moore.
Under Berg's leadership, Local 743 cut officer salaries, including his own, and put the union's dues money to work for the membership. Berg hired professional contract negotiators and led a successful strike to protect members' healthcare. The local has taken stands to promote civil rights and racial equality: Local 743 sponsored Martin Luther King Day events and participated in marches for immigrants rights.
"For years officials treated Local 743 like a piggy-bank," said Melanie Cloghessy, a member of Local 743 at the University of Chicago. "We won't go back to those dark days of corruption. The New Leadership team will keep fighting for a union that fights for us. The officials who are making this power grab are going to learn that we'll fight back against their double-dealing just like we stood up to the criminal activities of the past."
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17) Tax Them Both
[This is like mice demanding that cat's regulate themselves...bw]
Editorial
January 13, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/opinion/13wed1.html?hp
The White House is talking about levying a tax or fee on large banks to recover the $120 billion it spent to bail out the financial system. That is a good place to start, but it shouldn't stop there. President Obama and Congress should also impose a windfall tax on the huge bonuses that bailed-out bankers plan to pay themselves over the next few weeks.
This is an issue of fairness and sound public policy. The Treasury needs the money. A fee may also get banks and bankers to rethink the way they do business - something the much-promised, far-too-delayed and increasingly watered-down financial regulatory reform effort is unlikely to do. A permanent tax or fee imposed on the nation's largest banks could reduce future risks by discouraging big banks from getting even bigger.
Let's be clear, the crisis spawned by banks' recklessness has cost the country a lot more than $120 billion. Any calculation must also include the deepest recession since the 1930s and the loss of more than seven million jobs. What profits banks have made since then have not come from lending to credit-strapped businesses. They are trading profits made possible by trillions of dollars in cheap financing from the Federal Reserve.
The crisis occurred because banks that had grown too big to fail came too close to failure - driven by a reckless pursuit of risk and profit. Credit froze, and the government was forced to put enormous public resources at their disposal to keep them afloat.
Though all that public money has pulled banks back from the brink, some too-big-to-fail banks have since got even bigger by swallowing their weaker brethren. That means, if they get in trouble, they could wreak even greater havoc on the economy.
A levy on these financial giants would help by putting a brake on this consolidation - making the largest banks somewhat less profitable and steering investment and other resources into smaller banks, which, if they failed, wouldn't take the rest of us with them.
The Obama administration has not specified either the size or the type of levy it would impose on the nation's big banks. Officials are reportedly considering a tax on profits of the largest banks and a tax based on the size of their assets. Designing either will not be easy. Banks will deploy phalanxes of lawyers to avoid them and threaten to move their operations to friendlier climes.
To be effective, any fee or tax should be implemented as part of a coordinated effort with all the big financial centers around the globe. Britain and France would be likely to come on board. The Group of 20 leading industrial and developing nations asked the International Monetary Fund last year to study different ways to make big banks raise money to contribute for present and potential future bailouts.
Crafting a coordinated taxation regime might take a while. In the meantime, the Obama administration could start filling the budgetary gap with a windfall tax on those big bankers' bonuses. It is a perfect way to say thank you.
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18) Beverly Hills Blocks Outside Students
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
January 14, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/us/14beverly.html?hp
LOS ANGELES - In a contentious meeting ringed by police officers, the Beverly Hills school board voted Tuesday night to dismiss roughly 470 students enrolled in its schools on out-of-district permits.
The school system there has long opened its doors to students who live outside the district - currently about one in seven of its roughly 4,800 students - in large part because they brought a financial windfall for the system. But now, because cash-poor California has reduced local support to schools, including the reimbursements for out-of-district students, the so-called permit students are more of a burden to the schools than a boon.
Beverly Hills will soon use its own property tax dollars to finance its schools to replace money lost from the state. So the board voted to notify most of the out-of-district students that they must go.
"Although I recognize this is an inconvenience, it's certainly not life or death," said Steven Fenton, the board president. He added that for those who want to keep their children in the schools, "there are apartments waiting for you tomorrow."
Most of the students now must choose between private schools or their local school under the Los Angeles Unified School District, which is largely troubled. "Go back to your home school to make it better," Lisa Korbatov, the board's vice president, admonished parents with children in the Beverly Hills schools on permits. "I don't understand this entitlement."
Only one board member, Myra Lurie, argued for all the children to fully matriculate. "What we're doing here is a defining moment," she said. A student representative on the board, Rachel Feinberg, did not take a position and instead read a poem decrying community infighting.
All five members voted for a new system, which will begin in the next school year, that will mean no children below high school age would be allowed to renew their permits, with the exception of seventh graders, who would be permitted to go on through eighth grade. All high school students would ostensibly be able to stay through graduation; an earlier plan had excluded ninth graders. The district will not permit new out-of-district permits; it will continue to extend them to children of district and city employees, some high school students from poor areas and children whose parents went to Beverly Hills schools and whose grandparents still live in the district.
"We are Beverly Hills and we can show some compassion," Mr. Fenton said. Families could appeal to the Los Angeles County Office of Education, which has ultimate authority on transfer matters.
California reimburses the majority of public schools on a daily rate per child using a complex formula based on property tax rates. When the schools here were not able to fill their classrooms with local students, the state gave the system $6,239 per child this year for each student who came from out of the district. The school board members and some parents and Beverly Hills residents have maintained that the out-of-district students have gone from providing money to draining the system, and now cost the district roughly $2 million a year, according to the superintendent, a figure that parents of children on permits insist is wildly inflated. The district's annual budget is about $62.5 million.
The meeting on Tuesday at Beverly Hills High School - which attracted a half-dozen police officers, a fire marshal and so many parents, students and community residents that an overflow room was needed to hold the crowds - was peppered with two and a half hours of impassioned testimony, largely from opponents including some of the children who would be removed under the plan. "If you kicked me out of my home," said Amanda Christovich, a seventh grader. "I will be lost." Two people in the audience were removed from the meeting for mocking a board member.
Lamenting the need for police officers - requested by the board members because the issue has become so heated - and saying the board's decision smacked of "perverse elitism," Robert K. Tanenbaum, the former mayor of Beverly Hills, said, "We made a commitment to these students, and we expect you to abide by that commitment."
But some parents, citing what they see as entitlement among parents and students who attend the schools on the so-called opportunity permits, asserted that only Beverly Hills residents should benefit from services paid for with their tax dollars. "This is a community trying to take care of its own," said Genevieve Peters, a resident and parent, "and there is nothing wrong with that."
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19) Deadly Protest in Afghanistan Highlights Tensions
"Also Tuesday, 16 people suspected of being insurgents were killed in a pair of Hellfire missile strikes launched by unmanned aerial vehicles, otherwise known as drones."
By DEXTER FILKINS
January 13, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/world/asia/13afghan.html?ref=world
KABUL, Afghanistan - A volatile town in southern Afghanistan erupted Tuesday as rumors spread that American servicemen had desecrated a Koran and defiled local women in a nearby village. Taliban provocateurs on the scene whipped up a crowd and goaded it to violence, local officials said.
When the riot was over, at least eight protesters were dead and about a dozen wounded, shot by Afghan intelligence officers. Much of the town of Garmsir blamed the Americans.
The episode, which American officers said they were investigating, highlighted how easily suspicions and resentment can flare out of control in an area as contested as the Helmand River Valley.
Separately, two United States service members were killed Wednesday in a bomb blast in eastern Afghanistan, NATO said in a statement without giving details, The Associated Press reported.
Their deaths brought to 12 the number of American troops killed in Afghanistan so far this month; 16 other soldiers from the international coalition have died this month. The A.P. said.
Thousands of American Marines and soldiers - the majority of the reinforcements President Obama has sent so far to try to turn the tide of the war - are moving into areas there that had previously stood as uncontested Taliban strongholds.
In Kabul, American commanders denied that their service members had engaged in any offensive conduct. But the damage, it seemed, had been done.
The protest began when several thousand Afghans gathered in the central bazaar in Garmsir, after reports of abuse by American servicemen during a raid at a nearby village two nights before. Local officials said the protest was organized by the Taliban's shadow governor for Garmsir, Mullah Mohammed Naim.
"The Taliban were provoking the people," Kamal Khan, Helmand Province's deputy police chief, said in a telephone interview. "They were telling the people that the Americans and their Afghan partners are killing innocent people, bombing their homes and destroying their mosques and also blaspheming their religion and culture.
"The Taliban were telling the people, 'This is jihad; you should sacrifice yourselves.' "
No witnesses to the disputed raid could be located; it took place Sunday night in the village of Darweshan. American officers in Kabul said that Afghan soldiers conducted a nighttime operation in the village, with the Americans in support. But they said that no shots had been fired and that no one had engaged in any inappropriate conduct.
The protesters in Garmsir began shouting "Death to America" and "Death to Kamal Khan" and overturned several cars. They set a school on fire. Then they stormed the local office of the National Directorate of Security, the Afghan domestic intelligence service.
The N.D.S. is sometimes blamed for providing faulty intelligence to the Americans, who then detain the wrong people. As the crowd moved in, N.D.S. officers opened fire, Mr. Khan said.
In addition to the 8 protesters killed and 13 wounded, an Afghan intelligence officer and two police officers were killed.
As the chaos unfolded, American officials said, a Taliban sniper began firing into a nearby American base, Forward Operating Base Delhi, a few hundred yards away. American officers said they killed the sniper but no one else. In a statement, the Americans denied that they had fired on any protesters.
Mr. Khan, the deputy police chief, seconded that. "There were no Americans there," he said.
Still, the episode appeared to have soured relations between the Americans and at least some Afghans.
"The Americans are blaspheming the holy Koran and violating and disrespecting our culture," said Jan Gul, a farmer whose son was killed in the protest. "We cannot tolerate such behavior. We will defend our religion."
Indeed, some Afghans at the demonstration maintained that the American forces were present with the N.D.S. agents and fired on the crowd. But Mr. Khan and American officers in Kabul said that was not true.
"While denying these allegations, we take them very seriously and support a combined investigation with local Afghan authorities," Maj. Gen. Michael Regner said in Kabul.
"I.S.A.F. is an international force that includes Muslim soldiers, and we deplore such an action under any circumstances," he said, using the abbreviation for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.
At least 363 American and other NATO service personnel have been killed in Helmand, more than in any other Afghan province. Helmand received the bulk of the 17,000 additional soldiers Mr. Obama sent to the region after taking office last January, and it will get at least some of the 30,000 reinforcements that he ordered last month.
Garmsir is an especially difficult area. It was under Taliban control until May 2008, when a force of American Marines swept in and cleared the town. Since then, the Marines have been trying to secure the area and establish a government. In fact, they have brought a measure of calm to Garmsir and its environs, an area six miles long and six miles wide. But outside Garmsir - and sometimes inside it - the Taliban are still operating.
Also Tuesday, 16 people suspected of being insurgents were killed in a pair of Hellfire missile strikes launched by unmanned aerial vehicles, otherwise known as drones.
Airstrikes by drones have drawn great attention in Pakistan, where the C.I.A. has used Predator drones and the larger Reaper drones to find and kill Taliban and Qaeda fighters in the rugged areas along the border.
In Afghanistan, by contrast, the strikes carried out by the United States Air Force are rarely publicized. In 2002, officials with the C.I.A. used a drone to fire a missile at a warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, outside Kabul, but missed. Until Monday, there had been very few publicized drone strikes on the Afghan side of the border.
In a statement, the American command in Kabul said the more lethal of the two drone strikes took place in Now Zad, where the missile was fired at a group of men moving military equipment. The attack killed 13 people suspected of being insurgents, the statement said. An Afghan in the area who was interviewed by telephone said that those killed had in fact been insurgents, and that no civilians had been harmed.
A second missile was fired in the Nad Ali District, killing three insurgents, the command said.
In both instances, the drones fired Hellfire missiles.
Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan.
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20) A Year of Terror Plots, Through a Second Prism
"Exactly 14 of the approximately 14,000 murders in the United States last year resulted from allegedly jihadist attacks: 13 people shot at Fort Hood in Texas in November and one at a military recruiting station in Little Rock, Ark., in June."
By SCOTT SHANE
News Analysis
January 13, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/us/13intel.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON - As terrorist plots against the United States have piled up in recent months, politicians and the news media have sounded the alarm with a riveting message for Americans: Be afraid. Al Qaeda is on the march again, targeting the country from within and without, and your hapless government cannot protect you.
But the politically charged clamor has lumped together disparate cases and obscured the fact that the enemies on American soil in 2009, rather than a single powerful and sophisticated juggernaut, were a scattered, uncoordinated group of amateurs who displayed more fervor than skill. The weapons were old-fashioned guns and explosives - in several cases, duds supplied by F.B.I. informants - with no trace of the biological or radiological poisons, let alone the nuclear bombs, that have long been the ultimate fear.
And though 2009 brought more domestic plots, and more serious plots, than any recent year, their lethality was relatively modest. Exactly 14 of the approximately 14,000 murders in the United States last year resulted from allegedly jihadist attacks: 13 people shot at Fort Hood in Texas in November and one at a military recruiting station in Little Rock, Ark., in June.
Such statistics would be no comfort, of course, if an attack with mass casualties succeeded some day.
Nor do they excuse the acknowledged missteps at the United States' bulked-up security agencies that helped allow a makeshift bomb to be carried onto a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines plane on Christmas Day - the attempted attack that set off the flood of news coverage.
But even that near miss, said Mark M. Lowenthal, assistant director of the Central Intelligence Agency for analysis from 2002 to 2005, may offer indirect evidence of the enemy's diminished strength, compared with the coordinated attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
"Sending one guy on one plane is a huge step down," Mr. Lowenthal said. "They're less capable, even if they're still lethal. They're not able to carry out the intense planning they once did."
Counterterrorism experts inside and outside the government are intensely debating the meaning of the flurry of plots last year, and there is no settled consensus. Somalia and Yemen have emerged decisively as jihadist hot spots that may pose a direct threat to the United States. C.I.A. drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas have by no means ended the threat from there, as the Dec. 30 suicide bombing that killed seven C.I.A. employees in nearby Afghanistan grimly underscored. The Internet continues to prove a powerful tool for radicalization, as long-distance propagandists stir the ire of young Muslims about American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But Mr. Lowenthal and others who urge a calmer, more strategic assessment of the recent rash of violent schemes insist that the country is far safer than it was in 2001. They also argue that since the goal of terrorism is to spread terror, hyperbole about threats only does the extremists' work for them.
"We give comfort to our enemies," said Charles E. Allen, a 40-year C.I.A. veteran who served as the top intelligence official at the Department of Homeland Security from 2007 to early last year. Exaggerated news coverage and commentary, he said, "creates an atmosphere of tension and fear, and to me that's exactly the wrong way to go."
Mr. Allen said the United States needed "resilience" in the face of the terrorist threat. He noted with admiration that public transportation barely paused in London in 2005 when 52 people were killed by four suicide bombers attacking the subway and a bus.
"I believe in heightened attention to security; I just don't believe hysteria is useful," Mr. Allen said.
The 10 jihadist plots or attacks inside the United States in 2009 - a count by Bruce Hoffman, who studies terrorism at Georgetown University - had no evident links to one another and little in common beyond their apparent ideological motive.
The deadliest was allegedly carried out by Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of the Fort Hood shootings, who does not appear to have been directed by any group, though he exchanged e-mail messages with a radical cleric in Yemen. Schemes broken up in Newburgh, N.Y.; Springfield, Ill.; Raleigh, N.C.; Boston; and Dallas seem to have developed independently and largely under surveillance from the F.B.I.
More disturbing to counterterrorism officials were two cases with ties to Pakistan's tribal region, where Osama bin Laden and the remaining core of Al Qaeda are thought to be hiding. They involved Najibullah Zazi, the former Manhattan coffee vendor accused of traveling to Pakistan for explosives training, and David C. Headley of Chicago, who is charged with aiding the 2008 assault on Mumbai and plotting attacks in Denmark.
The term "Al Qaeda," used as a catchall in many of the plots, blurs important distinctions. By most accounts, apart from possibly the Zazi case, none of the 2009 cases appears to be directly tied to "Al Qaeda central," as experts refer to the Pakistan-based group led by Mr. bin Laden.
Others involved ersatz "Qaeda" agents who actually worked for the F.B.I. Still others, including the Christmas Day attempt, had links to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a loosely linked affiliate of Mr. bin Laden's group in Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
Audrey Kurth Cronin of the National War College said Qaeda affiliates borrow the name to enhance their appeal but are usually more interested in local goals than in the global jihad proclaimed by Mr. bin Laden.
"The proper response is to stop calling all these plots 'Al Qaeda,' " Ms. Cronin said. "We're inadvertently building up the brand."
In 2008, in his book "Leaderless Jihad," Marc Sageman, a psychiatrist and former C.I.A. officer who has long studied terrorism networks, wrote that Al Qaeda was in decline, to be replaced by dispersed terrorists for whom it provided mostly inspiration. The new generation of extremists, he believed, would be less skilled and would likely pose less of a threat than the network responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.
Dr. Sageman said he saw no reason to revise that judgment today. The plots of the last year should be carefully analyzed and the findings used to improve counterterrorism, not turned into fuel for thoughtless anti-Muslim panic and discrimination, he said.
"If we overreact and upset 1.5 billion Muslims," Dr. Sageman said, referring to the global total, "then we'll have a lot bigger problem on our hands."
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21) Boy, 4, Chooses Long Locks and Is Suspended From Class
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
January 13, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/education/13hair.html?ref=us
HOUSTON - A suburban Dallas school district has suspended a 4-year-old from his prekindergarten class because he wears his hair too long and does not want his parents to cut it.
The boy, Taylor Pugh, says he likes his hair long and curly. But on Monday night, the school board in Mesquite voted unanimously to enforce its ban on Beatles haircuts, much less anything approaching coiffures of bands like Led Zeppelin. School officials say the district's dress code serves to limit distractions in the classroom.
No exception could be made for the pint-size rebel, who sat through the hearing with his hair in a ponytail, manifestly bored.
"It's a trade-off," said one board member, Gary Bingham, an insurance agent, in an interview. "Do the parents value his education more than they value a 4-year-old's decision to make his own grooming choices?"
The boy's parents, Delton Pugh and Elizabeth Taylor, have argued that it is unfair to punish Taylor for his longish locks; it suggests, they say, that the district cares more about appearances than education.
"I don't think it's right to hold a child down and force him to do something," Mr. Pugh, a tattoo artist, told The Associated Press. "It's not hurting him or affecting his education."
The parents rejected a compromise proposed by the board under which they would braid his hair and pin it up.
Since Nov. 24, when his principal decreed that Taylor's hair had grown too long, the boy has been sent to the library to study alone with a teacher's aide. "They kicked me out of that place," Taylor told a reporter on Dec. 17. "I miss my friends."
His parents plan to appeal the school board ruling to the state education commissioner. In the meantime, school officials said they would continue to separate Taylor from other children.
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22) Mumia faces new execution threat!
Dear Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal,
Below is a critical note from Hans Bennett, co-editor of Free Mumia News and leading advocate for Mumia's freedom. Han's note is followed by a detailed article by Jeff Mackler, Director of the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal in California, on the significance of the U.S. Supreme Court's deliberations in the Ohio case of Smith v. Spisak. The court did rule against Spisak this week and will now hear Pennsylvania's appeal which aims at executing Mumia. The hearing is set for this Friday, January 15. Click on Jeff's attachment or see straight text below for a comprehensive view of the dangers immediately before Mumia when the Supreme Court will hear the arguments of Pennsylvania prosectors to reinstate the death penalty. But first read the note by Hans below.
Finally, The Mobilization to Free Mumia will be announcing an emergency protest in San Francisco in the event of any immediate threat to Mumia's life. Stay tuned for an emergency alert.
In solidarity,
Laura Herrera and Jeff Mackler, Co-coordinators
The Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
Funds urgently needed! Mail your check payable to:
Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 10328
Oakland, CA 94610
Urgent note from Hans Bennett:
Yesterday there was a huge development in Mumia's case.
According to a posting yesterday on the US Supreme Court's website, the Court has scheduled a conference for this Friday, January 15, to discuss Mumia's case. Specifically, they are looking at the Philadelphia DA's request to have Mumia executed without a new sentencing hearing. [that is, to proceed to execute Mumia soon after, (60-90 days) PA Governor signs a new warrant for Mumia's execution. JM]
The Supreme Court has apparently been delaying a ruling on the Pennsylvania effort to execute Mumia until it ruled on the Spisak case, which was also released yesterday. In Spisak, the court ruled to reinstate Spisak's death sentence, but it is still unclear what impact this ruling will have. The common thread between Mumia and Spisak is the "Mills" precedent, and the Court yesterday ruled that Spisak's case did not meet the standards of Mills. [See Jeff's article on the relation between Spisak, the Mills case and the threat to Mumia's life.]
This is the link to the Supreme Court posting:
http://origin.www.supremecourtus.gov/docket/08-652.htm
SOME BACKGROUND from Hans:
This past March, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Abu-Jamal's appeal for a new guilt-phase trial [thus virtually ending Mumia's effort in the federal courts.] But the Court has yet to rule on whether to hear the appeal made simultaneously by the Philadelphia District Attorney's office, which seeks to execute Abu-Jamal without granting him a new penalty-phase trial.
In March 2008, the Third Circuit Court affirmed Federal District Court Judge William Yohn's 2001 decision "overturning" the death sentence. Citing the 1988 Mills v. Maryland precedent, Yohn had ruled that sentencing forms used by jurors and Judge Albert Sabo's instructions to the jury were potentially confusing, and that therefore jurors could have mistakenly believed that they had to unanimously agree on any mitigating circumstances in order to consider them as weighing against a death sentence.
According to the 2001 ruling, affirmed in 2008, if the DA wants to re-instate the death sentence, the DA must call for a new penalty-phase jury trial. In such a penalty hearing, new evidence of Abu-Jamal's innocence could be presented, but the jury could only choose between execution and a life sentence without parole.
The Pennsylvania DA is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court against this 2008 affirmation of Yohn's ruling. If the court rules in the DA's favor, Abu-Jamal can be executed without benefit of a new sentencing hearing. If the U.S. Supreme Court rules against the DA's appeal, the DA must either accept the life sentence for Abu-Jamal or call for the new sentencing hearing. Meanwhile, Mumia Abu-Jamal has never left his death row cell.
Text of Jeff's article:
Mumia Abu-Jamal faces new execution threat but his freedom is still within reach
BY JEFF MACKLER
After almost 28 years on Pennsylvania's death row and innumerable battles in the U.S. criminal injustice system, innocent political prisoner, journalist and world renowned "Voice of the Voiceless" Mumia Abu-Jamal
Ignoring it's own historic decision in the 1986 case of Batson v. Kentucky that the systematic and racist exclusion of Blacks from juries voids all guilty verdicts and mandates a new trial, the Court nevertheless refused to hear Mumia's appeal.
In Mumia's 1982 trial presided over by the notorious "hanging judge" Albert Sabo, the prosecutor, Joseph McGill, used 10 or perhaps 11 of his 15 peremptory strikes against Black jurors. But as with virtually all court decisions over the past decades in Mumia's case, the "Mumia Exception," the contorted interpretation of the "law" to reach a predetermined result, was once again applied, with the high court refusing to review the twisted logic of its subordinate bodies thereby allowing Mumia's frame-up murder conviction to stand.
But what has caught the attention of both legal observers and human rights activists even more is the fact that the same court, while refusing to hear Mumia's appeal, chose to delay a ruling on a cross appeal filed by the State of Pennsylvania that seeks Mumia's execution. Pennsylvania prosecutors, twice rejected in their efforts to impose the death penalty on Mumia (in 2001 and 2008), may have found new support in the U.S. Supreme Court.
It appears that the court's delay in ruling on the validity of Mumia's original execution sentence was due to its decision to grant oral arguments in the Ohio case of Smith v. Spisak, a case that might re-write or reinterpret the nation's laws to make it easier to obtain jury verdicts calling for execution. The Court heard Ohio prosecutor's arguments for Spisak's execution on October 13, 2009. A ruling is expected in the year ahead.
Frank Spisak, a neo-Nazis who wore a Hitler mustache to his trial, denounced Jews, and Blacks and confessed in court to three hate crime murders in Ohio, saw his jury-imposed death sentence reversed in the federal courts when his attorney's successfully invoked a 1988 Supreme Court decision in the famous Mills v. Maryland case. Mills requires that in order to find mitigating circumstances sufficient to impose a sentence of life imprisonment without parole, as opposed to the death penalty, the jury's majority decision (as opposed to unanimous decision) on each mitigating circumstance is sufficient. In both Spisak and Mumia's case the presiding trial court judge violated Mills and in essence instructed the juries that unanimity, not a majority vote on each mitigating circumstance was required. As a consequence, federal district courts in both Ohio and in Pennsylvania (in the case of Mumia) overruled the jury's death sentence and ordered a new sentencing hearing and trial where evidence of innocence could be presented but where the jury was bound by the previous jury's guilty finding.
In both cases the prosecution took the cases to U.S. Courts of Appeal and were again rejected. Mills was upheld, thus continuing the staying of the imposed death sentences. In both cases the prosecution, seeking to avoid a new trial in any form, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court demanding execution. An April 7, 2009 article in the Legal Intelligencer, the oldest law journal in the country, had this to say about the Supreme Court's decision to delay a ruling on Pennsylvania's request to re-impose the death penalty on Mumia.
"In both cases, [Spisak and Abu-Jamal] the federal courts' decisions to overturn the death sentences
"The Mills ruling struck down a Maryland statute that said juries in capital cases must be unanimous on any aggravating or mitigating factor. [Emphasis added].
"The justices declared that unanimity was properly required for any aggravating factor, but that mitigating factors -- those that weigh against imposing a death sentence -- must be handled more liberally, with each juror free to find on his or her own."
The effect of Mills was to make it harder for prosecutors to obtain death sentences in capital cases. The Intelligencer concludes, "The question now before the courts is whether Mills requires that death sentences in other states be overturned if the juries in those states are misled by faulty instructions or sufficiently vague verdict forms to believe that mitigating factors require unanimity." [Emphasis added].
I emphasize the words "other states" because prior to this unexpected turn of events the legal community appeared to agree that Mills applied to all states. That is, if a jury was orally mis-instructed and/or received faulty or unclear verdict forms that implied it needed to be unanimous with regard to mitigating circumstances sufficient to not impose the death penalty, the death penalty was set aside and a new sentencing hearing was ordered.
This is what happened in Mumia's case when Federal District Court Judge William H. Yohn in 2001 employed Mills to set aside the jury's death penalty decision. Yohn gave the State of Pennsylvania 180 days to decide whether or not to retry Mumia at a new sentencing hearing where new evidence of innocence can be presented by Mumia, but where the jury can only decide between execution and life in prison without parole. At this hearing, the jury cannot make a decision regarding guilt. Since then, Pennsylvania officials have effectively stayed Yohn's order by appealing to the higher federal courts.
In deciding to hear Ohio prosecutors' arguments in the Spisak case with regard to Mills the Supreme Court has implied that one of the key issues they will consider centers on the interpretation of the concept of federalism, that is, that the exercise of power in the U.S. is shared in some measure between the federal government and the states. The political pendulum has swung back and forth on this issue. In past decades, the "states' rights" interpretation was employed to justify racist state laws that denied Blacks access to public institutions and facilities. With the rise of the Civil Rights movement federal power was used to compel the elimination of the same racist laws. Justice has been far from blind in racist America. It is applied to the advantage of the working class and the oppressed only to the extent that the relationship of forces, that is, the struggles of the masses, demand it.
Since Mills was decided in the State of Maryland, the would-be Ohio and Pennsylvania executioners argue that based on the laws of their states, Mills cannot be automatically applied to the situation in Ohio where a different set of jury instructions and therefore jury deliberations were involved. Indeed, Ohio prosecutors argued before the Supreme Court on October 13 that Ohio and Pennsylvania were the exception and not the rule and that the norm in other states was to essentially reject a strict interpretation of Mills in favor of various state guidelines regarding jury instructions.
Should this "states' rights" argument be accepted and Mills be effectively constricted, the Supreme Court could then uphold Spisak's death sentence and, with a mere citation to Spisak and the new interpretation of Mills, uphold the Pennsylvania's appeal seeking Mumia's execution.
While most legal observers previously considered a Supreme Court Mills re-interpretation a virtual impossibility, the stage has now been set for such an outcome. The state's longstanding effort to execute Mumia has been given new legal avenues for success with the top court's decision to re-consider the Spisak case.
What the Supreme Court will do, however, is far from clear. It will also consider Spisak's new attorney's argument that his jury trial lawyers were incompetent in essentially arguing during their trial summation that Spisak was essentially an extreme and horrific nut case who barely understood what he was doing. Should the Supreme Court choose to ignore or side-step Pennsylvania's Mills arguments and rule only on the issue of ineffective assistance of counsel, the chances of Mumia's execution recede considerably. The court could also chose to remand the case back to the lower courts to reconsider their previous Mills interpretation in light of the Supreme Court's possible new instructions on this issue. Second guessing the courts in Mumia's 28-year legal sojourn has stumped virtually the entire legal community, or at least those who believe that the laws of the land should be implemented without prejudice to the individual concerned. In virtually every instance, however, this has not been the case; an unending series of legal atrocities have been perpetrated against Mumia that expose the criminal "justice" system for the fraud it is in racist and classist America.
In every sense Mumia's life is on the line as never before. Pennsylvania's Governor Ed Rendell is pledged to sign what could be the third and final warrant for Mumia's execution, a warrant that would likely order that his life be taken by lethal injection. Mumia's supporters around the world and Mumia himself have long known that the battle for his life and freedom would be qualitatively more advanced by the construction of a powerful mass movement in the streets that won the hearts and minds of millions and more than reliance on a court system permeated by its very nature with class and race bias.
The state power's march for Mumia's execution has not been limited to the courts. The 2007 "Murdered by Mumia" book co-authored by Maureen Faulkner, the wife of police officer Daniel Faulkner, who Mumia was falsely convicted of murdering, and rightwing talk radio host, Michael Smerconish, presents an outrageous account of Faulkner's murder. While having little or no basis in the facts of the case the book has nevertheless been used to advance the Fraternal Order of Police's longstanding campaign to execute the "cop killer."
More recently, filmmaker Tigre Hill, with the help of rightwing sponsors, has produced a work scheduled for a debut in Philadelphia in December and later international distribution entitled, "The Barrel of a Gun," wherein ex-Black Panther leader Bobby Seal's rhetoric about "offing the pig," is coupled with rightwinger David Horowitz's assertions that Mumia was merely carrying out Panther policy. The three-minute preview or trailer to "The Barrel of a Gun" theorizes, without a shred of evidence, that Mumia and his brother Billy Cook, literally planned the Faulkner murder, ambush style.
Those unfamiliar with Mumia's background and the facts of the case could only conclude that Mumia was guilty without question. That Mumia had left the disintegrating Panthers more than a decade before his frame-up trial, that he was an award-winning journalist and president of the Association of Black Journalists, a leading reporter/critic of the Philadelphia Police Department, dozens of whose officers were indicted and convicted on Justice Department charges of involvement in drug-running, prostitution, planting and falsification evidence and intimidation of witnesses, was not mentioned.
Today, having exhausted most all legal remedies, Mumia's supporters are engaged in an important campaign to demand a Justice Department civil rights investigation into charges presented by his supporters that demonstrate illegal collusion between Pennsylvania prosecutors and the judiciary. A delegation of Mumia's defenders across the country has planned a November 12 visit to Washington, D.C. where a meeting with Attorney General Eric Holder will be sought for this purpose. Thousands of petitions demanding Mumia's freedom obtained across the world will also be presented Holder and to officials of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Similarly, a mass antiwar protest in Washington, D.C.'s Malcolm X Park is set for Saturday, November 7. In addition to the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from the Middle East the sponsoring Black is Back Coalition is demanding Mumia's freedom.
In the San Francisco Bay Area the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal is sponsoring a tour with Amnesty International's Death Penalty Abolition Campaign leader Laura Moye. Entitled "Innocent but Facing Execution," the tour will focus on the cases of Mumia, Troy Davis and Kevin Cooper, three innocent frame-up victims of America's racist criminal "justice" system.
These efforts, and more to come, are aimed at winning Mumia's freedom and stopping the State of Pennsylvania's drive to execution. Pennsylvania prosecutors seek to use the Supreme Court to clear the way for a final execution order. They were present while the Supreme Court heard the Ohio arguments in Spisak to reverse Mills.
In this writer's view the last thing Pennsylvania officials desire is to be bound by Judge Yohn's decision that Mumia must be granted a new trial where for the first time in 28 years all the evidence of his innocence and frame-up can be presented. If such a trial were to take place, it is clear that while the jury's decision would be restricted to imposing a sentence of execution or life in prison without possibility of parole, much more would be at stake.
The mere thought of a massive exposure of this frame-up during a new trial strikes fear in the minds of those who have labored so long to keep the truth of Mumia's frame-up from public view. The base corruption of the criminal justice system and its various components would be exposed as never before with unpredictable consequences.
"Law and order aside," murdering innocent people does not sit well with the American people. In the capitalist courts as in life itself nothing is written in stone. The "law" has more than once been "adjusted" in the interests of the oppressed when the price to pay by insisting on its immutability is too costly in terms of doing greater damage to the system as a whole.
Anticipating such a result, Judge Yohn's ruling left Pennsylvania officials a way out. If their effort to have the Supreme Court pave the way for Mumia execution fails, they have a ready-made alternative. They can let the 180-day clock run out on Yohn's order for a new sentencing trial and allow Yohn's other choice to prevail by default, that is, to change the jury's verdict from execution to life without parole.
While the fanatics who seek Mumia's life at any cost might rage for one more chance at his head, those who understand the price to be paid in a new trial's fundamentally undermining the corruption of the system as a whole might choose to avoid awakening additional millions to the nature of the racist and classist criminal injustice system beast.
The fight for Mumia's life and freedom is far from over.
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23) Stand with the people of Haiti!
What the U.S. government isn't telling you
ANSWER Coalition
http://answer.pephost.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ANS_homepage
We at the ANSWER Coalition extend our heartfelt solidarity to all of our Haitian sisters and brothers, as well as to all those who have friends and family there, as Haiti copes with the destruction and grief of the massive 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck yesterday.
All of us are joining in the outpouring of solidarity from people all over the hemisphere and world who are sending humanitarian aid and assistance to the people of Haiti.
At such a moment, it is also important to put this catastrophe into a political and social context. Without this context, it is impossible to understand both the monumental problems facing Haiti and, most importantly, the solutions that can allow Haiti to survive and thrive. Hillary Clinton said today, "It is biblical, the tragedy that continues to daunt Haiti and the Haitian people." This hypocritical statement that blames Haiti's suffering exclusively on an "act of God" masks the role of U.S. and French imperialism in the region.
In this email message, we have included some background information about Haiti that helps establish the real context:
Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive stated today that as many as 100,000 Haitians may be dead. International media is reporting bodies being piled along streets surrounded by the rubble from thousands of collapsed buildings. Estimates of the economic damage are in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Haiti's large shantytown population was particularly hard hit by the tragedy.
As CNN, ABC and every other major corporate media outlet will be quick to point out, Haiti is the poorest country in the entire Western hemisphere. But not a single word is uttered as to why Haiti is poor. Poverty, unlike earthquakes, is no natural disaster.
The answer lies in more than two centuries of U.S. hostility to the island nation, whose hard-won independence from the French was only the beginning of its struggle for liberation.
In 1804, what had begun as a slave uprising more than a decade earlier culminated in freedom from the grips of French colonialism, making Haiti the first Latin American colony to win its independence and the world's first Black republic. Prior to the victory of the Haitian people, George Washington and then-Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson had supported France out of fear that Haiti would inspire uprisings among the U.S. slave population. The U.S. slave-owning aristocracy was horrified at Haiti's newly earned freedom.
U.S. interference became an integral part of Haitian history, culminating in a direct military occupation from 1915 to 1934. Through economic and military intervention, Haiti was subjugated as U.S. capital developed a railroad and acquired plantations. In a gesture of colonial arrogance, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was the assistant secretary of the Navy at the time, drafted a constitution for Haiti which, among other things, allowed foreigners to own land. U.S. officials would later find an accommodation with the dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, and then his son Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, as Haiti suffered under their brutal repressive policies.
In the 1980s and 1990s, U.S. policy toward Haiti sought the reorganization of the Haitian economy to better serve the interests of foreign capital. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was instrumental in shifting Haitian agriculture away from grain production, paving the way for dependence on food imports. Ruined Haitian farmers flocked to the cities in search of a livelihood, resulting in the swelling of the precarious shantytowns found in Port-au-Prince and other urban centers.
Who has benefited from these policies? U.S. food producers profited from increased exports to Haitian markets. Foreign corporations that had set up shop in Haitian cities benefitted from the super-exploitation of cheap labor flowing from the countryside. But for the people of Haiti, there was only greater misery and destitution.
Washington orchestrated the overthrow of the democratically elected Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide-not once, but twice, in 1991 and 2004. Haiti has been under a U.S.-backed U.N. occupation for nearly six years. Aristide did not earn the animosity of U.S. leaders for his moderate reforms; he earned it when he garnered support among Haiti's poor, which crystallized into a mass popular movement. Two hundred years on, U.S. officials are still horrified by the prospect of a truly independent Haiti.
The unstable, makeshift dwellings imposed upon Haitians by Washington's neoliberal policies have now, for many, been turned into graves. Those same policies are to blame for the lack of hospitals, ambulances, fire trucks, rescue equipment, food and medicine. The blow dealt by such a natural disaster to an economy made so fragile from decades of plundering will greatly magnify the suffering of the Haitian people.
Natural disasters are inevitable, but resource allocation and planning can play a decisive role in mitigating their impact and dealing with the aftermath. Haiti and neighboring Cuba, who are no strangers to violent tropical storms, were both hit hard in 2008 by a series of hurricanes-which, unlike earthquakes, are predictable. While more than 800 lives were lost in Haiti, less than 10 people died in Cuba. Unlike Haiti, Cuba had a coordinated evacuation plan and post-hurricane rescue efforts that were centrally planned by the Cuban government. This was only possible because Cuban society is not organized according to the needs of foreign capital, but rather according to the needs of the Cuban people.
In a televised speech earlier today, President Obama has announced that USAID and the Departments of State and Defense will be working to support the rescue and relief efforts in Haiti in the coming days. Ironically, these are the same government entities responsible for the implementation of the economic and military policies that reduced Haiti to ruins even before the earthquake hit.
The ANSWER Coalition has called for a mass national march and rally in Washington, D.C., on March 20 to oppose the wars and occupations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. We will also demand an end the foreign occupation of Haiti and reparations to Haiti for the vast wealth that has been looted from the country by foreign imperialist countries.
Help build the March 20 March on Washington!
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24) Losing the Internet as We Know It
By Megan Tady
Blog Editor and Video Producer, Free Press
How much have you already used the Internet today?
JANUARY 14, 2010
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/megan-tady/losing-the-internet-as-we_b_420322.html
We don't think twice about how much we rely on the Internet. Imagine not being able to map directions on Google or check the weather online. A business that doesn't have a Web site? Forgettable. Or rather, unsearchable. Remember when we didn't have e-mail? Would you want to go back to those Dark Ages? Me neither.
The Internet is in the very fabric of how we communicate, learn, shop, conduct business, organize, innovate and engage. If we lost it, we'd be lost.
But did you know that we're at risk of losing the Internet as we know it? Millions of Americans don't know that a battle over the future of the Internet is being played out right now in Washington. How it ends will have deep repercussions for decades to come.
On one side are public interest and consumer groups, small businesses, Internet entrepreneurs, librarians, civil libertarians and civil rights groups who want to preserve the Internet as it is - the last remaining open communications platform where anyone with access and a computer can create and consume online content.
Right now a film student in Idaho can upload a video the same way a Hollywood movie studio can. A small upstart company can launch a brilliant idea that challenges the Fortune 500. An independent journalist can break a story without waiting for a newspaper to run or print it.
The principle of "Network Neutrality" is what makes this open communications possible. Net Neutrality is what allows us to go wherever we want online. Our relationship with the phone and cable companies stops when we pay for our Internet service. These companies can not block, control or interfere with what we search for or create online; nor can they prioritize some content over others -making the Hollywood video load faster than the kid's video in Idaho.
On the other side are the Internet service providers, who want to dismantle Net Neutrality. Not only do they want to provide Internet service, but they want to be able to charge users to prioritize their content, effectively giving themselves the ability to choose which content on the Web loads fast, slow or not at all. The film student, the small entrepreneur, and the independent journalist will be lost in the ether, unable to compete with other, more established companies who can pay for a spot in the fast lane.
Gone is the level playing field. Gone is the multitude of voices on the Web. Gone is the Internet as we know it - unless we act now.
The Federal Communications Commission is crafting new Net Neutrality rules right now. The public has until Thursday at midnight to tell the FCC what we value about the Internet, and why we want the agency to create a strong Net Neutrality rule to protect it.
I'm filing my comments today, and I have to admit, it's a little tough-not because I'm at a loss for words, but because there's so much to say.
I'm filing because:
· An open Internet gives me freedom of expression - freedom to write and share my views and the freedom to find alternative viewpoints;
· I want other, smarter people to come up with the next Google, the next YouTube, the next Web application that I can't even imagine;
· I want to read about people and cultures that are different from me;
· Mainstream media make me scream expletives, and I use the Internet to find alternative sources of news and information;
· I want to e-mail my boyfriend a link to a picture that reminds me of our last vacation;
· Net Neutrality means I don't need anyone's permission to create my own videos, and media execs aren't determining what's funny - we are;
· I come up with potential million-dollar ideas all the time, and some day, I just might start my own business;
· An open Internet feeds the activist in me, allowing me to engage with my community and organize for social change online;
· It's winter and I'd rather shop online, only I still want to support a local business;
· I needed advice on how to prime and paint a room, and found a video online that taught me how to do it; and,
· I don't want to be censored.
This is why I'm filing. Why are you? If you care about how the Internet impacts and boosts your life, and if you care about how the Internet could evolve in years to come, it's essential that you tell the FCC by Thursday.
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25) Haiti Devastated by Largest Earthquake in 200 Years
Thousands Feared Dead
By Democracy Now! - January 13, 2010
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24388.htm
Haiti has been devastated by a massive 7.0-magnitude earthquake, the largest to strike the Caribbean nation in more than two centuries. Buildings have collapsed. Fires rage in the streets. The extent of the disaster is still unknown, but there are fears thousands of people may have died and tens of thousands homeless. We get the latest on Haiti, a country rocked by natural as well as political crises. We speak with journalist Kim Ives of Haiti Liberté and Haitian American novelist Edwidge Danticat, her family at the epicenter of the quake.
Haiti Devastated by Largest Earthquake in 200 Years
Thousands Feared Dead
By Democracy Now! - January 13, 2010
Haiti has been devastated by a massive 7.0-magnitude earthquake, the largest to strike the Caribbean nation in more than two centuries. Buildings have collapsed. Fires rage in the streets. The extent of the disaster is still unknown, but there are fears thousands of people may have died and tens of thousands homeless. We get the latest on Haiti, a country rocked by natural as well as political crises. We speak with journalist Kim Ives of Haiti Liberté and Haitian American novelist Edwidge Danticat, her family at the epicenter of the quake.
Sky News Report
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: The Caribbean nation of Haiti has been devastated by a massive 7.0-magnitude earthquake, causing what's being described as a catastrophe of major proportions.
The extent of the disaster is still unclear, but there are fears thousands of people may have died and tens of thousands lost their homes. In the capital Port-au-Prince, a city of two million people, thousands of buildings were damaged or destroyed, including hospitals, schools and hotels. The United Nations headquarters was also reported to be severely damaged, and many of its staff are reported missing.
The earthquake struck about ten miles southwest of the capital at around 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday. It was the strongest earthquake to hit Haiti in more than two centuries. It was followed by at least twenty-seven aftershocks, the largest two of which were 5.9 and 5.5 in magnitude. The quake prompted a tsunami alert for parts of the Caribbean that was later cancelled.
For hours after the quake, the air was filled with a choking dust from the debris of fallen buildings. People were heard screaming for help throughout the city. A Food for the Poor charity worker in Port-au-Prince told Reuters, quote, "There are people running, crying, screaming. People are trying to dig victims out with flashlights. I think hundreds of casualties would be a serious understatement."
AMY GOODMAN: The historic National Palace has also been severely damaged. President René Préval and his wife are both reported to be alive. A number of nations, including the US, Britain, Venezuela and other Latin American countries, are gearing up to send aid.
Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere and has suffered a number of recent disasters, including four hurricanes and storms in 2008 that killed hundreds.
Kim Ives is with us here. He's a journalist with the newspaper Haiti Liberté. He's joining us here in our studios in New York.
Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian American novelist. Her books include Brother, I'm Dying. It tells the story of her uncle dying in immigration detention in Miami. She joins us from Miami. We want to go now to Edwidge.
We welcome you. Our condolences on your country and what it is going through right now. Can you start off by telling us what you have heard from your own family in Haiti?
EDWIDGE DANTICAT: Thank you so much, Amy. Thank you for the opportunity to be here.
I have heard very little from my own family, who is-the relatives that I have in Port-au-Prince. I have not heard-we've not heard from any one of our family members in Carrefour or in Bel Air. So we're just watching sort of the news footage and trying to piece together, you know, things approximately where they are there. So we've had no contact.
The good news is, we've had some contact with our family that's outside of Port-au-Prince. We spoke last night to my mother-in-law, who's in Cavaillon, which is outside of Les Cayes. And even as we were speaking to her about 10:30, she kept saying, "The ground is shaking, the ground is shaking." But she was fine, and her neighbors were fine. They did not have any damage there. But it's a very different and frightening picture in Port-au-Prince, for we have not had news there.
AMY GOODMAN: Kim Ives, you've got your computer on the table. You've been following tweets as we've begun this show. What are you learning about what's happening now in Port-au-Prince, which many are saying has been leveled?
KIM IVES: Yes, it's apocalyptic. This is definitely the greatest tragedy that has befallen a tragedy-beset country. It's just unimaginable, the destruction-the roads, buildings, houses. And one has to think, I mean, so much of the construction is done in just concrete without any steel rebar reinforcement. Last year a school collapsed just by itself. And so, you can imagine, with a 7.0 earthquake, what's happening.
AMY GOODMAN: That school was in Pétionville-
KIM IVES: That's correct.
AMY GOODMAN: -which is in a wealthy suburb of Port-au-Prince up on a hill. And that's where they said yesterday the first hospital collapsed.
KIM IVES: Yes, I think many of the buildings in that area, especially in the hilly areas where, you know, houses, like in much of Latin America, in many of the cities, are built in giant bowls of houses on top of each other. And last night, most of the radio stations in Haiti were out of commission, but there was an internet television that was on. People were calling into that, and people were describing firsthand how houses had fallen on their house, and their family had been killed inside.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And what do you understand is the scope of the devastation? It is very hard to get reports from the ground right now, but we've heard the UN building was severely damaged, and so was the National Palace. But also, thousands of buildings have reportedly been damaged or collapsed.
KIM IVES: Well, the Hotel Christopher, which is where the UN mission to stabilize Haiti, the UN occupation force, was headquartered, collapsed. The Montana Hotel, which was the principal foreign journalist hotel up in Pétionville, collapsed. The palace collapsed, the general hospital. The cathedral, the roof fell off it. I mean, this is-these are a century of architecture-two centuries has just been wiped out in this disaster.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: There's also been a report that the UN security chief has been killed. It was just breaking on Al Jazeera before we went to air today.
KIM IVES: I didn't hear that, but I know dozens and dozens of UN workers are missing. And Jacmel was also very severely hit. We heard from some contacts in Jacmel that total devastation there. Again, that's just on the backside of the earthquake, which was right in the rim of mountains between Port-au-Prince and Jacmel.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And describe for viewers and listeners what Port-au-Prince is like. This is a city of two million people. Paint a picture of the city and of Haiti.
KIM IVES: Well, a minimum of two million, probably more like three million. I mean, due to US economic policies over the past three decades, millions of people have been pushed out of the countryside into the cities, where they live in makeshift shacks built up on usually state land along the perimeters of the city. It is usually shacks, you know, cinderblocks, tin, sometimes straw. And they very easily fall down in something like this.
AMY GOODMAN: Edwidge Danticat, Kim just alluded to something more than the natural catastrophe that we're seeing today, which was the very fragile politics of Haiti and what has devastated the country for so long. Could you give us a brief history of your country, founded in 1804, the first black republic in the western hemisphere born of a slave uprising?
EDWIDGE DANTICAT: Well, that's a very wonderful place to start on a day like this. Indeed, the first black republic in this hemisphere, one of the first two republics in this hemisphere. But soon after independence, was not recognized by its neighbors, which it nevertheless helped gain, in some cases, their independence in Latin America and helped the US fight here in Savannah, Georgia. And then a series of debt, because it had to pay to France a large amount of money for its independence. And then two US invasion occupations and a series of dictatorships. It's been-you know, before and in the midst of this, you know, deforestation sponsored by outside interests, and just a series of a very painful history.
But-and add to that all the other natural disasters-four storms last year, the tropical storm Jeanne a couple of years ago, which covered the town of Gonaives. But nothing, I think, like today. Nothing-you know, this is something-this is really the big one. This is what-people have talked about this, because we would look at these houses on the hillsides. You would look at some neighborhoods that-like Kim was talking about, with the shacks and the overpopulation in Port-au-Prince, but never imagined this. And add to this some fires that we've seen in the footage that we've seen of Port-au-Prince of the cathedral. You know, I can see parts of my old neighborhood, you know, through this very large veil of fire. So it's really-it's totally unimaginable. It seems like the abyss of a very long and painful history of natural and political disasters.
AMY GOODMAN: Edwidge Danticat is our guest. We're going to come back to her after break, Haitian American novelist, well known for her books. Brother, I'm Dying won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She wrote Krik? Krak! and Breath, Eyes, Memory, as well as other books. Kim Ives is a journalist with the newspaper Haiti Liberté, and he'll be reading us some of the tweets he has been getting from Haiti.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Then, as we talk about the twin catastrophes that rock Haiti-natural and political-we'll move on to the US policy in Haiti and what the United States does with Haitian refugees, like Edwidge Danticat's uncle, who died in custody at the Krome Detention Center in Florida. And then we'll look at the broader picture of immigration in this country. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Our guests are Edwidge Danticat, the great Haitian American novelist-she's speaking to us from Miami, which has one of the largest Haitian populations in the United States, along with here in New York, especially in Brooklyn. And we're joined from Kim Ives-from Brooklyn, who is a journalist with the newspaper Haiti Liberté.
Kim, can you read us some of the tweets that you're getting right now from Haiti?
KIM IVES: Well, most of the tweets have been coming from Richard Morse, a musician and manager of the Oloffson Hotel, the historic Oloffson Hotel in Port-au-Prince. He has been keeping people abreast, talking about the buildings falling down. "If the Montana Hotel and Hotel Christopher are gone, I don't know where the UN leadership is." That was twenty-eight minutes ago. "Hotel Christopher and Montana are flattened," said from an eyewitness. "Rumors are that Montana has fallen." The Castel Haiti, which is a landmark which was on the mountain right behind the Oloffson, is, according to him, "a pile of rubble."
AMY GOODMAN: As is the UN compound, you were saying, where the UN peacekeepers, mainly Brazilian, were stationed. Is this MINUSTAH?
KIM IVES: The Hotel Christopher, yes. The MINUSTAH was stationed in Hotel Christopher, which has apparently been totally destroyed. He spoke of hearing in the streets, and particularly in Carrefour Feuilles neighborhood, which is right around the Oloffson, people singing and praying loudly in the streets and wailing. The wall of the Oloffson fell down on somebody and killed them. So there have been just thousands-I think it's not a question of thousands; it's how many thousands, and if it's even tens of thousands of people who will have died.
AMY GOODMAN: And the palace is devastated.
KIM IVES: And the-yes, the palace, as you can see, is-they said "damaged," but it's completely going to have to be razed. It's on its knees. It's halfway-the roof-the palace was built by the US Marines about a century ago in 1915, after the original was burned in 1912. And so, this has always been sort of a hallmark of Haiti.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And can you explain why are there UN peacekeepers deployed on the ground? Explain for people. We had the ouster of the democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. Where does it stand politically right now in Haiti?
KIM IVES: Well, the UN occupation is extremely unpopular. This was sent in after Aristide was removed by a plot essentially by the US, France and Canada on February 29, 2004. US, France and Canada sent in occupation troops, which remained there for three months. And then they handed off the mission to the UN, as they've done in the past-in 1995, in particular-to the UN to carry out. That's mainly done by the Brazilians, are heading that. But it's extremely unwelcome. People are sick and tired of the millions being spent, having guys riding around in giant tanks pointing guns at them. And, you know, essentially, this is a force to keep the country bottled up. And I don't know what's going to happen now, because the dogs of madness have really-are going to be unleashed by this catastrophe.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: I want to read a statement that was just released by the former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He said, "My wife and I stand with the people of our country and mourn the death and destruction that has befallen Haiti. It is a tragedy that defies expression; a tragedy that compels all people to the highest levels of human compassion and solidarity. From Africa, the ancestral home of Haiti, we send our profoundest condolences and love to the thousands of children, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters worst affected." Where in Africa right now is he speaking from, Kim?
KIM IVES: He's in South Africa, in Johannesburg. And this is one of the things. Aristide is being kept in exile, even now under the Obama administration, being kept out of the hemisphere. Apparently he's gotten tremendous pressure since he went on the radio on November 25th and spoke out against the exclusionary elections that the Haitian government is trying to carry out, where the Lavalas Family party, the country's largest, the party he founded, has been excluded from those elections, along with fourteen other parties.
And now he's stuck in South Africa. He has no passport, which has long since expired. He has no laissez-passer, which he asked for explicitly in that radio address. And he should be invited. In fact, he should be brought back to help heal the country. I mean, the Haitian ambassador to the US, Ray Joseph, who was a participant in the coup d'état, has called for unity. I think if ever there was a moment when the Haitian government could now demonstrate unity, it would be now in allowing Aristide to come back, which has been one of the principal demands of the Haitian people over these past five years.
AMY GOODMAN: When we asked about the history-1915 to '34, 1991, explain the significance of these dates.
KIM IVES: Nineteen fifteen to 1934 was the first US Marine occupation, carried out under Woodrow Wilson, and finally, during the administration of FDR, it was ended. In '91, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was inaugurated and-
AMY GOODMAN: As the first elected president.
KIM IVES: As, yes, the first democratically elected president. Eight months later, he was overthrown by a US CIA-backed coup. He remained three years in exile. They thought the coup could be somehow consolidated. It wasn't. The resistance to it continued during that period. Finally, Clinton was forced to bring in 20,000 US troops, not to stop the coup, really, but to stop a revolution, which was in the making because of that coup.
AMY GOODMAN: Which would lead to immigrants coming into the United States.
KIM IVES: Possibly, yeah. I mean, the immigrants were being forced out by the coup. If there were a revolution in Haiti, maybe the flow would reverse. But the fact is the Clinton administration brought Aristide back as a sort of hostage on the shoulders of 20,000 US troops, and they remained until about 1999.
He was reelected in 2000. They again immediately started a coup when he was inaugurated on February 7, 2001, involving Contras based in the Dominican Republic and diplomatic and economic embargos, and all the-the whole works. They forced him out at gunpoint, essentially. A team of US Navy Seals came in and kidnapped him from his home in Tabarre on February 29th, 2004. And he's been in exile ever since.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And speaking of immigration, what is the status right now of immigrants in this country, Haitian refugees? There was a final act by President Bush before President Obama took office. Explain the situation right now.
KIM IVES: There's been a big push for what's called "temporary protected status," where if a country is struck by a natural disaster or tremendous political upheaval, people can receive a status in this country-it's renewable every six months-where they won't be deported. The Bush administration, as one of its final acts, did not-refused that status for Haitians. Everybody thought that Obama, when he came in, would-
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: How many were affected?
KIM IVES: Thirty thousand. Thirty thousand Haitians are due to be deported, and they are in detention centers, many of them, around the United States. And the Obama administration has never provided that temporary protected status, despite the storms of September 2008. But I think with this disaster, I can't see how they can't.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Edwidge Danticat, how does that treatment compare to others coming into this country?
EDWIDGE DANTICAT: Well, soon after Tropical Storm Jeanne covered Gonaives, we had, very soon after that, deportations, and some of them were of people that I knew. So in the first-you know, in this first disaster, which was the biggest natural disaster we had had up to that point, you know, there was no change in the treatment. I'm hoping-I would assume, with all the humanity that there is and political goodwill, one hopes that that won't be the case that people would be deported to this situation. But the policy has been so inconsistent and inhumane that one cannot assume anything, really. But I am hoping that this is something that will be taken into consideration, that this-that people, these people, that these 30,000 people and others would be granted temporary protected status and that people won't be deported. The country needs the leadership. The people need all their-all the help they can get from individuals, as well as Haiti's neighbors. And this is a type of complication, another layer of tragedy, that we would not need.
AMY GOODMAN: All through the night, the cable channels were focusing on what was happening in Haiti, trying to get information, and they were listing relief organizations. Now, we see this in situations all over the world. And the question is, where people give their money, what are the organizations that end up having power on the ground? The United States says that they will also give money. Other countries, I presume, will be also pledging. What about the politics of aid and what you see as the pitfalls and what you see are the tremendous needs that Haiti has right now? Let me put that question to Kim Ives.
KIM IVES: Well, yes, aid has historically in Haiti been extremely pernicious. It has destroyed Haitian agriculture. It's been a real counter to development in the country, development aid. And even humanitarian aid has been often wasted. For instance, during-after the storms of 2008, $197 million was freed from the Petrocaribe accounts, which Venezuela provided Haiti. A lot of questions remain about how that money, that $197 million, was spent. A lot of it seems to have been frittered away into corruption and various other types of embezzlement.
So, yes, there's going to be a tremendous amount of corruption and charlatans flocking to Haiti like flies. And it's important to find good relief agencies. One is the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund, HERF, that people can go to the site of haitiaction.net and find out more about that. And that is a place people can donate. But, yes, we can expect terrible things to be happening in the aid front in the coming weeks.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And also, Kim Ives, the issue of food. We saw last year a food crisis around the world in early 2009. Haiti was one of the worst hit by that food crisis. There were reports of people eating mud for-because of starvation. Explain the issue of food and also how the United States affected the food supply in Haiti.
KIM IVES: Well, yeah. Essentially, Haiti was self-sufficient thirty years ago in its production of food, particularly rice. And since the fall of the Duvalier regime, it has really been opened up. The neoliberal regime, one of its principal demands is the lowering of tariff barriers, so that rice grown in Arkansas and Texas and Louisiana can be dumped on the country, which has effectively destroyed the rice farmers of the Artibonite Valley, leaving Haiti now required to import almost 80 percent of its food. So foreign aid has essentially destroyed Haitian food self-sufficiency.
AMY GOODMAN: And then the poverty that that leads to, the deforestation of the mountains. Having spent-gone to Haiti a number of times, people going up into the mountains to make charcoal, to burn whatever wood they can get, and that leads to the precarious natural situation, where you have an earthquake or a hurricane and the mudslides that-from Pétionville down, right?
KIM IVES: Exactly.
AMY GOODMAN: That make the crisis much worse.
KIM IVES: Exactly. And, Amy, just in the days before this, there was a lot of rain. So a lot of this is mudslides. I mean, the ground was already saturated with water, so it was extremely unstable. And I think that made the collapses even more terrible.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we're going to continue to cover this story, of course. It's expected at least three million of the ten million people of Haiti have been seriously affected by this. Disaster specialists say various mathematical models for an earthquake of such a magnitude predict that perhaps 4,000 people could have been killed. We don't know.
But right now we're going to turn back to what we touched on earlier, and it's the issue of immigration. And we want to turn back to Edwidge to tell us the story of her uncle. You may wonder why we're talking about this today, but Haiti has been the epicenter of natural and political crises, and particularly affected by its powerful neighbor to the north, the United States. Edwidge, what happened to your uncle over five years ago?
EDWIDGE DANTICAT: Before that, Amy, I would just like to-you know, on the issue of aid, I feel that it's-you know, there will be corruption and so forth, but I don't want to discourage people who would like to give. There are some wonderful organizations that are already working within Haiti, organizations like Dr. Paul Farmer's Partners in Health and the Lambi Fund and Doctors Without Borders. So I don't want, sort of in the more political talk, to discourage people from giving, because in whatever-or to try to help in whatever way they can, because it's going to be extraordinarily needed.
On-that being said, on the-my uncle's story, it's very ironic. I've been thinking about my uncle throughout this whole issue, because I'm not even sure now that the building where he lived and where he did all of his work is still standing. He was-he lived in Bel Air, which, as one of the-someone had said, is just shattered and broken right now, for more than fifty years, and in 2004, because of a threat by gangs there, had to leave. And he had been coming to the United States for about thirty years, on and off, visiting. And after this incident at his house with a confrontation with a gang, he was-he came to Miami, where-here where I live, and he requested temporary-he called temporary asylum. He was arrested and brought to jail at the Krome Detention Center. He was eighty-one years old, a cancer survivor who spoke with a voice box. And his medications were taken away, and he died a few days later in the custody of the immigration service.
AMY GOODMAN: He died at the Krome Detention Center, his medication taken away.
EDWIDGE DANTICAT: Oh, he died at-mm-hmm, well, he died in the hospital. He was taken finally to Jackson Memorial Hospital, after he was accused of faking his illness. When finally it seemed like-it seemed like he was near death, they took him to the hospital.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And Edwidge Danticat, also you write about this in your book Brother, I'm Dying, the difficulty of getting information and just dealing with immigration bureaucracy, trying to get information about your uncle, and also what happened after his death. They gave you the body with no-they performed an autopsy and gave you very little information of what actually happened. Can you talk about that?
EDWIDGE DANTICAT: Well, they basically-while he was in the hospital, he was attached to, chained to a bed, shackled to a bed, in the prison ward of the hospital. We were not allowed to see him there. And even when he died, we tried to confirm that he had died. And the night that he died, someone had called me to say that, and I called the immigration-I called the hospital, and they said, "No, you have to call to the immigration service." And we weren't told officially that he died until the following morning. And then we were basically-they performed an autopsy and gave-said that he died of chronic pancreatitis. And he had never had pancreatitis, much less chronic. And we were just given the corpse and told "Good luck."
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Edwidge, we're going to talk more about the overall issue of immigration in this country and what is happening in our immigration detention jails. I shouldn't say "ours," because so many of them are private. We want to thank Kim Ives for being with us, of Haiti Liberté, joining us here in New York. Edwidge Danticat is staying with us to the end of the show, the Haitian American novelist whose books include Breath, Eyes, Memory, Krik? Krak!, Brother, I'm Dying about her uncle who died in custody here in the United States as he appealed for asylum and for the drugs that he was used to taking.
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