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[please excuse duplicate postings, and please post widely]
APPEAL from San Francisco Labor Council:
"It was corporate greed that led to this economic downturn and workers should not continue to pay the price!"
We Are One.
Forty-three years ago, a struggle by 1,300 city sanitation workers for economic justice brought Dr. Martin Luther King to Memphis. Dr. King, along with a coalition of civil and human rights organizations, the religious community and the union movement stood with the striking workers and faced down the armed forces of a city and state.
Dr. King was assassinated on Apr. 4, 1968 in Memphis.
On April 4th, we will honor Dr. King by continuing this struggle across our nation.
Union members, community activists, advocates for civil and human rights, and religious leaders will flood the streets around this country to stand together and declare that all workers deserve the right to bargain for a better life. It was corporate greed that led to this economic downturn and workers should not continue to pay the price.
In San Francisco,we will be meeting at Bank of America (555 California) before marching to several locations that represent the ultra-rich who fail to pay their taxes and are fundamentally responsible for the economic downturn, high unemployment, government budget deficits, and huge spikes in public employee pension costs.
Now is the time for action.
To Download the Flyer and Route Map for the April 4th March and Rally in San Francisco, go to http://sflaborcouncil.org/ and click "April 4 - We are One - End the $$$" under Upcoming Events.
April 4th Rally and March
4:45 pm
Meet at 555 California, Bank of America
6:00 pm
Rally at 101 Market, Federal Reserve Building
Speakers Include:
Stephanie Bloomingdale, Secretary-Treasurer with the Wisconsin AFL-CIO
Eva Paterson with the Equal Justice Society and the California Civil Rights Coalition
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FREE BRADLEY MANNING! HANDS OFF JULIAN ASSANGE!
In a recent New York Daily News Poll the question was asked:
Should Army pfc Bradley Manning face charges for allegedly stealing classified documents and providing them for WikiLeaks?
New York Daily News Poll Results:
Yes, he's a traitor for selling out his country! ...... 28%
No, he's a hero for standing up for what's right! ..... 62%
We need to see more evidence before passing judgment.. 10%
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2011/03/05/2011-03-05_wikileaks_private_loses_his_underwear.html?r=news
Sign the Petition:
We stand for truth, for government transparency, and for an end to our tax-dollars funding endless occupation abroad...
We stand with accused whistle-blower
US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning
Stand with Bradley!
A 23-year-old Army intelligence analyst, Pfc. Manning faces decades in prison for allegedly leaking a video of a US helicopter attack that killed at least eleven Iraqi civilians to the website Wikileaks. Among the dead were two working Reuters reporters. Two children were also severely wounded in the attack.
In addition to this "Collateral Murder" video, Pfc. Manning is suspected of leaking the "Afghan War Diaries" - tens of thousands of battlefield reports that explicitly describe civilian deaths and cover-ups, corrupt officials, collusion with warlords, and a failing US/NATO war effort.
"We only know these crimes took place because insiders blew the whistle at great personal risk ... Government whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal," noted Barack Obama while on the campaign trail in 2008. While the President was referring to the Bush Administration's use of phone companies to illegally spy on Americans, Pfc. Manning's alleged actions are just as noteworthy. If the military charges against him are accurate, they show that he had a reasonable belief that war crimes were being covered up, and that he took action based on a crisis of conscience.
After nearly a decade of war and occupation waged in our name, it is odd that it apparently fell on a young Army private to provide critical answers to the questions, "What have we purchased with well over a trillion tax dollars and the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan?" However, history is replete with unlikely heroes.
If Bradley Manning is indeed the source of these materials, the nation owes him our gratitude. We ask Secretary of the Army, the Honorable John M. McHugh, and Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, General George W. Casey, Jr., to release Pfc. Manning from pre-trial confinement and drop the charges against him.
http://standwithbrad.org/
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U.S./NATO HANDS OFF MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA! END ALL AID TO ISRAEL! STOP FUNDING DICTATORS ACROSS THE GLOBE! MONEY FOR HUMAN NEEDS NOT FOR WAR AND OCCUPATION! LET THE PEOPLE DECIDE HERE AND EVERYWHERE!
TAX THE RICH! LEAVE WORKERS AND THEIR UNIONS ALONE! DON'T AGONIZE, ORGANIZE!...BW
Resolution passed by the San Francisco Labor Council in support of April 10:
Rally and March: The Wars Against Working People at Home and Abroad April 10th
Whereas the wealthy and corporations now in control of our country continue to take more, while we get less, continue to destroy our environment, exploit our labor and reduce our services for ever-increasing profits, using half of our Federal tax dollars for military purposes, and our youth, under an economic draft, as cannon fodder to invade and occupy other countries, and
Whereas, the price of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya is creating a permanent war economy draining the US of trillions of dollars that could be used for jobs, education, and social services, draining funds at the state and local level, while providing a convenient excuse for draconian cuts in services and extreme austerity measures resulting in the decimation of collective bargaining agreements now being carried out in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and other states.
Therefore be it resolved that the San Francisco Labor Council join the Bay Area Chapter of US Labor Against War, and hundreds of social justice organizations, nation-wide, calling for an immediate end to these wars, and endorsing the bi-coastal marches and rallies occurring on April 9th in New York City and April 10th in San Francisco, sponsored by the United National Antiwar Committee.
Submitted by Tom Lacey, OPEIU, Local 3, Alan Benjamin, OPEIU, Local 3, Ann Robertson, California Faculty Association, Tom Edminster, UESF, Local 61*, David Welsh, NALC, Local 214, Kathy Lipscomb, Retired, SEIU, Rodger Scott, AFT, Local 2121, Shane Hoff, UTU, Local 1741*
* for identification purposes only
RALLY AGAINST THE WARS AGAINST WORKING PEOPLE AT HOME AND ABROAD! BACK TO THE STREETS! BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2011
ASSEMBLE AT DOLORES PARK AT 11:00 A.M.
NOON RALLY
MARCH AT 1:30 P.M.
THEY are the government, corporate, and financial powers that wage war, ravage the environment and the economy and trample on our democratic rights and liberties.
WE are the vast majority of humanity who want peace, a healty planet and a society that prioritizes human needs, democracy and civil liberties for all.
WE DEMAND Bring U.S. Troops, Mercenaries and War Contractors Home Now: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan! End the sanctions and stop the threats of war against the people of Iran, North Korea and Yemen. No to war and plunder of the people of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa! End U.S. Aid to Israel! End U.S. Support to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the Siege of Gaza! End support of dictators in North Africa!
WE DEMAND an end to FBI raids on antiwar, social justice, and international solidarity activists, an end to the racist persecution and prosecutions that ravage Muslim communities, an end to police terror in Black and Latino communities, full rights and legality for immigrants and an end to all efforts to repress and punish Wikileaks and its contributors and founders.
WE DEMAND the immediate end to torture, rendition, secret trials, drone bombings and death squads.
WE DEMAND trillions for jobs, education, social services, an end to all foreclosures, quality single-payer healthcare for ail, a massive conversion to sustainable and planet-saving energy systems and public transportation and reparations to the victims of U.S. terror at home and abroad.
Sponsored by the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC)
www.unacpeace.org
unacnortherncalifornia@gmail.com
415-49-NO-WAR
Facebook.com/EndTheWars
Twitter.com/UNACPeace
TRADUCCION:
Marcha en contra de las guerras: en casa y en el exterior
Ellos son el gobierno y las corporaciones que financian las guerras, destruyen el medio ambiente, la economía y pisotean nuestras libertades y derechos democráticos.
Nosotros, somos la gran mayoría de la humanidad y queremos paz. Un planeta saludable y una sociedad que priorice en las necesidades humanas, la democracia y las libertades civiles para todos.
Nosotros, demandamos que las tropas militares, los mercenarios y los contratistas de guerra que enviaron a Irak, Afganistán, y Paquistán sean traídas de regreso a los Estados Unidos ¡Ahora! Que paren con las sanciones y las amenazas de guerra en contra de los pueblos de Irán, Corea del Norte y Yemen; y que los Estados Unidos deje de colaborar con Israel en la invasión y acoso a Palestina y Gaza. No al saqueo de los pueblos de América Latina, el Caribe y África; que paren la persecución racista que amenaza las comunidades musulmanas y que paren el terror policiaco en contra de las comunidades negras y latinas; derechos totales y legalización para los emigrantes.
Nosotros, demandamos que el FBI pare de inmediato la persecución a los luchadores por la justicia social y la solidaridad internacional; como también pongan un alto a todos los esfuerzos que reprimen y castigan a los contribuidores y fundadores de Wikileaks.
Nosotros, demandamos trillones de dólares para trabajos, educación y servicios sociales; que cesen todos los embargos de viviendas y desalojos; un programa de salud gratuito y de calidad para todos; un programa energético de conversión masiva que salve al planeta y buen el sistema de transporte público. Y reparaciones para las víctimas del terror de estados unidos aquí en casa y en el exterior.
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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Table of Contents:
A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.
C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
D. ARTICLES IN FULL
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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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UNITED NATIONAL ANTIWAR COMMITTEE (UNAC) NEXT MEETING TO BUILD APRIL 10TH
SUNDAY, April 3, 2011, 1:00 P.M.
Centro del Pueblo
474 Valencia Street
(Between 15th and 16th Streets, San Francisco)
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APPEAL from San Francisco Labor Council:
"It was corporate greed that led to this economic downturn and workers should not continue to pay the price!"
We Are One.
Forty-three years ago, a struggle by 1,300 city sanitation workers for economic justice brought Dr. Martin Luther King to Memphis. Dr. King, along with a coalition of civil and human rights organizations, the religious community and the union movement stood with the striking workers and faced down the armed forces of a city and state.
Dr. King was assassinated on Apr. 4, 1968 in Memphis.
On April 4th, we will honor Dr. King by continuing this struggle across our nation.
Union members, community activists, advocates for civil and human rights, and religious leaders will flood the streets around this country to stand together and declare that all workers deserve the right to bargain for a better life. It was corporate greed that led to this economic downturn and workers should not continue to pay the price.
In San Francisco,we will be meeting at Bank of America (555 California) before marching to several locations that represent the ultra-rich who fail to pay their taxes and are fundamentally responsible for the economic downturn, high unemployment, government budget deficits, and huge spikes in public employee pension costs.
Now is the time for action.
To Download the Flyer and Route Map for the April 4th March and Rally in San Francisco, go to http://sflaborcouncil.org/ and click "April 4 - We are One - End the $$$" under Upcoming Events.
April 4th Rally and March
4:45 pm
Meet at 555 California, Bank of America
6:00 pm
Rally at 101 Market, Federal Reserve Building
Speakers Include:
Stephanie Bloomingdale, Secretary-Treasurer with the Wisconsin AFL-CIO
Eva Paterson with the Equal Justice Society and the California Civil Rights Coalition
San Francisco Labor Council Resolution - Unanimously adopted 3/14/2011
Resolution in Support of April 4, 2011
No Business as Usual
Solidarity Actions
Whereas, the San Francisco Labor Council Executive Committee is calling for a mobilization in San Francisco on April 4, 2011 against union-busting and the budget cuts;
Therefore be it Resolved, that in the event that a Council affiliate votes to engage in an industrial action on April 4, the San Francisco Labor Council will call on all its affiliates with fax blast, e-mail, phone etc. to support such action by engaging, wherever possible, in work stoppages, sick-outs and any other solidarity actions.
Resolution adopted March 14, 2011 by unanimous vote of the regular Delegates Meeting of the Council, meeting in San Francisco, California.
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CWA ANNOUNCES NATIONWIDE DAY OF ACTION APRIL 4
http://www.cwa-union.org/news/entry/cohen_announces_nationwide_day_of_action_april_4
'We Have the Opportunity to Plan and Build Something Enormous'
The voice of the labor movement and its allies will roar louder than ever on April 4, the anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when "it will not be business as usual at workplaces and communities across this nation," CWA President Larry Cohen said Wednesday.
Speaking to 10,000 CWA members on a nationwide phone call, Cohen said the AFL-CIO Executive Board had adopted his proposal for "movement-wide dramatic action" to honor King and the workers fighting for their rights today.
King was shot to death while he was in Memphis to support 1,300 striking city sanitation workers. "Their fight was about recognition, respect and dignity," Cohen said. "Dr. King called it a moral struggle for an economic outcome, much like the fights in the states and at the bargaining table and in every one of our organizing drives."
Cohen urged CWA locals and members to begin brainstorming ideas and making plans for April 4, challenging them and all Americans to "create events at every workplace in America."
It could be as simple as everyone wearing red that day, having workers meet outside and march into work together or standing up at noon and shouting, "Workers rights are human rights!" Cohen said.
Other ideas include candlelight vigils in parks, meetings of church congregations, rallies at statehouses and protests in front of corporate offices. Cohen said CWA locals and activists will receive an e-mail shortly asking them to submit their ideas and plans, and another town hall-style phone call will be held in advance of the events.
King's murder while fighting for city workers spurred public organizing drives across the United States. Cohen said there is no better way to honor that and King than by doing what he would do, "create a new movement for economic justice."
"We need to combine offense and defense," Cohen said. "We need to take it to every workplace, union and non union, private and public sector. We have an opportunity to plan and build something enormous."
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Are you joining us on April 8 at the Pentagon in a climate chaos protest codenamed "Operation Disarmageddon?" It has been decided that affinity groups will engage in nonviolent autonomous actions. Do you have an affinity group? Do you have an idea for an action?
So far these are some of the suggested actions:
Send a letter to Sec. of War Robert Gates demanding a meeting to disclose the Pentagon's role in destroying the planet. He will ignore the letter, so a delegation would then go to the Metro Entrance to demand a meeting.
Use crime tape around some area of the Pentagon. The idea of crime/danger taping off the building could be done just outside the main Pentagon reservation entrance (intersection of Army/Navy) making the Alexandria PD the arresting authority (if needed) and where there is no ban on photography. Hazmat suits, a 'converted' truck (or other vehicle) could be part of the street theater. The area where I am thinking is also almost directly below I-95 and there is a bridge over the intersection - making a banner drop possible. Perhaps with the hazmat/street closure at ground level with a banner from above. If possible a coordinated action could be done at other Pentagon entrances and / or other war making institutions.
A procession onto the Pentagon reservation, without reservations, and set up a camp on one of the lawns surrounding The Pentagon. This contingent would reclaim the space in the name of peace and Mother Earth. This contingent would plan to stay there until The Pentagon is turned into a 100% green building using sustainable energy employing people who work for peace and the abolishment of war and life-affirming endeavors.
Bring a potted tree to be placed on the Pentagon's property to symbolize the need to radically reduce its environmental destructiveness.
Since the Pentagon is failing to return to the taxpayers the money it has misappropriated, "Foreclose on the Pentagon."
Banner hanging from a bridge.
Hand out copies of David Swanson's book WAR IS A LIE. Try to deliver a copy to Secretary of War Robert Gates.
Have short speeches in park between Pentagon and river; nice photo with Pentagon in background.
Die-in and chalk or paint outlines of victim's bodies everywhere that remain after the arrest to point to where real crimes are really being committed.
Establish command center, Peacecom? Paxcom? Put several people in white shirts and ties plus a few generals directing their armies for "Operation Disarmageddon."
Make the linkage between the tax dollars going to the Pentagon and war tax resistance. Use the WRL pie chart and carry banners "foreclose on war" and "money for green jobs not war jobs."
Hold a rally with representative speakers before going to the Pentagon Reservation. This would be an opportunity to speak out against warmongering and the Pentagon's role in destroying the environment.
As part of "Operation Disarmageddon," we will take a tree and plant it on the reservation. Our sign reads, "Plant trees not landmines."
Use crime tape on Army/Navy Drive to declare the Pentagon a crime scene. Do street theater there as well. Other affinity groups could go to selected entrances.
Establish a Peace Command Center at the Pentagon. Hold solidarity actions at federal buildings and corporate offices.
What groups have you contacted to suggest joining us at the Pentagon? See below for those who plan to be at the Pentagon on April 8 and for what groups have been contacted.
Kagiso,
Max
April 8, 2011 participants
Beth Adams
Ellen Barfield
Tim Chadwick
Joy First
Jeffrey Halperin
Malachy Kilbride
Max Obuszewski
David Swanson
April 8 Outreach
Beth Adams -- Earth First, Puppet Underground, Emma's Revolution, Joe Gerson-AFSC Cambridge, Code Pink(national via Lisa Savage in Maine), Vets for Peace, FOR, UCC Justice & Witness Ministries, Traprock, Nipponzan Myohoji Buddhist Order, (National-INt'l) Vets for Peace and WILPF, Pace e Bene, Christian Peace Witness & UCC Justice & Witness (Cleveland).
Tim Chadwick -- Brandywine, Lepoco, Witness against Torture, Vets for Peace (Thomas Paine Chapter Lehigh Valley PA), and Witness for Peace DC.
Jeffrey Halperin -- peace groups in Saratoga Spring, NY
Jack Lombardo - UNAC will add April 8 2011 to the Future Actions page on our blog, and make note in upcoming E-bulletins, but would appreciate a bit of descriptive text from the organizers and contact point to include when we do - so please advise ASAP! Also, we'll want to have such an announcement for our next print newsletter, which will be coming out in mid-December.
Max Obuszewski - Jonah House & Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore
Bonnie Urfer notified 351 individuals and groups on the Nukewatch list
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ENDING THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN
An Evening with MALALAI JOYA
When: Saturday April 9th, 2011
6-7 pm reception/light food
7-9 pm program
Where: Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist
corner of 15th and Julian (btw Mission & Valencia) San Francisco
with music by Kaylah Marin
$10-25 (no one turned away)
wheelchair accessible (wheelchair entrance on 15th Street)
Malalai Joya has been called the "bravest woman in Afghanistan." She was the youngest member elected to the Afghan Parliament but was suspended for denouncing the warlords and the US/NATO war and occupation. She continues to speak out despite death threats and assassination attempts.
Join us as she talks about the situation in Afghanistan and why it's essential that US/NATO troops leave immediately.
Her book, "A Woman Among Warlords," with a new afterward about the war under Obama, is now in paperback and will be available for purchase.
For more information: or if you want to endorse: sfjoya@gmail.com
Endorsed by (partial list): American Friends Service Comm • ANSWER/SF • Arab Resource Organizing Center • BAYAN • Bay Area Jewish Voice for Peace • Bay Area Women in Black • Black Alliance for Just Immigration • Black Women Stirring the Waters • Buddhist Peace Fellowship • California Women's Agenda • Catalyst Project • Code Pink/Women for Peace • Courage to Resist • Eastside Arts Alliance • Ecumenical Peace Institute • Freedom Archives • Global Exchange • Grandmothers Against the War • Haiti Action Committee • International Action Center • International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network • International Socialist Organization • KPFA Women's Magazine •LAGAI • Middle East Children's Alliance • National Radio Project/ Making Contact • Priority Africa Network • Queers Undermining Israeli Terror • Radical Women • San Francisco Women In Black • Unitarian Universalists for Peace-SF • UNAC • War Resisters League/West • Women for Genuine Security • WILPF/ Berkeley /East Bay • WILPF/ Santa Cruz) • Veterans For Peace Chapter 69
•Unitarian Universalists for Peace-SFUNAC • War Resisters League/West • Women for Genuine Security • WILPF/ Berkeley /East Bay • WILPF/ Santa Cruz) • Veterans For Peace Chapter 69
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Atomic Mom at the Los Angeles Women's International Film Festival
Atomic Mom, a feature length documentary by M.T. Silvia, will screen on Saturday, April 9th @ 7:30pm at the Roxie Theater at 3117 16th Street San Francisco, CA 94103 in the San Francisco International Women's Film Festival.
Media Contact:
M.T. Silvia
mtsilvia@atomicmom.org
510-541-0413
- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -
Atomic Mom weaves an intimate portrait of a complex mother-daughter relationship within an obscure - but important - moment in American history.
As the only female scientist present during atomic detonations in the Nevada desert, Pauline Silvia, the filmmaker's mother, undergoes a crisis of conscience. After a long silence and prompted by her daughter, she finally reveals grim secrets of working in the U.S. atomic testing program.
In our present moment of Wikileaks, Pauline is a similar whistle-blower having been cowed by the silencing machine of the US military for decades. In an attempt to reconcile with her own mother's past, her daughter, filmmaker M.T. Silvia, meets Emiko Okada, a Hiroshima survivor trying to reconcile her own history in Japan. The film follows these survivors, each on a different end of atomic warfare, as they "meet" through the filmmaking process, and as they, with startling honestly, attempt to understand the other.
With the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the footage of the devastation is hauntingly familiar to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Japan experiences its second nuclear crisis, Atomic Mom illustrates how we are all downwind of this story.
Atomic Mom invites viewers to confront American nuclear history in a completely new way and will inspire dialogue about human rights, personal responsibility, and the possibility - and hope - of peace.
More info at http://www.atomicmom.org
M.T. Silvia is an independent filmmaker. Her first documentary Picardy Drive (2002, Documentary, 57min) aired on KQED's ImageMaker series, FreeSpeechTV and airs yearly during the holidays on Oakland's KTOP. She has worked professionally in the film industry for over twenty years at both Skywalker Sound and Pixar Animation Studios. Among many mainstream film and CD credits, she has also worked on several independent films.
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RALLY AGAINST THE WARS AGAINST WORKING PEOPLE AT HOME AND ABROAD! BACK TO THE STREETS! BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!NO NUKES/NO WAR!
SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2011
ASSEMBLE AT DOLORES PARK AT 11:00 A.M.
NOON RALLY
MARCH AT 1:30 P.M.
THEY are the government, corporate, and financial powers that wage war, ravage the environment and the economy and trample on our democratic rights and liberties.
WE are the vast majority of humanity who want peace, a healty planet and a society that prioritizes human needs, democracy and civil liberties for all.
WE DEMAND Bring U.S. Troops, Mercenaries and War Contractors Home Now: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan! End the sanctions and stop the threats of war against the people of Iran, North Korea and Yemen. No to war and plunder of the people of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa! End U.S. Aid to Israel! End U.S. Support to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the Siege of Gaza! End support of dictators in North Africa!
WE DEMAND an end to FBI raids on antiwar, social justice, and international solidarity activists, an end to the racist persecution and prosecutions that ravage Muslim communities, an end to police terror in Black and Latino communities, full rights and legality for immigrants and an end to all efforts to repress and punish Wikileaks and its contributors and founders.
WE DEMAND the immediate end to torture, rendition, secret trials, drone bombings and death squads.
WE DEMAND trillions for jobs, education, social services, an end to all foreclosures, quality single-payer healthcare for ail, a massive conversion to sustainable and planet-saving energy systems and public transportation and reparations to the victims of U.S. terror at home and abroad.
Next organizing meeting Sunday, February 20, 1:00 P.M., Centro del Pueblo, 474 Valencia Street (between 15th and 16th Streets, San Francisco)
Sponsored by the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC)
www.unacpeace.org
unacnortherncalifornia@gmail.com
415-49-NO-WAR
Facebook.com/EndTheWars
Twitter.com/UNACPeace
TRADUCCION:
Marcha en contra de las guerras: en casa y en el exterior
Ellos son el gobierno y las corporaciones que financian las guerras, destruyen el medio ambiente, la economía y pisotean nuestras libertades y derechos democráticos.
Nosotros, somos la gran mayoría de la humanidad y queremos paz. Un planeta saludable y una sociedad que priorice en las necesidades humanas, la democracia y las libertades civiles para todos.
Nosotros, demandamos que las tropas militares, los mercenarios y los contratistas de guerra que enviaron a Irak, Afganistán, y Paquistán sean traídas de regreso a los Estados Unidos ¡Ahora! Que paren con las sanciones y las amenazas de guerra en contra de los pueblos de Irán, Corea del Norte y Yemen; y que los Estados Unidos deje de colaborar con Israel en la invasión y acoso a Palestina y Gaza. No al saqueo de los pueblos de América Latina, el Caribe y África; que paren la persecución racista que amenaza las comunidades musulmanas y que paren el terror policiaco en contra de las comunidades negras y latinas; derechos totales y legalización para los emigrantes.
Nosotros, demandamos que el FBI pare de inmediato la persecución a los luchadores por la justicia social y la solidaridad internacional; como también pongan un alto a todos los esfuerzos que reprimen y castigan a los contribuidores y fundadores de Wikileaks.
Nosotros, demandamos trillones de dólares para trabajos, educación y servicios sociales; que cesen todos los embargos de viviendas y desalojos; un programa de salud gratuito y de calidad para todos; un programa energético de conversión masiva que salve al planeta y buen el sistema de transporte público. Y reparaciones para las víctimas del terror de estados unidos aquí en casa y en el exterior.
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NO MORE NUCLEAR VICTIMS
Posted on Mar 31, 2011 by Coffee House Teach Ins
PROTEST against Diablo and stand up for clean energy.
Join at a peaceful demonstration on
Saturday, April 16.
Meet at Avila Pier in Avila Beach, CA, at noon.
Bring signs and the messages that:
We can no longer ignore the warnings from Fukushima Daiichi,
Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island
Diablo Canyon is on shaky ground; the area is riddled with over a
dozen earthquake faults
Nuclear Energy is not worth the risk to our lives and our planet
Stop the license renewal process at Diablo
San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace
http://mothersforpeace.org
(805)773-3881
P.O. Box 3608
San Luis Obispo, CA 93403
Date: Sat, Apr 16th, 2011
Time: 12:00 pm
More Info: http://mothersforpeace.org
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Please announce, forward, share, come
For the Beauty of the Earth
Good Friday, Earth Day & the Bomb
The Cross in the Midst of Creation
Rev. Sharon Delgado, preaching
Liturgical dance led by Carla DeSolaa
April 22, 6:45 a.m.
Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory
Vasco Road & Patterson Pass Road, Livermore
Livermore Lab was founded to develop the hydrogen bomb, and new weapons of mass destruction are still designed there. For more than 25 years, people of faith and others concerned about the proliferation of nuclear weapons have gathered on Good Friday outside the Livermore Laboratory.
This year Good Friday and Earth Day coincide. We will hear from Sharon Delgado, a longtime advocate for peace, justice and the environment, a United Methodist clergywoman, founder of interfaith Earth Justice Ministries, and author of Shaking the Gates of Hell: Faith-Led Resistance to Corporate Globalization.
We will be led in dance by Carla DeSola a nationally recognized teacher of liturgical dance, presently teaching at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley and through the Center for the Arts, Religion & Education.
After the service we will walk about one-half mile to the main gate, where there will be opportunity for nonviolent witness. Please bring banners, puppets and other visuals for the walk to the gate.
We invite your participation in this event, your financial support, and, if available, your organization's co-sponsorship
Information, downloadable flyer etc at http://www.epicalc.org/ email to epicalc@lmi.net
Surface mail to EPI PO Box 9334, Berkeley, CA 94702
Write or email us if you can help or want to participate in some way. Please spread the word.
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Ninth Annual International Al-Awda Convention
April 29 & 30, 2011
The Embassy Suite Hotel, Anaheim South
11767 Harbor Boulevard
Garden Grove, Ca 92840
A significant event at a critical time in Arab history!
CONVENTION WEBSITE: http://www.al-awda.org/convention9/index.html
Ninth Annual International Al-Awda Convention - Onward, United and Stronger Until Return!
JUST IN: Hugh Lanning, Deputy General Secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, one of the 'big five' trade unions in Britain, and Palestine Solidarity Campaign's Chair UK will be addressing Al-Awda's Ninth Annual International Convention.
Strategy, tactics and planning discussions:
* The Palestine Papers and the Arab people's uprising; Impact on the Palestinian struggle and future organizing
* Boycotts & Divestment
* Refugee Support
* Return From Exile Project with Free Palestine Movement
* Cultural Resistance Through Various Forms of Art
* Palestinian Children's Rights Campaign
* Young activist program with hands on workshops
Speakers include:
* Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, Founding President of the Palestine Land Society
* Abbas Al-Nouri, Syrian Arab actor of "bab el-hara" fame, political activist
* Diana Buttu, Palestinian lawyer, former legal advisor to Palestinian negotiating team
* Hugh Lanning, Deputy General Secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, and Palestine Solidarity Campaign's Chair UK
* Ali Abunimah, Palestinian author and co-founder Electronic Intifada
* Lubna Masarwa, Palestinian activist, survivor of Mavi Marmara massacre
* Laila Al-Arian, Palestinian Author, writer and Al-Jazeera English producer
* Dr. Jamal Nassar, Specialist in Middle East politics, Dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at CSUSB
* Rim Banna, Palestinian singer & activist
* Najat El-Khairy, Palestinian porcelain painting artist
* Remi Kanazi, Palestinian spoken word artist, activist
* Youth from Al Bayader Center Yarmouk Refugee Camp
Plus . . .
Cultural presentations, films, books and solidarity items, network with friends and fellow activists & lunch keynote presentations & evening banquet with live music! (Baby-sitting available for entire convention)
Al-Awda Convention on Facebook
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B. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.:
[Some of these videos are embeded on the BAUAW website:
http://bauaw.blogspot.com/ or bauaw.org ...bw]
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VIDEO: SWAT Team Evicts Grandmother
Take Back the Land- Rochester Eviction Defense March 28, 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2axN1zsZno&feature=player_embedded
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B. D. S. [Boycott, Divest, Sanction against Israel]
(Jackson 5) Chicago Flashmob
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4tXe2HKqqs&feature=player_embedded
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Labor Beat: Wisconsin and After
http://blip.tv/file/4959469
A overview of the recent weeks in the battle for public sector workers in Wisconsin, and touching upon the national ramifications. Key issues are raised, through interviews and documentary footage: concessions have been pushed and agreed to by the Democrats and top union leaderships, setting workers up for the current Republican attacks. "On the national level, the Democrats have bought into the idea that workers should pay for the crisis," points out AFSCME 2858 Pres. Steve Edwards. But the money is there, if we taxed the rich and ended war spending. Includes scenes of the return of the 14 Democrats, the capitol rotunda occupation, mass marches, Iraq Veterans Against the War, more. Connects state budget crises with the wars and Wall Street, and looks at the tactics of the recall election and a general strike. Interviews and speeches from: Steve Edwards, Pres. of AFSCME 2858 and member of Socialist Alternative; Andy Heidt, Pres. of AFSCME Local 1871 and member of wisconsinwave.org; Jesse Sharkey, V.P. Chicago Teachers Union (for i.d. purposes only); Jan Rodolfo, National Outreach Coordinator, National Nurses United; Scott Kimbell, Iraq Veterans Against the War; Austin Thompson, labor organizer - Madison, WI. 25:30. Produced by Labor Beat. Labor Beat is a CAN TV Community Partner. Labor Beat is a non-profit 501(c)(3) member of IBEW 1220. Views are those of the producer Labor Beat. For info: mail@laborbeat.org, www.laborbeat.org. 312-226-3330. For other Labor Beat videos, visit Google Video, YouTube, or blip.tv and search "Labor Beat". Labor Beat has regular cable slots in Chicago, Evanston, Rockford, Urbana, IL; St. Louis, MO; Princeton, NJ; and Rochester, NY. For more detailed information, send us a request at mail@laborbeat.org
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Dr. Michio Kaku says three raging meltdowns under way at Fukushima (22442 views)
Uploaded 3/31/2011
http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=604AB3FA803FF3647DF6E34EC5E8C8A0
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26th March Insurrection - Statement by Charlie Veitch of the the Love Police
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nroZMHBlui4
NOTE: I do not support the tactics of the "Love Police" or the "black block." In fact, in Toronto, Canada, there's video evidence that the "black block" protesters at the 2010 World Health Organization Conference were actually police--caught on video with their badges. But the perspective that it is the system of capitalism that is at the root of the crisis working people of the world face today, I do support.
What working people need and want is not violence and war; it's peace, justice, democracy and equality--including economic equality. It is not working people that declare war; imprison masses of the poor; steal food out of the mouths of children and their parents. It's not working people that order clones to bomb the innocent; that chooses to invade foreign lands or to deport children because their parents are immigrants. The purveyors of violence are the rulers of capital--the most powerful being the bi-partisan rulers of the U.S.A.
Working people can change things without the slightest use of violence--through rational, democratic planning and organization. But the commanders of capital, as they are consistently illustrating, will use any and all force necessary to stop us from making rational choices. And, we have the right to defend ourselves from those acts of violence they will use against us as do the people under the U.S. guns and drones, warships and nuclear weapons of mass destruction today.
Our goal should be to disarm them militarily and confiscate the wealth they have pillaged from us and use it to build a better world in the interests of all working people and the planet we share. That's what a democratic, socialist society is all about and it's our last hope!...Bonnie Weinstein
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Michael Moore on the Colbert Report -- March 28th, 2011
http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/63-63/5452-michael-moore-stephen-colbert-union-busting
Michael Moore on the Colbert Report -- March 28th, 2011 from MMFlint on Vimeo.
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Afghans for Peace
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ror0qPcasM&NR=1
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The Kill Team
How U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdered innocent civilians and mutilated their corpses - and how their officers failed to stop them. Plus: An exclusive look at the war crime photos censored by the Pentagon
Rolling Stone
March 27, 3011
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-kill-team-20110327
Afghans respond to "Kill Team"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3guxWIorhdA
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END THE U.S./UN/NATO KILL TEAM NOW!
WARNING: THESE ARE HORRIFIC, DISGUSTING, VIOLENT CRIMES COMMITTED BY THE U.S. MILITARY MAKING THE UPCOMING APRIL 10 [APRIL 9 IN NEW YORK] MARCH AND RALLY AGAINST THE WARS A FIRST PRIORITY FOR WE, THE PEOPLE OF THE U.S. WE DEMAND OUT NOW! END THE WARS AGAINST WORKING PEOPLE HERE AND EVERYWHERE! BRING ALL THE TROOPS, UN/NATO/US/ and CONTRACTORS HOME NOW!
The Kill Team Photos More war crime images the Pentagon doesn't want you to see
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/the-kill-team-photos-20110327
'Death Zone' How U.S. soldiers turned a night-time airstrike into a chilling 'music video'
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/death-zone-20110327
'Motorcycle Kill' Footage of an Army patrol gunning down two men in Afghanistan
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/motorcyle-kill-20110327
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BOB MARLEY - WAR
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73zaNwyhXn0&playnext=1&list=PLA467527F8DD7DE1F
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Frederick Alexander Meade on The Prison Industrial Complex
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vqzfEYo6Lo
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Chernobyl 25 years on -- The Big Cover-Up
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9URUQvGE9g&feature=player_embedded
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Dropkick Murphys - Worker's Song (with lyrics)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTafZRecy2k&feature=email&tracker=False
Worker's Song Lyrics
Artist(Band):Dropkick Murphys
Yeh, this one's for the workers who toil night and day
By hand and by brain to earn your pay
Who for centuries long past for no more than your bread
Have bled for your countries and counted your dead
In the factories and mills, in the shipyards and mines
We've often been told to keep up with the times
For our skills are not needed, they've streamlined the job
And with sliderule and stopwatch our pride they have robbed
[Chorus:]
We're the first ones to starve, we're the first ones to die
The first ones in line for that pie-in-the-sky
And we're always the last when the cream is shared out
For the worker is working when the fat cat's about
And when the sky darkens and the prospect is war
Who's given a gun and then pushed to the fore
And expected to die for the land of our birth
Though we've never owned one lousy handful of earth?
[Chorus x3]
All of these things the worker has done
From tilling the fields to carrying the gun
We've been yoked to the plough since time first began
And always expected to carry the can
Which Side Are You On - Dropkick Murphys
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKWfnO7fhQM&feature=email&tracker=False
Lyrics :
Our father was a union man
some day i'll be one too.
The bosses fired daddy
what's our family gonna do?
Come all you good workers,
Good news to you I'll tell
Of how the good old union
Has come in here to dwell.
CHORUS:
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on? (x2)
My dady was a miner,
And I'm a miner's son,
And I'll stick with the union
'Til every battle's won.
They say in Harlan County
There are no neutrals there.
You'll either be a union man
Or a thug for J. H. Blair.
Oh workers can you stand it?
Oh tell me how you can?
Will you be a lousy scab
Or will you be a man?
Don't scab for the bosses,
Don't listen to their lies.
Us poor folks haven't got a chance
Unless we organize !
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'America Is NOT Broke': Michael Moore Speaks in Madison, WI -- March 5, 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgNuSEZ8CDw&feature=player_embedded
Answer to Michael Moore: We ain't Gonna Play the Game No More!
By Bonnie Weinstein
info@socialistviewpoint.org
socialistviewpoint.org
The problem with Michael Moore's speech in Wisconsin March 5, 2011 is that the 14 Democratic emigres have already given away the economic security of the workers--their pay; their benefits; their vacations; their sick-days; their overtime. They have even convinced organized labor to accept the pay cuts, shorter hours--anything but unemployment, starvation and homelessness!
What noble choices the good Democrats have given to the masses of struggling working people in Wisconsin and everywhere!
In the prelude to his speech, Moore lauds those "heroic 14 Democratic" émigrés that have already given away the workers hard-won benefits and conditions for holding firm and staying away--"not one has come back!" he cheers.
Where are the rest of the Democratic politicians around the country? Where's Obama when masses of workers are being sold down the river? What about all the Democratic governors and mayors who are doing the same thing in their respective states and cities across the country. There isn't one state or city that's lavishing more on social services; on schools; on community medical centers; on healthcare--everyone everywhere EXCEPT THE TOP ONE PERCENT is being asked to give back and give up and surrender to the new middle ages--with the Democrats pretending and promising to steal a little less from workers than the Republicans! Workers can't depend upon any party that claims to represent both workers and the bosses. The jig is up!
Working people need to make democratic decisions based upon our own needs and wants and what is good for us and our families; like whether to spend trillions of OUR dollars on wars based upon lies; or on massive bailouts to corporations who have stolen and hoarded the wealth for themselves; or whether to use the fruits of our labor to pay for healthcare; schools; housing; all the things people need to live healthy, free and happy lives.
Working people produce the wealth; working people should have democratic control over that wealth and the means of production they operate to produce it.
The game of voting for one capitalist liar over another is over. It's like plea-bargaining when you are innocent. It's a lose/lose situation and certainly, the workers of the world are losing the game!
No, America is not broke. But telling workers to depend upon the capitalist electoral process, which only allows workers to vote for one capitalist representative over another, is preposterous and makes workers broke!
We workers must take that wealth that we, and we alone create, into our own hands. We can. We are the majority. And it's the only hope for creating a happy and healthy future for all of us, our children and the world. As Rosa Luxemburg said, the only choice for workers is Socialism; or else, we will continue the plunge into Barbarism!
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BP Oil Spill Scientist Bob Naman: Seafood Still Not Safe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3VdxvMnDls
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Exclusive: Flow Rate Scientist : How Much Oil Is Really Out There?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsHl3kn63ZA&NR=1
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Labor Beat: No Concessions Emergency Meeting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaFrWNi2gM0
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Iraq Veterans Against the War in Occupied Capitol, Madison, WI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7K0wn73uJU
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A joke:
A unionized public employee, a member of the Tea Party, and a CEO are
sitting at a table. In the middle of the table there is a plate with a
dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies,
looks at the tea partier and says,"watch out for that union guy, he
wants a piece of your cookie."
Marc Luzietti
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18th dead baby dolphin washes ashore in Northern Gulf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybFeuSNszSg&feature=player_embedded
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[This is a great video. Kipp Dawson, the school teacher in the video, is an old friend...bw]
Middle Class Revolution
Hundreds packed USW headquarters Feb. 24. 2011, to rally for the middle class and stand up against attacks on workers in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and elsewhere. Check out highlights here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_UmZYlSyC5U
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solidarity
'We Stand With You as You Stood With Us': Statement to Workers of Wisconsin by Kamal Abbas of Egypt's Centre for Trade Unions and Workers Services
February 20th, 2011 3:45 PM
About Kamal Abbas and the Centre for Trade Unions and Workers Services:
Kamal Abbas is General Coordinator of the CTUWS, an umbrella advocacy organization for independent unions in Egypt. The CTUWS, which was awarded the 1999 French Republic's Human Rights Prize, suffered repeated harassment and attack by the Mubarak regime, and played a leading role in its overthrow. Abbas, who witnessed friends killed by the regime during the 1989 Helwan steel strike and was himself arrested and threatened numerous times, has received extensive international recognition for his union and civil society leadership.
KAMAL ABBAS: I am speaking to you from a place very close to Tahrir Square in Cairo, "Liberation Square", which was the heart of the Revolution in Egypt. This is the place were many of our youth paid with their lives and blood in the struggle for our just rights.
From this place, I want you to know that we stand with you as you stood with us.
I want you to know that no power can challenge the will of the people when they believe in their rights. When they raise their voices loud and clear and struggle against exploitation.
No one believed that our revolution could succeed against the strongest dictatorship in the region. But in 18 days the revolution achieved the victory of the people. When the working class of Egypt joined the revolution on 9 and 10 February, the dictatorship was doomed and the victory of the people became inevitable.
We want you to know that we stand on your side. Stand firm and don't waiver. Don't give up on your rights. Victory always belongs to the people who stand firm and demand their just rights.
We and all the people of the world stand on your side and give you our full support.
As our just struggle for freedom, democracy and justice succeeded, your struggle will succeed. Victory belongs to you when you stand firm and remain steadfast in demanding your just rights.
We support you. we support the struggle of the peoples of Libya, Bahrain and Algeria, who are fighting for their just rights and falling martyrs in the face of the autocratic regimes. The peoples are determined to succeed no matter the sacrifices and they will be victorious.
Today is the day of the American workers. We salute you American workers! You will be victorious. Victory belongs to all the people of the world, who are fighting against exploitation, and for their just rights.
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Stop LAPD Stealing of Immigrant's Cars
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0lf4kENkxo
On Februrary 19, 2011 Members of the Southern California Immigration Coalition (SCIC) organized and engaged in direct action to defend the people of Los Angeles, CA from the racist LAPD "Sobriety" Checkpoints that are a poorly disguised trap to legally steal the cars from working class people in general and undocumented people in particular. Please disseminate this link widely.
Venceremos,
SCIC
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WikiLeaks Mirrors
Wikileaks is currently under heavy attack.
In order to make it impossible to ever fully remove Wikileaks from the Internet, you will find below a list of mirrors of Wikileaks website and CableGate pages.
Go to
http://wikileaks.ch/Mirrors.html
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Labor Beat: Labor Stands with Subpoenaed Activists Against FBI Raids and Grand Jury Investigation of antiwar and social justice activists.
"If trouble is not at your door. It's on it's way, or it just left."
"Investigate the Billionaires...Full investigation into Wall Street..." Jesse Sharkey, Vice President, Chicago Teachers Union
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSNUSIGZCMQ
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Oil Spill Commission Final Report: Catfish Responds
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3ZRdsccMsM
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The Most Heroic Word in All Languages is Revolution
By Eugene Debs
Eugene Debs, that greatest son of the Middle American west, wrote this in 1907 in celebration of that year's May Day events. It retains all of its vibrancy and vitality as events breathe new life into the global struggle for emancipation. "Revolution" remains the most heroic word in every language. -The Rustbelt Radical
Today the slaves of all the world are taking a fresh breath in the long and weary march; pausing a moment to clear their lungs and shout for joy; celebrating in festal fellowship their coming Freedom.
All hail the Labor Day of May!
The day of the proletarian protest;
The day of stern resolve;
The day of noble aspiration.
Raise high this day the blood-red Standard of the Revolution!
The banner of the Workingman;
The flag, the only flag, of Freedom.
Slavery, even the most abject-dumb and despairing as it may seem-has yet its inspiration. Crushed it may be, but extinguished never. Chain the slave as you will, O Masters, brutalize him as you may, yet in his soul, though dead, he yearns for freedom still.
The great discovery the modern slaves have made is that they themselves must achieve. This is the secret of their solidarity; the heart of their hope; the inspiration that nerves them all with sinews of steel.
They are still in bondage, but no longer cower;
No longer grovel in the dust,
But stand erect like men.
Conscious of their growing power the future holds up to them her outstretched hands.
As the slavery of the working class is international, so the movement for its emancipation.
The salutation of slave to slave this day is repeated in every human tongue as it goes ringing round the world.
The many millions are at last awakening. For countless ages they have suffered; drained to the dregs the bitter cup of misery and woe.
At last, at last the historic limitation has been reached, and soon a new sun will light the world.
Red is the life-tide of our common humanity and red our symbol of universal kinship.
Tyrants deny it; fear it; tremble with rage and terror when they behold it.
We reaffirm it and on this day pledge anew our fidelity-come life or death-to the blood-red Banner of the Revolution.
Socialist greetings this day to all our fellow-workers! To the god-like souls in Russia marching grimly, sublimely into the jaws of hell with the Song of the Revolution in their death-rattle; to the Orient, the Occident and all the Isles of the Sea!
VIVA LA REVOLUTION!
The most heroic word in all languages is REVOLUTION.
It thrills and vibrates; cheers and inspires. Tyrants and time-servers fear it, but the oppressed hail it with joy.
The throne trembles when this throbbing word is lisped, but to the hovel it is food for the famishing and hope for the victims of despair.
Let us glorify today the revolutions of the past and hail the Greater Revolution yet to come before Emancipation shall make all the days of the year May Days of peace and plenty for the sons and daughters of toil.
It was with Revolution as his theme that Mark Twain's soul drank deep from the fount of inspiration. His immortality will rest at last upon this royal tribute to the French Revolution:
"The ever memorable and blessed revolution, which swept a thousand years of villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood-one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two Reigns of Terror, if we would but remember it and consider it: the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death on ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the horrors of the minor Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror, which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over, but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves."
-The Rustbelt Radical, February 25, 2011
http://rustbeltradical.wordpress.com/2011/02/25/the-most-heroic-word-in-all-languages-is-revolution/
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New music video by tommi avicolli mecca of the song "stick and stones," which is about bullying in high school, is finished and up on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of_twpu3-Nw
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New antiwar song that's bound to be a classic:
box
http://www.youtube.com/user/avimecca
by tommi avicolli mecca
(c) 2009
Credits are:
Tommi Avicolli Mecca, guitar/vocals
John Radogno, lead guitar
Diana Hartman, vocals, kazoo
Chris Weir, upright bass
Produced and recorded by Khalil Sullivan
I'm the recruiter and if truth be told/ I can lure the young and old
what I do you won't see/ til your kid's in JROTC
CHO ooh, put them in a box drape it with a flag and send them off to mom and dad
send them with a card from good ol' uncle sam, gee it's really just so sad
I'm the general and what I do/ is to teach them to be true
to god and country flag and oil/ by shedding their blood on foreign soil
CHO
I'm the corporate boss and well I know/ war is lots of dough dough dough
you won't find me over there/ they just ship the money right back here
CHO
last of all it's me the holy priest/ my part is not the least
I assure them it's god's will/ to go on out and kill kill kill
CHO
it's really just so sad
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Free Bradley Manning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4eNzokgRIw&feature=player_embedded
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Did You Know?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY
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Domestic Espionage Alert - Houston PD to use surveillance drone in America!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpstrc15Ogg
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Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVGqE726OAo&feature=player_embedded
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LOWKEY - TERRORIST? (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmBnvajSfWU
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Coal Ash: One Valley's Tale
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E7h-DNvwx4&feature=player_embedded
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Flashmob: Cape Town Opera say NO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wElyrFOnKPk
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"Don't F*** With Our Activists" - Mobilizing Against FBI Raid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyG3dIUGQvQ
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C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS ALERT:
San Francisco Health Center/PLANNED PARENTHOOD - San Francisco, CA
1650 Valencia St
San Francisco, CA 94110
IS BEING PICKETED DAILY BY RIGHT TO LIFE DEMONSTRATORS CARRYING GIANT SIGNS RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE CLINIC INTIMIDATING PATIENTS!
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The Arab Revolutions:
Guiding Principles for Peace and Justice Organizations in the US
Please email endorsement to ekishawi@yahoo.com
We, the undersigned, support the guiding principles and demands listed in this statement. We call on groups who want to express solidarity with the Arab revolutions to join our growing movement by signing this statement or keeping with the demands put forward herewith.
Background
The long-awaited Arab revolution has come. Like a geologic event with the reverberations of an earthquake, the timing and circumstances were unpredictable. In one Arab country after another, people are taking to the street demanding the fall of monarchies established during European colonial times. They are also calling to bring down dictatorships supported and manifested by neo-colonial policies. Although some of these autocratic regimes rose to power with popular support, the subsequent division and subjugation of the Arab World led to a uniform repressive political order across the region. The Arab masses in different Arab countries are therefore raising a uniform demand: "The People Want to Topple the Regimes!"
For the past two decades, the Arab people witnessed the invasion and occupation of Iraq with millions killed under blockade and occupation, Palestinians massacred with the aim to crush the anti-Zionist resistance, and Lebanon repeatedly invaded with the purposeful targeting of civilians. These actions all served to crush resistance movements longing for freedom, development, and self-determination. Meanwhile, despotic dictatorships, some going back 50 years, entrenched themselves by building police states, or fighting wars on behalf of imperialist interests.
Most Arab regimes systematically destroyed the social fabric of civil society, stifled social development, repressed all forms of political dissent and democratic expression, mortgaged their countries' wealth to foreign interests and enriched themselves and their cronies at the expense of impoverishing their populations. After pushing the Arab people to the brink, populations erupted.
The spark began in Tunisia where a police officer slapped and spat on Mohammad Bou Azizi, flipping over his produce cart for not delivering a bribe on time. . Unable to have his complaint heard, he self-immolated in protest, igniting the conscience of the Tunisian people and that of 300 million Arabs. In less than a month, the dictator, Zine El Abedine Ben Ali, was forced into exile by a Tunisian revolution. On its way out, the regime sealed its legacy by shooting at unarmed protestors and burning detention centers filled with political prisoners. Ben Ali was supported by the US and Europe in the fight against Islamic forces and organized labor.
Hosni Mubarak's brutal dictatorship fell less than a month after Tunisia's. The revolution erupted at a time when one half of the Egyptian population was living on less than $2/day while Mubarak's family amassed billions of dollars. The largest population recorded in Egyptian history was living in graveyards and raising their children among the dead while transportation and residential infrastructure was crumbling. Natural gas was supplied to Israel at 15% of the market price while the Rafah border was closed with an underground steel wall to complete the suffocation of the Palestinians in Gaza. Those who were deemed a threat swiftly met the fate of Khalid Said. 350 martyrs fell and 2,000 people were injured.
After Egypt and Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain, Oman, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan exploded in protest. Some governments quickly reshuffled faces and ranks without any tangible change. Some, like Bahrain and Yemen, sent out their security forces to massacre civilians. Oman and Yemen represent strategic assets for the US as they are situated on the straits of Hormuz and Aden, respectively. Bahrain is an oil country that hosts a US military base, situated in the Persian Gulf. A new round of US funded blood-letting of Arab civilians has begun!
Libyan dictator Qaddafi did not prove to be an exception. He historically took anti-imperialist positions for a united Arab World and worked for an African Union. He later transformed his regime to a subservient state and opened Libya to British Petroleum and Italian interests, working diligently on privatization and political repression. He amassed more wealth than that of Mubarak. In the face of the Libyan revolution, Qaddafi exceeded the brutality of Ben Ali and Mubarak blind-folding and executing opponents, surrounding cities with tanks, and bombing his own country. Death toll is expected to be in the thousands.
Qaddafi's history makes Libya an easy target for imperialist interests. The Obama administration followed the Iraq cookbook by freezing Libyan assets amounting to 30% of the annual GDP. The White House, with the help of European governments, rapidly implemented sanctions and called for no-fly zones. These positions were precipitated shortly after the US vetoed a resolution condemning the illegal Israeli colonization of the West Bank. Special operations personnel from the UK were captured by the revolutionary commanders in Ben Ghazi and sent back. The Libyan revolutionary leadership, the National Council clearly stated: "We are completely against foreign intervention. The rest of Libya will be liberated by the people ... and Gaddafi's security forces will be eliminated by the people of Libya."
Demands of the Solidarity Movement with Arab Revolutions
1. We demand a stop to US support, financing and trade with Arab dictatorships. We oppose US policy that has favored Israeli expansionism, war, US oil interest and strategic shipping routes at the expense of Arab people's freedom and dignified living.
2. We support the people of Tunisia and Egypt as well as soon-to-be liberated nations to rid themselves of lingering remnants of the deposed dictatorships.
3. We support the Arab people's right to sovereignty and self-determination. We demand that the US government stop its interference in the internal affairs of all Arab countries and end subsidies to wars and occupation.
4. We support the Arab people's demands for political, civil and economic rights. The Arab people's movement is calling for:
a. Deposing the unelected regimes and all of its institutional remnants
b. Constitutional reform guaranteeing freedom of organizing, speech and press
c. Free and fair elections
d. Independent judiciary
e. National self-determination.
5. We oppose all forms of US and European military intervention with or without the legitimacy of the UN. Standing in solidarity with the revolution against Qaddafi, or any other dictator, does not equate to supporting direct or indirect colonization of an Arab country, its oil or its people. We therefore call for:
a. Absolute rejection of military blockades, no-fly zones and interventions.
b. Lifting all economic sanctions placed against Libya and allowing for the formation of an independent judiciary to prosecute Qaddafi and deposed dictators for their crimes.
c. Immediately withdrawing the US and NATO troops from the Arab region.
6. We support Iraq's right to sovereignty and self determination and call on the US to immediately withdraw all occupation personnel from Iraq.
7. We recognize that the borders separating Arab nations were imposed on the Arab people by the colonial agreements of Sykes-Picot and the Berlin Conference on Africa. As such, we support the anti-Zionist nature of this revolution in its call for:
a. Ending the siege and starvation of the Palestinian people in Gaza
b. Supporting the right of the Palestinian people to choose their own representation, independent of Israeli and US dictates
c. Supporting the right of the Lebanese people to defend their country from Israeli violations and their call to end vestiges of the colonial constitution constructed on the basis of sectarian representation
d. Supporting the right of the Jordanian people to rid themselves of their repressive monarchy
e. Ending all US aid to Israel.
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Committee to Stop FBI Repression
NATIONAL CALL-IN DAY -- ANY DAY
to Fitzgerald, Holder and Obama
The Grand Jury is still on its witch hunt and the FBI is still
harassing activists. This must stop.
Please make these calls:
1. Call U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald at 312-353-5300 . Then dial 0
(zero) for operator and ask to leave a message with the Duty Clerk.
2. Call U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder 202-353-1555
3. Call President Obama at 202-456-1111
Suggested text: "My name is __________, I am from _______(city), in
______(state). I am calling _____ to demand he call off the Grand Jury
and stop FBI repression against the anti-war and Palestine solidarity
movements. I oppose U.S. government political repression and support
the right to free speech and the right to assembly of the 23 activists
subpoenaed. We will not be criminalized. Tell him to stop this
McCarthy-type witch hunt against international solidarity activists!"
If your call doesn't go through, try again later.
Update: 800 anti-war and international solidarity activists
participated in four regional conferences, in Chicago, IL; Oakland,
CA; Chapel Hill, NC and New York City to stop U.S. Attorney Patrick
Fitzgerald's Grand Jury repression.
Still, in the last few weeks, the FBI has continued to call and harass
anti-war organizers, repressing free speech and the right to organize.
However, all of their intimidation tactics are bringing a movement
closer together to stop war and demand peace.
We demand:
-- Call Off the Grand Jury Witch-hunt Against International Solidarity
Activists!
-- Support Free Speech!
-- Support the Right to Organize!
-- Stop FBI Repression!
-- International Solidarity Is Not a Crime!
-- Stop the Criminalization of Arab and Muslim Communities!
Background: Fitzgerald ordered FBI raids on anti-war and solidarity
activists' homes and subpoenaed fourteen activists in Chicago,
Minneapolis, and Michigan on September 24, 2010. All 14 refused to
speak before the Grand Jury in October. Then, 9 more Palestine
solidarity activists, most Arab-Americans, were subpoenaed to appear
at the Grand Jury on January 25, 2011, launching renewed protests.
There are now 23 who assert their right to not participate in
Fitzgerald's witch-hunt.
The Grand Jury is a secret and closed inquisition, with no judge, and
no press. The U.S. Attorney controls the entire proceedings and hand
picks the jurors, and the solidarity activists are not allowed a
lawyer. Even the date when the Grand Jury ends is a secret.
So please make these calls to those in charge of the repression aimed
against anti-war leaders and the growing Palestine solidarity
movement.
Email us to let us know your results. Send to info@StopFBI.net
**Please sign and circulate our 2011 petition at http://www.stopfbi.net/petition
In Struggle,
Tom Burke,
for the Committee to Stop FBI Repression
FFI: Visit www.StopFBI.net or email info@StopFBI.net or call
612-379-3585 .
Copyright (c) 2011 Committee to Stop FBI Repression, All rights
reserved.
Our mailing address is:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
PO Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55415
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Call for EMERGENCY RESPONSE Action if Assange Indicted,
Dear Friends:
We write in haste, trying to reach as many of you as possible although the holiday break has begun.......This plan for an urgent "The Day After" demonstration is one we hope you and many, many more organizations will take up as your own, and mobilize for. World Can't Wait asks you to do all you can to spread it through list serves, Facebook, twitter, holiday gatherings.
Our proposal is very very simple, and you can use the following announcement to mobilize - or write your own....
ANY DAY NOW . . . IN THE EVENT THAT THE U.S. INDICTS JULIAN ASSANGE
An emergency public demonstration THE DAY AFTER any U.S. criminal indictment is announced against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Spread the word and call people to come out, across the whole range of movements and groups: anti-war, human rights, freedom of information/freedom of the press, peace, anti-torture, environmental, students and youth, radicals and revolutionaries, religious, civil liberties, teachers and educators, journalists, anti-imperialists, anti-censorship, anti-police state......
At the Federal Building in San Francisco, we'll form ourselves into a human chain "surrounding" the government that meets the Wikileaked truth with repression and wants to imprison and silence leakers, whistleblowers and truthtellers - when, in fact, these people are heroes. We'll say:
HANDS OFF WIKILEAKS! FREE JULIAN ASSANGE! FREE BRADLEY MANNING!
Join the HUMAN CHAIN AROUND THE FEDERAL BUILDING!
New Federal Building, 7th and Mission, San Francisco (nearest BART: Civic Center)
4:00-6:00 PM on The Day FOLLOWING U.S. indictment of Assange
Bring all your friends - signs and banners - bullhorns.
Those who dare at great risk to themselves to put the truth in the hands of the people - and others who might at this moment be thinking about doing more of this themselves -- need to see how much they are supported, and that despite harsh repression from the government and total spin by the mainstream media, the people do want the truth told.
Brad Manning's Christmas Eve statement was just released by his lawyer: "Pvt. Bradley Manning, the lone soldier who stands accused of stealing millions of pages secret US government documents and handing them over to secrets outlet WikiLeaks, wants his supporters to know that they've meant a lot to him. 'I greatly appreciate everyone's support and well wishes during this time,' he said in a Christmas Eve statement released by his lawyer...." Read more here:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/mannings-message-christmas-eve-i-gr/
Demonstrations defending Wikileaks and Assange, and Brad Manning, have already been flowering around the world. Make it happen here too.
Especially here . . .
To join into this action plan, or with questions, contact World Can't Wait or whichever organization or listserve you received this message from.
World Can't Wait, SF Bay
415-864-5153
sf@worldcantwait.org
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Email received from Lynne Stewart:
12/19/10; 12:03pm
Dear Folks:
Some nuts and bolts and trivia,
1. New Address
Lynne Stewart #53504 - 054
Unit 2N
Federal Medical Center, Carswell
P.O. Box 27137
Fort Worth, TEXAS 76127
2. Visiting is very liberal but first I have to get people on my visiting list Wait til I or the lawyers let you know. The visits are FRI, SAT, SUN AND MON for 4 hours and on weekends 8 to 3. Bring clear plastic change purse with lots of change to buy from the machines. Brief Kiss upon arrival and departure, no touching or holding during visit (!!) On visiting forms it may be required that you knew me before I came to prison. Not a problem for most of you.
3. One hour time difference
4. Commissary Money is always welcome It is how I pay for the phone and for email. Also need it for a lot that prison doesn't supply in terms of food and "sundries" (pens!) A very big list that includes Raisins, Salad Dressing , ankle sox, mozzarella (definitely not from Antonys--more like a white cheddar, Sanitas Corn Chips but no Salsa etc. To add money, you do this by using Western Union and a credit card by phone or you can send a USPO money order or Business or Govt Check. The negotiable instruments (PAPER!) need to be sent to Federal Bureau of Prisons , 53504-054, Lynne Stewart, PO Box 474701, Des Moines Iowa 50947-001 (Payable to Lynne Stewart, 53504-054) They hold the mo or checks for 15 days. Western Union costs $10 but is within 2 hours. If you mail, your return address must be on the envelope. Unnecessarily complicated ? Of course, it's the BOP !)
5. Food is vastly improved. Just had Sunday Brunch real scrambled eggs, PORK sausage, Baked or home fried potatoes, Butter(sweet whipped M'God !!) Grapefruit juice Toast , orange. I will probably regain the weight I lost at MCC! Weighing against that is the fact that to eat we need to walk to another building (about at far as from my house to the F Train) Also included is 3 flights of stairs up and down. May try to get an elevator pass and try NOT to use it.
6. In a room with 4 bunks(small) about two tiers of rooms with same with "atrium" in middle with tv sets and tables and chairs. Estimate about 500 on Unit 2N and there are 4 units. Population Black, Mexicano and other spanish speaking (all of whom iron their underwear, Marta), White, Native Americans (few), no orientals or foreign speaking caucasians--lots are doing long bits, victims of drugs (meth etc) and boyfriends. We wear army style (khaki) pants with pockets tee shirts and dress shirts long sleeved and short sleeved. When one of the women heard that I hadn't ironed in 40 years, they offered to do the shirts for me. (This is typical of the help I get--escorted to meals and every other protection, explanations, supplies, etc. Mostly from white women.) One drawback is not having a bathroom in the room---have to go about 75 yards at all hours of the day and night --clean though.
7. Final Note--the sunsets and sunrises are gorgeous, the place is very open and outdoors there are pecan trees and birds galore (I need books for trees and birds (west) The full moon last night gladdened my heart as I realized it was shining on all of you I hold dear.
Love Struggle
Lynne
The address of her Defense Committee is:
Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
1070 Dean Street
Brooklyn, New York 11216
For further information:
718-789-0558 or 917-853-9759
Please make a generous contribution to her defense.
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Help end the inhumane treatment of Bradley Manning!
Bradley Manning Support Network. December 22, 2010
The Marine Brig at Quantico, Virginia is using "injury prevention" as a vehicle to inflict extreme pre-trial punishment on accused Wikileaks whistleblower Army PFC Bradley Manning (photo right). These "maximum conditions" are not unheard-of during an inmate's first week at a military confinement facility, but when applied continuously for months and with no end in sight they amount to a form of torture. Bradley, who just turned 23-years-old last week, has been held in solitary confinement since his arrest in late May. We're now turning to Bradley's supporters worldwide to directly protest, and help bring a halt to, the extremely punitive conditions of Bradley's pre-trial detention.
We need your help in pressing the following demands:
End the inhumane, degrading conditions of pre-trial confinement and respect Bradley's human rights. Specifically, lift the "Prevention of Injury (POI) watch order". This would allow Bradley meaningful physical exercise, uninterrupted sleep during the night, and a release from isolation. We are not asking for "special treatment". In fact, we are demanding an immediate end to the special treatment.
Quantico Base Commander
Colonel Daniel Choike
3250 Catlin Ave, Quantico VA 22134
+1-703-784-2707 (phone)
Quantico Brig Commanding Officer
CWO4 James Averhart
3247 Elrod Ave, Quantico VA 22134
+1-703-784-4242 (fax)
Background
In the wake of an investigative report last week by Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com giving evidence that Bradley Manning was subject to "detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries", Bradley's attorney, David Coombs, published an article at his website on Saturday entitled "A Typical Day for PFC Bradley Manning". Mr. Coombs details the maximum custody conditions that Bradley is subject to at the Quantico Confinement Facility and highlights an additional set of restrictions imposed upon him under a Prevention of Injury (POI) watch order.
Usually enforced only through a detainee's first week at a confinement facility, or in cases of violent and/or suicidal inmates, the standing POI order has severely limited Manning's access to exercise, daylight and human contact for the past five months. The military's own psychologists assigned to Quantico have recommended that the POI order and the extra restrictions imposed on Bradley be lifted.
Despite not having been convicted of any crime or even yet formally indicted, the confinement regime Bradley lives under includes pronounced social isolation and a complete lack of opportunities for meaningful exercise. Additionally, Bradley's sleep is regularly interrupted. Coombs writes: "The guards are required to check on Manning every five minutes [...] At night, if the guards cannot see PFC Manning clearly, because he has a blanket over his head or is curled up towards the wall, they will wake him in order to ensure he is okay."
Denver Nicks writes in The Daily Beast that "[Bradley Manning's] attorney [...] says the extended isolation - now more than seven months of solitary confinement - is weighing on his client's psyche. [...] Both Coombs and Manning's psychologist, Coombs says, are sure Manning is mentally healthy, that there is no evidence he's a threat to himself, and shouldn't be held in such severe conditions under the artifice of his own protection."
In an article to be published at Firedoglake.com later today, David House, a friend of Bradley's who visits him regularly at Quantico, says that Bradley "has not been outside or into the brig yard for either recreation or exercise in four full weeks. He related that visits to the outdoors have been infrequent and sporadic for the past several months."
In an average military court martial situation, a defense attorney would be able to bring these issues of pre-trial punishment to the military judge assigned to the case (known as an Article 13 hearing). However, the military is unlikely to assign a judge to Bradley's case until the pre-trial Article 32 hearing is held (similar to an arraignment in civilian court), and that is not expected until February, March, or later-followed by the actual court martial trial months after that. In short, you are Bradley's best and most immediate hope.
What can you do?
Contact the Marine Corps officers above and respectfully, but firmly, ask that they lift the extreme pre-trial confinement conditions against Army PFC Bradley Manning.
Forward this urgent appeal for action widely.
Sign the "Stand with Brad" public petition and letter campaign at www.standwithbrad.org - Sign online, and we'll mail out two letters on your behalf to Army officials.
Donate to Bradley's defense fund at www.couragetoresist.org/bradley
References:
"The inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning's detention", by Glenn Greenwald for Salon.com, 15 December 2010
"A Typical Day for PFC Bradley Manning", by attorney David E. Coombs, 18 December 2010
"Bradley Manning's Life Behind Bars", by Denver Nicks for the Daily Beast, 17 December 2010
Bradley Manning Support Network
Courage To Resist
484 Lake Park Ave. #41
Oakland, CA 94610
510-488-3559
couragetoresist.org
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KOREA: Emergency Response Actions Needed
The United National Antiwar Committee urges the antiwar movement to begin to plan now for Emergency 5pm Day-of or Day-after demonstrations, should fighting break out on the Korean Peninsula or its surrounding waters.
As in past war crisis and U.S. attacks we propose:
NYC -- Times Square, Washington, D.C. -- the White House
In Many Cities - Federal Buildings
Many tens of thousands of U.S., Japanese and South Korean troops are mobilized on land and on hundreds of warships and aircraft carriers. The danger of a general war in Asia is acute.
China and Russia have made it clear that the scheduled military maneuvers and live-fire war "exercises" from an island right off the coast of north Korea (the Democratic People's Republic of Korea) by South Korea are very dangerous. The DPRK has made it clear that they consider these live-fire war exercises to be an act of war and they will again respond if they are again fired on.
The U.S. deployment of thousands of troops, ships, and aircraft in the area while South Korea is firing thousands of rounds of live ammunition and missiles is an enormously dangerous provocation, not only to the DPRK but to China. The Yellow Sea also borders China. The island and the waters where the war maneuvers are taking place are north of the Korean Demilitarized Zone and only eight miles from the coast of the DPRK.
On Sunday, December 19 in a day-long emergency session, the U.S. blocked in the UN Security Council any actions to resolve the crisis.
UNAC action program passed in Albany at the United National Antiwar Conference, July 2010 of over 800 antiwar, social justice and community organizations included the following Resolution on Korea:
15. In solidarity with the antiwar movements of Japan and Korea, each calling for U.S. Troops to Get Out Now, and given the great increase in U.S. military preparations against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, National Peace Conference participants will organize immediate protests following any attack by the U.S. on Korea. U.S. war preparations include stockpiling hundreds of bunker-busters and conducting major war games near the territorial waters of China and Korea. In keeping with our stand for the right of self-determination and our demand of Out Now, the National Peace Conference calls for Bringing All U.S. Troops Home Now!
UNAC urges the whole antiwar movement to begin to circulate messages alerts now in preparation. Together let's join together and demand: Bring all U.S. Troops Home Now! Stop the Wars and the Threats of War.
The United National Antiwar Committee, www.UNACpeace.org
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In earnest support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange:
http://readersupportednews.org/julian-assange-petition
rsn:Petition
We here undersigned express our support for the work and integrity of Julian Assange. We express concern that the charges against the WikiLeaks founder appear too convenient both in terms of timing and the novelty of their nature.
We call for this modern media innovator, and fighter for human rights extraordinaire, to be afforded the same rights to defend himself before Swedish justice that all others similarly charged might expect, and that his liberty not be compromised as a courtesy to those governments whose truths he has revealed have embarrassed.
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GAP Inc: End Your Relationship with Supplier that Allows Workers to be Burned Alive
http://humanrights.change.org/blog/view/workers_burned_alive_making_clothes_for_the_gap
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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT! FREE KEVIN COOPER!
Reasonable doubts about executing Kevin Cooper
Chronicle Editorial
Monday, December 13, 2010
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/12/13/EDG81GP0I7.DTL
Death penalty -- Kevin Cooper is Innocent! Help save his life from San Quentin's death row!
http://www.savekevincooper.org/
http://www.savekevincooper.org/pages/essays_content.html?ID=255
URGENT ACTION APPEAL
- From Amnesty International USA
17 December 2010
Click here to take action online:
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/index.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&template=x.ascx&action=15084
To learn about recent Urgent Action successes and updates, go to
http://www.amnestyusa.org/iar/success
For a print-friendly version of this Urgent Action (PDF):
http://www.amnestyusa.org/actioncenter/actions/uaa25910.pdf
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Free the Children of Palestine!
Sign Petition:
http://www.gopetition.com/petition/41467.html
Published by Al-Awda, Palestine Right to Return Coalition on Dec 16, 2010
Category: Children's Rights
Region: GLOBAL
Target: President Obama
Web site: http://www.al-awda.org
Background (Preamble):
According to Israeli police, 1200 Palestinian children have been arrested, interrogated and imprisoned in the occupied city of Jerusalem alone this year. The youngest of these children was seven-years old.
Children and teen-agers were often dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night, taken in handcuffs for questioning, threatened, humiliated and many were subjected to physical violence while under arrest as part of an ongoing campaign against the children of Palestine. Since the year 2000, more than 8000 have been arrested by Israel, and reports of mistreatment are commonplace.
Further, based on sworn affidavits collected in 2009 from 100 of these children, lawyers working in the occupied West Bank with Defense Children International, a Geneva-based non governmental organization, found that 69% were beaten and kicked, 49% were threatened, 14% were held in solitary confinement, 12% were threatened with sexual assault, including rape, and 32% were forced to sign confessions written in Hebrew, a language they do not understand.
Minors were often asked to give names and incriminate friends and relatives as a condition of their release. Such institutionalized and systematic mistreatment of Palestinian children by the state of Israel is a violation international law and specifically contravenes the Convention on the Rights of the Child to which Israel is supposedly a signatory.
Petition:
http://www.gopetition.com/petition/41467.html
We, the undersigned call on US President Obama to direct Israel to
1. Stop all the night raids and arrests of Palestinian Children forthwith.
2. Immediately release all Palestinian children detained in its prisons and detention centers.
3. End all forms of systematic and institutionalized abuse against all Palestinian children.
4. Implement the full restoration of Palestinian children's rights in accordance with international law including, but not limited to, their right to return to their homes of origin, to education, to medical and psychological care, and to freedom of movement and expression.
The US government, which supports Israel to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars a year while most ordinary Americans are suffering in a very bad economy, is bound by its laws and international conventions to cut off all aid to Israel until it ends all of its violations of human rights and basic freedoms in a verifiable manner.
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"Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority, which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests."..."Publishing State Secrets" By Leon Trotsky
Documents on Soviet Policy, Trotsky, iii, 2 p. 64
November 22, 1917
http://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/foreign-relations/1917/November/22.htm
FREE JULIAN ASSANGE! FREE BRADLEY MANNING! STOP THE FBI RAIDS NOW!
MONEY FOR HUMAN NEEDS NOT WAR!
To understand how much a trillion dollars is, consider looking at it in terms of time:
A million seconds would be about eleven-and-one-half days; a billion seconds would be 31 years; and a trillion seconds would be 31,000 years!
From the novel "A Dark Tide," by Andrew Gross
Now think of it in terms of U.S. war dollars and bankster bailouts!
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For Immediate Release
Antiwar movement supports Wikileaks and calls for and independent, international investigation of the crimes that have been exposed. We call for the release of Bradley Manning and the end to the harassment of Julian Assange.
12/2/2010
For more information: Joe Lombardo, 518-281-1968,
UNACpeace@gmail.org, NationalPeaceConference.org
Antiwar movement supports Wikileaks and calls for and independent, international investigation of the crimes that have been exposed. We call for the release of Bradley Manning and the end to the harassment of Julian Assange.
The United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC) calls for the release of Bradley Manning who is awaiting trial accused of leaking the material to Wikileaks that has been released over the past several months. We also call for an end to the harassment of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks and we call for an independent, international investigation of the illegal activity exposed through the material released by Wikileaks.
Before sending the material to Wikileaks, Bradley Manning tried to get his superiors in the military to do something about what he understood to be clear violations of international law. His superiors told him to keep quiet so Manning did the right thing; he exposed the illegal activity to the world.
The Afghan material leaked earlier shows military higher-ups telling soldiers to kill enemy combatants who were trying to surrender. The Iraq Wikileaks video from 2007 shows the US military killing civilians and news reporters from a helicopter while laughing about it. The widespread corruption among U.S. allies has been exposed by the most recent leaks of diplomatic cables. Yet, instead of calling for change in these policies, we hear only a call to suppress further leaks.
At the national antiwar conference held in Albany in July, 2010, at which UNAC was founded, we heard from Ethan McCord, one of the soldiers on the ground during the helicopter attack on the civilians in Iraq exposed by Wikileaks (see: http://www.mediasanctuary.org/movie/1810 ). He talked about removing wounded children from a civilian vehicle that the US military had shot up. It affected him so powerfully that he and another soldier who witnessed the massacre wrote a letter of apology to the families of the civilians who were killed.
We ask why this material was classified in the first place. There were no state secrets in the material, only evidence of illegal and immoral activity by the US military, the US government and its allies. To try to cover this up by classifying the material is a violation of our right to know the truth about these wars. In this respect, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange should be held up as heroes, not hounded for exposing the truth.
UNAC calls for an end to the illegal and immoral policies exposed by Wikileaks and an immediate end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an end to threats against Iran and North Korea.
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Courage to Resist needs your support
By Jeff Paterson, Courage to Resist.
It's been quite a ride the last four months since we took up the defense of accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower Bradley Manning. Since then, we helped form the Bradley Manning Support Network, established a defense fund, and have already paid over half of Bradley's total $100,000 in estimated legal expenses.
Now, I'm asking for your support of Courage to Resist so that we can continue to support not only Bradley, but the scores of other troops who are coming into conflict with military authorities due to reasons of conscience.
Please donate today:
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38590
"Soldiers sworn oath is to defend and support the Constitution. Bradley Manning has been defending and supporting our Constitution."
-Dan Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistle-blower
Iraq War over? Afghanistan occupation winding down? Not from what we see. Please take a look at, "Soldier Jeff Hanks refuses deployment, seeks PTSD help" in our December newsletter. Jeff's situation is not isolated. Actually, his story is only unique in that he has chosen to share it with us in the hopes that it may result in some change. Jeff's case also illustrates the importance of Iraq Veterans Against the War's new "Operation Recovery" campaign which calls for an end to the deployment of traumatized troops.
Most of the folks who call us for help continue to be effected by Stoploss, a program that involuntarily extends enlistments (despite Army promises of its demise), or the Individual Ready Reserve which recalls thousands of former Soldiers and Marines quarterly from civilian life.
Another example of our efforts is Kyle Wesolowski. After returning from Iraq, Kyle submitted an application for a conscientious objector discharge based on his Buddhist faith. Kyle explains, "My experience of physical threats, religious persecution, and general abuse seems to speak of a system that appears to be broken.... It appears that I have no other recourse but to now refuse all duties that prepare myself for war or aid in any way shape or form to other soldiers in conditioning them to go to war." We believe he shouldn't have to walk this path alone.
Sincerely,
Jeff Paterson
Project Director, Courage to Resist
First US military service member to refuse to fight in Iraq
Please donate today.
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38590
P.S. I'm asking that you consider a contribution of $50 or more, or possibly becoming a sustainer at $15 a month. Of course, now is also a perfect time to make a end of year tax-deductible donation. Thanks again for your support!
Please click here to forward this to a friend who might
also be interested in supporting GI resisters.
http://ymlp.com/forward.php?id=lS3tR&e=bonnieweinstein@yahoo.com
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Add your name! We stand with Bradley Manning.
"We stand for truth, for government transparency, and for an end to our tax-dollars funding endless occupation abroad... We stand with accused whistle-blower US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning."
Dear All,
The Bradley Manning Support Network and Courage to Resist are launching a new campaign, and we wanted to give you a chance to be among the first to add your name to this international effort. If you sign the letter online, we'll print out and mail two letters to Army officials on your behalf. With your permission, we may also use your name on the online petition and in upcoming media ads.
Read the complete public letter and add your name at:
http://standwithbrad.org/
Courage to Resist (http://couragetoresist.org)
on behalf of the Bradley Manning Support Network (http://bradleymanning.org)
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610
510-488-3559
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Committee to Stop FBI Repression
P.O. Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414
Dear Friend,
On Friday, September 24th, the FBI raided homes in Chicago and Minneapolis, and turned the Anti-War Committee office upside down. We were shocked. Our response was strong however and we jumped into action holding emergency protests. When the FBI seized activists' personal computers, cell phones, and papers claiming they were investigating "material support for terrorism", they had no idea there would be such an outpouring of support from the anti-war movement across this country! Over 61 cities protested, with crowds of 500 in Minneapolis and Chicago. Activists distributed 12,000 leaflets at the One Nation Rally in Washington D.C. Supporters made thousands of calls to President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. Solidarity statements from community organizations, unions, and other groups come in every day. By organizing against the attacks, the movement grows stronger.
At the same time, trusted lawyers stepped up to form a legal team and mount a defense. All fourteen activists signed letters refusing to testify. So Assistant U.S. Attorney Brandon Fox withdrew the subpoenas, but this is far from over. In fact, the repression is just starting. The FBI continues to question activists at their homes and work places. The U.S. government is trying to put people in jail for anti-war and international solidarity activism and there is no indication they are backing off. The U.S. Attorney has many options and a lot of power-he may re-issue subpoenas, attempt to force people to testify under threat of imprisonment, or make arrests.
To be successful in pushing back this attack, we need your donation. We need you to make substantial contributions like $1000, $500, and $200. We understand many of you are like us, and can only afford $50, $20, or $10, but we ask you to dig deep. The legal bills can easily run into the hundreds of thousands. We are all united to defend a movement for peace and justice that seeks friendship with people in other countries. These fourteen anti-war activists have done nothing wrong, yet their freedom is at stake.
It is essential that we defend our sisters and brothers who are facing FBI repression and the Grand Jury process. With each of your contributions, the movement grows stronger.
Please make a donation today at stopfbi.net (PayPal) on the right side of your screen. Also you can write to:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
P.O. Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414
This is a critical time for us to stand together, defend free speech, and defend those who help to organize for peace and justice, both at home and abroad!
Thank you for your generosity! Tom Burke
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Please sign the petition to stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal and
and forward it to all your lists.
"Mumia Abu-Jamal and The Global Abolition of the Death Penalty"
http://www.petitiononline.com/Mumialaw/petition.html
(A Life In the Balance - The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, at 34, Amnesty Int'l, 2000; www. Amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/001/2000.)
[Note: This petition is approved by Mumia Abu-Jamal and his lead attorney, Robert R. Bryan, San Francisco (E-mail: MumiaLegalDefense@gmail.com; Website: www.MumiaLegalDefense.org).]
Committee To Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 2012
New York, NY 10159-2012
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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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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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D. ARTICLES IN FULL (Unless otherwise noted)
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1) They've Got to Fix Their Priorities
New York Times Editorial
March 30, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/opinion/31thu1.html?hp
2) Low Levels of Radiation Found in American Milk
By MATTHEW L. WALD
March 30, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/us/31milk.html?ref=world
3) NATO Warns Rebels Against Attacking Libyan Civilians
By THOM SHANKER and CHARLIE SAVAGE
March 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/world/africa/01civilians.html?hp
4) Tokyo Student-Labor Protester Under Assault At Japan Protest At Criminal Nuclear Operator TEPCO & Regulatory Agency
Three Students Arrested for Protest Against TEPCO
Doro-Chiba International Labor Solidarity Committee
http://www.doro-chiba.org/english/english.htm
Earthquake:
http://www.doro-chiba.org/english/english2.htm
5) Japan Railroad Workers Union Doro-Chiba Earthquake Report No. 6
3/25/2011
http://www.doro-chiba.org/english/dc_en_11/dc_en_3_27.htm
6) Many Low-Wage Jobs Seen as Failing to Meet Basic Needs
"According to the report, a single worker needs an income of $30,012 a year - or just above $14 an hour - to cover basic expenses and save for retirement and emergencies. That is close to three times the 2010 national poverty level of $10,830 for a single person, and nearly twice the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. A single worker with two young children needs an annual income of $57,756, or just over $27 an hour, to attain economic stability, and a family with two working parents and two young children needs to earn $67,920 a year, or about $16 an hour per worker. That compares with the national poverty level of $22,050 for a family of four. The most recent data from the Census Bureau found that 14.3 percent of Americans were living below the poverty line in 2009. ...among households with children and annual incomes of less than $25,000, 83 percent of them would not be able to afford food within three months of losing the family income. That is up from 68 percent in 2008 at the height of the recession."
By MOTOKO RICH
March 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/business/economy/01jobs.html?_r=1&hp
7) Syrian Protesters Clash With Security Forces
By LIAM STACK and J. DAVID GOODMAN
April 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/world/middleeast/02syria.html?hp
8) Dueling Protests Grip Yemeni Capital
By LAURA KASINOF and J. DAVID GOODMAN
April 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/world/middleeast/02yemen.html?hp
9) Speak Out, Fight Back! CLASS WARFARE
By Michael Yates
April 1, 2011
http://blog.cheapmotelsandahotplate.org/2011/04/01/speak-out-fight-back/
10) Sour Economy and Multiple New Crises Test Japan's Young
By KEN BELSON
March 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/world/asia/01youth.html?ref=world
11) Cleanup Questions as Radiation Spreads
"The cesium levels were about double the minimums found in the area declared uninhabitable around the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine, raising the question whether the evacuation zones around Fukushima should be extended beyond the current 18 miles. On Thursday, the Japanese government said it had no plans to expand the zone."
By HENRY FOUNTAIN
March 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/world/asia/01clean.html?ref=world
12) The Jobless See a Lifeline at Risk
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
March 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/us/01florida.html?ref=us
13) Missouri Halts Extension of Pay for Unemployed
By A. G. SULZBERGER
March 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/us/01missouri.html?ref=us
14) Ohio's Anti-Union Law Is Tougher Than Wisconsin's
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
March 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/us/01ohio.html?ref=us
15) Two Former Officers Sentenced in a Killing After Katrina
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
March 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/us/01police.html?ref=us
16) Report Criticizes High Pay at Fannie and Freddie
"The companies, whose fates are to be decided by Congress this year, paid a combined $17 million to their chief executives in 2009 and 2010, the two full years when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were wards of the state, the report found. The top six executives at the companies received $35.4 million over the two years. Since Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over in September 2008, the companies' mounting mortgage losses have required a $153 billion infusion from taxpayers. Total losses may reach $363 billion through 2013, according to government estimates. Charles E. Haldeman Jr., a former head of Putnam Investments, the giant fund management concern, joined Freddie Mac as its chief executive in 2009. He made $7.8 million for 2009 and 2010. Fannie Mae's chief is Michael J. Williams, who has worked at the company since 1991. He received $9.3 million for the two years. Company officials declined to comment."
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
March 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/business/01pay.html?ref=business
17) In 2010, CEO Pay Went Up 27 percent While Worker Pay Went Up 2 percent
By Pat Garofalo | Sourced from ThinkProgress
Posted at April 1, 2011, 9:58 am
http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/546326/in_2010%2C_ceo_pay_went_up_27_while_worker_pay_went_up_2/#paragraph4
18) Bruce Springsteen
Letter to the Editor:
Story on poverty,aid cuts gives voice to voiceless
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
7:03 AM, Mar. 31, 2011|
http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/63-63/5484-giving-voice-to-the-voiceless
19) As poverty rises in NJ, cuts target aid
"'We're always much too polite when it comes to this fear of raising the issue of class warfare,' said Meara Nigro of the New Jersey Anti-Hunger Coalition. She said wealthy companies benefit, and programs for the poor and middle class are cut."
By MICHAEL SYMONS STATEHOUSE BUREAU
March 31, 2011
http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/63-63/5484-giving-voice-to-the-voiceless
20) Statement of Cynthia McKinney
Newseum Press Conference on Libya
Thursday, 31 March 2011
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2011/04/01/statement-of-cynthia-mckinney-newseum-pr
21) Reactor Pit Found Leaking Radioactive Water Into Sea
By KEN BELSON and HIROKO TABUCHI
April 2, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/world/asia/03japan.html?_r=1&hp
22) NATO Airstrike Reportedly Kills Rebels in Libya
By KAREEM FAHIM and C. J. CHIVERS
April 2, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/world/africa/03libya.html?hp
23) From Far Labs, a Vivid Picture Emerges of Japan Crisis
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
April 2, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/science/03meltdown.html?ref=world
24) Protesters Scold Egypt's Military Council
"Painted banners, hung between palm trees on the square's south side, enumerated still more. They included the cancellation of a proposed law that would ban demonstrations, faster prosecution of those responsible for killing hundreds of protesters in January and February and trials for the Mubarak family on charges of plundering national wealth. ...'The army needs to be reminded that we are the ones who started this revolution, and that is why they are in power now,' said Omniya Bahgat, a 26-year-old demonstrator. 'We are tired of hearing that our demands will be met later.'"
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
April 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/world/middleeast/02egypt.html?ref=world
25) Illinois Workers Find That a Death Penalty Ban Abolishes Their Jobs, Too
By A. G. SULZBERGER
April 2, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/us/03penalty.html?ref=us
26) On Eve of Redefining Malcolm X, Biographer Dies
By LARRY ROHTER
April 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/books/malcolm-x-biographer-dies-on-eve-of-publication-of-redefining-work.html?ref=us
27) Reactor Core Was Severely Damaged, U.S. Official Says
By DAVID E. SANGER and DAVID JOLLY
April 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/world/asia/02japan.html?ref=us
28) Maine: Lawsuit Seeks to Restore Labor Mural
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/us/02brfs-LAWSUITSEEKS_BRF.html?ref=us
29) Pennsylvania: Miners Rally for Union Rights
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/us/02brfs-MINERSRALLYF_BRF.html?ref=us
30) Decades After Ban, Columbia Opens Door to R.O.T.C. Return
By ALAN FEUER
April 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/nyregion/02rotc.html?ref=nyregion
31) Girl, 11, Sues the Police, Claiming She Was Handcuffed
By FERNANDA SANTOS
April 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/nyregion/02lawsuit.html?ref=nyregion
32) Transocean Gives Safety Bonuses Despite Deaths
"Safety accounts for a quarter of the executives' total cash bonuses. The total bonus for CEO Steve Newman last year was $374,062. According to calculations by The Associated Press, the total value the company assigned to Newman's compensation package was $5.8 million. That figure includes an $850,000 base salary - a 34 percent increase from the prior year; perquisites of $622,057, which includes housing and vacation allowances, among other things; and the $374,062 bonus. Also included in the figure are stock options valued at $1.9 million and deferred shares valued at $2 million when those awards were granted in March 2010. Transocean's Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion on April 20 in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers and set off the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history." [UN-BE-LIEVE-ABLE!!!!...BW]
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 2, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/04/02/business/AP-US-Transocean-Executive-Compensation.html?src=busln
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1) They've Got to Fix Their Priorities
New York Times Editorial
March 30, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/opinion/31thu1.html?hp
The banks may have weathered the financial crisis, but the rest of the country hasn't. Taxpayers are still on the hook for federally guaranteed bank debt. Homeowners' equity continues to erode. Small businesses still have trouble getting loans, and savers are still getting hammered by near zero interest rates. Joblessness remains high. State budgets are ravaged.
So whom have Washington policy makers singled out for help? Bank shareholders, including bank executives who are invariably big holders of stock in their banks.
The Federal Reserve recently gave the all-clear for several banks to increase dividends and expand share buybacks, among them JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. That's good news, at least in the short run for bank investors, but it is a dubious development for everyone else.
The dividend-boosting banks that were too big to fail before the crisis are even bigger now, while reforms to rein them in are under political attack even before they have been implemented. Sheer size and inadequate regulation - the combination that led to the crisis - argue for banks to use their earnings to build bigger capital cushions, not to pay dividends and repurchase shares.
Yet Fed officials have concluded that many banks are safe and sound enough to pay out cash and still withstand a severe shock should one occur again. It's hard to share their confidence. Before it approved new dividends, the Fed required banks to test their crisis-readiness against several criteria, like elevated unemployment, but it did not release detailed results of the tests. Public data do not inspire confidence either. There is much debate over whether banks are valuing their mortgage assets correctly, and, by extension, whether they are adequately capitalized.
What is known is that recent bank profits have been boosted not by increasing revenues, but by downward revisions to expected future losses. With house prices falling anew, further reducing the value of mortgage assets, how reasonable is that?
Even if banks were ready for anything, more dividends and buybacks still would be premature. Big banks that plan to increase payouts still hold nearly $120 billion in government-backed debt under a crisis-era program from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The subsidized bonds come due between now and the end of 2012. Paying shareholders before the bonds are retired puts bank investors before taxpayers - talk about skewed priorities. Banks also face potentially huge fines in court cases and in settlement talks with government officials over mortgage and foreclosure practices that have harmed both homeowners and mortgage investors. It is irresponsible for the Fed to allow bolstered dividends before the penalties are known and paid. It is also a disturbing omen. Regulators are part of the settlement talks over the banks' wrongful practices. Are they assuming that banks can afford both stiff penalties and bolstered dividends? Or are they assuming that the penalties will be weak?
When it comes to redress and reward, bank shareholders should be at the back of the line, behind taxpayers who stand behind too-big-to-fail banks and behind homeowners who are bearing the brunt of a housing debacle for which banks bear considerable responsibility. For the Fed to allow new dividends and bigger buybacks before these issues are settled is a display of the same type of "banks first" favoritism that got us into this mess to start.
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2) Low Levels of Radiation Found in American Milk
By MATTHEW L. WALD
March 30, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/us/31milk.html?ref=world
Tests of milk samples taken last week in Spokane, Wash., indicate the presence of radioactive iodine from the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, but at levels far below those at which action would have to be taken, the Environmental Protection Agency said on Wednesday.
Radioactive materials in liquids are measured in pico-curies per liter, and the sample, taken March 25, showed a reading of 0.8 pico-curies, the agency said. Those numbers, it said, would have to be 5,000 times higher to reach the "intervention level" set by the Food and Drug Administration.
"These types of findings are to be expected in the coming days and are far below levels of public health concern, including for infants and children," the environmental agency said.
Levels of iodine 131 entering the air can be very diluted, but if the iodine is deposited on grass eaten by cows, the cows will reconcentrate it in their milk by a factor of 1,000. This is mainly a concern with fresh milk, not for dairy products that are stored before consumption.
Iodine 131 has a half-life of eight days, meaning that every eight days it loses half its strength. Since production of iodine 131 stopped when the Fukushima reactors shut down on March 11, it has already been through two half-lives and could easily be halved once or twice more again before the milk is consumed as cheese or yogurt.
Iodine 131 emits beta particles, which resemble electrons. They are not considered a major hazard outside the human body, although in large doses, they can damage the cornea of the eye.
The problem arises when materials that emit beta particles are ingested or inhaled. Iodine 131 is chemically identical to normal, nonradioactive iodine and thus is absorbed into the body just as normal iodine is, mainly in the thyroid gland, where it delivers a concentrated dose to that small organ and can cause cancer.
In the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986, the biggest health effect was cases of thyroid cancer, especially in children living near the nuclear plant in Ukraine.
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3) NATO Warns Rebels Against Attacking Libyan Civilians
By THOM SHANKER and CHARLIE SAVAGE
March 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/world/africa/01civilians.html?hp
WASHINGTON - Members of the NATO alliance have sternly warned the rebels in Libya not to attack civilians as they push against the regime of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, according to senior military and government officials.
As NATO takes over control of airstrikes in Libya and the Obama administration considers new steps to tip the balance of power there, the coalition has told the rebels that the fog of war will not shield them from possible bombardment by NATO planes and missiles, just as the regime's forces have been punished.
"We've been conveying a message to the rebels that we will be compelled to defend civilians, whether pro-Qaddafi or pro-opposition," said a senior Obama administration official. "We are working very hard behind the scenes with the rebels so we don't confront a situation where we face a decision to strike the rebels to defend civilians."
The warnings, and intense consultations within the NATO-led coalition over its rules for attacking anyone who endangers innocent civilians, come at a time when the civil war in Libya is becoming ever more chaotic, and the battle lines ever less distinct. They raise a fundamental question that the military is now grappling with: Who in Libya is a civilian?
In the early days of the campaign, the civilian population needing protection was hunkered down in cities like Benghazi, behind a thin line of rebel defenders who were easily distinguishable from the attacking government forces.
That is no longer always the case. Armed rebels - some in organized militias, as are other young men who have picked up rifles to fight them - have moved out of Benghazi in an effort to take control of other population centers along the way, they hope, to seizing Tripoli.
Meanwhile, fresh intelligence this week showed that Libyan government forces were supplying assault rifles to civilians in the town of Surt, which is populated largely by Qaddafi loyalists. These civilian Qaddafi sympathizers were seenchasing rebel forces in nonmilitary vehicles like sedans and trucks, accompanied by Libyan troops, according to American military officers.
The increasing murkiness of the battlefield, as the freewheeling rebels advance and retreat and as fighters from both sides mingle among civilians, has prompted NATO members to issue new "rules of engagement" spelling out when the coalition may attack units on the ground in the name of protecting civilians.
It was unclear how the rules are changing - especially on the critical questions surrounding NATO's mandate and whether it extends to protecting rebels who are no longer simply defending civilian populated areas like Benghazi, but are instead are themselves on the offensive.
"This is a challenge," said a senior alliance military officer. "The problem of discriminating between combatant and civilian is never easy, and it is compounded when you have Libyan regime forces fighting irregular forces, like the rebel militias, in urban areas populated by civilians."
Oana Lungescu, the senior NATO spokeswoman, emphasized that NATO was taking action because Qaddafi's forces were attacking Libyan civilians, including shelling cities with artillery. She said that if the rebels do likewise, the organization will move to stop them, too, because the United Nations Security Council resolution "applies to both sides."
"Our goal, as mandated by the U.N., is to protect civilians against attacks or threats of attack, so those who target civilians will also be targets for our forces, because that resolution will be applied across the board," she said.
But it is no simple matter to follow that logic.
"Qaddafi is trying to take advantage of this mixing of combatants and noncombatants to deter NATO from striking," said one Obama administration official who was briefed on the intelligence reports.
Even though rebel forces were in retreat on Wednesday, the civil war has seen repeated advances and retreats by both sides, and that is expected to continue. The highest concern is not how to deal with fighters who are loyal to the regime, but how NATO would respond to rebels firing on a town of Qaddafi sympathizers, like Surt.
Calls by some NATO members to provide heavier weapons to the rebels suggest that these worries will only intensify.
The deliberations about where to draw the line, going on at the highest levels of allied nations and among senior officials across the Obama administration, show how an intervention to stop a potential massacre is evolving into a much more complex, and perhaps open-ended, role in policing the Libyan chaos.
The situation is as complicated legally as it is militarily. The United Nations Security Council resolution that authorized a no-flight zone and other steps in Libya makes no distinction between pro-rebel and pro-Qaddafi civilians.
Senior legal advisers to the military campaign say that unarmed civilians, whether living in towns or fleeing the fighting, are clearly meant to be protected by the United Nations resolution, while opposition forces taking an active part in combat away from cities are currently seen as falling outside of its protection. But one such official acknowledged that there are other situations that are much less clear.
Noncombatants and the various shades of opposition, resistance and rebellion "are so intermixed that it is not feasible to discern where the boundary between the civilians and opposition forces lie," the official said. "There are also those civilians entitled to protection that may be armed in order to protect their families, homes, businesses, and communities. Other civilians may join the rebels at certain stages, becoming armed combatants, and then decide to return home for whatever reason, thus transitioning back to civilian non-combatants."
At times when the rebels are gaining ground, the allies fear that the rebels will inevitably try to take loyalist cities by force, and could end up endangering or even killing civilians there. That is what prompted the coalition's warnings to the rebels, administration officials said.
The specifics of the warnings - like when they were conveyed, who delivered them, and to which rebel leaders - remained unclear.
The traditional laws of war distinguish between combatants, who may be lawfully attacked, and civilians, who generally must be protected. Civilians who pick up weapons and join in fighting can be lawfully attacked as long as they are directly participating in hostilities.
But the laws of war are vague about how to categorize internal rebels, rather than external enemies. And the recognized government of a country - even an internationally despised one like the Qaddafi regime - is generally seen to have a right to use force to put down an armed insurrection, said David Glazier, a professor of national-security law at Loyola Law School-Los Angeles.
"I don't know that we have distinguished between civilians who are truly nonparticipants in the conflict and who no one has any right to attack, and those civilians who have taken up arms in revolt against the government and so are legitimate targets," Mr. Glazier saided. "This is all poorly defined. It really is all about politics, and not at all about law."
On March 21, in a briefing with reporters, Tom Donilon, the national security advisor to President Obama, appeared not to distinguish between armed rebels and other citizens of Libya who opposed the Qaddafi government.
"They are citizens of Libya, and they are civilians," he said, referring to the rebels. "They're not military forces under the direction and control of Qaddafi."
But that same day, General Carter Ham, the head of United States Africa Command, said that opposition forces with heavier weaponry would not qualify for protection the way civilians would, and he acknowledged that "it's not a clear distinction, because we're not talking about a regular military force - it's a very problematic situation."
"These are situations that brief much better at a headquarters than they do in the cockpit of an aircraft," General Ham said, adding that "if it's a situation where it's unclear that it is civilians who may be being attacked, then those air crews are under instruction to be very cautious and not apply military force, again, unless they are convinced that doing so would be consistent with their mission to protect civilians."
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4) Tokyo Student-Labor Protester Under Assault At Japan Protest At Criminal Nuclear Operator TEPCO & Regulatory Agency
Three Students Arrested for Protest Against TEPCO
Doro-Chiba International Labor Solidarity Committee
http://www.doro-chiba.org/english/english.htm
Earthquake:
http://www.doro-chiba.org/english/english2.htm
Japan Railroad Workers Union Doro-Chiba Earthquake Report No. 6 3/25/2011
http://www.doro-chiba.org/english/dc_en_11/dc_en_3_27.htm
Dear Friends,
Today(March 31),Zengakuren, National Coordinating Center of Labor
Unions, workers, farmers and other people protested against TEPCO and
Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.
An extraordinary number of the security police and TEPCO's "security
personnel" both in dark plain clothes took photos and videos of the
protesters and intimidated them.
In front of the TEPCO head office, the security police arrested three
students: ODA Yosuke, president of Zengauren, SAKANO Yohei, acting
presindent of Zengakuren, and SAITO Ikuma, president of the Federation
of Cultural Clubs of Hosei University. Please see photos of them two
or three minutes before the arrest: 2011_0331TepcoProtest06.jpg
Sakano Yohei spoke using a megaphone. Oda Yosuke and Saito Ikuma are
chanting slogan: "Shutdown ALL nuke plants NOW!" "Tepco must pay all
damages!" "Punish diabolic criminals!"
Then the security police arrested them.
TEPCO and the Kan administration are extremely afraid of critics and
protest. They cannot but hide the truth and escape from reality.
Arrogance and repressin is their only answer. They must be overthrown.
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5) Japan Railroad Workers Union Doro-Chiba Earthquake Report No. 6
3/25/2011
http://www.doro-chiba.org/english/dc_en_11/dc_en_3_27.htm
Confirmed death toll has already risen over ten thousand and nobody knows how high it will mount. Thousands of remains still lie in gymnasiums and other places without their families or friends to bury them. Situation in the shelters, hospitals and care facilities for the aged people is very serious. More serious are, however, those elderly people who have been forcibly transferred from hospitals and care facilities to home care as a result of reactionary change of medical system. They are abandoned in the cold and increasing stress without foods, medicine or medical treatment. Power failure causes breakdown of critical medical instrument. Actually aged people die one after another in these circumstances.
The situation is alarming
The situation is alarming. High-level radioactivity is detected in the measurement of the water purification plants in various areas form Tohoku to Kanto region. An instruction is given to stop drinking tap water. In Tokyo and Chiba, it is prohibited to give water to infants. Bottles of mineral water have disappeared from supermarkets.
Vegetables and milk are also under suspect. Not only no shipment but also no consumption of certain kind of vegetables has already been instructed since yesterday. Seawater also showed high-level radioactivity. Tomorrow perhaps vegetables will disappear from the supermarkets.
Even now when the things have so far deteriorated, the government, TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Corporation) and mass medias are repeating thousands times, "There is no harm to the health". It has become apparent that the government, TEPCO and mass media are joining in a crime against people.
Greedy as vultures
All the car-manufacturing factories are completely closed. After the East Japan earthquake, a large-scale "planned blackout" has forced numerous workplaces to stop operation and a large number of workers in irregular employment instantly became jobless. The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare issued an instruction: "There is no need of making compensation for the lost working days and hours". The reality is not only numerous workers have lost jobs or dismissed, but also workers, farmers and fishermen are losing means of life.
In the midst of this situation, big banks are reported to have made a common decision to finance \ 1.2 trillion to TEPCO. They are expecting bankruptcy and nationalization of TEPCO and investing for profitable future. It is evident that all the burden will be put on the shoulders of working class. They are greedy vultures!
The essence of the tragedy
The reality before us is by no means natural disaster but man-made tragedy, caused by neo-liberal offensive on the basis of capitalist market economy. Its real essence is nakedly exposed day by day.
It is symbolized by the crisis of nuclear plants. Japan has numerous steam power plants and hydroelectric plants enough to cover the demand without the supply from nuclear plants. 54 nuclear plants have been operated, while competent steam power plants and hydroelectric plants were put out of work. The construction of nuclear plants started in 1960's but its all-out operation began by the conclusion of New Japan-US Nuclear Power Agreement in 1983 through the cooperation of Nakasone and Reagan administrations. It triggered a series of constructions of nuclear facilities: nuclear fuel reprocessing facility, fast breeder reactor, uranium enrichment plant and development of laser uranium enrichment method. Trillions of Yen were financed by the state to nuclear industry. In line with the all-out neo-liberal offensive on workers, nuclear policy has been carried out as a desperate measure for the survival of capitalism.
Stop nuke now, otherwise we ...
The fact is the earthquake killed only a very few people but ensuing tsunami massacred a large number of people as a result of total lack of administrative preventive measures against it. Financing of only a part of gigantic state budget, assigned to nuclear industry led by big corporations, such as Toshiba and Hitachi, for the construction of necessary levee instead of nuclear facilities, could have surely avoided the horrible tragedy. It had been anticipated that huge earthquake would occur, with certainty of 99%, on the Sanriku coast that was violently hit by the East Japan earthquake. It is reported that there were records of a towering tsunami over 10 meter high in the past. But the nuclear authorities and administration provided the coast with levees of only 3 meter high and boasted to the inhabitants there that the nuclear plants were absolutely safe. What happened now? A large number of people were precipitated in a horrible situation caused by the leaking radioactive materials of high level from the wrecked nuclear plants.
Even in the present catastrophic situation, the government is still running nuclear plants in many localities of Japan. Shut down them all immediately! Among other nuclear facilities, Hamaoka nuclear plant (in Shizuoka prefecture in Tokai region, between Tokyo and Osaka areas) is built on the most dangerous location, namely, "active fault". An imminent breakout of Tokai huge earthquake has been warned since long. And this time, the nuclear plants would be hit not by tsunami but directly by inland earthquake. Knowing this very well, capitalists can't stop their policy of money making under the control of mechanical movement for more profit at the risk of a large number of people. We are confronting this dreadful character of capitalist system.
We call on our friends all over the world!
This tragedy shall never be repeated again. We in Japan are squarely confronting this brutal and outrageous reality with all of our power. We seriously call on all of our friends across the word to rise up to abolish nuclear plants and nuke once and for all! Please send you strong demand to Japanese government "to stop nuclear plants immediately!"
DORO-CHIBA (DC): National Railway Motive Power Union of CHIBA
Email: doro-chiba@doro-chiba.org
Web: http://www.doro-chiba.org/
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6) Many Low-Wage Jobs Seen as Failing to Meet Basic Needs
"According to the report, a single worker needs an income of $30,012 a year - or just above $14 an hour - to cover basic expenses and save for retirement and emergencies. That is close to three times the 2010 national poverty level of $10,830 for a single person, and nearly twice the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. A single worker with two young children needs an annual income of $57,756, or just over $27 an hour, to attain economic stability, and a family with two working parents and two young children needs to earn $67,920 a year, or about $16 an hour per worker. That compares with the national poverty level of $22,050 for a family of four. The most recent data from the Census Bureau found that 14.3 percent of Americans were living below the poverty line in 2009. ...among households with children and annual incomes of less than $25,000, 83 percent of them would not be able to afford food within three months of losing the family income. That is up from 68 percent in 2008 at the height of the recession."
By MOTOKO RICH
March 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/business/economy/01jobs.html?_r=1&hp
Hard as it can be to land a job these days, getting one may not be nearly enough for basic economic security.
The Labor Department will release its monthly snapshot of the job market on Friday, and economists expect it to show that the nation's employers added about 190,000 jobs in March. With an unemployment rate that has been stubbornly stuck near 9 percent, those workers could be considered lucky.
But many of the jobs being added in retail, hospitality and home health care, to name a few categories, are unlikely to pay enough for workers to cover the cost of fundamentals like housing, utilities, food, health care, transportation and, in the case of working parents, child care.
A separate report being released Friday tries to go beyond traditional measurements like the poverty line and minimum wage to show what people need to earn to achieve a basic standard of living.
The study, commissioned by Wider Opportunities for Women, a nonprofit group, builds on an analysis the group and some state and local partners have been conducting since 1995 on how much income it takes to meet basic needs without relying on public subsidies. The new study aims to set thresholds for economic stability rather than mere survival, and takes into account saving for retirement and emergencies.
"We wanted to recognize that there was a cumulative impact that would affect one's lifelong economic security," said Joan A. Kuriansky, executive director of Wider Opportunities, whose report is called "The Basic Economic Security Tables for the United States." "And we've all seen how often we have emergencies that we are unprepared for," she said, especially during the recession. Layoffs or other health crises "can definitely begin to draw us into poverty."
According to the report, a single worker needs an income of $30,012 a year - or just above $14 an hour - to cover basic expenses and save for retirement and emergencies. That is close to three times the 2010 national poverty level of $10,830 for a single person, and nearly twice the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
A single worker with two young children needs an annual income of $57,756, or just over $27 an hour, to attain economic stability, and a family with two working parents and two young children needs to earn $67,920 a year, or about $16 an hour per worker.
That compares with the national poverty level of $22,050 for a family of four. The most recent data from the Census Bureau found that 14.3 percent of Americans were living below the poverty line in 2009.
Wider Opportunities and its consulting partners saw a need for an index that would indicate how much families need to earn if, for example, they want to save for their children's college education or for a down payment on a home.
"It's an index that asks how can a family have a little grasp at the middle class," said Michael Sherraden, director of the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis, who consulted on the project and helped develop projections for how much income families need to devote to savings. "If we're interested in families being able to be stable and not have their lives disrupted and have a little protection and backup and be able to educate their children, then this is the way we have to think."
The numbers will not come as a surprise to working families who are struggling. Tara, a medical biller who declined to give her last name, said that she earns $15 an hour, while her husband, who works in building maintenance, makes $11.50 an hour. The couple, who live in Jamaica, Queens, have three sons, aged 9, 8 and 6.
"We tried to cut back on a lot of things," she said. But the couple has been unable to make ends meet on their wages, and visit the River Fund food pantry in Richmond Hill every Saturday. With no money for savings, "I'm hoping that I will hit the lotto soon," she said.
To develop its income assessments, the report's authors examined government and other publicly available data to determine basic costs of living. For housing, which along with utilities is usually a family's largest expense, the authors came up with "a decent standard of shelter which is accessible to those with limited income" by averaging data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development that identified a monthly cost equivalent for rent at the fortieth percentile among all rents paid in each metropolitan area across the country.
They chose a "low cost" food plan from the nutritional guidelines of the Department of Agriculture, and calculated commuting costs "assuming the ownership of a small sedan." For health care, they calculated expenses for workers both with and without employer-based benefits.
Ms. Kuriansky said that the income projections do not take into account frills like gifts or meals out. "It's a very bare-bones budget," she said.
Obviously, the income needs change drastically depending on where a family lives. Ms. Kuriansky said the group was working on developing data for states and metropolitan areas.
The report compares its standards against national median incomes derived from the census, and finds that both single parents and workers who have only a high school diploma or only some college earn median wages that fall well below the amount needed to ensure economic security.
Workers who only finished high school have fared badly in the recession and the nascent recovery. According to an analysis of Labor Department data by Cliff Waldman, the economist at the Manufacturers Alliance, a trade group, the gap in unemployment rates more than doubled between those with just a high school diploma and those with at least a four-year college degree from the start of 2008 through February.
For some of the least educated, Mr. Waldman fears that even low wages are out of reach. "Given the needs of a more cognitive and more versatile labor force," he said, "I'm afraid that those that don't have the education are going to be part of a structural unemployment story."
Even for those who do get jobs, it may be hard to live without public services, say nonprofit groups that assist low-income workers. "Politicians are so worried about fraud and abuse," said Carol Goertzel, president of PathWays PA, a nonprofit that serves families in the Philadelphia region. "But they are not seeing the picture of families who are working but simply not making enough money to support their families, and need public support."
In New York, Áine Duggan, vice president for research, policy and education at the Food Bank for New York City, estimates that about a third of the group's clients are working but not earning enough to cover basic needs, much less saving for retirement or an emergency. She said that among households with children and annual incomes of less than $25,000, 83 percent of them would not be able to afford food within three months of losing the family income. That is up from 68 percent in 2008 at the height of the recession.
As the nation's employers add jobs, it is not yet clear how many of them are low wage jobs, especially those that do not come with benefits, like health care. Manufacturing, for example, has been relatively strong and tends to pay higher wages.
Over the last year, wages adjusted for inflation have been essentially flat. "If we were creating more low-paid jobs," said John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics, "we would expect more of a decline in real wages."
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7) Syrian Protesters Clash With Security Forces
By LIAM STACK and J. DAVID GOODMAN
April 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/world/middleeast/02syria.html?hp
CAIRO - Thousands of protesters took to the streets in cities around Syria after prayers on Friday to chants of "We want freedom" and security forces responded with tear gas, electrified batons, clubs and bullets, activists and residents said in telephone interviews.
The most violent clashes occurred in the city of Douma, near the capital, where two activists said security forces had opened fire on more than 1,000 protesters after beating them and attacking with the electric batons. At least one person was killed and six others wounded, the activists said; Reuters reported at least three dead.
"It is crazy, nonstop," one activist, who asked not to be named because of safety fears, said of the shooting. The type of ammunition used could not be immediately determined.
Another protester was killed during demonstrations in a small town outside the southern city of Dara'a, according to Ahmed Al Sayasna, a prayer leader in Dara'a.
In the capital, Damascus, witnesses said thousands had gathered at Al Rifai mosque and were met there by security forces and plain-clothed government supporters who barricaded them inside, beating those who tried to leave. Inside the mosque protesters sang the national anthem while outside the air rang with pro-government chants to "cover up the sounds of beating and hitting as they are trying to break into the mosque," said one activist, who asked not to be named.
The protests, organized via social networking sites and using Friday prayers as a meeting point, appeared to pose a critical test of the strength of the movement, which in a little more than two weeks has presented an unprecedented challenge to the four-decade iron rule of President Bashar al-Assad and his family.
National unity emerged as a significant theme in Friday's protests, with demonstrators appealing to the Syrian people just days after Mr. Assad used a major address from the floor of Parliament to accuse demonstrators of being "duped" by foreign conspirators bent on the destruction of the country.
After his speech the government announced on Thursday that it was creating committees to address the protesters' concerns but failed to promise immediate action and the move appeared unlikely to quell the rising tide of unrest.
Before the protests started on Friday the government sent large forces into the streets of the capital and other cities.
"I have never seen as many security forces in Syria as I have today," Wissam Tarif, executive director of Insan, a human rights group, said by telephone from Damascus. "Generally the secret police in Syria are secret, but not anymore."
Security forces also massed in front of the capital's landmark Umayyad mosque, the epicenter of antigovernment demonstrations last week, in a large and intimidating display that appeared to prevent a similar outpouring on Friday, Mr. Tarif said.
In Dara'a, where the unrest began two weeks ago, residents said security forces used tear gas on Friday to disperse protesters. Mr. Al Sayasna, the imam who led Friday prayers at the city's central mosque, said he had delivered a sermon that "stood with the demands of the people."
"I told the people that they should be happy because Dara'a is the home of martyrs," Mr. Sayasna said. "We have a history of demanding freedom and of martyrdom."
As tension mounted in Dara'a on Friday, security forces used tear gas and fired on protesters in two villages outside the city, Mr. Sayasna said, killing one. Last week they killed five or six protesters outside of Al Omari mosque when they tried to disperse a crowd using live ammunition and tear gas. Activists from Syrian Human Rights Information Link say 73 people have been killed by security forces in the city since the protests began.
Activists said protesters had also gathered in the mostly Kurdish northern towns of Amouda, Hasaki, Ras Aleen and Tal Namer. Many chanted, "With our soul, with our blood, we sacrifice for you, O Dara'a," said Fouad Aleiku, a leading member of the Kurdish Yakipi Party, in a telephone interview.
Mr. Aleiku said security forces were also present in the northern cities on Friday but at midday appeared not to be engaging with demonstrators, mainly young men demanding political reforms. He said demonstrators had chanted "Freedom is not a foreign conspiracy or call to sectarian division," in response to the Wednesday speech in which President Assad accused protesters of advancing "an Israeli agenda" against Syria and said they had been "duped" or were conspiring to destroy the nation.
Syrian state media on Friday reported that imams and prayer leaders had repeated President Assad's warning about foreign conspiracies.
Meanwhile, the government released two Americans, a college student from Vermont and an Egyptian-American engineer, who were arrested during a protest at the beginning of the unrest two weeks ago. Reuters reported that one of its correspondents was also freed on Friday after three days in Syrian custody.
Analysts said the moves by Mr. Assad's government this week, including the creation of two committees on Thursday, amounted to little more than window dressing. According to the state news agency one was appointed to investigate deaths in Dara'a and Latakia, another city where the government has cracked down on protesters. Syrian Human Rights Information Link has documented the names of 103 people killed across the country since the protests began March 15, including 10 in Latakia. It was not clear if the number for Latakia included protesters killed on Wednesday night.
On Friday security forces deployed across Latakia to head off about 1,500 protesters who were gathering there. "There are so, so, so many police," said one resident, who requested anonymity out of concern for his safety. "We are more afraid of the central security forces than the army, they are the ones who have been doing things to people the most."
The government also announced the creation of a committee to study lifting the emergency law imposed in 1963 and replacing it with legislation "that secures the preservation of the country's security, the dignity of citizens and combating terrorism," according to the state news agency. Lifting the emergency law has been a major demand of the protesters. Among its provisions it suppresses dissent and allows security forces to detain people without charge.
"It is clear from Bashar's speech that he is threatening Syrians who go to the street," said Radwan Ziadeh, a Syrian human rights activist and visiting scholar at George Washington University in Washington. "He ended the speech by saying, 'This is a battle and we are ready to fight it.' But against who?"
The Facebook group Syrian Revolution 2011, which has more than 100,000 fans, urged Syrians to take to the streets on Friday. "What we have understood from the speech is that we have no choice but to remove the regime," the group said in a statement posted Thursday.
Activists expressed little faith that the government would expand political freedoms in any meaningful way. Mr. Ziadeh said he feared that replacing the emergency law with antiterrorism laws would be only a cosmetic change. "They will put the same restrictions on basic rights into the terrorism law that they put into the emergency law," he said. "The emergency law might be lifted but the state of emergency that governs every aspect of our lives will be the same."
Liam Stack reported from Cairo and J. David Goodman from New York. A New York Times employee contributed reporting from Damascus, Syria, and Alan Cowell from Paris.
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8) Dueling Protests Grip Yemeni Capital
By LAURA KASINOF and J. DAVID GOODMAN
April 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/world/middleeast/02yemen.html?hp
SANA, Yemen - Dueling protests gripped this dusty, divided city on Friday as tens of thousands of people prayed in the streets for the end of President Ali Abdullah Saleh's rule while his supporters staged equally large demonstrations of their own warning of the chaos that would come to Yemen if he were driven from power.
The division could be heard across the city with people in the street shouting at passersby: "Are you with Saleh or are you with those who want the regime to fall?"
Antigovernment demonstrations swelled to their largest levels yet in weeks of protests throughout the country, with demonstrators calling it a "Friday of Enough," as government supporters mounted what they called a "Friday of Brotherhood" to defend Mr. Saleh's tottering administration. Posters of Mr. Saleh hung on cars, houses and shops.
The protests pointed to a deepening stalemate between Mr. Saleh, who clings to power, and his opposition, which grew in strength 10 days ago after the country's most powerful military commander, Maj. Gen. Ali Mohsin al-Ahmar, announced his support for antigovernment protesters.
Mr. Saleh gave a short, defiant and threatening speech Friday in front of a crowd of tens of thousands of supporters in Sana. "I will spend blood for the sake of these people," he said. "I will make costly and precious sacrifices for the sake of the Yemeni masses."
In places along the antigovernment protest route, which stretched south for more than two miles from Sana University toward the center of the city, General Ahmar's soldiers took up positions on rooftops in an apparent effort to protect the crowds. It was two weeks ago after Friday Prayer that a similarly large protest along the same street came under attack by snipers linked to the government, killing more than 50.
But that attack did not succeed in driving protesters from the streets, where they have staged a continuous sit-in since mid-February. The large antigovernment crowds on Friday remained defiant as they prayed together during a sermon that took on strong revolutionary tones.
"We've had 33 years of hunger," one imam said, challenging Mr. Saleh's rule. "We've had 33 years of crises."
Opposition political parties have inched Mr. Saleh toward the door, first extracting the promise that he would step down by 2013, then that he would depart before the end of the year. But neither timetable has been acceptable to protesters in the street, who are demanding that Mr. Saleh, an ally of the United States against the rising presence of Al Qaeda here, step down immediately.
Negotiations for Mr. Saleh to establish a transfer of power, which appeared promising last week, have recently faltered amid an outpouring of support that buttressed his resolve.
"We are with the president," said Abdullah Magdy, a biology professor at Sana University who had just attended the pro-government rally. He complained that the antigovernment protests had greatly disrupted life in the capital and that the opposition must "listen to the president" when he makes concessions in order to reach a political solution.
Many government supporters came from outside the city for Mr. Saleh's rally, which centered around an open-air stage near the presidential palace. The rally broke apart in the early afternoon and protesters dispersed in microbuses and pickup trucks covered in pro-Saleh posters. In a sign of the mounting tension, the British Foreign Office urged its citizens to "leave now." Tanks have taken up positions in the capital and hundreds of security forces have deployed at checkpoints across the city.
"It's highly unlikely that the British government will be able to evacuate you or provide consular assistance if you do not leave now," the Foreign Office said in a statement.
Laura Kasinof reported from Sana, Yemen, and J. David Goodman from New York.
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9) Speak Out, Fight Back! CLASS WARFARE
By Michael Yates
April 1, 2011
http://blog.cheapmotelsandahotplate.org/2011/04/01/speak-out-fight-back/
We spent six weeks in January and February in Ford City, Pennsylvania, my hometown. We stayed with my mother, in the house in which I grew up, and slept in the twin beds in my old room. Fifty years ago, I would pull up the covers and listen to faraway AM stations on my father's Hallicrafter shortwave radio. I'd think about girls and baseball games and fall asleep while the train whistle blew in the distance. I never thought, much less worried, about the future. It was a hopeful and prosperous period for the white working class, and I couldn't imagine anything but good times ahead.
Today the good times are all gone. The population (a little over 3,000) declined by nearly 10 percent in the last decade, and it has been falling since the 1970s. It is half what it was when I was a teenager. Jobs are scarce; drug and alcohol abuse are rampant (there were two heroin overdoses in one evening); wages are shockingly low; and homeowners, including one of my relatives, are selling out to the Marcellus shale companies for ridiculously small sums of money. The glass factory and the pottery that once paid union wages are shuttered. Every day, the local paper lists a slew of arrests, jail admissions, and fines levied. The sad affects of the shoppers at the Wal Mart and the crowds in the store at midday-retirees and younger men and women who would be at work in a more prosperous area-are paradigmatic of what has been happening.
We took frequent trips to Pittsburgh, about forty miles south, traveling occasionally on back roads that went through some other small towns. They all looked poor and rundown, victims not only of the demise of local manufacturing and mining but also more than two years of deep recession. Pittsburgh, itself, was dreary and dirty, with roads chock full of deep potholes. Gang violence and murders are appallingly common; public services are getting ever more scarce; and the city's finances are in disarray. Given what we saw, we were stunned when the Economist rated Pittsburgh one of the most livable cities in the world. My guess is that if you gave the magazine's editors a choice of cities in which to live, none of them would choose Pittsburgh.
Western Pennsylvania may have features that make its economic misery unique, but I think in most respects it is not that much different than scores of other regions in the country. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert put it well in his final column last week:
"So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.
"Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living. . . ."
High unemployment, enormous and growing inequalities in wealth and income, and endless wars are pestilences that stalk the land, leaving in their wakes a litany of woes: homicides, suicides, heart attacks, hypertension, arrests, prison admissions, mental illness, post traumatic stress disorder, alcoholism, drug addiction, homelessness, family dysfunctions, and a host of others. Job growth is so slow that it will take nearly a decade just to get the unemployment rate down to 5 percent.
The U.S. economy and the economies of nearly every other country are under the firm control of financiers rich beyond comprehension, and these individuals and the firms they direct want a pliable and insecure worldwide labor force that will do their bidding. They stand ready to exert their enormous power to get their way, whether by shutting down plants, moving offshore, outsourcing jobs, disseminating propaganda through their media, or flooding politicians with money. They have no loyalty to any country, only to the expansion of their capital. If a nation tries to put in place policies that benefit working people, finance capital stands ready to attack its currency and move its resources elsewhere. Governments disobey their monied masters at their peril.
What all of this means is that the trajectory of working class life is at best stagnant and at worst continuously downward, ever more insecure and precarious. The rich will get richer, and the rest of us will serve them in one way or another. It will not matter who is president or prime minister or what promises any aspiring politician makes. Whatever could be done to alleviate human misery will not be done. In the United States, there will be no "New New Deal," no universal health care, no concern for the poor, the aged, the infirm. There will be nothing but a deepening assault on the living standards of the working class.
The hope for a better future has been deeply ingrained in the American psyche. And this hope had some basis in reality, even if the "rags to riches" saga was more myth than truth. Today, however, hope is a pipedream for most. Our best days are behind us. We have good reason to be anxious and depressed; the future looks bleak because it will be.
Unless, that is, we do something about it. It is time to resurrect what Karl Marx and Frederick Engels said at the end of The Communist Manifesto: "The workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all countries, unite!" These words might sound quaint, antiquated slogans of a bygone era. But they are as relevant as ever. One proof of this is that the enemies of the workers, the finance capitalists with all the power, have taken them to heart for a long time. As Warren Buffett famously said, "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." Well, it is far past the time for us to wage class war in return. If much of what we had has already been taken, and what we still possess is under assault, we really don't have much more to lose but our chains.
Right now, across the world, millions of people are rising up in protest against dictatorships that have not only denied their citizens basic democratic rights but have implemented the neoliberal agenda of attacks on workers. In Tunisia and Egypt, the masses said "enough is enough," took to the streets, and overthrew their governments. In Bahrain and Yemen, they have bravely faced bullets to demand freedom. Civil war has erupted in Libya, and protests have spread to Syria. Chinese workers are organizing, as are those in India and South Africa. Iran may soon once again see its streets full of anti-government demonstrators. What my friend Elly Leary said about the top leadership of most U.S. labor unions applies in spades to the world's autocrats, "Everyone can and should be replaced."
This past February, revolt spread to the United States, with the remarkable uprising by public employees in Madison, Wisconsin. Working persons around the country have taken heart from this, and protests have erupted in other states. As living standards continue to deteriorate, what happened and continues to happen in Wisconsin might give others the courage to rebel.
Readers sometimes ask me what I think should be done to reverse the collapse of the labor movement and the one-sided class struggle Warren Buffett and his ilk have been waging. I usually hesitate to answer, arguing instead that the people themselves will figure out what to do as they fight to improve their circumstances. Let me make an exception here and issue a call to arms.
Educate yourselves so that you can learn what is going on in the world. Do not be taken in by the mainstream media, whose owners are more interested in making money than in telling us the truth. Do not fall for the hatemongers who would have us believe that immigrants or Muslims or the Chinese are to blame for what is happening. They are not. It is the economic system and those who control it that bear responsibility. We must make common cause with all exploited people, no matter their race, ethnicity, or religion. We have more things in common than not.
We must stop believing that this or that election will make much difference. It will not. President Obama says he is a man of the people. He is not. He is a war maker. He cares little for democracy and a lot for Wall Street. When he and his opponents tell us that taxes on the rich must not be raised, that deficits must be immediately cut, that we can't afford Social Security and Medicare, that public services must be cut or privatized, that money doesn't matter when it comes to quality schooling, that Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and all the new wars being planned are necessary to protect our freedoms, that all the things we think are good are really bad, remember that they are lying. Remember that it is better not to vote than to vote for the lesser of two evils. Fight politically for programs not for people. Build an independent party for workers.
Organize your workplaces. You have no chance otherwise. Your employer does not have your interests in mind when it makes decisions. You are not "associates" or "team members" or valuable and cherished human beings. You are costs of production; the harder you work and the lower your wage, the more valuable you are. You will be scrapped like worn out machinery whenever more money can be made with other workers in other places.
If you are in a union, demand that the rank-and-file control it. Reject all labor-management cooperation schemes. Don't abandon the strike. Make compromise a tactic not a strategy. Many union leaders are as bad as employers. They care for us just as little. Show them the door as soon as you can. If it is just for Egyptians to demand democracy, it is for you too.
I am a writer and a teacher. It is my duty to choose sides when I write, to be allied to the working class. It is my duty to teach my students to think for themselves. We should use whatever skills we have to push our struggles forward. This might be a time when what we do matters. We must speak out.
About Michael Yates
Michael Yates is a writer, editor, and educator. Among his books are The ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know (with Fred Magdoff, Monthly Review Press, 2009), In and Out of the Working Class (Arbeiter Ring, 2009), Cheap Motels and a Hotplate: an Economist's Travelogue (Monthly Review Press, 2007), Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy (Monthly Review Press, 2002), Why Unions Matter (Monthly Review Press, 1998 and second edition, 2009), Longer Hours, Fewer Jobs (Monthly Review Press, 1994), and Power on the Job (South End Press, 1994). He has also published more than 150 articles and reviews in a wide variety of journals, magazines, and newspapers. His works have been translated into seventeen languages. He is currently Associate Editor of Monthly Review magazine and Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press. He taught economics and labor relations at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown from 1969 until his retirement in 2001. He won the Chancellor=s Distinguished Teaching Award in 1984. He taught courses for workers from 1980 until 2008, at a number of colleges, including Penn State, the University of Indiana, Cornell University, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Yates also worked in the Research Office of the United Farm Workers Union and served as a labor arbitrator with the Pennsylvania Bureau of Mediation. Yates grew up in Ford City, Pennsylvania. He is married to Karen Korenoski of Dunlo, Pennsylvania. They have four adult children.
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10) Sour Economy and Multiple New Crises Test Japan's Young
By KEN BELSON
March 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/world/asia/01youth.html?ref=world
TOKYO - As hundreds of thousands of young people begin their working lives on Friday, they face a transformed Japan that will test a generation reared in affluence yet dismissed by its elders as selfish materialists.
April 1 is the traditional entrance day for incoming classes of new employees, who assume adult responsibilities and values along with the new suits and crisp white shirts that are the uniforms of corporate Japan. But they face a landscape as uncertain as any in their lives, with Japan's economy hobbled and its national pride bruised by the triple disasters of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis.
Yo Miura had expected to enter a bank in the Sendai area, counting on a steady income and a modest amount of prestige. But his start date at the bank has been put off while northeastern Japan struggles to rebuild. "My life has completely changed," he said while sitting in the job office at Tohoku University in Sendai, his alma mater. "Before, my life was peaceful and predictable. Now, I'm not sure what the future holds."
While he awaits word from his employer, Mr. Miura plans to follow his friends' example and volunteer to help people rebuild their homes. Mr. Miura hopes that by fixing broken walls and retiling roofs, he can repair people's lives and bring deeper meaning to his own.
"So many houses are shattered, I will feel good helping out," he said.
While many of their elders wrote them off as too coddled to live up to traditional Japanese values of self-sacrifice and hard work, many young people are finding meaning in the crisis. Even before the earthquake, this generation was struggling with a sense of thwarted opportunities in a stagnant economy. With the erosion of the postwar compact that traded a slavish devotion to work for stable wages and benefits, many young people felt alienated. Legions of college graduates, unable to land full-time jobs and eager to express their individuality, have drifted in and out of part-time work, a limbo-like existence that older generations find unfathomable.
Now some graduates, destined for corporate life, have found purpose volunteering to work at nonprofit groups shuttling aid to the newly destitute in the prefectures north of here. Students have taken to the streets to collect donations for those in need. Blogs and social networking sites are flooded with comments from young people asking what they can do to help.
"Before the earthquake, I thought about myself and what I can do for my new company," said Miki Kamiyama, who just graduated from Meiji University and will start working at a small cable company in Yokohama on Friday. "But now I think what I can do for all of society."
Among the hardest-hit are the new hires at Tokyo Electric Power Company, which owns the disabled nuclear power plants in Fukushima. Once one of Japan's most prestigious companies, Tokyo Electric has become the target of anger and contempt, and some observers question whether it will need government aid.
Tokyo Electric, known as Tepco, is so consumed with shutting down its reactors in Fukushima that it is unlikely to have many free workers to train the 1,100 or so new hires that start work this week, and many new construction projects have been put off. Still, some new hires sense an opportunity to fix a broken company. "In a way, I feel fortunate that I will be on the front line to help the people and Japan's society," said one new entrant who asked that his name not be used so as not to alienate his employer. "I feel that people who work for companies like Tepco want to help in some way."
The personal transformations are more subtle outside Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima, the three prefectures that have suffered the most. Without obvious damage to fix, young people are instead grappling with a silent threat from radioactive particles, as well as rolling blackouts that have forced Japanese to do without many of the electronic gadgets that were their constant companions.
The larger question is whether these young adults will remain as committed and concerned as they appear to be now. Life in many Japanese companies, especially for new hires, can be all-consuming, leaving little time for sleep, let alone volunteer activities. Partners, spouses and children will have their own gravitational pull. And because people's identities are so closely tied to the groups they are part of, social pressure may naturally lead them to narrow their circles to family, associates from work and friends from school.
"It's premature to say what the impact of the earthquake and tsunami will be," said Hiroshi Sakurai, who teaches sociology at the School of International Liberal Studies at Waseda University. "Japanese have gotten used to these things." But a minority of young adults may continue to find meaning not just in the suffering they are seeing daily, but the outpouring of support for Japan from other countries.
That sense of interconnectedness has motivated Keiko Eda, a volunteer at Peace Winds Japan, a humanitarian relief organization in Tokyo. "Because of the earthquake, I think a lot of young people are clearly changing, including me," she said. "We don't recognize this as our normal lives anymore."
For now, companies in Tokyo and elsewhere in Japan are adapting to the less-than-normal start of the fiscal year. Many of them have canceled the yearly ceremonies where executives greet new workers on their first day on the job. Moments of silence are now the norm. Late-night drinking sessions with superiors that mix bonding and hazing are being shunned.
For now, people are continuing to search for ways they can help, large and small. Shota Kitanishi, a student at Kwansei Gakuin University in Nishinomiya, near Kobe, was 4 years old when the earthquake of 1995 destroyed parts of the city. He grew up watching the city being rebuilt.
In solidarity, he is asking other students to pledge about $12 a month for 12 months and send the money to aid groups helping victims in northeastern Japan.
"You just can't think of the disaster as someone else's disaster," he said. "We're all Japanese. When you get together, you feel like you can do anything."
Hiroko Tabuchi, Ken Ijichi and Moshe Komata contributed reporting.
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11) Cleanup Questions as Radiation Spreads
"The cesium levels were about double the minimums found in the area declared uninhabitable around the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine, raising the question whether the evacuation zones around Fukushima should be extended beyond the current 18 miles. On Thursday, the Japanese government said it had no plans to expand the zone."
By HENRY FOUNTAIN
March 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/world/asia/01clean.html?ref=world
As it struggles with the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, the Japanese government now faces another problem spawned by the disaster: whether and how to clean up areas that have been heavily contaminated by radioactivity.
On Wednesday, the International Atomic Energy Agency said a soil sample from Iitate, a village of 7,000 people about 25 miles northwest of the plant, showed very high concentrations of cesium 137 - an isotope that produces harmful gamma rays, accumulates in the food chain and persists in the environment for hundreds of years.
The cesium levels were about double the minimums found in the area declared uninhabitable around the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine, raising the question whether the evacuation zones around Fukushima should be extended beyond the current 18 miles. On Thursday, the Japanese government said it had no plans to expand the zone.
Experts said the Japanese government must also decide what to do about the cesium contamination in the village, especially since radiation releases from the plant could continue for months.
That might argue for evacuating now and postponing any long-term decisions about cleanup, which might include abandoning some areas. But experts say there are reasons to clean sooner.
With cesium, decontamination "has to be done very quickly," said Didier Champion, director of the environmental and response division of the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety. "Cesium tends to fix to materials and into soil."
Lawrence Boing, manager of special projects in the nuclear engineering division at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, agreed. "Sooner is always better when you have something that can be driven down into soils," he said.
Cleaning up to a safe level could be difficult and enormously expensive, but experts say it is possible, depending on the extent of the contamination.
"The good news is that we don't need to develop new technologies to address the decontamination," said Jaime Yassif, who has studied the issue as a former researcher with the Federation of American Scientists. The nuclear power industry has developed methods to deal with minor contamination at plants, she said, "but scaling up those operations for something so large is going to be very costly."
Experts were not surprised that high cesium levels were recorded at one spot in Japan; the distribution of radioactive particles from the plant depends on wind and precipitation: even a brief shower can literally rain fallout onto one spot. (High levels of radioactive iodine also create problems, but largely in food and water supplies; because it decays much more quickly than cesium, most of it is gone from the environment in a few months.)
The atomic energy agency has stressed that the data from Iitate are just a spot reading and that concentrations of cesium in the region vary widely.
But experts say that illustrates part of the problem that Japan now faces. Much more measuring is needed to understand the extent of radiation and whether areas need to be decontaminated.
It will be very expensive just to determine which areas are habitable after decontamination, said an official with an American company that works on radiation cleanup, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicate nature of his business contacts.
And such costs may pale in comparison to the actual costs of cleanup. If there is extensive contamination of soil, for instance, one likely cleanup method would be to scoop up the top three or four inches and cart it to a safe disposal site. It's a simple method, "and simpler is generally better when you're looking at technology," Mr. Boing said.
Even so, depending on the radiation, workers would have to wear protective gear, and chemicals might be applied to keep radioactive dust from spreading.
To reduce costs at Chernobyl, some of the less contaminated soil was dumped in a pit on the site rather than being hauled away, said Ms. Yassif, who is now a biophysicist studying at the University of California, Berkeley. But that should not be done in agricultural areas, she said, because the cesium can taint crops.
Dan Coyne, a vice president with CH2M-WG Idaho, which is cleaning up an Energy Department site in that state, said that given the uncertainty at Fukushima, one approach might be to spray a chemical on the soil that would prevent the cesium from migrating further. "Go and put a fixative on it, control the area, and save the remediation of that for a time when it fits your priorities," he said.
If buildings and roads need to be decontaminated, that could be accomplished by other relatively simple methods like wiping, power-washing or steam-cleaning, unless the cesium is deep.
And because waste removal and storage are among the most expensive elements in any cleanup, Ms. Yassif said, the general goal is "to remove as much of the radioactive waste as you can in as small a volume as possible."
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12) The Jobless See a Lifeline at Risk
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
March 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/us/01florida.html?ref=us
PALM COAST, Fla. - With his worn black canvas briefcase at his feet, Richard Dudenhoeffer, a cabinet maker, stood at a computer at the one-stop employment center and scrolled through Florida's employment listings before settling on three applications: Custodian for the Flagler County School Board. City meter reader. Assistant manager at a tractor supply company.
In the year he has been collecting unemployment checks in Flagler County, where joblessness remains stubbornly high, Mr. Dudenhoeffer, 61, has not even gotten his foot in the door, despite his almost daily efforts to find a job, any job. No interviews. No phone calls. No e-mails. No flicker of hope.
Without charity and his $247 weekly unemployment check, he would lose it all, he said, starting with his mobile home and his car, a lifeline in a county with no public transportation.
"I sold my 9-millimeter gun," Mr. Dudenhoeffer said offhandedly, after rattling off the possessions - coin collection, gold jewelry - he had sold to stay afloat. "It was too tempting to blow my brains out." He added, "I am just so depressed."
For the jobless like Mr. Dudenhoeffer, the outlook does not look immediately brighter.
The Florida House of Representatives approved a bill in March that would establish the deepest and most far-reaching cuts in unemployment benefits in the nation. Like the law signed in Michigan on Monday, the measure would reduce the number of weeks the unemployed could collect benefits from the standard 26 weeks to 20.
But the House proposal in Florida - in a high-unemployment state that already has some of the lowest benefits - takes it one step further by tying benefits to the unemployment rate. If the rate falls, so do the number of weeks of benefits. If the rate dips below 5 percent, the jobless would collect only 12 weeks of benefits, the lowest level.
This has workers worried in Florida, where the unemployment rate, while continuing to inch down, is 11.5 percent, considerably higher than the nation's rate of 8.9 percent. Michigan's rate is 10.4 percent.
The Senate is taking a less stringent approach in its bill, choosing not to reduce the number of weeks or tie benefits to the unemployment rate. The two chambers are expected to resolve their differences within the next few weeks.
The House version, which would take effect Aug. 1 if signed into law and affect people who apply after that date, would also make it easier for businesses to fire employees, who would then not be eligible for unemployment benefits.
The bill's sponsor, Representative Doug Holder, a Sarasota Republican, said creating jobs is pivotal to keeping Floridians off the unemployment rolls. Businesses need the state's help in doing that, Mr. Holder said. The average number of weeks people remain on unemployment compensation is 17.7 weeks, he added, and that means most people would be unaffected, at least in terms of how long they would collect benefits. More than 535,000 Floridians were receiving benefits as of March 26.
"Florida is positioning itself to be the most business-friendly state in the country," said Representative Holder, whose bill would also help weed out those who do not have legitimate claims. "Our unemployment compensation trust fund has gone broke. We have to replenish it. The best way to do that and to right a capsized economy is to provide more jobs."
Others disagree.
"To talk about cutting the maximum number of weeks down to as low as 12 is basically accepting as a certainty that lots more people will run out of benefits before they find employment and that they will go many weeks without any income," said George Wentworth, senior staff attorney for the National Employment Law Project, which advocates for workers. "It's cruel as a matter of public policy, and it's really kind of wrongheaded in terms of the local economy."
But the business community, led by the Florida Chamber of Commerce, has made passing the House version of the bill a priority, contending that businesses would benefit greatly from relief from the escalating tax to pay for jobless compensation. This year the tax on business owners jumped to $72.10 a year for each employee from $25.20, still relatively low, but it is expected to climb steeply because Florida's unemployment fund is running a $2.1 billion deficit. Thirty other states are facing deficits in their unemployment programs.
"This is our thorniest problem this year," said Bill Herrle, Florida executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business. "There is no happy solution. It's intractable. We have an enormous problem. Our take is that big problems require solutions from all the participants."
Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican who has made job creation a cornerstone of his tenure, supports the House approach.
But to some here in Flagler County, where the economy rose higher but fell harder than in any other in Florida in the past decade, the idea of creating jobs by taking away meager benefits from people whose lives have been upended does not seem just. From 2000 to 2010, this slice of Florida, just north of Daytona Beach, had the highest population growth in the state, spurred by construction as houses multiplied along vast stretches of open land. The collapse here was equally drastic. Construction jobs disappeared practically overnight, and the county now has the state's highest unemployment rate, 14.9 percent.
Jobs make news here. A few weeks ago word spread that new Red Lobster and Olive Garden restaurants in town were ready to hire. Hundreds lined up in the sun to file their applications. Only a few dozen were accepted.
Standing outside the employment center here, Leslie Stultz, a trim 62-year-old man with a Jamaican lilt, said politicians were too quick to dismiss how difficult it was for some people to find jobs in this region of Florida, particularly for workers in their 50s and 60s. Relocating is out of the question when there is no money in the bank, Mr. Stultz said.
He said he recently lost his temporary job performing quality control for a company that manufactures sunscreen. It was his second layoff in two years, he said. His wife, a home health care worker, has seen her income drop sharply. Now he is fighting with the bank to arrange affordable payments so he can keep his tidy white stucco house, decorated with Egyptian artwork and mirrors and with a pool out back, in one of Palm Coast's many walled-off developments.
"People aren't sitting back relaxing and collecting $275 a week," Mr. Stultz said. "There are no jobs here, and there are so many unemployed people."
Mr. Dudenhoeffer, whose kind eyes grow weary as he retells his journey from small-business owner to perpetual job seeker, said he could hear the clock ticking. He explained that he had exhausted his state benefits and was now collecting emergency federal benefits. He said he tried to be optimistic. And despite his grim situation, there are occasional moments of happiness. On his birthday recently, friends collected money to buy him a gift card for Red Lobster.
Still, watching his online job applications simply fall into a void again and again, Mr. Dudenhoeffer said he could not help growing despondent.
"When the benefits run out," he said, "I'll just give up."
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13) Missouri Halts Extension of Pay for Unemployed
By A. G. SULZBERGER
March 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/us/01missouri.html?ref=us
KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Citing concerns about the national debt, a handful of conservative state legislators have blocked a vote to accept federal money to extend unemployment benefits, effectively cutting financial assistance for more than 10,000 out-of-work residents next week.
The move, which came despite widespread bipartisan support for extending the benefits, puts Missouri at the center of a growing national discussion about reining in unemployment benefits at a time when both the job market and government coffers remain weakened.
In recent weeks, Republican leaders in Michigan, Arkansas and Florida have taken steps to limit their states' contributions by cutting the duration of unemployment benefits.
But for now Missouri, with an unemployment rate above 9 percent, is the only state that has stopped accepting dedicated federal money to extend payments to 99 weeks from 79. (A number of states never joined when the program was initially offered.)
"This is about sending a message to the federal government from the state of Missouri that enough is enough," said Jim Lembke, the state senator who, with three other Republicans, is filibustering the legislation. "The federal government is sending us money they don't have."
Mr. Lembke said he also plans to block a vote needed to accept nearly $190 million in federal education money.
The reauthorization legislation, which was supported by the leadership of both parties, passed by a wide majority in the House and had been expected to pass easily in the Senate, where a similar extension passed unanimously last year. Both chambers are controlled by Republicans. The legislation is supported by Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat.
But senators so far have decided against using a rarely invoked procedure to end debate. The chamber adjourned Thursday without voting on the matter, missing a deadline required for the payments to continue uninterrupted.
"This is the angriest I've ever been," said Jolie Justus, a Democratic senator who gave an emotional speech in favor of extending benefits. "To tell these thousands of people that they have to get off their backsides and get a job is so out of touch with what's going on in Missouri right now."
In addition to those whose payments will stop immediately, the Missouri Department of Labor estimated that another 24,000 people would be affected by the end of the year - totaling $105 million in lost payments.
Senators were still discussing the possibility that a deal could be worked out, either through compromise or by forcing a vote.
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14) Ohio's Anti-Union Law Is Tougher Than Wisconsin's
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
March 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/us/01ohio.html?ref=us
After Wisconsin's labor battle seized the nation's attention, after nearly 100,000 people rallied in Madison to protest a bill to curb public-sector collective bargaining, the Ohio legislature has, with far less fanfare, enacted a bill perhaps even tougher on unions.
It is perhaps surprising that Ohio faced more limited public demonstrations considering that its bill, which Gov. John R. Kasich signed Thursday, goes further than Wisconsin's in several important ways.
While both laws severely limit public employees' ability to bargain collectively - they both prohibit any bargaining over health coverage and pensions - the Ohio law largely eliminates bargaining for the police and firefighters. Wisconsin's law leaves those two groups' bargaining rights untouched. Ohio's law also gives city councils and school boards a free hand to unilaterally impose their side's final contract offer when management and union fail to reach a settlement.
Notwithstanding the differences in legislation, the push by those states' Republican governors and Republican-dominated legislatures points to a pendulum swing away from what many unions and Democrats see as a fundamental right for public employees: the right to bargain over wages and benefits.
Moreover, at a time of huge budget deficits and of Republican dominance in many states, including states like Ohio and Wisconsin where unions once had swaggering power, the pendulum has swung toward the taxpayer instead of the government workers paid by the taxpayer. And after five decades in which public-sector unions have grown far stronger in membership and political power, Mr. Kasich and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin seem intent on checking their rise.
State Senator Shannon Jones, a Republican and chief sponsor of the Ohio law, said curbing collective bargaining made sense when so many states, cities, counties and school districts faced daunting budget deficits. She said the law would help public employers hold down compensation costs, especially soaring health and pension costs, as a way to minimize any layoffs and reductions in public services, whether police patrols or garbage collections.
"The economy has changed fundamentally," Ms. Jones said. "Not only families and business have to change to adapt to tougher economic circumstances, but governments have to adapt, too."
Many Democrats and labor leaders said the law was an effort to balance state and local budgets on the backs of Ohio's 360,000 public employees. They argue that the driving force behind the law was ideological and political. "It's a politically motivated effort to weaken and destroy the unions that the leaders of the Republican Party perceive as their biggest political opponents," said William Leibensperger, vice president of the Ohio Education Association, which represents 130,000 teachers and other school employees.
William Even, an economics professor at Miami University of Ohio, said the law resulted from another difference between the parties. "There's a definite philosophical disagreement between the Republicans and Democrats about what unions do to the efficiency of government operations and whether unions have led to overcompensation for public workers."
When the Ohio Senate approved the bill Wednesday night, 17 to 16, all 17 supporters were Republicans, and when the Ohio House passed it earlier Wednesday, 53 to 44, all of the supporters were Republicans.
In Ohio, as in Wisconsin, mayors, school superintendents and county executives are already thinking through how to use the legislation to hold down public employees' raises and health costs. At the same time, in Ohio, as in Wisconsin, Democrats and union members are maneuvering to overturn the legislation.
In Ohio, union leaders plan to dispatch rank-and-file members around the state to collect signatures to trigger a referendum. And in Wisconsin - in addition to a lawsuit that has resulted in a court order temporarily suspending the anti-union law for violating the open meetings act - unions have collected tens of thousands of signatures to hold recall elections aimed at ousting a half-dozen Republican state senators, as a first step to repeal the law.
Ohio political and union leaders say there were fewer protests than in Wisconsin because Governor Walker moved first, making him and Madison a lighting rod. Moreover, Madison has a famously liberal university and Wisconsin was the home of the progressive movement. Still, Ohio unions boast that their biggest rally in Columbus attracted 20,000, just a fraction of Madison's weekly Saturday rallies.
The Wisconsin law is in ways tougher toward unions - it bars any public employer from deducting workers' dues from their paychecks and forwarding it to union treasuries. It is also requires a vote each year to determine whether government workers want to keep their union.
Both states would let government employees opt out of paying any union dues or fees.
The Wisconsin law generally limits raises to the Consumer Price Index, although under the Ohio legislation if a public employer accepts the union's contract offer and if that forces a community to raise taxes to pay for it, then voters can overturn the contract through a referendum.
"It's pretty much evisceration of collective bargaining in both states," said James Brudney, an Ohio State law professor.
Louis W. Blessing, a Republican House member who represents Cincinnati, said his party had pushed for the law at the behest of taxpayers who feel public unions have become too powerful, their pensions too generous. "We're trying to level the playing field between the two parties, between the taxpayer and the unions," he said. But Mr. Blessing acknowledged that political motivations also came into play. "It's clear the unions support the Democrats," he said. "I'm sure that made it easier to pass."
Governor Kasich has repeatedly said the law would give communities the tools they need to hold down labor costs to help reduce layoffs. For instance, Ohio's office of collective bargaining estimates that replacing statutory step pay increases with merit pay will save the state $75 million a year and local governments $393 million a year.
Armond Budish, the Ohio House Democratic leader, said, "This bill is an effort to camouflage the pain that the governor's huge budget cuts are going to cause."
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15) Two Former Officers Sentenced in a Killing After Katrina
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
March 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/us/01police.html?ref=us
NEW ORLEANS - Two former police officers were sentenced to prison on Thursday in the killing of an unarmed civilian and the burning of his body in the days after Hurricane Katrina in a case that exposed the city's troubled police department.
One of the officers, David Warren, was sentenced by Judge Lance M. Africk of Federal District Court here to 25 years and 9 months in prison for a civil rights violation resulting in the death of Henry Glover, 31. Mr. Warren was also convicted of using a firearm to commit manslaughter.
The other officer, Greg McRae, was sentenced to 17 years and 3 months for obstructing justice and other charges in the burning of Mr. Glover's body.
On Sept. 2, 2005, Officer Warren shot Mr. Glover from the second floor of a strip mall that was being used as a police substation. Mr. Glover had been preparing to leave the city and was picking up suitcases that had been looted. He was shot as he was running away; at trial, Mr. Warren said he had fired in self-defense.
The wounded Mr. Glover was taken by a group of bystanders to a nearby school that was being used a makeshift police station. There, officers surrounded the men and handcuffed them.
Officer McRae drove off in the bystanders' car with Mr. Glover in the back seat; he then burned Mr. Glover's body and the car with a traffic flare.
The men were convicted in December. A third, Travis McCabe, a former lieutenant, was convicted of perjury and obstructing justice for drawing up a false police report; he has not been sentenced. Mr. Warren was ordered to pay $7,642.32 to Mr. Glover's family for funeral expenses; Mr. McRae was ordered to pay $6,000 as restitution for the burned car.
Federal investigators began looking into Mr. Glover's death after The Nation, in a joint investigative project with ProPublica, published an article about the killing in 2008.
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16) Report Criticizes High Pay at Fannie and Freddie
"The companies, whose fates are to be decided by Congress this year, paid a combined $17 million to their chief executives in 2009 and 2010, the two full years when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were wards of the state, the report found. The top six executives at the companies received $35.4 million over the two years. Since Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over in September 2008, the companies' mounting mortgage losses have required a $153 billion infusion from taxpayers. Total losses may reach $363 billion through 2013, according to government estimates. Charles E. Haldeman Jr., a former head of Putnam Investments, the giant fund management concern, joined Freddie Mac as its chief executive in 2009. He made $7.8 million for 2009 and 2010. Fannie Mae's chief is Michael J. Williams, who has worked at the company since 1991. He received $9.3 million for the two years. Company officials declined to comment."
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
March 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/business/01pay.html?ref=business
Regulators have approved generous executive compensation at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the taxpayer-backed mortgage finance giants, with little scrutiny or analysis, according to a report published Thursday by the inspector general of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
The companies, whose fates are to be decided by Congress this year, paid a combined $17 million to their chief executives in 2009 and 2010, the two full years when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were wards of the state, the report found. The top six executives at the companies received $35.4 million over the two years. Since Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over in September 2008, the companies' mounting mortgage losses have required a $153 billion infusion from taxpayers. Total losses may reach $363 billion through 2013, according to government estimates.
Charles E. Haldeman Jr., a former head of Putnam Investments, the giant fund management concern, joined Freddie Mac as its chief executive in 2009. He made $7.8 million for 2009 and 2010. Fannie Mae's chief is Michael J. Williams, who has worked at the company since 1991. He received $9.3 million for the two years. Company officials declined to comment.
With hundreds of billions in government support necessary to keep the companies running, questions are arising about the nature of the pay packages and how performance goals are determined. The pay was approved by the housing finance agency, which is charged with conserving the assets of Fannie and Freddie on behalf of taxpayers.
"F.H.F.A. has a responsibility to Congress and taxpayers to efficiently, consistently, and reliably ensure that the compensation paid to Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's senior executives is reasonable," 'said Steve A. Linick, the newly appointed inspector general of the agency, in a statement. "This is especially true when you realize that the U.S. Treasury has invested close to $154 billion to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac," and they "are spending tens of millions of dollars for executive compensation."
The report cited a "lack of standardized evaluation criteria, documentation of management procedures and internal controls" at the oversight agency, missing steps that may have led to overpayments.
For example, the inspector general said that taxpayer support of the companies may have made performance benchmarks easier to meet for executives. In 2009, Fannie Mae issued 47 percent of new mortgage-backed securities, far exceeding its goal of 37.5 percent. But, as the report noted, this hurdle was almost certainly cleared because the Federal Reserve purchased almost all the mortgage securities issued by Fannie and Freddie in 2009.
In response to the report, the housing agency said that it would "institute a more formal and systematic approach" to its review of the performance benchmarks and the assessment of whether they were reached by the companies' executives. A spokeswoman for the agency said its officials declined to comment.
Lavish executive pay that does not track a company's performance has led to anger among shareholders in recent years. When the government stepped in to support some of the nation's biggest financial institutions in 2008, compensation became an issue of concern to taxpayers. Executive pay at institutions receiving support under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, for example, was subject to approval by an overseer, the special master for TARP. Fannie and Freddie were not required to submit to this process because their assistance did not come from TARP.
As the primary regulator and conservator of both companies, the housing agency has broad powers to direct the companies' activities; it has replaced board members and senior officers, for example. And it can bar the companies from making golden parachute payments to executives. It consulted with the TARP special master on executive pay at Fannie and Freddie after they were rescued by the government.
Nevertheless, the agency delegates pay decisions to the companies' boards, accepting their recommendations "unless there is an observed reason to do otherwise," according to the inspector general's report. The F.H.F.A. receives advice from its own compensation consultant as well as the work of those hired by Fannie and Freddie.
The inspector general's report noted that the executives at Fannie and Freddie received far more than their counterparts at other federal housing agencies. The top executive at Ginnie Mae, for example, received an annual salary of less than $200,000. The inspector general suggested that the agency review the discrepancy and account for it to taxpayers.
Agency officials say the salaries and deferred compensation awarded to executives at Fannie and Freddie are necessary if they are to attract and keep talent required to run those operations effectively. They say that current pay at Fannie and Freddie is roughly 40 percent less than it was before the bailout and maintain that the compensation plans are based on the companies' ability to meet financial and performance targets, like providing liquidity and affordability to the mortgage market.
Edward J. DeMarco, acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, testified before Congress on Thursday about proposals to overhaul Fannie and Freddie. "I am concerned that legislation to overhaul the compensation levels and programs in place today with the application of a federal pay system to nonfederal employees carries great risk for the conservatorships and hence the taxpayer," he said.
Last year, Mr. DeMarco testified that the executive compensation plans at Fannie and Freddie were designed to achieve the goals of the conservatorship and "align executive decision-making with the long-term financial prospects of the enterprises, and minimize costs to the taxpayer."
Because shares of both Fannie and Freddie have little value, the companies' executive compensation consists solely of cash paid out in base salary, deferred salary and long-term incentive pay.
But Brian Foley, a compensation consultant in White Plains questioned the characterization of the companies' incentive pay as long term, given that it is paid entirely within two years. "One hundred percent of the compensation is paid for two-year performance and a fair portion of that is without regard to performance," he said. "I understand the stock is worthless, but that doesn't mean you can't have cash on the table for a long period. If anybody needs to have good long-term performance, isn't it Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?"
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17) In 2010, CEO Pay Went Up 27% While Worker Pay Went Up 2%
By Pat Garofalo | Sourced from ThinkProgress
Posted at April 1, 2011, 9:58 am
http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/546326/in_2010%2C_ceo_pay_went_up_27_while_worker_pay_went_up_2/#paragraph4
Households across the country are still feeling the effects of the Great Recession, with unemployment falling very slowly, while foreclosures are still increasing, along with poverty rates and oil prices. However, one group of Americans is doing very well - corporate CEOs, whose pay is returning to pre-recession levels:
At a time most employees can barely remember their last substantial raise, median CEO pay jumped 27% in 2010 as the executives' compensation started working its way back to prerecession levels, a USA TODAY analysis of data from GovernanceMetrics International found. Workers in private industry, meanwhile, saw their compensation grow just 2.1% in the 12 months ended December 2010, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Median CEO pay last year was $9 million, the highest since 2007. The median CEO bonus was $2.2 million. Family wealth, meanwhile, is currently down $12.8 trillion from its 2007 peak.
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18) Bruce Springsteen Letter to the Editor:
Story on poverty, aid cuts gives voice to voiceless
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
7:03 AM, Mar. 31, 2011
http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/63-63/5484-giving-voice-to-the-voiceless
Thank you for your March 27 front-page story by Michael Symons, "As poverty rises, cuts target aid." The article is one of the few that highlights the contradictions between a policy of large tax cuts, on the one hand, and cuts in services to those in the most dire conditions, on the other.
(Click here to see the article: As poverty rises, NJ cuts target aid: http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/63-63/5484-giving-voice-to-the-voiceless)
Also, you've shone some light on anti- poverty workers and analysts such as Adele LaTourette, Meara Nigro, Cecilia Zalkind and Raymond Castro, among others, all of whom have something important to add to the discussion: real information and actual facts about what is happening below the poverty line.
These are voices that in our current climate are having a hard time being heard, not just in New Jersey, but nationally. Finally, your article shows that the cuts are eating away at the lower edges of the middle class, not just those already classified as in poverty, and are likely to continue to get worse over the next few years. I'm always glad to see my hometown newspaper covering these issues.
Bruce Springsteen
COLTS NECK
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19) As poverty rises in NJ, cuts target aid
By MICHAEL SYMONS STATEHOUSE BUREAU
March 31, 2011
http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/63-63/5484-giving-voice-to-the-voiceless
TRENTON - Poverty is rising, demand for food stamps has rocketed and the job market remains tepid at best, more than three years after the economy began to crater.
Against that backdrop of need is a harsh reality anti-poverty groups say they struggle to overcome: Much of the public doesn't want to hear about it. Driven by Gov. Chris Christie here and Tea Partyers in Washington, the conversation is all about cutting government services - the faster the better.
As a pair of reports measuring societal challenges facing New Jersey were released last week, one about poverty and the other about child well-being, one of the common themes was about using the sobering numbers to try to change the conversation and wrest back a voice in the public-policy debate.
There were also disagreements about how aggressively to push their case.
"We're always much too polite when it comes to this fear of raising the issue of class warfare," said Meara Nigro of the New Jersey Anti-Hunger Coalition. She said wealthy companies benefit, and programs for the poor and middle class are cut. "We just need to be better at messaging. The Republicans are great at it."
Adele LaTourette, director of the New Jersey Anti-Hunger Coalition, said that while polls indicate people are concerned about poverty and hunger, they vote for candidates that don't share those priorities in elections. There's a disconnect there she thinks is driven by race.
"Racism plays a huge role in the fact that people don't see it, don't want to see it," LaTourette said. "I think you get into an "us and them.' People feel that if there are people living in poverty . . . as long as it's not them - they're not OK with it, but they're OK enough with it. They would never say they're OK with it, but I think you get into that incredible dichotomy of the way this society is structured. I know that's a huge thing to say, but that's what I think is true."
With the Legislature's intensive review of Christie's budget proposal getting under way in hearings that begin this week, anti- poverty groups have keyed in - with some familiar refrains - on portions they want reversed before a plan is adopted in three months.
A restructuring of general assistance included in Christie's proposed budget would cut benefits to people in the program by 7 percent to 11 percent, said Herb Levine, executive director of the Mercer Alliance to End Homelessness.
"So where is the parallel sacrifice on the millionaires' part?" said Levine, bemoaning what he calls a "fundamental mean- spiritedness that is at the core of the current assault on government.
"These are the poorest, poorest people. And you're asking them to take a cut while you're giving a free pass on this side," Levine said. "That's got to be our message. We've got to put that on the ballot."
Christie vetoed legislation that would have temporarily raised taxes on income exceeding $1 million. Senior policy analyst Raymond Castro of New Jersey Policy Perspective was also critical of planned cuts in business taxes worth nearly $200 million in the first year, growing to $690 million by the fifth year.
"It's really alarming," Castro said. "We are cutting assistance to low-income people at the same time we're providing hundreds of millions in tax breaks to large corporations. I t's just unacceptable, and I think it would be unacceptable to the public if they understood that. And I don't think that they do."
Maybe an education campaign would help, said the Rev. Bruce Davidson of the Anti- Poverty Network.
Davidson said he thinks one could be built around last year's cut to the Earned Income Tax Credit, which was trimmed from 25 percent of the federal benefit to 20 percent for its roughly 485,000 recipients. Low-wage earners can get a credit, or even a refund if they don't owe taxes. That saved the state $45 million.
A family of three may have experienced the equivalent of $300 tax increase, Davidson said, equal to roughly one week's worth of its annual income.
"I would humbly suggest that we communicate with the general public that if everyone in the state was willing to contribute one week of their wages in additional taxes, we would solve pretty much every problem we raised today," he said. "But instead we're putting a very unfair burden on the lowest-income earners, and we're not putting a burden on other folks. There is a question of fairness."
Even among advocates for the poor angry about budget decisions being made in Trenton and Washington, some moderated their message and said the last few years have been tough on most people.
"I do think the public is listening. I also think it's a difficult time for everyone," said Cecilia Zalkind, executive director of Advocates for Children of New Jersey, which just published its annual Kids Count report.
"The state's budget crisis is a serious one. We don't have the resources we had 10 years ago to make investments," Zalkind said. "And families are hurting. I think for a time that made families look inward. But my sense is we're still a compassionate state, and there still is a commitment here overall."
"One of our challenges is that almost everybody is concerned about their own survival," Castro said. "Even a lot of people who have jobs are wondering how long they're going to be able to keep their jobs. Somehow we have to broaden the dialogue. We're always saying we're a very generous country. Well, we need to be very generous not only when the economy doing well but when the economy is not so much."
Attorneys Maura Sanders and Joshua Spielberg of Legal Services of New Jersey, which released its annual poverty benchmarks report last week, said acknowledging the wider impacts of the recession helps make the public more open to hearing their message and could help their recommendations gain traction with Republicans.
"The majority of New Jerseyans have suffered reductions in incomes, have suffered economically, have suffered the pain in this recession," Sanders said. "It isn't just those in poverty. It's those in the middle class. It's the majority of folks in New Jersey. And you have to acknowledge that everyone is suffering."
Regarding the one-week-pay campaign that was kicked around, for instance, Advertisement Spielberg noted anyone who's been furloughed over the last few years has given up some salary already.
"One of the things we have to do in New Jersey is give something that either some Republicans or the governor will sign onto. When we increase the rhetoric about the millionaires, sometimes we turn off the other side," Spielberg said. "We have to have an approach that appeals to the other side's conscience."
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20) Statement of Cynthia McKinney
Newseum Press Conference on Libya
Thursday, 31 March 2011
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2011/04/01/statement-of-cynthia-mckinney-newseum-pr
I am pleased to stand with my colleagues today who are outraged at Nobel
Peace Laureate President Obama's decision to wage war on Africa in Libya. At
the outset, let me state that Libya is home to tens of thousands or more of
foreign students and guest workers. The students come from Ethiopia,
Eritrea, and Somalia. The messages I have received from concerned Africans
state that these young innocent people, inaccurately labeled by the U.S.
press as "black mercenaries," have been trapped in hostile territory and are
hated by the U.S.-allied Al Qaeda insurgents. The press forgot that Libya is
in Africa and that Libyans are Black!
I would also like to acknowledge the outrage of the Women International
Democratic Federation of Brazil that repudiates the invasion of Libya. They
point specifically to the depressed state of women in pre-Qaddafi Libya and
how women now have positions that had once been denied to them. They note in
their communiqué that the National Front of the Salvation of Libya has been
financed by the C.I.A. since 1981 and that its headquarters is in
Washington, D.C.
In fact, I have received messages and phone calls from people literally all
over the world who are outraged at this action. And because the media cannot
be relied upon to tell the truth, I repeat the call that I received directly
from Libya yesterday for international observers to go to Libya to tell the
world the truth. I would go.
Sadly, President Obama's justification for war provides answers that don't
answer, explanations that don't explain, and conclusions that don't
conclude. Reports continue to emerge of the US ties to the so-called rebel
leaders: the latest being that Khalifa Hifter, latest leader of the rebel
army, spent much of the past 20 years in Langley, Virginia. He didn't even
move to Baltimore to disguise the relationship! Moreover, General Wesley
Clarke told us that Libya was on the U.W. hitlist ten years ago!
This is nothing new. This operation smells very much like so many other
Africa operations fueled by U.S.-supported individuals who become a rebel
force able to threaten an inconvenient leader who stands up to the U.S. This
particular play has been repeated in Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of
Congo, Ivory Coast, and Angola and Mozambique before them. We are not blind;
we recognize this play. And the use of depleted uranium will cause health
effects for generations to come.
Pentagon Secretary Gates said "Libya is not part of our vital interest."
Then why are we there? Herein lies the conundrum. President Obama has
authorized secret support for its rebels in Libya, just like Miami's Cuban
community has received for decades.
Sadly, our President has chosen to spend $600 million per week in addition
to other war costs at a time when the Black community is melting. As of the
most recent Economic Policy Institute study, average Black family wealth was
$2,000 while that of Whites was $94,600. President Obama has done nothing to
address the disparities that have existed in this country since slavery.
Clearly, our President should focus on home and improving the lot of the
people of this country before launching another war.
Finally, I must say something about the ugly hate language that is
emanating more and more from Black political voices. Any politician seeking
votes by exacerbating divisions in our country does not deserve our votes.
I'm speaking specifically about the unfortunate remarks of Herman Cain who
should know better.
I stand with those who support the right of self-determination of the
Libyan people, including their right to resolve differences without
interference from outsiders.
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21) Reactor Pit Found Leaking Radioactive Water Into Sea
By KEN BELSON and HIROKO TABUCHI
April 2, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/world/asia/03japan.html?_r=1&hp
TOKYO - Highly radioactive water is leaking directly into the sea from a damaged pit near a crippled reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Japanese safety officials said Saturday, the latest setback in the increasingly difficult bid to regain control of the reactors.
Although higher than normal levels of radiation have been detected in the ocean water near the plant in recent days, the breach discovered Saturday is the first identified direct leak of such high levels of radiation into the sea.
The leak, found at a maintenance pit near the plant's No. 2 reactor, is a fresh reminder of the dangerous side effects of the strategy to cool the reactors and spent fuel storage pools by pumping hundreds of tons of water a day into them. While much of that water has evaporated, a significant portion has also turned into runoff.
The Japanese authorities have said they have little choice at the moment, since the normal cooling systems at the plant are inoperable and more radiation would be released if the reactors were allowed to melt down fully or if the rods caught fire.
Three workers at the plant, operated by Tokyo Electric Power Company, have been injured by stepping into pools of contaminated water inside one reactor complex.
Workers are racing to drain the excess water, but they have struggled to figure out how to store it. On Saturday, some contaminated water was transferred into a barge to free up space in other tanks on land. A second barge also arrived.
"The more water they add, the more problems they are generating," said Satoshi Sato, a consultant to the nuclear energy industry and a former engineer with General Electric. "It's just a matter of time before the leaks into the ocean grow."
Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director general of Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said it was possible that water in the pit had leaked from the reactor, although it was also possible that it came from other sources, like leaking pipes. In either case, any leak would be exacerbated by the enormous amounts of water being used to cool the reactor.
Tetsuo Iguchi, a professor in the department of quantum engineering at Nagoya University, said that the leak discovered Saturday raised fears that contaminated water might be seeping out through many more undiscovered sources. He said that unless workers could quickly stop the leaking, Tokyo Electric could be forced to re-evaluate the feed-and-bleed strategy, in which they flood the reactors and fuel ponds with water and then release the steam it creates.
"It is crucial to keep cooling the fuel rods, but on the other hand, these leaks are dangerous," Mr. Iguchi said. "They can't let the plant keep leaking high amounts of radiation for much longer," he said.
Plant workers discovered a crack about eight inches wide in the maintenance pit, which lies between the No. 2 Reactor and the sea and holds cables used to power seawater pumps, Japan's nuclear regulator said.
The space directly above the water leaking into the sea had a radiation reading of more than 1,000 millisieverts per hour, Mr. Nishiyama said, a level that could be dangerous to humans. Tests of the water within the pit later showed the presence of one million becquerels per liter of iodine 131, a radioactive substance. That level of iodine is 10,000 times what is normal for water at the plant. However, iodine 131 has a half life of about eight days.
Mr. Nishiyama also said that higher than normal levels of radioactive materials were detected about 25 miles south of the Fukushima plant, much farther than had previously been reported.
At the time the leak was discovered, the deep pit was filled with four to eight inches of contaminated water, according to Tokyo Electric. But it was impossible to immediately judge how much water had escaped and over how long a period of time.
Workers had started to try to fill the crack with concrete, Mr. Nishiyama said late Saturday.
Saturday's announcement of a leak came a day after the United States energy secretary, Steven Chu, said that roughly 70 percent of the core of one reactor at the Fukushima plant had suffered severe damage. The statement was the most specific yet from an American official on how close the plant came to a full meltdown after it was hit by a severe earthquake and massive tsunami on March 11.
The crisis at the nuclear plant has overshadowed the recovery effort under way in Japan since the quake. The country's National Police Agency said the official death toll from the disaster had surpassed 11,800, while more than 15,500 were listed as missing.
Earlier Saturday, Prime Minister Naoto Kan made his first visit to the region since the disaster, and he promised to do everything possible to help.
"We'll be together with you to the very end," Mr. Kan said during a stop in Rikuzentakata, a town of about 20,000 people that was destroyed. "Everybody, try your best."
Dressed in a blue work jacket, Mr. Kan also visited with refugees stranded in an elementary school and then visited a sports complex about 20 miles south of the nuclear plant. The facility had been turned into a staging area for firefighters, Self-Defense Forces and workers from Tokyo Electric.
Ken Ijichi and Moshe Komata contributed reporting.
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22) NATO Airstrike Reportedly Kills Rebels in Libya
By KAREEM FAHIM and C. J. CHIVERS
April 2, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/world/africa/03libya.html?hp
BENGHAZI, Libya - A NATO airstrike killed 13 rebel fighters in the battle outside the pivotal oil port of Brega, the rebels said Saturday.
The deaths underscored the challenge that the Western allies and the rebels face in relying on airstrikes to push back the the forces of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi as the two sides mix in the battle zone along the front.
Perhaps in response to the Western airstrikes, the Qaddafi forces are increasingly plunging into combat in equipment similar to what the rebels are using, mainly pickup trucks mounted with machine guns or rockets. The move makes it increasingly difficult for even the combatants to distinguish one group from the other at first sight.
"It's a mistake," said Abdul Hafidh Ghoga, the rebel's main spokesman. "Nothing has changed."
One rebel fighter who was wounded in the airstrike said a fellow rebel had fired into the air moments before the attack.
"I don't know why," the rebel, Ali Abdullah Abubaker, said later from a hospital in Benghazi. "Maybe he was scared."
Seconds later, Mr. Abubaker heard the planes. "I saw something white," he said. "There was no sound."
His white pickup truck was set on fire, and he said three of the four other men in the car were killed. Mr. Abubaker, a college student studying political science, had burns on his face and was struck by bullets in his car that ignited in the blast.
A NATO spokesman in Brussels said the alliance was aware of the report and was investigating.
"NATO takes reports of civilian casualties very seriously," the spokesman said. "But for us, exact details are hard to verify because we do not have reliable sources on the ground."
The spokesman, who, according to NATO policy, asked not to be identified, added, "If someone fires at one of our aircraft, they have the right to defend themselves."
NATO said that it had conducted 148 airstrike sorties in the previous 24 hours.
The strike occurred after dark on Friday as rebels were continuing their efforts to retake Brega. The Qaddafi forces had positioned forward observers in the desert outside of the city with a view of the road, enabling their superior artillery crews within Brega to hit the rebels as they tried to approach.
A group of about four rebel trucks had entered a no-man's land of close fighting between the lines of the two sides, where they mixed with similar trucks of the Qaddafi militia. Around 8:30 p.m., several allied strikes were heard at the front.
Mr. Abubaker said the rebels had been told to search the area.
The men had stopped for prayers on a stretch of the road between Ajdabiya and Brega. A few seconds before the bombing, rebels driving a Mitsubishi truck with a machine gun mounted on the back pulled up near the group, and one of the rebels - a man Mr. Abubaker knew - started firing the weapon into the air.
A rebel ambulance driver who arrived at the scene about an hour later said he found only the blackened remains of the four trucks and eight or nine bodies so badly burned and mangled by the explosion that he could not determine the exact number.
"I saw the fire, and the bodies, eight or nine bodies," said the driver, Akhmed al-Ginashi. "They were totally burned."
At Benghazi's hospital, Brahim Fahim al-Oraybey, a 19-year-old rebel fighter, said he had been wounded in the blast. His right leg was amputated below the knee, and he was badly burned across his face, back, shoulders and hands.
He said there had been six vehicles, including an ambulance, in front of him in a convoy when the explosion struck. He had been riding in a white pickup with a machine gun mounted on the back, a favorite combat configuration of both the rebels and Colonel Qaddafi's forces. He said he saw a local shepherd who lost both arms in the blast, but his fate was not clear.
Around the scene of the airstrikes, rebel fighters speculated that Colonel Qaddafi's forces had infiltrated the rebel lines and fired at the planes, or that celebrating rebels shooting guns into the air had drawn the allied fire.
Here on the eastern front and in the besieged western city of Misurata, rebel fighters said Saturday that they were anxious about what they perceived as a slowdown in the airstrikes, enabling Colonel Qaddafi to hold on as his forces regroup and advance.
The battle lines remained largely unchanged, centered to the east of Brega, as the fighting continued Saturday. A few rebels had established a light presence in the city, near the university, but the Qaddafi forces remained in solid control.
Although airstrikes have taken out some of the Qaddafi forces' tanks and heavy weapons, the militia had evidently held back some of its military equipment in the relatively dense urban area, where the NATO forces cannot strike without the risk of civilian casualties.
In Washington, two lawmakers, Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, argued in an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal that Western forces should refocus their airstrikes on toppling Colonel Qaddafi, moving beyond the initial mandate to protect Libyan civilians.
"A successful outcome in Libya requires the departure of Gadhafi as quickly as possible," the senators wrote, using an alternate spelling for Qaddafi. "It is not in our interest for Libya to become the scene of a protracted stalemate that will destabilize and inflame the region."
They continued, "The battlefield reversals suffered by the opposition this week, when weather conditions hampered coalition airstrikes, underscore the need for a more robust and coherent package of aid to the rebel ground forces."
As a stalemate held in the eastern front, the capital, Tripoli, remained under a tight lockdown. A panic set off by the defection of the Qaddafi confidant Moussa Koussa eased slightly as only one other high-level official appeared to have fled in his wake. According to former government officials, guards were preventing others from leaving.
One senior official who had said he planned to travel to Egypt to pick up family members canceled his trip, telling reporters that he delayed it because of a paperwork problem.
There was no word on the details of talks in London by a senior aide to one of Colonel Qaddafi's sons, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, though British officials said the aide had returned to Libya.
In an informal currency market in the old city of Tripoli, traders said Libyan dinars were selling for less than half their value just a month ago. Colonel Qaddafi has flooded the economy with new money by providing a 500-dinar subsidy to each family and pay raises to all soldiers, apparently in an effort to bolster his support.
And, currency traders said in recent days, many are hedging against the long-term survival of the Qaddafi government as well.
Kareem Fahim reported from Benghazi, and C. J. Chivers from Brega, Libya. David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting from Tripoli.
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23) From Far Labs, a Vivid Picture Emerges of Japan Crisis
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
April 2, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/science/03meltdown.html?ref=world
For the clearest picture of what is happening at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, talk to scientists thousands of miles away.
Thanks to the unfamiliar but sophisticated art of atomic forensics, experts around the world have been able to document the situation vividly. Over decades, they have become very good at illuminating the hidden workings of nuclear power plants from afar, turning scraps of information into detailed analyses.
For example, an analysis by a French energy company revealed far more about the condition of the plant's reactors than the Japanese have ever described: water levels at the reactor cores dropping by as much as three-quarters, and temperatures in those cores soaring to nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to burn and melt the zirconium casings that protect the fuel rods.
Scientists in Europe and America also know from observing the explosions of hydrogen gas at the plant that the nuclear fuel rods had heated to very dangerous levels, and from radioactive plumes how far the rods had disintegrated.
At the same time, the evaluations also show that the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi escaped the deadliest outcomes - a complete meltdown of the plant.
Most of these computer-based forensics systems were developed after the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, when regulators found they were essentially blind to what was happening in the reactor. Since then, to satisfy regulators, companies that run nuclear power plants use snippets of information coming out of a plant to develop simulations of what is happening inside and to perform a variety of risk evaluations.
Indeed, the detailed assessments of the Japanese reactors that Energy Secretary Steven Chu gave on Friday - when he told reporters that about 70 percent of the core of one reactor had been damaged, and that another reactor had undergone a 33 percent meltdown - came from forensic modeling.
The bits of information that drive these analyses range from the simple to the complex. They can include everything from the length of time a reactor core lacked cooling water to the subtleties of the gases and radioactive particles being emitted from the plant. Engineers feed the data points into computer simulations that churn out detailed portraits of the imperceptible, including many specifics on the melting of the hot fuel cores.
Governments and companies now possess dozens of these independently developed computer programs, known in industry jargon as "safety codes." Many of these institutions - including ones in Japan - are relying on forensic modeling to analyze the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi to plan for a range of activities, from evacuations to forecasting the likely outcome.
"The codes got better and better" after the accident at Three Mile Island revealed the poor state of reactor assessment, said Michael W. Golay, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
These portraits of the Japanese disaster tend to be proprietary and confidential, and in some cases secret. One reason the assessments are enormously sensitive for industry and government is the relative lack of precedent: The atomic age has seen the construction of nearly 600 civilian power plants, but according to the World Nuclear Association, only three have undergone serious accidents in which their fuel cores melted down.
Now, as a result of the crisis in Japan, the atomic simulations suggest that the number of serious accidents has suddenly doubled, with three of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi complex in some stage of meltdown. Even so, the public authorities have sought to avoid grim technical details that might trigger alarm or even panic.
"They don't want to go there," said Robert Alvarez, a nuclear expert who, from 1993 to 1999, was a policy adviser to the secretary of energy. "The spin is all about reassurance."
If events in Japan unfold as they did at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, the forensic modeling could go on for some time. It took more than three years before engineers lowered a camera to visually inspect the damaged core of the Pennsylvania reactor, and another year to map the extent of the destruction. The core turned out to be about half melted.
By definition, a meltdown is the severe overheating of the core of a nuclear reactor that results in either the partial or full liquefaction of its uranium fuel and supporting metal lattice, at times with the atmospheric release of deadly radiation. Partial meltdowns usually strike a core's middle regions instead of the edge, where temperatures are typically lower.
The main meltdowns of the past at civilian plants were Three Mile Island in 1979, the St.-Laurent reactor in France in 1980, and Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986.
One of the first safety codes to emerge after Three Mile Island was the Modular Accident Analysis Program. Running on a modest computer, it simulates reactor crises based on such information as the duration of a power blackout and the presence of invisible wisps of radioactive materials.
Robert E. Henry, a developer of the code at Fauske & Associates, an engineering company near Chicago, said that a first sign of major trouble at any reactor was the release of hydrogen - a highly flammable gas that has fueled several large explosions at Fukushima Daiichi. The gas, he said in an interview, indicated that cooling water had fallen low, exposing the hot fuel rods.
The next alarms, Dr. Henry said, centered on various types of radioactivity that signal increasingly high core temperatures and melting.
First, he said, "as the core gets hotter and hotter," easily evaporated products of atomic fission - like iodine 131 and cesium 137 - fly out. If temperatures rise higher, threatening to melt the core entirely, he added, less volatile products such as strontium 90 and plutonium 239 join the rising plume.
The lofting of the latter particles in large quantities points to "substantial fuel melting," Dr. Henry said.
He added that he and his colleagues modeled the Japanese accident in its first days and discerned partial - not full - core melting.
Micro-Simulation Technology, a software company in Montville, N.J., used its own computer code to model the Japanese accident. It found core temperatures in the reactors soaring as high as 2,250 degrees Celsius, or more than 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit - hot enough to liquefy many reactor metals.
"Some portion of the core melted," said Li-chi Cliff Po, the company's president. He called his methods simpler than most industry simulations, adding that the Japanese disaster was relatively easy to model because the observable facts of the first hours and days were so unremittingly bleak - "no water in, no injection" to cool the hot cores.
"I don't think there's any mystery or foul play," Dr. Po said of the disaster's scale. "It's just so bad."
The big players in reactor modeling are federal laboratories and large nuclear companies such as General Electric, Westinghouse and Areva, a French group that supplied reactor fuel to the Japanese complex.
The Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque wrote one of the most respected codes. It models whole plants and serves as a main tool of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Washington agency that oversees the nation's reactors.
Areva and French agencies use a reactor code-named Cathare, a complicated acronym that also refers to a kind of goat's milk cheese.
On March 21, Stanford University presented an invitation-only panel discussion on the Japanese crisis that featured Alan Hansen, an executive vice president of Areva NC, a unit of the company focused on the nuclear fuel cycle.
"Clearly," he told the audience, "we're witnessing one of the greatest disasters in modern time."
Dr. Hansen, a nuclear engineer, presented a slide show that he said the company's German unit had prepared. That division, he added, "has been analyzing this accident in great detail."
The presentation gave a blow-by-blow of the accident's early hours and days. It said drops in cooling water exposed up to three-quarters of the reactor cores, and that peak temperatures hit 2,700 degrees Celsius, or more than 4,800 degrees Fahrenheit. That's hot enough to melt steel and zirconium - the main ingredient in the metallic outer shell of a fuel rod, known as the cladding.
"Zirconium in the cladding starts to burn," said the slide presentation. At the peak temperature, it continued, the core experienced "melting of uranium-zirconium eutectics," a reactor alloy.
A slide with a cutaway illustration of a reactor featured a glowing hot mass of melted fuel rods in the middle of the core and noted "release of fission products" during meltdown. The products are radioactive fragments of split atoms that can result in cancer and other serious illnesses.
Stanford, where Dr. Hansen is a visiting scholar, posted the slides online after the March presentation. At that time, each of the roughly 30 slides was marked with the Areva symbol or name, and each also gave the name of their author, Matthias Braun.
The posted document was later changed to remove all references to Areva, and Dr. Braun and Areva did not reply to questions about what simulation code or codes the company may have used to arrive at its analysis of the Fukushima disaster.
"We cannot comment on that," Jarret Adams, a spokesman for Areva, said of the slide presentation. The reason, he added, was "because it was not an officially released document."
A European atomic official monitoring the Fukushima crisis expressed sympathy for Japan's need to rely on forensics to grasp the full dimensions of the unfolding disaster.
"Clearly, there's no access to the core," the official said. "The Japanese are honestly blind."
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24) Protesters Scold Egypt's Military Council
"Painted banners, hung between palm trees on the square's south side, enumerated still more. They included the cancellation of a proposed law that would ban demonstrations, faster prosecution of those responsible for killing hundreds of protesters in January and February and trials for the Mubarak family on charges of plundering national wealth. ...'The army needs to be reminded that we are the ones who started this revolution, and that is why they are in power now,' said Omniya Bahgat, a 26-year-old demonstrator. 'We are tired of hearing that our demands will be met later.'"
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
April 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/world/middleeast/02egypt.html?ref=world
CAIRO - Thousands of demonstrators filled Tahrir Square on Friday for the largest protest in weeks, demanding that the ruling military council move faster to dismantle lingering aspects of the old regime.
Disenchantment with the military was the focus of many speeches and chants, and participants milling about were all too ready to grumble about the generals.
"The military council is inexplicably slow in responding to our demands," said Mohammad el-Qassas, a leader of the youth wing of the Muslim Brotherhood and a member of the coalition of those who organized the Jan. 25 revolution. "Protests and popular pressure must return, because they are only the real method of realizing the people's demands."
He reeled off a list of unaccomplished goals, including the arrest of leading members of the old government, serious trials for corrupt businessmen, the removal of university presidents appointed by former President Hosni Mubarak as well as his provincial governors.
Painted banners, hung between palm trees on the square's south side, enumerated still more. They included the cancellation of a proposed law that would ban demonstrations, faster prosecution of those responsible for killing hundreds of protesters in January and February and trials for the Mubarak family on charges of plundering national wealth.
"Mubarak is still fishing in Sharm, as if nothing happened," groused Hassan Ismail, 60, a housing manager. He was referring to the Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheik, where Mr. Mubarak and his family now live - after being barred from leaving the country.
Some noted that the military had taken steps through a national referendum to bring about legislative elections planned for September and a presidential vote two months later. But to many, those actions seem driven by what the military wants.
"People are still skeptical about how this revolution is moving forward - they want to remind the army and all forces that the revolution did not end yet," said Shaheer George, a 25-year-old independent activist.
The chants that erupted on the square included "The people want the fall of the field marshal," referring to Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the leader of the military council and another Mubarak confidant.
Among the most common complaints is that the military is utterly opaque, issuing edicts from behind closed doors. Despite its attempts to reach out by making announcements via Facebook and text messages, there is no sense of popular consultation.
The mood was a notable shift from two months ago, when the armed forces were being universally hailed as the country's saviors for refusing to fire on the crowds demanding President Mubarak's departure. A heavy military hand in breaking up demonstrations and credible allegations of torturing arrested protesters have also chipped away at the military's reputation.
"The army needs to be reminded that we are the ones who started this revolution, and that is why they are in power now," said Omniya Bahgat, a 26-year-old demonstrator. "We are tired of hearing that our demands will be met later."
The crowd on Friday appeared to number about 4,000, a far cry from the hundreds of thousands who gathered there to demand Mr. Mubarak's ouster. But it was too dense for the cars to penetrate, and the distinctive red berets of the military police were not in sight. People also turned out in droves in Alexandria and other large cities, activists said.
In part, the smaller crowds are attributable to the fact that the various political organizations no longer share the same simple goals like overthrowing the president, analysts said. Also there is a general debate about whether it is time to abandon the protests in the square as a method of change and wait for a nascent political system to grow stronger.
"Tahrir Square represents the possibility of getting people mobilized - hundreds of thousands of people," said Diaa Rashwan, a political analyst at the Ahram Center for Strategic and International Studies. "That still matters."
Lara El Gibaly and Liam Stack contributed reporting.
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25) Illinois Workers Find That a Death Penalty Ban Abolishes Their Jobs, Too
By A. G. SULZBERGER
April 2, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/us/03penalty.html?ref=us
The day after the death penalty was abolished in Illinois in early March, Wendi Liss received a call from one of her clients, who was facing trial for murder and the prospect of being executed if found guilty.
He was calling not to celebrate, but to express concern for her career.
"He said, 'I know this is what you guys wanted and I know this is good for us, but I don't want you to be out of a job,' " recounted Ms. Liss, one of dozens of employees at the Office of the State Appellate Defender who specialize in death penalty cases.
It was indeed a bittersweet moment - some of the very people who pushed and prayed most fervently to end capital punishment in the state found that the triumph came with a termination notice.
"We've done such good work that we've put ourselves out of work," joked Ms. Liss, 37, who spent a decade as a mitigation specialist assembling information to persuade juries to spare the lives of defendants.
The weeks since Gov. Patrick J. Quinn signed a law making Illinois the 16th state to ban the death penalty - while also commuting the sentences of those on death row to life without the possibility of parole - have been tumultuous for those laboring in this grim legal niche.
When the news came, after months of speculation surrounding the fate of the legislation, the mood in the office was one of joy and relief. The lawyers and investigators and secretaries, most of whom had clients on death row and others potentially headed there, gathered around a computer to watch the live news conference. After work, some went to bars to revel in the moment.
It was not until the next day that people at the office began openly discussing the uncertainty that lay ahead. Some said they would retire, others will stay on in new roles, and about three dozen will be laid off.
Cheryl Bormann, the head of the unit responsible for death penalty defendants at trial, which is being shut down in two weeks, said she might move to another state where she could continue working on death penalty cases.
"This is an opportunity for me to try to work to continue to abolish the death penalty in the United States," she said.
Ms. Liss said she planned to dip into her savings while looking for a new way to put her degrees in law and social work to use. "Now is a time for me to transition into something else," she said. "There is no logical next step."
And Charles Hoffman, who has represented defendants in capital cases for more than three decades, has already accepted an offer to stay at the office working on appeals.
"I'm not losing my job like many people here, so I'm a lot better off," he said. "But on the other hand there is my career, this is what I'm an expert in. I also have a sense of loss."
At the state appellate prosecutor's office, Patrick Delfino, the director, said he did not expect to have to lay anyone off despite losing the significant amount of revenue used for prosecutions in capital cases. He expressed sympathy for those defenders soon to be out of work. "It's an odd situation," he said.
And the defender's office was not the only organization that was affected.
At the Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, the mission expressed in the title seemed clearly accomplished.
Though the nonprofit organization will continue in some form to guard against efforts to reinstate the death penalty, some of which are under way, the staff has already been reduced to two from five and the board of directors is considering a proposal to switch exclusively to volunteers, said Jeremy Schroeder, the executive director.
"This was the whole goal," Mr. Schroeder said. "To bring Illinois to this point is really worth it."
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26) On Eve of Redefining Malcolm X, Biographer Dies
By LARRY ROHTER
April 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/books/malcolm-x-biographer-dies-on-eve-of-publication-of-redefining-work.html?ref=us
For two decades, the Columbia University professor Manning Marable focused on the task he considered his life's work: redefining the legacy of Malcolm X. Last fall he completed "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention," a 594-page biography described by the few scholars who have seen it as full of new and startling information and insights.
The book is scheduled to be published on Monday, and Mr. Marable had been looking forward to leading a vigorous public discussion of his ideas. But on Friday Mr. Marable, 60, died in a hospital in New York as a result of medical problems he thought he had overcome. Officials at Viking, which is publishing the book, said he was able to look at it before he died. But as his health wavered, they were scrambling to delay interviews, including an appearance on the "Today" show in which his findings would have finally been aired.
The book challenges both popular and scholarly portrayals of Malcolm X, the black nationalist leader, describing a man often subject to doubts about theology, politics and other matters, quite different from the figure of unswerving moral certitude that became an enduring symbol of African-American pride.
It is particularly critical of the celebrated "Autobiography of Malcolm X," now a staple of college reading lists, which was written with Alex Haley and which Mr. Marable described as "fictive." Drawing on diaries, private correspondence and surveillance records to a much greater extent than previous biographies, his book also suggests that the New York City Police Department and the F.B.I. had advance knowledge of Malcolm X's assassination but allowed it to happen and then deliberately bungled the investigation.
"This book gives us a richer, more profound, more complicated and more fully fleshed out Malcolm than we have ever had before," Michael Eric Dyson, the author of "Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X" and a professor of sociology at Georgetown University, said on Thursday. "He's done as thorough and exhaustive a job as has ever been done in piecing together the life and evolution of Malcolm X, rescuing him from both the hagiography of uncritical advocates and the demonization of undeterred critics."
Over the course of a 35- year academic career, Mr. Marable wrote and edited numerous books about African-American politics and history, and remained one of the nation's leading Marxist historians. But the biography is likely to be regarded as his magnum opus. He obtained about 6,000 pages of F.B.I. files on Malcolm X through the Freedom of Information Act, as well as records from the Central Intelligence Agency, State Department and New York district attorney's office. He also interviewed members of Malcolm X's inner circle and security team, as well as others who were present when Malcolm X was shot to death.
Poor health had slowed his progress, but Mr. Marable remained optimistic. "For a quarter-century I have had sarcoidosis, an illness that gradually destroyed my pulmonary functions," he wrote in the volume's acknowledgments. "In the last year in researching this book, I could not travel and I carried oxygen tanks in order to breathe. In July 2010, I received a double lung transplant, and following two months' hospitalization, managed a full recovery." (An interview with The New York Times was planned, but did not take place.)
The book's account of the assassination of Malcolm X, then 39, on Feb. 21, 1965, is likely to be its most incendiary claim. Mr. Marable contends that although Malcolm X embraced mainstream Islam at least two years before his death, law-enforcement authorities continued to see him as a dangerous rabble-rouser.
"They had the mentality of wanting an assassination," Gerry Fulcher, a former New York City police detective who participated in the surveillance of Malcolm X, told Mr. Marable for the book.
That is why "law-enforcement agencies acted with reticence when it came to intervening with Malcolm's fate," the book asserts. "Rather than investigate the threats on his life, they stood back."
In a statement, Paul Browne, the chief spokesman for the Police Department, said, "As much as conspiracy theorists may press to reach a sweeping, unsupported and untrue conclusion, the fact is the N.Y.P.D. was not complicit in Malcolm X's assassination, and it's gratuitously false to suggest as much."
Based on his new material, Mr. Marable concluded that only one of the three men convicted of killing Malcolm X was involved in the assassination, and that the other two were at home that day. The real assassination squad, he writes, had four other members, with connections to the rival Nation of Islam's Newark mosque - two of whom are still alive and have never been charged.
Since Malcolm X's death, the posthumous "Autobiography," along with "Malcolm X," Spike Lee's 1992 film drawn from it, has made a pop-culture hero out of the man who was born Malcolm Little. But the Marable book contradicts and complicates key elements of his life story.
Malcolm X himself contributed to many of the fictions, Mr. Marable argues, by exaggerating, glossing over or omitting important incidents in his life. These episodes include a criminal career far more modest than he claimed, an early homosexual relationship with a white businessman, his mother's confinement in a mental hospital for nearly 25 years and secret meetings with leaders of groups as divergent as the Ku Klux Klan and the Palestine Liberation Organization.
"Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention" shows, for instance, that at a time when Malcolm X claimed in the autobiography to have "devoted himself to increasingly violent crime" in New York, he was actually in Lansing, Mich., his hometown. Mr. Marable attributes the embroidery of "amateurish attempts at gangsterism" to Malcolm X's wish to demonstrate that the Nation of Islam's gospel of pride and self-respect had the power to redeem even the most depraved criminal.
"In many ways, the published book is more Haley's than its author's," Mr. Marable writes, noting that Haley, who died in 1992, was a liberal Republican and staunch integrationist who held "racial separation and religious extremism in contempt" but was "fascinated by the tortured tale of Malcolm's personal life."
The book maintains that several chapters of the autobiography explaining Malcolm X's evolving but still radical political vision were deleted before publication, perhaps out of Haley's desire to produce a work that "frames his subject firmly within mainstream civil rights respectability at the end of his life."
The Marable book also sheds new light on Malcolm X's departure from the Nation of Islam and the subsequent feud with the organization and its founder, Elijah Muhammad, preceding his assassination. That split is usually attributed to theological and political differences and the jealousy of Muhammad's children and inner circle.
But Mr. Marable also points to an episode of almost Oedipal sexual duplicity, in which Elijah Muhammad impregnated a woman Malcolm X had loved since he was a young man. "Malcolm must have felt a deep sense of betrayal," Mr. Marable writes.
Malcolm X's subsequent trip to Mecca in 1964 - a likely turning point in his religious evolution - was recounted in both the autobiography and the biopic. The Marable book, however, provides extensive new material about a second, 24-week trip to Africa and the Middle East later that year, drawing on Malcolm X's own travel diary and providing details on a campaign he waged to have the United States condemned for racism in a vote at the United Nations.
As part of that effort to open a foreign front for the civil rights struggle, which was closely monitored by American governmental agencies, Malcolm X met with numerous African heads of state as well as Chinese and Cuban diplomats. The Johnson administration was so upset, Mr. Marable writes, that Nicholas Katzenbach, the acting attorney general, considered prosecuting him for violating a law that bans United States citizens from negotiating with foreign states.
"These are new facts being unveiled, showing just how serious and sustained was Malcolm's interest in the global dimension" of the domestic civil rights struggle, Mr. Dyson said. "They really do suggest he was a subversive figure, trying to undermine the best interests of the U.S. government" in the name of a larger pan-African cause. "That is a fresh insight, one of many."
Mr. Marable's editor, Wendy Wolf, said Friday evening that "his every fiber was devoted to the completion of this book." She added: "It's heartbreaking he won't be here on publication day with us."
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27) Reactor Core Was Severely Damaged, U.S. Official Says
By DAVID E. SANGER and DAVID JOLLY
April 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/world/asia/02japan.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON - Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Friday that roughly 70 percent of the core of one reactor at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan had suffered severe damage.
His assessment of the damage to Reactor No. 1 was the most specific yet from an American official on how close the plant came to a full meltdown after it was hit by a severe earthquake and massive tsunami on March 11.
Japanese officials have spoken of "partial meltdown" at some of the stricken reactors. But they have been less than specific, especially on the question of how close No. 1 - the most badly damaged reactor - came to a full meltdown.
Mr. Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics, suggested that the worst moments of the crisis appeared to be receding, saying that the best information the United States had received from the Japanese authorities indicated that water was once again covering the cores of the stricken reactors and that pools of spent fuel atop the reactor buildings were "now under control."
In addition to the severe damage at Reactor No. 1, the Energy Department said that Reactor No. 2 had suffered a 33 percent meltdown. Mr. Chu cautioned that the figures were "more of a calculation" because radiation levels inside the plant had been too high for workers to get inside, and sensors were unreliable.
He called the nuclear crisis in Japan "a cascade of events" that led to multiple failures of backup systems. He told reporters at a breakfast that while officials were reviewing the accident to see if American nuclear plants needed significant changes, he did not want to overreact or rush into changes whose effects might not be fully understood.
"First and foremost, we are trying to make sure that fuller damage is not done," he said.
Questioned about the long-term effects of Japan's effort to "feed and bleed" the reactors - pouring in cooling water, then releasing it as steam into the atmosphere - he said there was an effort now under way to "minimize the release" of radioactivity into the air.
"They're trying to reach a steady state," he said, in which cooling could take place with minimal radioactive releases into the atmosphere.
Meanwhile, Japan and the United States combined efforts on Friday in a final search for thousands of people still missing after the earthquake and tsunami. The three-day effort will be the last big sweep before officials in Tokyo shift their focus to a daunting national reconstruction effort.
In the largest rescue mission ever carried out in Japan, 18,000 Japanese searchers have been joined by 7,000 American sailors and Marines, in an operation using 120 helicopters and reconnaissance aircraft and 65 ships to scour a coastal area from the northern tip of Iwate Prefecture to the southern end of Fukushima Prefecture.
"Until now," said Minako Sawamura, a spokeswoman for the Japanese military in Sendai, "the search has focused on finding survivors on land. But the tsunami carried many people with it when it washed back out to sea. So we're making an effort, including from the air, to find those people." The National Policy Agency still lists 16,464 as missing, and the number of dead at 11,620.
In a symbolic gesture to show the changing emphasis in Tokyo, Yukio Edano, the chief cabinet secretary, showed up for a news conference Friday morning dressed in normal business attire, the first time since the disaster struck that he had not appeared in one of the blue work jackets officials have worn to indicate the seriousness of the situation.
"We want to show that the government is looking to the future, considering the reconstruction plans," Mr. Edano said.
Japanese nonetheless remain concerned by the drama at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, 140 miles north of Tokyo. Since the quake and tsunami hit, the plant has sustained fires and explosions at several reactor buildings. Radiation leaks have included some into the sea near the plant. The operator of the plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company, said this week that four of the six reactors there would be scrapped.
Attempts to cool the reactors and spent-fuel pools, and efforts to answer the critical question of where the radiation leaks are coming from, are being hindered by highly radioactive water in turbine buildings attached to Reactors 1, 2, 3 and 4.
Junichi Matsumoto, a Tokyo Electric Power spokesman, said at an afternoon news conference that the pumping of the contaminated water was continuing successfully.
Tokyo Electric Power said late Thursday that the groundwater near the plant had also been contaminated. The company initially said the radiation was 10,000 times the normal level, then later questioned its own data. It did the same with a report that the level of iodine 131 in seawater near the plant had fallen below 2,000 times the statutory limit, compared with a level of more than 4,000 times the limit on Thursday.
On Friday, Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy head of the Japanese Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said at a news conference that the government had questions about the company's figures and had asked it to review the data.
Tokyo Electric officials said they would recalculate the figures after an error was discovered in a computer program. The company has several times issued radioactivity reports only to retract them after experts questioned their validity.
Questions about the credibility of the data have added to a sense that the authorities are uncertain about what is happening inside the reactors of the damaged power plant.
David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and David Jolly from Tokyo. Reporting was contributed by Makiko Inoue, Ken Ijichi, Moshe Komata and Chika Ohshima from Tokyo.
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28) Maine: Lawsuit Seeks to Restore Labor Mural
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/us/02brfs-LAWSUITSEEKS_BRF.html?ref=us
A lawsuit was filed in Federal District Court on Friday over Gov. Paul LePage's decision to remove a mural depicting the state's labor history from the Labor Department's building in Augusta. The lawsuit seeks to confirm the mural's location, ensure that it is adequately preserved and restore it to the lobby of the Labor Department. It was filed on behalf of an organized labor representative, a workplace safety official, three artists and a lawyer. The governor contends that the mural depicting labor history overlooks the contributions of entrepreneurs. His press secretary, Adrienne Bennett, said the mural was "safe and secure, awaiting transfer to a suitable venue for public display."
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29) Pennsylvania: Miners Rally for Union Rights
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/us/02brfs-MINERSRALLYF_BRF.html?ref=us
Nearly 3,000 union mine workers rallied Friday in Waynesburg, the first major gathering of union members outside states where lawmakers are battling over collective bargaining rights. "What people don't realize is when we're gone, the good wages are gone," said Regis Bozek, 57, a coal miner from Masontown. "My kids will never live as good as our generation did." About 3,000 members of the United Mine Workers of America, their families and other supporters from Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia attended the march.
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30) Decades After Ban, Columbia Opens Door to R.O.T.C. Return
By ALAN FEUER
April 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/nyregion/02rotc.html?ref=nyregion
More than four decades after Columbia University, the heart of the Vietnam-era student movement, banned R.O.T.C. from campus in a moment of 1960s antimilitary rage, the University Senate voted overwhelmingly on Friday to support efforts to bring the group back.
The vote - 51 to 17, with 1 abstention - came in support of a Senate resolution to "explore mutually beneficial relationships with the armed forces of the United States, including participation in the programs of the Reserve Officers Training Corps." It followed a series of sometimes venomous campus meetings and found its impetus in President Obama's signing three months ago of a bill to repeal the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy on homosexuality.
In the popular eye, and in history texts, Columbia's relations with the military have been more or less defined by the decision in 1969 to ban R.O.T.C. The move came at the end of a period of pitched student activism - the Spirit of '68, as it was known - that included student strikes and the occupation of Hamilton Hall, a main academic building. On Friday, the sense of generational turnabout in the Senate vote was not lost on the students of today.
"So often when people mention Columbia, the Spirit of '68 comes up - it always resonates," said Kenny Durrell, 21, a student senator who voted against the resolution. "Now we've contradicted that, or at least we've shown a willingness to re-examine how the military interacts with students and with bodies of higher education."
Six years ago, the Senate, which helps set university policy, voted 53 to 10 to deny campus access to the R.O.T.C. program. This time, the decisive issue was the move to repeal "don't ask, don't tell," which was widely seen as violating Columbia's policy of nondiscrimination.
Almost upon the announcement of the repeal law, a group of nine senators - four students and five faculty members - created the so-called Taskforce on Military Engagement, which held three town-hall-style meetings in February that occasionally turned bitter. At one of the meetings, a wounded military veteran was heckled briefly by the crowd.
"What you had was a couple of groups who don't normally talk to one another," said James H. Applegate, an astronomy professor and member of the task force. "There was a large presence of veterans, but also of students whose perspective was that the U.S. was an imperial, war-monger, colonial oppressor."
Some opponents of the resolution criticized the process preceding the vote as rushed and ineffectual.
Sean Udell, the senior class president, said a task force set up to debate a universitywide smoking ban, for instance, had taken almost two years to do its work, not the few months taken by the military engagement group. "Clearly there was a lot of pressure coming from the administration to get this done," Mr. Udell said. "To me, what this says is that there's an agenda here."
In early March, officials at Harvard announced that they would formally recognize the Naval R.O.T.C. 40 years after the program was banned. Since the signing of the "don't ask, don't tell" repeal law, other universities have publicly expressed a similar interest in bringing back the armed forces officers' group, which has units at more than 300 campuses nationwide.
For reasons both of history and institutional character, however, none has the importance of Columbia, which was home to a particularly vigorous chapter of Students for a Democratic Society - some of whose most militant members helped to form the left-wing radical group the Weathermen.
One former Weatherman, Brian Flanagan, who still lives in the Columbia area, was unrepentantly critical of the military and the R.O.T.C. in a brief interview on Friday.
"The U.S. armed forces are a blight on the planet," Mr. Flanagan said. "I don't support soldiers - I think they're war criminals. So obviously, I'm against R.O.T.C. coming back."
Before the Vietnam War, Columbia had a long and mostly cordial rapport with the armed forces. Dwight D. Eisenhower once served as its president, and crucial research for the Manhattan Project was conducted in Pupin Hall. Columbia provided more young officers during World War II than the Naval Academy did, said N. Rudy Rickner, a former Marine Corps pilot and the departing president of a campus veterans group.
"The conversation between the military and the university has traveled through an arc," said Mr. Rickner, a business school student. "Veterans and people who come here to study have not always had the kind of interaction they should have had for the last 30 years. Now they will."
At least, they might. It remains unclear if the armed forces will accept an invitation to return to campus. Officials from the Army and Navy could not be reached on Friday evening for comment.
At the very least, the Senate vote has "taken the military out of the realm of the taboo," said Ron Mazor, a member of the task force and a second-year law school student who voted for the resolution.
Professor Applegate said: "This is a culmination of something going back several years. Back in the '60s, students kicked R.O.T.C. off campus. But in 2011, students brought them back."
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31) Girl, 11, Sues the Police, Claiming She Was Handcuffed
By FERNANDA SANTOS
April 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/nyregion/02lawsuit.html?ref=nyregion
An 11-year-old Bronx girl has sued New York City, claiming that police officers overreacted last spring, handcuffing her after a fight with a third-grade classmate and denying her mother's request to be present when they interviewed her.
The suit claims that the fight did not warrant a police response: no one was injured, it says, and although a teacher was kicked while trying to break it up, the teacher later said she was not sure which of the girls involved was to blame. The suit also accuses the city of failing to properly train the officers to deal with episodes involving children.
The Police Department disputed most of the claims. In a statement, its chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said that last April 30, the girl, who was then 10, punched and kicked the other girl and pulled out her hair, leaving a bald spot. He also denied she was interrogated or kept away from her mother. His statement did not address whether she was handcuffed.
"She was taken from the school at 3:17 p.m. and brought to the station house at 3:30 p.m., where she was joined by her mother and released in her mother's custody at 4:58 p.m. - a total of one hour and 41 minutes," Mr. Browne said.
The suit claims the girl had been kept in the station house for at least three hours. It accuses the police officers of violating her constitutional protection against illegal searches and of abuse of government authority.
The suit asks for compensatory and punitive damages, but it does not specify an amount.
Anissa Chalmers, the principal at Public School 132 in Morrisania, where the fight occurred, declined to comment. The Department of Education referred calls to the city's Law Department. Connie Pankratz, a spokeswoman there, said, "We have not yet received the lawsuit."
School discipline has been a thorny issue for the Police Department, the Education Department and advocates for children, who say that students are too often arrested for infractions that could have been best handled by school officials.
In January, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg signed a law requiring periodic submission of reports to the City Council on disciplinary practices and police activity in the schools. The reports are to be broken down by students' race, sex, age and other criteria to help determine if there are any patterns of bias.
The suit, filed in United States District Court in Manhattan, claims that the girls had argued early in the school day. About 2 p.m., it says, one of them put her hands on the other's face, then each kicked and punched the other. The girl who is suing was taken to the principal's office, and from there, escorted from the building in handcuffs by three police officers, according to the suit.
In an interview, the girl's lawyer, Steven H. Goldman, said that since the incident, she has lost her trust in people in authority - including her mother, her teachers and the police. The suit says that in the weeks after the fight, she cried nearly every day at school and that she is still emotionally anguished and depressed because of what happened to her.
"How does one put a price tag on something like this?" Mr. Goldman said.
The girl is now in fourth grade at the same school. She was never charged with a crime. Mr. Browne, the police spokesman, said she was issued a juvenile report, which does not result in a Family Court appearance and will be expunged.
The lawsuit names the city, the Police Department and the three police officers who went to the school as defendants. The officers were not identified.
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32) Transocean Gives Safety Bonuses Despite Deaths
"Safety accounts for a quarter of the executives' total cash bonuses. The total bonus for CEO Steve Newman last year was $374,062. According to calculations by The Associated Press, the total value the company assigned to Newman's compensation package was $5.8 million. That figure includes an $850,000 base salary - a 34 percent increase from the prior year; perquisites of $622,057, which includes housing and vacation allowances, among other things; and the $374,062 bonus. Also included in the figure are stock options valued at $1.9 million and deferred shares valued at $2 million when those awards were granted in March 2010. Transocean's Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion on April 20 in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers and set off the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history." [UN-BE-LIEVE-ABLE!!!!...BW]
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 2, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/04/02/business/AP-US-Transocean-Executive-Compensation.html?src=busln
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Transocean Ltd. gave its top executives bonuses for achieving the "best year in safety performance in our company's history" - despite the explosion of its oil rig that killed 11 people and spilled 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
The company said in a regulatory filing that its most senior managers were given two thirds of their total possible safety bonus.
Transocean noted "the tragic loss of life" in the Gulf when the rig operated by BP PLC exploded last April. But it said the company still had an "exemplary" safety record because it met or exceeded certain internal safety targets concerning the frequency and severity of its accidents, according to the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday.
Safety accounts for a quarter of the executives' total cash bonuses. The total bonus for CEO Steve Newman last year was $374,062.
According to calculations by The Associated Press, the total value the company assigned to Newman's compensation package was $5.8 million.
That figure includes an $850,000 base salary - a 34 percent increase from the prior year; perquisites of $622,057, which includes housing and vacation allowances, among other things; and the $374,062 bonus. Also included in the figure are stock options valued at $1.9 million and deferred shares valued at $2 million when those awards were granted in March 2010.
Transocean's Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion on April 20 in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers and set off the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history.
A commission appointed by President Barack Obama earlier this year said the explosion was caused by a series of time and money-saving decisions by Transocean, BP and oil services company Halliburton Inc. that created an unacceptable amount of risk.
In the regulatory filing, the company said its bonuses were appropriate as a way to recognize its executives' efforts in "significantly improving the company's safety record" and implementing a new internal planning system.
Those efforts have "enabled the company to maintain its financial flexibility during a challenging period, while, at the same time, positioning the company for sustained growth in the future."
The Associated Press formula calculates an executive's total compensation during the last fiscal year by adding salary, bonuses, perks, above-market interest the company pays on deferred compensation and the estimated value of stock and stock options awarded during the year. The AP formula does not count changes in the present value of pension benefits. That makes the AP total slightly different in most cases from the total reported by companies to the SEC.
The value that a company assigned to an executive's stock and option awards for 2010 was the present value of what the company expected the awards to be worth to the executive over time. Companies use one of several formulas to calculate that value. However, the number is just an estimate, and what an executive ultimately receives will depend on the performance of the company's stock in the years after the awards are granted. Most stock compensation programs require an executive to wait a specified amount of time to receive shares or exercise options.
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