Santa Should Be the Only One with Unlimited Spying Powers
We now know that this holiday season, our private communications aren't as private as we thought. While we're calling, texting, emailing, and visiting our friends and loved ones, the NSA is tuning in and collecting massive amounts of data on millions of Americans.
Thanks to the revelations from Edward Snowden, each week we get new proof that the NSA has vastly overstepped its authority.
The good news is that the tide is turning in the fight to rein in all this runaway surveillance. Right now, there is legislation pending in the House and Senate that would go a long way to stopping the worst of the NSA's excesses. So we need to turn up the pressure on Congress, which blindly gave the NSA too much spying power in the first place.
If we're going to get past this last hurdle, we need to stand together and send our representatives in Washington a crystal clear message: Americans stand opposed to this blatant abuse of power.
Sign the petition and let's push Congress to get in gear to end the secret surveillance state now.
https://www.aclu.org/secure/stopnsa?sid=1804544
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Urgent Update on Lynne Stewart
“HELP BRING ME HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS” a life and death Appeal from renowned people’s attorney Lynne Stewart.
“Yet they refuse to act. While this is entirely within the range of their politics and their cruelty to hold political prisoners until we have days to live before releasing us – witness Herman Wallace of Angola and Marilyn Buck – we are fighting not to permit this and call for a BIG push.”
Lynne Stewart, FMC Carswell
Take Action between now and the New Year. Telephone and send emails or other messages to Federal Bureau of Prisons Director Charles E. Samuels, Jr. and Attorney General Eric Holder.
CHARLES E. SAMUELS, Jr., Director Federal Bureau of Prisons
(202) 307-3250 or 3062; info@bop.gov
ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER, U.S. Department of Justice
(202) 353-1555; AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
Contact U.S. Embassies and Consulates in nations throughout the world
LET US CREATE A TIDAL WAVE OF EFFORT INTERNATIONALLY. Together, we can prevent the bureaucratic murder of Lynne Stewart.
Notes:
In a new 237-page report entitled “A Living Death,” the American Civil Liberties Union documents unconstitutional practices permeating federal and state prisons in the United States.
Focused on life imprisonment without parole for minor offenses, the ACLU details conditions of 3,278 individual prisoners whose denial of release is deemed “a flagrant violation of the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment” occurring on an increasing scale.
The ACLU labels the deliberate stonewalling as “willful,” a touchstone of Federal Bureau of Prisons and Department of Justice arrogance.
These
conclusions corroborate the findings of Human Rights Watch in 2012:
“The Answer is ‘No’: Too Little Compassionate Release in U.S. Prisons.”
The Report is definitive in exposing arbitrary and illegal conduct that infuses every facet of the treatment accorded Lynne Stewart:
“…the Bureau has usurped the role of the courts. In fact, it is fair to say the jailers are acting as judges. Congress intended the sentencing judge, not the BOP to determine whether a prisoner should receive a sentence reduction.”
Lynne Stewart’s medical findings show less than twelve months to live as stipulated by her oncologist at FMC Carswell.
The Federal Bureau Prisons has failed to file the legally required motion, declaring instead that the matter lies “with the Department of Justice.”
The Report is definitive in exposing arbitrary and illegal conduct that infuses every facet of the treatment accorded Lynne Stewart:
“…the Bureau has usurped the role of the courts. In fact, it is fair to say the jailers are acting as judges. Congress intended the sentencing judge, not the BOP to determine whether a prisoner should receive a sentence reduction.”
Lynne Stewart’s medical findings show less than twelve months to live as stipulated by her oncologist at FMC Carswell.
The Federal Bureau Prisons has failed to file the legally required motion, declaring instead that the matter lies “with the Department of Justice.”
Write to Lynne Stewart at:
Lynne Stewart #53504-054
Unit 2N, Federal Medical Center, Carswell
P.O. Box 27137
Fort Worth, TX 76127
Write to Lynne Stewart Defense Committee at:
Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
1070 Dean Street
Brooklyn, New York 11216
For further information: 718-789-0558
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PVT Chelsea Manning tells TIME Magazine what she's thankful for this year
For their special Thanksgiving edition, TIME Magazine asked WikiLeaks whistleblower PVT Chelsea Manning what she's thankful for this year. Her answer was published alongside those from Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, and 14 other well-known public figures. Her response, while demonstrating wisdom beyond her years, is one that many people who work for the betterment of society will appreciate:
"I’m usually hesitant to celebrate Thanksgiving Day. After all, the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony systematically terrorized and slaughtered the very same Pequot tribe that assisted the first English refugees to arrive at Plymouth Rock. So, perhaps ironically, I’m thankful that I know that, and I’m also thankful that there are people who seek out, and usually find, such truths. I’m thankful for people who, even surrounded by millions of Americans eating turkey during regularly scheduled commercial breaks in the Green Bay and Detroit football game; who, despite having been taught, often as early as five and six years old, that the “helpful natives” selflessly assisted the “poor helpless Pilgrims” and lived happily ever after, dare to ask probing, even dangerous, questions.
Such people are often nameless and humble, yet no less courageous. Whether carpenters of welders; retail clerks or bank managers; artists or lawyers, they dare to ask tough questions, and seek out the truth, even when the answers they find might not be easy to live with.
I’m also grateful for having social and human justice pioneers who lead through action, and by example, as opposed to directing or commanding other people to take action. Often, the achievements of such people transcend political, cultural, and generational boundaries. Unfortunately, such remarkable people often risk their reputations, their livelihood, and, all too often, even their lives.
Malcolm X began to openly embrace the idea, after an awakening during his travels to the Middle East and Africa, of an international and unifying effort to achieve equality, and was murdered after a tough, yearlong defection from the Nation of Islam. Martin Luther King Jr., after choosing to embrace the struggles of striking sanitation workers in Memphis over lobbying in Washington, D.C., was murdered by an escaped convict seeking fame and respect from white Southerners. Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician in the U.S., was murdered by a jealous former colleague. These are only examples; I wouldn’t dare to make a claim that they represent an exhaustive list of remarkable pioneers of social justice and equality—certainly many if not the vast majority are unsung and, sadly, forgotten.
So, this year, and every year, I’m thankful for such people, and I’m thankful that one day—perhaps not tomorrow—because of the accomplishments of such truth-seekers and human rights pioneers, we can live together on this tiny “pale blue dot” of a planet and stop looking inward, at each other, but rather outward, into the space beyond this planet and the future of all of humanity.
For those who don't already know, PVT Chelsea Manning grew up in a conservative community in the Midwest. She suffered a dysfunctional home life, and she was bullied at school for being gay. She was even homeless for a period, working two part-time jobs to get by. She dreamed of one day going to college, and for this reason joined the Army at the age of 19. A few years later she realized she was not gay, but transgender; since she was in the Army, her only option was to hide her identity while working 14 hour days in a war zone. Through all these obstacles, she has remained committed to educating herself, asking the hard questions, and taking risks in the name of helping other people.
This year, we give thanks for PVT Manning's humanist idealism, her bravery, and her unyielding belief that through the work of dedicated individuals our society can and will be made more just. It is not only her actions, but also her unique individualism, that has inspired thousands of people around the world to action. We hope you'll join us in showing thanks for Chelsea by making a gift to ensure her legal appeals process is fully funded. 35 years is far too harsh a punishment for showing the public the truth.
Donate to Support the Legal Appeals
So far we've raised just over $16,000 of the $40,000 needed. Please help us meet our goal by Chelsea's birthday on December 17th.
Pvt. Chelsea Manning's fourth birthday in prison
“When
I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for
my country and a sense of duty to others.”-Pvt. Manning
|
On December 17, Private Chelsea Manning will turn 26.
It will be the fourth birthday this young Army whistle-blower has spent in prison.
Thanks to this brave soldier’s heroic actions, the public learned the following startling truths:
- Donald Rumsfeld and General Petraeus helped support torture in Iraq.
- Deliberate civilian killings by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan went unpunished.
- Thousands of civilian casualties were never acknowledged publicly.
- Most Guantanamo detainees were innocent.
“When I
chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my
country and a sense of duty to others.”-Pvt. Manning
See even more of What WikiLeaks revealed
While
some of these documents may demonstrate how much work lies ahead in
terms of securing international peace and justice, their release changed
the world for the better.
Private Manning’s actions showed people everywhere how citizens can use
the Internet to hold their governments accountable.
In Chelsea’s request for pardon from President Obama, she wrote:
“As the late Howard Zinn once said, ‘There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.’
Private Manning’s brave actions have set an example for us all.
Here are three important ways you can support Chelsea on her birthday:
1. Make a gift to the Private Manning Defense Fund. We are currently in the middle of a fund drive to raise $40,000 for her legal appeals and personal needs, including visits from family.
2. Send her a birthday message at:
PVT Bradley E Manning89289
1300 N Warehouse Rd
Ft Leavenworth KS 66027-2304
USA
Please note that regular letter paper must be used, as cardstock will be turned away.
However, you can easily print out your own card by searching for “free birthday templates” online.
3. Hold a
party with friends and neighbors to raise money for Chelsea’s legal
defense.
Whether a dinner party, cocktail party or concert, bringing people
together for an evening of education and socializing is a great way to
kindle some social consciousness and holiday spirit.
On each person's way out the door, you can ask them to add a personal
message on a joint birthday letter to Chelsea.
If you want your party to be public, send information about your event
to owen@bradleymanning.org
Help us continue to cover 100%
of Pvt. Manning's legal fees! Donate today.
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38591
COURAGE TO RESIST
http://couragetoresist.org
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610
510-488-3559
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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Table of Contents:
A. ARTICLES IN FULL
B. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
D. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.
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A. ARTICLES IN FULL
(Unless otherwise noted)
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1)
N.S.A. Dragnet Included Allies, Aid Groups and Business Elite
By
JAMES GLANZ
and ANDREW W.
LEHREN
December
20, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/21/world/nsa-dragnet-included-allies-aid-groups-and-business-elite.html?hp
Secret
documents reveal more than 1,000 targets of American and British surveillance
in recent years, including the office of an Israeli prime minister, heads of
international aid organizations, foreign energy companies and a European Union
official involved in antitrust battles with American technology businesses.
While
the names of some political and diplomatic leaders have previously emerged as
targets, the newly disclosed intelligence documents provide a much fuller
portrait of the spies’ sweeping interests in more than 60 countries.
Britain’s
General Communications Headquarters, working closely with the National Security
Agency, monitored the communications of senior European Union officials,
foreign leaders including African heads of state and sometimes their family
members, directors of United Nations and other relief programs, and officials
overseeing oil and finance ministries, according to the documents. In addition
to Israel, some targets involve close allies like France and Germany, where tensions have already erupted over recent
revelations about spying by the N.S.A.
Details
of the surveillance are described in documents from the N.S.A. and Britain’s
eavesdropping agency, known as GCHQ, dating from 2008 to 2011. The target lists
appear in a set of GCHQ reports that sometimes identify which agency requested
the surveillance, but more often do not. The documents were leaked by the
former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden and shared by The New York Times,
The Guardian and Der Spiegel.
The
reports are spare, technical bulletins produced as the spies, typically working
out of British intelligence sites, systematically tapped one international
communications link after another, focusing especially on satellite
transmissions. The value of each link is gauged, in part, by the number of
surveillance targets found to be using it for emails, text messages or phone
calls. More than 1,000 targets, which also include suspected terrorists or
militants, are in the reports.
It
is unclear what the eavesdroppers gleaned. The documents include a few
fragmentary transcripts of conversations and messages, but otherwise contain
only hints that further information was available elsewhere, possibly in a
larger database.
Some
of the surveillance relates to issues examined by an advisory panel in
Washington, which on Wednesday recommended stricter limits on the N.S.A.,
including restrictions on spying on foreign leaders, particularly allies. In a
response to questions by The Times, the N.S.A. said that it was reviewing how
it coordinates with allies on spying. A GCHQ spokesman said that its policy was
not to comment on intelligence matters, but that the agency “takes its
obligations under the law very seriously.”
The
reports show that spies monitored the email traffic of several Israeli
officials, including one target identified as “Israeli prime minister,”
followed by an email address. The prime minister at the time of the
interception, in January 2009, was Ehud Olmert. The following month, spies
intercepted the email traffic of the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak,
according to another report. Two Israeli embassies also appear on the target
lists.
Mr.
Olmert confirmed on Friday that the email address was used for correspondence
with his office, which he said staff members often handled. He added that it
was unlikely that any secrets could have been compromised.
“This
was an unimpressive target,” Mr. Olmert said. He noted, for example, that his
most sensitive discussions with President George W. Bush took place in private.
“I would be surprised if there was any attempt by American intelligence in
Israel to listen to the prime minister’s lines,” he said.
Still,
despite the close ties between the United States and Israel, the record of
mutual spying is long: Israeli spies, including Jonathan Jay Pollard, who was
sentenced in 1987 to life in prison for passing intelligence information to
Israel, have often operated in the United States, and the United States has
often turned the capabilities of the N.S.A. against Israel.
The
interception of Mr. Olmert’s email occurred while he was dealing with fallout
from Israel’s military response to rocket attacks
from Gaza, but also at a particularly tense time in relations with the United
States. The two countries were simultaneously at odds on Israeli preparations
to attack Iran’s nuclear program and cooperating on the design and launching of
a wave of cyberattacks on Iran’s major nuclear enrichment facility.
A
year before the interception of Mr. Olmert’s email, the documents listed
another target, the Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
an internationally recognized center for research in atomic and nuclear
physics.
Also
appearing on the surveillance lists is JoaquÃn Almunia, vice president of the
European Commission, which, among other powers, has oversight of antitrust
issues in Europe. The commission has broad authority over local and foreign
companies, and has punished a number of American companies, including Microsoft
and Intel, with heavy fines for hampering fair competition. The reports say
that spies intercepted Mr. Almunia’s communications in 2008 and 2009.
Mr.
Almunia, a Spaniard, assumed direct authority over the commission’s antitrust
office in 2010. He has been involved in a three-year standoff with Google over how the
company runs its search engine. Competitors of the online giant had complained
that it was prioritizing its own search results and using content like travel
reviews and ratings from other websites without permission. While pushing for a
settlement with Google, Mr. Almunia has warned that the company could face
large fines if it does not cooperate.
The
surveillance reports do not specify whether the interceptions of Mr. Almunia’s
communications were requested by the N.S.A. or British spies. Nor do the
reports make clear whether he was a longstanding surveillance target or swept
up as part of a fleeting operation. Contacted by The New York Times, Mr.
Almunia said he was “strongly upset” about the spying.
In
a statement, the N.S.A. denied that it had ever carried out espionage to
benefit American businesses.
“We
do not use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of
foreign companies on behalf of — or give intelligence we collect to — U.S.
companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their
bottom line,” said Vanee Vines, an N.S.A. spokeswoman.
But
she added that some economic spying was justified by national security needs.
“The intelligence community’s efforts to understand economic systems and
policies, and monitor anomalous economic activities, are critical to providing
policy makers with the information they need to make informed decisions that
are in the best interest of our national security,” Ms. Vines said.
At
the request of the GCHQ, The Times agreed to withhold some details from the
documents because of security concerns.
The
surveillance reports show American and British spies’ deep appetite for
information. The French companies Total, the oil and gas giant, and Thales, an
electronics, logistics and transportation outfit, appear as targets, as do a
French ambassador, an “Estonian Skype security team” and the German Embassy in
Rwanda.
Germany
is especially sensitive about American spying since reports emerged that the
agency listened to Prime Minister Angela Merkel’s cellphone calls.
Negotiations for a proposed agreement between Germany and the United States on
spying rules have recently stalled for several reasons, including the refusal
of the United States to guarantee that it would never spy on German officials
other than the prime minister.
Multiple
United Nations missions in Geneva are listed as targets, including the United
Nations Children’s Fund, or Unicef, and the United Nations Institute for
Disarmament Research. So is Médecins du Monde, a medical relief
organization that goes into war-ravaged areas. Leigh Daynes, an executive
director of the organization in Britain, responded to news about the
surveillance by saying: “There is absolutely no reason for our operations to be
secretly monitored.”
More
obvious intelligence targets are also listed, though in smaller numbers,
including people identified as “Israeli grey arms dealer,” “Taleban ministry of
refugee affairs” and “various entities in Beijing.” Some of those included are
described as possible members of Al Qaeda, and as suspected extremists or
jihadists.
While
few if any American citizens appear to be named in the documents, they make
clear that some of the intercepted communications either began or ended in the
United States and that N.S.A. facilities carried out interceptions around the
world in collaboration with their British partners. Some of the interceptions
appear to have been made at the Sugar Grove, Va., listening post run by the
N.S.A. and code-named Timberline, and some are explicitly tied to N.S.A. target
lists in the reports.
Many
of the reports, written by British teams specializing in Sigint, shorthand for
“signals intelligence,” are called “Bude Sigint Development Reports,” referring
to a British spy campus on the Cornwall coast. The reports often reveal which
countries were the endpoints for the intercepted communications, and
information on which satellite was carrying the traffic.
Strengthening
the likelihood that full transcripts were taken during the intercepts is the
case of Mohamed Ibn Chambas, an official of the Economic Community of West
African States, known as Ecowas, a regional initiative of 15 countries that
promotes economic and industrial activity. Whether intentionally or through
some oversight, when Mr. Chambas’s communications were intercepted in August
2009, dozens of his complete text messages were copied into one of the reports.
Referred
to in the transcripts as “Dr. Chambers,” he seems to have been monitored during
an especially humdrum day or two of travel. “Am glad yr day was satisfying,”
Mr. Chambas texted one acquaintance. “I spent my whole day travelling... Had to
go from Abidjan to Accra to catch a flt to Monrovia... The usual saga of intra
afr.”
Later
he recommended a book, “A Colonial History of Northern Ghana,” to the same
person. “Interesting and informative,” Mr. Chambas texted. The high point of
his day was receiving an award in Liberia, but soon he was busy working out
logistics for future appointments.
“Where
is the conference pl? Didnt get the invt,” he texted another contact. He
discussed further details before adding, perhaps wistfully, given his grinding
travel schedule: “Have a restful Sunday.”
Katrin
Bennhold contributed reporting from London, David E. Sanger from Washington and
Ethan Bronner from New York.
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2)
Tackling a Racial Gap in Breast Cancer Survival
December
20, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/20/health/tackling-a-racial-gap-in-breast-cancer-survival.html?hp
MEMPHIS
— After her doctor told her two months ago that she had breast cancer, Debrah
Reid, a 58-year-old dance teacher, drove straight to a funeral home. She began
planning a burial with the funeral director and his wife, even requesting a
pink coffin.
Sensing
something was amiss, the funeral director, Edmund Ford, paused. “Who is this
for?” he asked. Ms. Reid replied quietly, “It’s for me.”
Aghast,
Mr. Ford’s wife, Myrna, quickly put a stop to the purchase. “Get on out of
here,” she said, urging Ms. Reid to return to her doctor and seek treatment.
Despondent, Ms. Reid instead headed to her church to talk to her pastor.
“I
was just going to sit down and die,” she says.
Like
many other African-American women in Memphis and around the country, Ms. Reid
learned about her breast cancer after it had already reached an advanced stage,
making it difficult to treat and reducing her odds of survival. Her story
reflects one of the most troubling disparities in American health care. Despite
20 years of pink ribbon awareness campaigns and numerous advances in medical
treatment that have sharply improved survival rates for women with breast
cancer in the United States, the vast majority of those gains have largely
bypassed black women.
The
cancer divide between black women and white women
in the United States is as entrenched as it is startling. In the 1980s, breast
cancer survival rates for the two were nearly identical. But since 1991, as
improvements in screening and treatment came into use, the gap has widened,
with no signs of abating. Although breast cancer is diagnosed in far more white
women, black women are far more likely to die of the disease.
And
Memphis is the deadliest major American city for African-American women with
breast cancer. Black women with the disease here are more than twice as likely
to die of it than white women.
“The
big change in the 1990s was advances in care that were widely available in
early detection and treatment,” said Steven Whitman, director of the Sinai
Urban Health Institute in Chicago. “White women gained access to those
advances, and black women didn’t.”
Over
all, black women with a breast cancer diagnosis will die three years sooner
than their white counterparts. While nearly 70 percent of white women live at
least five years after diagnosis, only 56 percent of black women do. And some
research suggests that institutions providing mammograms mainly to black
patients miss as many as half of breast cancers compared with the expected
detection rates at academic hospitals.
The
gap in cancer survival cannot be explained away by biological differences in
cancer between blacks and whites, researchers say. While African-American women
are at greater risk of a more aggressive form of cancer known as triple
negative, those cancers account for only about 10 percent of diagnoses.
Researchers
from the Sinai Institute last year analyzed breast cancer cases in the
country’s 25 largest cities and found that African-American women with breast
cancer were, on average, 40 percent more likely to die of their disease than
white women. In the United States, the disparity in breast cancer survival
translates to about 1,700 additional deaths each year — or about five more
black women dying every day.
Many
Health Issues
News
that Memphis has the widest survival gap between black and white hit the
medical community here hard. When the breast cancer disparity study was
published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology last year, Edward Rafalski was one
of the first here to read it. He is senior vice president for strategic
planning at Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, which operates eight hospitals in
the Memphis area.
As
it happened, Dr. Rafalski had previously worked at Mount Sinai Hospital in
Chicago and knew the study’s lead author, Dr. Whitman of the Sinai Institute.
As local headlines declared the city’s troubling record, Dr. Rafalski invited
Dr. Whitman to the city. Memphis, population 655,000, is more than two-thirds
black, and more than a quarter of its residents are poor.
“When
you look at any epidemiological study, Memphis is often the epicenter of
virtually any disease, be it diabetes, heart failure — there are a lot of
health issues here,” Dr. Rafalski said. “But for breast cancer to be as bad as
it is — that’s why everyone came to the table and said, ‘We have to do
something.’ ”
Dr.
Whitman flew to Memphis for a strategy session. The study’s co-author, Marc
Hurlbert of the Avon Breast Cancer Crusade, which funded the research, joined
the conference by phone.
The
solution, everyone agreed, would not be simple. Doctors and health care
researchers say the reasons behind the black-white cancer divide are complex.
Economic disparities that disproportionately affect African-Americans explain
some of it. Years of racial discrimination and distrust of the medical
establishment dating back to the Tuskegee, Ala., syphilis experiments on black
men in the 1930s continue to influence health decisions made by
African-American families in the South.
Lack
of health insurance among low-income and self-employed women was also cited as
an obstacle to timely care, a problem that may be eased if some of them gain
insurance through the Affordable Care Act.
Black
women often arrive at the hospital with cancers so advanced, they rival the
late-stage disease that doctors see among women in developing nations. A study
based on Medicare records published in July in JAMA, the Journal of the
American Medical Association, found that 20 percent of African-American women
with breast cancer did not learn of their disease until it had advanced to
Stage 3 or 4. By comparison, only 11 percent of white women learn at late
stages.
Doctors
in Memphis and in cities around the country tell horrific stories of poor and
uneducated patients, black and white, who arrive at the clinics with festering
tumors or a breast that has been all but consumed by a growing cancer.
With
a grant from the Avon Breast Cancer Foundation, researchers at the Methodist
system analyzed their records of breast cancer patients and discovered that
even in what is widely viewed as the top hospital system in the region, black
patients took on average about a month longer to begin treatment after
diagnosis compared with white patients.
“A
large percentage of our African-American population is also poor, and poor
people don’t have the luxury of being sick,” said Dr. Kurt Tauer, an oncologist
with the West Cancer Clinic, which is affiliated with the Methodist system.
“They have to take off work, find someone to give them a ride.”
But
the larger issue, hospital officials say, is that many black women in Memphis
do not seek health care at all. They do not undergo mammograms for screening or
see a doctor when the earliest signs of breast cancer develop. Even among women
with Medicare coverage, black women were significantly less likely than white
women to have seen a primary care doctor in the six to 18 months before
diagnosis, and also had far lower rates of breast cancer screening — 23.5
percent in that period, compared with 35.7 percent of white women, the JAMA
study found.
The
challenge is to get women screened and treated in good time. But how, the
Methodist officials asked, do you reach African-American women who have felt
excluded from the health care system for most of their lives?
Spreading
the Word
It
is often said that there is a church on every street corner in Memphis. In a
half-mile stretch of Elvis Presley Boulevard, there are six: the Faith Temple
Holiness Church, the Holmes Road Church of Christ, the CME Temple Christian
Methodist Church, the Lily of the Valley Church of God in Christ, Our Savior
Lutheran Church and the Holy Spring Baptist Church. Methodist hospital system
officials estimate there are 3,000 to 4,000 churches in the area they serve.
“Our
patients are in churches on Sunday,” said the Rev. Bobby Baker, director of
faith and community partnerships at Methodist. “If we want to be in their lives
when they’re not in our hospital, the church is where to find them.”
In
2005, the hospital system formed the Congregational Health Network. It began
with 12 area churches and has grown to more than 500 congregations. Through the
network, the hospitals have registered 18,000 people and given them messages
promoting prevention, screening and health education. An analysis of hospital
records shows that patients in the network fare better, staying out of the
hospital four months longer than non-network patients with a similar diagnosis.
Dr.
Rafalski and his Methodist colleagues realized that this network would be the
best way to reach out to black women on breast cancer issues. With a grant from
the Susan G. Komen Foundation, they hired Carole Dickens to work with pastors
and congregants. During Sunday services, she spreads the word about early
screening, gives women her cellphone number and follows up with those who share
their contact information. She helps them gain access to public health programs
and offers taxi vouchers so they can get to medical appointments.
Many
of the women admit to never getting a mammogram and avoiding doctors. Sometimes,
it is because they do not have health insurance, so Ms. Dickens refers them to
free mammography programs in the area. Others admit they are stopped by fear.
“They
have all kinds of reasons for not doing it,” Ms. Dickens said.
She
said the women have told her: “I don’t want anybody cutting on me.”
“My
mama died, and my aunt died and they suffered so much. I didn’t want to go
through that.”
“If
I’ve got it, I’ve got it. I’m going to die from something.”
A
Daunting Task
Mary
Singleton, 57, a Memphis print shop owner, noticed a lump in her breast in
July. Because she did not have health insurance, she did not get the lump
checked, telling herself that she did not need to worry because she did not
have a family history of breast cancer.
One
afternoon this fall, the Boulevard Church of Christ hosted a health fair,
giving away pink bags that included pink pens, a key chain and a brochure from
the American Cancer Society. It prompted Ms. Singleton to seek a free mammogram
through the local health department. She learned she had Stage 4 cancer in
October.
“It
takes a while for the brain to process,” she said. “There’s a difference
between what you heard about cancer, and now somebody is telling you that it’s
your story.”
After
years without health insurance, she was told that her cancer treatment would be
covered by Tenncare, the state’s Medicaid program.
“I
had to get cancer to get health insurance,” Ms. Singleton said, a tear rolling
down her cheek. “I’ve been one of those people waiting for Obamacare, waiting
for health insurance. And this is how I finally get it.”
After
her diagnosis, her son George moved home from Iowa to help her run her printing
business, which she had just opened about a month before learning of her
illness. The business, named STBS, for Sisters Together Building Success, is in
an office she leased from her church, just off Elvis Presley Boulevard.
On
a recent day, she stepped out of her shop to watch a holiday parade move slowly
past. She had printed some of the signs being carried in the parade, and she
wanted to see them go by. A dance group called the Sassie Seniors strutted by
in red Santa jackets. The leader, in a shiny red leotard and boots with faux
leopard fur, was none other than Ms. Reid, the dance instructor who began
planning her funeral after learning she had breast cancer.
After
the funeral home refused her business, Ms. Reid sought counseling from the Rev.
Robert J. Matthews of the New Hope Baptist Church of Memphis. He is a 12-year
survivor of colon cancer, and their talk was transformative for her.
“I’m
not a weak person,” she said. “I decided to be a messenger.”
Ms.
Reid, a former member of the Grizzlies Grannies, a dance team for the Memphis
Grizzlies, the city’s professional basketball team, said she had avoided a
mammogram for eight years because she found them so unpleasant. Last month, she
called a meeting of the Sassie Seniors in the dressing room before a
performance.
“I
revealed my breast so they could see it,” she said. “It was swollen. I made
them touch it. It shocked them. Out of 21 people with me that night, 15 have
already had mammograms, and others have them scheduled.”
While
Ms. Reid, who has Stage 3 cancer, hopes her story will help other women, she
knows that education is not enough. “A lot of us don’t have insurance,” she
said. “And without insurance, a lot of stuff goes undetected.”
Ms.
Reid, like Ms. Singleton, is undergoing treatment at the West Cancer Clinic.
Doctors
say it will be months or even years before they know if their efforts to reach
out to African-American women will lead to more early diagnoses and begin to
narrow the black-and-white divide for breast cancer.
“It’s
such a daunting task,” said Dr. Rafalski of Methodist. “It’s almost easier to
throw up your hands, but we can’t. We have to fix it, one little step at a
time.”
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3)
Obama Commutes Sentences for 8 in Crack Cocaine Cases
December
19, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/20/us/obama-commuting-sentences-in-crack-cocaine-cases.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON
— President Obama, expanding his push to curtail severe penalties in drug
cases, on Thursday commuted the sentences of eight federal inmates who were convicted
of crack cocaine offenses. Each inmate has been imprisoned
for at least 15 years, and six were sentenced to life in prison.
It
was the first time retroactive relief was provided to a group of inmates who
would most likely have received significantly shorter terms if they had been
sentenced under current drug laws, sentencing rules and charging policies. Most
will be released in 120 days. The commutations opened a major new front in the
administration’s efforts to curb soaring taxpayer spending on prisons and to
help correct what it has portrayed as inequality in the justice system.
In
a statement, Mr. Obama said that each of the eight
men and women had been sentenced under what is now recognized as an “unfair
system,” including a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder
cocaine offenses that was significantly reduced by the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010.
“If
they had been sentenced under the current law, many of them would have already
served their time and paid their debt to society,” Mr. Obama said. “Instead,
because of a disparity in the law that is now recognized as unjust, they remain
in prison, separated from their families and their communities, at a cost of
millions of taxpayer dollars each year.”
The
commutations have come during a pendulum swing away from tough mandatory
minimum sentencing laws enacted a generation ago amid the crack epidemic. The
policies fueled an 800 percent increase in the number of prisoners in the
United States. They also carried a racial charge: Offenses involving crack,
which was disproportionately prevalent in impoverished black communities,
carried far more severe penalties than those for powder cocaine, favored by
affluent white users.
According
to Families Against
Mandatory Minimums, about 8,800 federal inmates are serving time for
crack offenses committed before Congress reduced mandatory minimum sentences,
going forward, in the 2010 law.
The
commutation recipients included Clarence Aaron of Mobile, Ala., who was
sentenced to three life terms in prison for his role in a 1993 drug deal, when
he was 22. Mr. Aaron’s case has been taken up by civil rights groups and congressional
critics of severe sentencing for nonviolent drug offenses, and has received significant news media attention.
Margaret
Love, his lawyer, said she received a call informing her of the decision on
Thursday morning and called her client, who along with his family was “very
grateful.”
“He
was absolutely overcome,” Ms. Love said. “Actually, I was, too. He was in tears.
This has been a long haul for him, 20 years. He just was speechless, and it’s
very exciting.”
Rights
groups like the American
Civil Liberties Union, which had profiled several of the
recipients in a recent report on nonviolent offenders serving life sentences,
greeted the announcement with praise and calls for additional efforts.
Reaction
among conservatives, who in states like Texas and South Carolina have been at the
forefront of efforts to reduce the mass incarceration of nonviolent offenders,
was muted. The top Republicans on the House and Senate Judiciary Committees
declined to comment.
The
commutation recipients also included Reynolds Wintersmith, of Rockford, Ill.,
who was 17 in 1994 when he was sentenced to life in prison for dealing crack,
and Stephanie George, of Pensacola, Fla., who received a life sentence in 1997, when she
was 27, for hiding a boyfriend’s stash of crack in a box in her house. In both
cases, the judges criticized the mandatory sentences they were required to
impose, calling them unjust.
In
December 2012, The New York Times published an article about Ms. George’s case and the larger
rethinking of the social and economic costs of long prison terms for nonviolent
offenders. Mr. Obama mentioned the article in an interview with Time magazine that day and
said he was considering asking officials about ways to do things “smarter.”
Around
that time, a senior White House official said, Mr. Obama directed Kathryn
Ruemmler, his White House counsel, to ask the Justice Department to examine
pending clemency petitions to assess whether there were any in which current
inmates serving long sentences would have benefited from subsequent changes to
sentencing laws and policy.
The
deputy attorney general, James M. Cole, who oversees the pardon office, worked
on the policy shift and ultimately returned the eight cases with positive
recommendations from the department, the official said.
In
2010, there was bipartisan support in Congress for reducing the disparity in
sentences between crack and powder cocaine, against a backdrop of crime rates
that have plunged to the lowest levels in four decades. And in August, Attorney
General Eric H. Holder Jr. instructed prosecutors to omit listing any
quantities of illicit substances in indictments for low-level drug offenses in
order to avoid triggering mandatory minimum sentences.
But
those moves have left unanswered what, if anything, to do about federal inmates
serving lengthy sentences for crack offenses committed before the Fair
Sentencing Act.
A bill co-sponsored by Senator Richard J.
Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, would make the
Fair Sentencing Act retroactive for some offenders, allowing inmates to apply
to a judge for a review of whether a reduced sentence would be appropriate.
The
Obama administration supports that bill, the White House said on Thursday, as
an orderly way to ensure case-by-case analysis in addressing the broader
problem.
“In
the new year, lawmakers should act on the kinds of bipartisan sentencing reform
measures already working their way through Congress,” Mr. Obama said.
“Together, we must ensure that our taxpayer dollars are spent wisely, and that
our justice system keeps its basic promise of equal treatment for all.” Mr.
Obama, who has made relatively
little use of his constitutional clemency powers to forgive offenses or reduce
sentences, also pardoned 13 people who completed their sentences long
ago. Those cases involved mostly minor offenses, in line with his previous
pardons.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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4) Setting the
Table for a Regal Butterfly Comeback, With Milkweed
December 20,
2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/21/us/setting-the-table-for-a-fluttering-comeback-with-milkweed.html?hp
CEDAR FALLS,
Iowa — Bounding out of a silver Ford pickup into the single-digit wind-flogged
flatness that is Iowa in December, Laura Jackson strode to a thicket of
desiccated sticks and plucked a paisley-shaped prize.
It was a pod that, after a gentle squeeze, burst with chocolate brown buttons: seeds of milkweed, the favored — indeed, the only — food of the monarch butterfly caterpillar.
Once wild and common, milkweed has diminished as cropland expansion has drastically cut grasslands and conservation lands. Diminished too is the iconic monarch.
Dr. Jackson, a University of Northern Iowa biologist and director of its Tallgrass Prairie Center, is part of a growing effort to rescue the monarch. Her prairie center not only grows milkweed seeds for the state’s natural resources department, which spreads them in parks and other government lands, but has helped seed thousands of acres statewide with milkweed and other native plants in a broader effort to revive the flora and fauna that once blanketed more than four-fifths of the state.
Nationwide, organizations are working to increase the monarchs’ flagging numbers. At the University of Minnesota, a coalition of nonprofits and government agencies called Monarch Joint Venture is funding research and conservation efforts. At the University of Kansas, Monarch Watch has enlisted supporters to create nearly 7,450 so-called way stations, milkweed-rich backyards and other feeding and breeding spots along migration routes on the East and West Coasts and the Midwest.
But it remains an uphill struggle. The number of monarchs that completed the largest and most arduous migration this fall, from the northern United States and Canada to a mountainside forest in Mexico, dropped precipitously, apparently to the lowest level yet recorded. In 2010 at the University of Northern Iowa, a summertime count in some 100 acres of prairie grasses and flowers turned up 176 monarchs; this year, there were 11.
The decline has no single cause. Drought and bad weather have decimated the monarch during some recent migrations. Illegal logging of its winter home in Mexico has been a constant threat. Some studies conclude that pesticides and fungicides contribute not just to the monarchs’ woes, but to population declines among bees, other butterflies and pollinators in general.
But the greatest threat to the butterfly, most experts agree, is its dwindling habitat in the Midwest and the Great Plains, the vast expanse over which monarchs fly, breed new generations and die during migrations every spring and autumn. Simply put, they say, the flyway’s milkweed may no longer be abundant enough to support the clouds of monarchs of years past.
Soaring demand for corn, spurred by federal requirements that gasoline be laced with corn-based ethanol, has tripled prices in a decade and encouraged farmers to plant even in places once deemed worthless. Since 2007, farmers nationwide have taken more than 17,500 square miles of land out of federal conservation reserves, an Agriculture Department venture that pays growers modest sums to leave land fallow for wildlife. Iowa has lost a quarter of its reserve land; Kansas, nearly 30 percent; South Dakota, half.
A study published in February in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed land use in five states — Iowa, Minnesota, the Dakotas and Nebraska — in the broad arc of farmland where corn and soybeans are intensively planted. Over the five years from 2006 to 2011, the study concluded, 5 percent to 30 percent of the grasslands were converted to corn and soybean fields, a rate it said was “comparable to deforestation rates in Brazil, Malaysia and Indonesia.”
At the same time, farmers have switched in droves to new varieties of crops that are genetically engineered to tolerate the most widely used weed killer in the United States. The resulting use of weed killers has wiped out much of the milkweed that once grew between crop rows and on buffer strips separating fields and roads.
Roughly half of all Mexico-bound monarchs are hatched in the Midwest and depend as caterpillars on milkweed for food, according to a 2012 study that concluded that the region lost 58 percent of its milkweed and 81 percent of its monarchs between 1999 and 2010.
Said Dr. Jackson, “I can drive five hours east, five hours north, five hours south, five hours west and see nothing — nothing — but corn and soybeans.”
Beleaguered as they are, the butterflies do have one advantage: their seemingly unmatched popularity. Scientists allow that neither the butterfly nor its migration is crucial to the balance of nature. But as rallying points for conservationists and early warning signals of environmental problems, they are invaluable, backers say.
Monarch Watch’s director, Chip Taylor, decided last spring to sell milkweed “plugs” to supporters, charging $58 for a flat of 32 plants — and sold 22,000. The Natural Resources Defense Council gave him a grant this month to supply still more to 100 schools. Even the crowdfunding website Kickstarter sports a proposal to rally monarch support through an arts program.
There is no shortage of ideas. The Pollinator Partnership, a San Francisco-based organization, is pushing for federal legislation that would encourage more state highway departments to stop mowing roadsides and plant bee-friendly wildflowers and monarch habitat instead. (Some states, including Iowa, Texas and Minnesota, already plant some medians and shoulders.)
Next month, the group will publish a booklet showing utility companies how to establish monarch habitats under their power line rights-of-way. The organization’s executive director, Laurie Davies Adams, promoted aid to monarchs before the Wildlife Habitat Council, a consortium of major corporations involved in environmental stewardship.
“This is the Fortune 500 — big manufacturing and mining concerns,” she said in an interview. “I talked about pollinators and monarchs specifically, and they get it. But nobody’s acting yet.”
A few have stepped forward. Chevron added monarch habitat several years ago to a 500-acre stretch of native wetlands and prairie it maintains on an old refinery site 20 miles west of Cincinnati. Waste Management Inc. includes butterfly-friendly plantings on scores of capped landfills around the nation.
Dr. Taylor, of Monarch Watch, said he was convinced that the annual migration to Mexico can be revived; butterfly populations, he said, can fluctuate wildly from year to year as weather and habitat change. The insect’s troubles probably were as deep, or deeper, during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, he said. But so far, he said, monarch backers are mostly preaching to the choir, “and the choir’s of limited size.”
Northern Iowa’s Dr. Jackson said it would take a much larger — and speedier — effort to undo the impact of thousands of square miles of habitat loss.
“Monarchs are just like other iconic species,” she said. “Once people stop being accustomed to seeing them, they stop caring and they forget. Support drops like a ratchet.”
It was a pod that, after a gentle squeeze, burst with chocolate brown buttons: seeds of milkweed, the favored — indeed, the only — food of the monarch butterfly caterpillar.
Once wild and common, milkweed has diminished as cropland expansion has drastically cut grasslands and conservation lands. Diminished too is the iconic monarch.
Dr. Jackson, a University of Northern Iowa biologist and director of its Tallgrass Prairie Center, is part of a growing effort to rescue the monarch. Her prairie center not only grows milkweed seeds for the state’s natural resources department, which spreads them in parks and other government lands, but has helped seed thousands of acres statewide with milkweed and other native plants in a broader effort to revive the flora and fauna that once blanketed more than four-fifths of the state.
Nationwide, organizations are working to increase the monarchs’ flagging numbers. At the University of Minnesota, a coalition of nonprofits and government agencies called Monarch Joint Venture is funding research and conservation efforts. At the University of Kansas, Monarch Watch has enlisted supporters to create nearly 7,450 so-called way stations, milkweed-rich backyards and other feeding and breeding spots along migration routes on the East and West Coasts and the Midwest.
But it remains an uphill struggle. The number of monarchs that completed the largest and most arduous migration this fall, from the northern United States and Canada to a mountainside forest in Mexico, dropped precipitously, apparently to the lowest level yet recorded. In 2010 at the University of Northern Iowa, a summertime count in some 100 acres of prairie grasses and flowers turned up 176 monarchs; this year, there were 11.
The decline has no single cause. Drought and bad weather have decimated the monarch during some recent migrations. Illegal logging of its winter home in Mexico has been a constant threat. Some studies conclude that pesticides and fungicides contribute not just to the monarchs’ woes, but to population declines among bees, other butterflies and pollinators in general.
But the greatest threat to the butterfly, most experts agree, is its dwindling habitat in the Midwest and the Great Plains, the vast expanse over which monarchs fly, breed new generations and die during migrations every spring and autumn. Simply put, they say, the flyway’s milkweed may no longer be abundant enough to support the clouds of monarchs of years past.
Soaring demand for corn, spurred by federal requirements that gasoline be laced with corn-based ethanol, has tripled prices in a decade and encouraged farmers to plant even in places once deemed worthless. Since 2007, farmers nationwide have taken more than 17,500 square miles of land out of federal conservation reserves, an Agriculture Department venture that pays growers modest sums to leave land fallow for wildlife. Iowa has lost a quarter of its reserve land; Kansas, nearly 30 percent; South Dakota, half.
A study published in February in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed land use in five states — Iowa, Minnesota, the Dakotas and Nebraska — in the broad arc of farmland where corn and soybeans are intensively planted. Over the five years from 2006 to 2011, the study concluded, 5 percent to 30 percent of the grasslands were converted to corn and soybean fields, a rate it said was “comparable to deforestation rates in Brazil, Malaysia and Indonesia.”
At the same time, farmers have switched in droves to new varieties of crops that are genetically engineered to tolerate the most widely used weed killer in the United States. The resulting use of weed killers has wiped out much of the milkweed that once grew between crop rows and on buffer strips separating fields and roads.
Roughly half of all Mexico-bound monarchs are hatched in the Midwest and depend as caterpillars on milkweed for food, according to a 2012 study that concluded that the region lost 58 percent of its milkweed and 81 percent of its monarchs between 1999 and 2010.
Said Dr. Jackson, “I can drive five hours east, five hours north, five hours south, five hours west and see nothing — nothing — but corn and soybeans.”
Beleaguered as they are, the butterflies do have one advantage: their seemingly unmatched popularity. Scientists allow that neither the butterfly nor its migration is crucial to the balance of nature. But as rallying points for conservationists and early warning signals of environmental problems, they are invaluable, backers say.
Monarch Watch’s director, Chip Taylor, decided last spring to sell milkweed “plugs” to supporters, charging $58 for a flat of 32 plants — and sold 22,000. The Natural Resources Defense Council gave him a grant this month to supply still more to 100 schools. Even the crowdfunding website Kickstarter sports a proposal to rally monarch support through an arts program.
There is no shortage of ideas. The Pollinator Partnership, a San Francisco-based organization, is pushing for federal legislation that would encourage more state highway departments to stop mowing roadsides and plant bee-friendly wildflowers and monarch habitat instead. (Some states, including Iowa, Texas and Minnesota, already plant some medians and shoulders.)
Next month, the group will publish a booklet showing utility companies how to establish monarch habitats under their power line rights-of-way. The organization’s executive director, Laurie Davies Adams, promoted aid to monarchs before the Wildlife Habitat Council, a consortium of major corporations involved in environmental stewardship.
“This is the Fortune 500 — big manufacturing and mining concerns,” she said in an interview. “I talked about pollinators and monarchs specifically, and they get it. But nobody’s acting yet.”
A few have stepped forward. Chevron added monarch habitat several years ago to a 500-acre stretch of native wetlands and prairie it maintains on an old refinery site 20 miles west of Cincinnati. Waste Management Inc. includes butterfly-friendly plantings on scores of capped landfills around the nation.
Dr. Taylor, of Monarch Watch, said he was convinced that the annual migration to Mexico can be revived; butterfly populations, he said, can fluctuate wildly from year to year as weather and habitat change. The insect’s troubles probably were as deep, or deeper, during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, he said. But so far, he said, monarch backers are mostly preaching to the choir, “and the choir’s of limited size.”
Northern Iowa’s Dr. Jackson said it would take a much larger — and speedier — effort to undo the impact of thousands of square miles of habitat loss.
“Monarchs are just like other iconic species,” she said. “Once people stop being accustomed to seeing them, they stop caring and they forget. Support drops like a ratchet.”
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
5) Yemen
Deaths Test Claims of New Drone Policy
By MARK MAZZETTI and ROBERT F. WORTH
December 20,
2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/21/world/middleeast/yemen-deaths-raise-questions-on-new-drone-policy.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON — In some respects, the drone strike in Yemen last week resembled so many others from recent years: A hail of missiles slammed into a convoy of trucks on a remote desert road, killing at least 12 people.
But this time the trucks were part of a wedding procession, making the customary journey from the groom’s house to the house of the bride.
The Dec. 12 strike by the Pentagon, launched from an American base in Djibouti, killed at least a half-dozen innocent people, according to a number of tribal leaders and witnesses, and provoked a storm of outrage in the country. It also illuminated the reality behind the talk surrounding the Obama administration’s new drone policy, which was announced with fanfare seven months ago.
Although American officials say they are being more careful before launching drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere — and more transparent about the clandestine wars that President Obama has embraced — the strike last week offers a window on the intelligence breakdowns and continuing liability of a targeted killing program that remains almost entirely secret.
Both the Pentagon and the C.I.A. continue to wage parallel drone wars in Yemen, but neither is discussed publicly. A Pentagon spokeswoman declined to comment about the Dec. 12 strike, referring a reporter to a vague news release issued last week by the government of Yemen, written in Arabic.
It remains unclear whom the Americans were trying to kill in the strike, which was carried out in a desolate area southeast of Yemen’s capital, Sana. Witnesses to the strike’s aftermath said that one white pickup truck was destroyed and that two or three other vehicles were seriously damaged. The Associated Press reported Friday that the target of the strike was Shawqi Ali Ahmad al-Badani, a militant who is accused of planning a terrorist plot in August that led to the closing of more than a dozen United States Embassies. American officials declined to comment about that report.
At first, the Yemeni government, a close partner with the Obama administration on counterterrorism matters, said that all the dead were militants. But Yemeni officials conceded soon afterward that some civilians had been killed, and they gave 101 Kalashnikov rifles and about 24 million Yemeni riyals (about $110,000) to relatives of the victims as part of a traditional compensation process, a local tribal leader said.
Yemeni government officials and several local tribal leaders said that the dead included several militants with ties to Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, but no one has been able to identify them. Some witnesses who have interviewed victims’ families say they believe no militants were killed at all.
The murky details surrounding the strike raise questions about how rigorously American officials are applying the standards for lethal strikes that Mr. Obama laid out in a speech on May 23 at the National Defense University — and whether such standards are even possible in such a remote and opaque environment.
In the speech, the president said that targeted killing operations were carried out only against militants who posed a “continuing and imminent threat to the American people.” Over the past week, no government official has made a case in public that the people targeted in the strike posed a threat to Americans.
Moreover, the president said in May, no strike can be authorized without “near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured” — a bar he described as “the highest standard we can set.”
At the time, administration officials said that authority over the bulk of drone strikes would gradually shift to the Pentagon from the C.I.A., a move officials said was intended partly to lift the shroud of secrecy from the targeted killing program.
But nearly seven months later, the C.I.A. still carries out a majority of drone strikes in Yemen, with the remote-controlled aircraft taking off from a base in the southern desert of Saudi Arabia. The Pentagon strikes, usually launched from the Djibouti base, are cloaked in as much secrecy as those carried out by the C.I.A.
“The contradictory reports about what happened on Dec. 12 underscore the critical need for more transparency from the Obama administration and Yemeni authorities about these strikes,” said Letta Tayler of Human Rights Watch, who has done extensive research in Yemen about the drone strikes.
The very fact that the drone strike last week targeted an 11-vehicle convoy — a much larger group than Al Qaeda would typically use — suggests that the new American guidelines to rule out civilian casualties may not have been followed in this case.
And the confusion over the victims’ identities raises questions about how the United States government gathers intelligence in such a contested region and with partners whose interests may differ sharply from those of the Obama administration.
The area where the strike occurred, in the central province of Bayda, is almost completely beyond the control of the Yemeni government, and is populated by tribes whose recurring feuds can easily become tied up in the agendas of outsiders.
Over the past two years, the Saudi government — which for decades has used cash to maintain a network of influence in Yemen — has increased its payments to tribal figures in Bayda to recruit informers and deter militants, according to several tribal leaders in the area. This shadowy system appears to contribute to the secretive process of information-gathering that determines targets for drone strikes, a process in which Saudi and Yemeni officials cooperate with Americans.
But Saudi and American interests diverge in important ways in Yemen. Many of the militants there who fight in Al Qaeda’s name are expatriate Saudis whose sole goal is to bring down the Saudi government.
Because of the program’s secrecy, it is impossible to know whether the American dependence on Saudi and Yemeni intelligence results in the killing of militants who pose a danger only to Arab countries.
Some Yemeni officials have also hinted that the timing and target of the drone strike last week may have been influenced by a devastating attack two weeks ago on the Yemeni Defense Ministry in which 52 people were killed, including women, children and doctors at the ministry’s hospital.
That attack ignited a desire for revenge in Yemen’s security establishment and also damaged Al Qaeda’s reputation in Yemen, leaving the group hungry for opportunities to change the subject. Both parties, in other words, may have had reasons to manipulate the facts, both before and after the drone strike.
American officials will not say what they knew about the targets of the strike last week. But in the past, American officials have sometimes appeared to be misinformed about the accidental deaths of Yemeni civilians in drone strikes.
In one example from Aug. 1, a drone strike killed a 28-year-old man who happened to hitch a ride with three men suspected to have been Qaeda members. According to a number of witnesses, relatives and local police officials, the man, Saleh Yaslim Saeed bin Ishaq, was waiting by a gas station late at night when the three men stopped in a Land Cruiser and agreed to give him a ride.
Mr. Ishaq’s ID card and belongings were found in the burned wreckage of the vehicle, and the local police — who confirmed that the other three dead men were wanted militants — said he appeared to have been an innocent person whose presence in the car was accidental.
When contacted about the strike, American officials said they were aware only of the three militants killed. Yet the details of Mr. Ishaq’s death, and an image of his ID card, were published at the time in newspapers and on websites in Yemen.
Shuaib al-Mosawa contributed reporting from Sana, Yemen.
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6) South
Africa’s Biggest Trade Union Pulls Its Support for A.N.C.
December 20,
2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/21/world/africa/south-africas-biggest-union-pulls-support-for-anc.html?ref=world
JOHANNESBURG — South Africa’s largest trade union withdrew its support for the African National Congress on Friday, a move that is likely to erode the party’s dominance ahead of national elections next year and reorder the politics of a country the party has governed with huge majorities since the end of white rule two decades ago.
The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, which calls itself “the biggest union in the history of the African continent,” with 338,000 members, announced Friday after a special congress that it would seek to start a socialist party aimed at protecting the interests of the working class. It was a direct rebuke to the A.N.C., which since its days as an underground movement resisting apartheid rule has portrayed itself as the champion of South Africa’s downtrodden.
“It is clear that the working class cannot any longer see the A.N.C. or the S.A.C.P. as its class allies in any meaningful sense,” Irvin Jim, the union’s secretary general, said at a news conference, referring to the governing party and its partner in government, the South African Communist Party.
The announcement came at the end of 10 days of mourning for Nelson Mandela, the man who led the A.N.C. to victory in the nation’s first fully democratic elections in 1994 and was to many people here the moral compass of the party. His successors, especially the current president, Jacob Zuma, have come under increasing fire for allegations of corruption and cronyism.
Several government agencies are investigating $20 million in improvements to Mr. Zuma’s private home that were billed as security upgrades but included luxuries like a swimming pool and an amphitheater at government expense, according to a preliminary government report.
More broadly, some in the left wing of the labor movement have denounced the government’s coziness with big business, exemplified by its handling of a wildcat strike by miners in Marikana last year. The government ordered the police to break up the strike, and the police fired upon a group of miners, killing 34 people. The A.N.C.’s deputy president, Cyril Ramaphosa, had been on the board of the platinum mining company whose workers were striking.
“The congress called on President Jacob Zuma to resign with immediate effect because of his administration’s pursuit of neo-liberal policies,” Mr. Jim said, describing Mr. Zuma’s government as “steeped in corruption, patronage and nepotism.”
The call by the union to abandon the A.N.C. has turned what had been fissures in the broad alliance that governs South Africa into gaping chasms that could, in time, end the A.N.C.’s grip on national power. The nation’s broader labor union alliance, Cosatu, and the South African Communist Party form two legs of the stool that has kept the A.N.C. firmly in government since the end of white rule in 1994. The metalworkers’ union is part of Cosatu.
“It is a massive development,” said Mondli Makhanya, a newspaper columnist and political analyst. “People have long been predicting the breakup of the alliance, and it never came to pass; they always managed to rescue it at a certain point. But not this time.”
The A.N.C. and its alliance partners have always represented a big tent in South African politics, including elements of the old Stalinist left, wealthy business leaders, labor unions and deeply conservative traditional leaders. Holding that mix together has always been tricky, but as inequality has deepened and more voters come to think that a small elite with links to the party has enriched itself at the expense of the majority of voters, unity has frayed.
Mr. Zuma has become a lightning rod for such criticism. His reputation has plummeted so deeply that he was booed by thousands of people at a national memorial held on Dec. 10 for Mr. Mandela, enduring humiliation as he stood onstage beside world leaders.
Elections scheduled for April were already expected to be a crucial test for the A.N.C., which has seen its popularity eroded by corruption scandals, poor government services and the killings in Marikana. “The A.N.C. monopoly is being dented in all sorts of way by internal factionalism, disenchantment of voters, and now this,” said Steven Friedman, a political analyst at the University of Johannesburg.
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7)
New Health Law Frustrates Many in Middle Class
December
20, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/21/business/new-health-law-frustrates-many-in-middle-class.html?ref=us
Ginger
Chapman and her husband, Doug, are sitting on the health care cliff.
The
cheapest insurance plan they can find through the new federal marketplace in
New Hampshire will cost their family of four about $1,000 a month, 12 percent
of their annual income of around $100,000 and more than they have ever paid
before.
Even
more striking, for the Chapmans, is this fact: If they made just a few thousand
dollars less a year — below $94,200 — their costs would be cut in half, because
a family like theirs could qualify for federal subsidies.
The
Chapmans acknowledge that they are better off than many people, but they
represent a little-understood reality of the Affordable Care Act. While the act
clearly benefits those at the low end of the income scale — and rich people can
continue to afford even the most generous plans — people like the Chapmans are
caught in the uncomfortable middle: not poor enough for help, but not rich
enough to be indifferent to cost.
“We
are just right over that line,” said Ms. Chapman, who is 54 and does
administrative work for a small wealth management firm. Because their plan is
being canceled, she is looking for new coverage for her family, which includes Mr.
Chapman, 55, a retired fireman who works on a friend’s farm, and her two sons.
“That’s an insane amount of money,” she said of their new premium. “How are you
supposed to pay that?”
An
analysis by The New York Times shows the cost of premiums for people who just
miss qualifying for subsidies varies widely across the country and rises
rapidly for people in their 50s and 60s. In some places, prices can quickly
approach 20 percent of a person’s income.
Experts
consider health insurance unaffordable once it exceeds 10 percent of annual
income. By that measure, a 50-year-old making $50,000 a year, or just above the
qualifying limit for assistance, would find the cheapest available plan to be
unaffordable in more than 170 counties around the country, ranging from
Anchorage to Jackson, Miss.
A
60-year-old living in Polk County, in northwestern Wisconsin, and earning
$50,000 a year, for example, would have to spend more than 19 percent of his
income, or $9,801 annually, to buy one of the cheapest plans available there. A
person earning $45,000 would qualify for subsidies and would pay about 5
percent of his income, or $2,228, for an inexpensive plan.
In
Oklahoma City, a 60-year-old earning $50,000 could buy one of the cheapest
plans for about 6.6 percent of his income, or about $3,279 a year with no
subsidy. If he earned $45,000, with the benefit of a subsidy, he would spend
about $2,425.
While
the number of people who just miss qualifying for subsidies is unclear, many of
them have made their frustration known, helping fuel criticism of the law in
recent weeks. Like the Chapmans, hundreds of thousands of people have received
notices that their existing plans are being canceled and that they must now pay
more for new coverage.
In
an effort to address that frustration, the Obama administration announced on Thursday
that it would permit people whose plans had been canceled to buy bare-bones
catastrophic plans, which are less expensive but offer minimal coverage. Those
plans have always been available to people under 30 and to those who can prove
that the least expensive plan in their area is not affordable. But the announcement
does not address the concerns of those who would like to buy better coverage,
yet find premiums in their area too expensive.
David
Oscar, an insurance broker in New Jersey, another high-cost state, said many of
his clients had been disappointed to learn that the premiums were much more
expensive than they had expected.
“They’re
frustrated,” he said. “Everybody was thinking that Obamacare was going to come
in with more affordable rates. Well, they’re not more affordable.”
Many
of the biggest provisions of the Affordable Care Act are aimed squarely at the
poorest of Americans. Under the law, states have the option of expanding Medicaid
to a larger pool of people with the lowest incomes. To those earning more, the
law provides subsidies to people earning up to four times the federal poverty
level, or $45,960 for an individual and $62,040 for a couple.
Ninety
percent of the country’s uninsured population have incomes that fall below that
level, according to one recent analysis. As a result, the subsidies “are well
targeted for people who are uninsured or underinsured,” said Sara R. Collins,
an executive with the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that finances
health policy research. “That is really where the firepower of the law is
focused.”
Federal
assistance is based on the cost of premiums for the second-cheapest silver, or
midlevel, plan in a person’s geographic area and are set so the amount the
person must pay for coverage does not exceed a certain percentage of income,
ranging from 2 to 9.5 percent.
Even
before the announcement on Thursday giving people with canceled plans the
option of buying catastrophic coverage, the law permitted people to select such
plans if the price of premiums in their area exceeded 8 percent of their
income. The catastrophic plans are often less expensive and include three
doctor visits and free preventive care, but require someone to pay almost all
of the medical bills up to a certain amount, which is usually several thousand
dollars.
That
is the option that the Chapmans say they are likely to choose when their
current insurance plan, which costs $665 a month, expires in September. Anthem
is the only insurer offering plans in the marketplace in New Hampshire, and
prices there are higher than in many other parts of the country.
Some
experts dismissed the varying effects of the income cutoff, saying the law’s
main elements benefit most of those who could not previously buy insurance.
“I
think that job one was to make sure that the people who clearly have the
greatest difficulty affording premiums receive the greatest help,” said Ron
Pollack, the founding executive director of Families USA, a consumer advocacy
group that favored the law.
To
avoid creating such steep cliffs, federal officials would have had to spend
more money on the subsidies, said Larry Levitt, an executive with the Kaiser
Family Foundation, a nonprofit research group that is closely following the
health care law. Subsidies would have been higher, and could have been more
gradually phased out, he said. The design “was largely driven by budgetary
decisions,” Mr. Levitt said.
The
subsidy cutoff can seem especially arbitrary to people whose incomes vary from
year to year, even if they stand to benefit from the law.
Christian
Johnsen, a bakery owner who lives with his wife and two children in Big Sky,
Mont., and has an income of about $88,000, will probably be eligible for
subsidies next year. As a result, the family could buy a midlevel insurance
plan for about $697 a month.
But
if the bakery does better next year, the family could be asked to pay a lot
more. Without any subsidy, the same plan would cost $822.
Mr.
Johnsen, who is 47, said he would like to buy insurance for his family. They
have gone without it for the last two years, paying out of pocket on rare
visits to the doctor. But he said it is hard to justify those prices to prevent
an unforeseen catastrophe when so many real-world expenses demand his attention
first. “I know absolutely that I’m going to need a new car in two years, but I
don’t know that I’m going to have a catastrophic accident,” he said. “That’s
the kind of debate that happens in our house.”
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8)
A Dealer Serving Life Without Having Taken One
By DAN BARRY
December 21, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/us/a-dealer-serving-life-without-having-taken-one.html?hp
GREENVILLE, Ill. — A lifer with a pen sat in the 65-square-foot cell he shares. A calendar taunted from a bulletin board. He began to write.
Dear President Obama.
He acknowledged his criminal past. He expressed remorse. And he pleaded for a second chance, now that he had served 18 years of the worst sentence short of execution: life without parole, for a nonviolent first offense.
Mr. President, he wrote, “you are my final hope.”
Sincerely, Jesse Webster.
Eleven hundred men reside in medium security at this remote Greenville federal prison in Southern Illinois. Most come and go, sentences served. Others stay, their legal appeals exhausted, their only hope to take up a pen and enter the long-shot lottery of executive clemency with a salutation that begins: Dear President Obama.
The prisoners are men like Mr. Webster, 46, a former cocaine dealer from the South Side of Chicago. And his old cellmate, Reynolds Wintersmith Jr., 39, a former teenage crack-cocaine dealer from Rockford, Ill., who has spent half his life in prison.
The two friends first met at the maximum-security prison in Leavenworth, Kan. That was almost 15 years ago.
“We were both younger then,” Mr. Webster recalled.
Mr. Webster, bald, stocky and bespectacled, discussed his case several days ago in the spare visitors’ room at Greenville. Signs everywhere said “no” this and “no” that. Nearby stood an artificial Christmas tree used by families as a prop to feign normality in holiday photos.
“I should have done time,” Mr. Webster said. “But a living death sentence?”
Growing up, his family of seven barely survived on his stepfather’s job as a parking-lot attendant. Dropping out of ninth grade to make money for the household, he wound up buffing at a carwash favored by a big-tipping drug dealer. Seeing hustle in 16-year-old Jesse’s eyes, he offered the boy a job as his driver, $200 a week.
Mr. Webster never forgot what his friends had said and how they said it: “that I had moved up in low places.”
He became a low-key freelancer in a hooked-up world, living in a doorman building, driving a Volvo and concealing a gun he never used. “I didn’t do flash,” he said.
In 1995, though, he learned that the law was looking for him, so he decided to turn himself in. One day a station wagon left the South Side for the North Side, jammed with his mother, brother and others who wanted to be there in support. “We all went as a family,” his mother, Robin Noble, said.
Soon Mr. Webster was being cuffed from behind, an indelible moment. “The look on his face,” Leon Noble, his younger brother, said. “Like he let us down.”
Prosecutors offered leniency on the condition that Mr. Webster become a confidential informant against a powerful drug gang. He declined, which Matthew Crowl, a prosecutor in his case, described many years later as a reasonable decision, given that the gang had already killed an informant.
Mr. Webster was convicted of participating in a drug conspiracy and filing false tax returns. His sentence of life without parole left his mother weeping and his brother’s heart dropping to the floor. For a sentence like that, the inmate said, “I thought I’d have to hurt somebody, do bodily harm.”
The federal judge, James B. Zagel, explained to the court that he was adhering to the mandatorily harsh sentencing guidelines of the day. “To put it in simple terms,” the judge said before imposing sentence, “it’s too high.”
If it were 1986 or today, Mr. Webster would probably be sentenced to serve about 25 years. But he was sentenced in 1996, during a period when sentencing guidelines gave federal judges virtually no discretion in assessing punishment.
“That was at the peak of mandatory sentencing,” said Vanita Gupta, the deputy legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union.
The A.C.L.U. — which highlighted the cases of Mr. Webster and Mr. Wintersmith, among dozens of others, in a recent report on lifers — estimates that more than 2,000 federal inmates are serving life without parole for nonviolent offenses.
What’s more, in a sample study of 169 federal inmates incarcerated for nonviolent crimes, the organization found dozens who were first-time offenders, as well as many others who had only misdemeanors and juvenile infractions in their past.
And this was just in the federal prison system.
“We kind of lost our moral center and any sense of proportionality in our sentencing” during the so-called war on drugs, Ms. Gupta said. “The result was the throwing away of certain people’s lives, predominantly black and brown people’s lives.”
Mr. Webster spent 16 years in federal maximum-security prisons, including Leavenworth, willing himself past the temptations, the lockdowns, the nearly hopeless reality. He received only three infractions — all minor, with the last one in 1997 — and earned the trusted position of captain’s orderly.
In July 2011, finally, he won a transfer to relative tranquillity, here in Greenville. “Took me 17 years to get here,” he said.
Up at 6:30. Bowl of oatmeal. Stretch. Clean cell. Work as a unit orderly. Run three miles. Push-ups and pull-ups. Shower. Lunch. Volunteer as a tutor to other inmates. Stand for count. Dinner. Work on job skills and resume writing. Shower. Read the Bible. And call Mom, whose picture he keeps tucked into his bottom bunk’s ceiling.
Family members say Mr. Webster lifts spirits on the outside when he calls from the inside, urging improvement, strength. Mr. Noble, for example, considers his older brother to be his role model.
All the while, Mr. Webster knows that the associates who testified against him have been free for years; that his mother is ill; that his daughter, Jasmine, who was 4 when he went away, has given him a grandson he has seen only once. That barring the secular equivalent of divine intervention, he will die in prison khaki.
A few months ago, Mr. Webster’s lawyer, Jessica Ring Amunson, sent a thick packet of documents to the Office of the Pardon Attorney of the Justice Department. This office assists the president in exercising his power of executive clemency, including pardons and the commutations of sentences.
In these papers were Mr. Webster’s life, the bad and the good. The particulars of his case, his achievements as an inmate, and many, many letters requesting a commutation of Mr. Webster’s sentence, all effectively beginning with: Dear Mr. President. They even included appeals for clemency from the prosecutors and the judge in his case.
“A commutation of sentence which would result in his service of 20 or so years in prison is enough punishment for his crimes,” Judge Zagel wrote.
The packet also included Mr. Webster’s letter, which had undergone several drafts as he sought concision in conveying to the president the essence of who Jesse Webster was, and is. “I didn’t want a lot of mumbo jumbo,” he says. “I know he’s a busy man.”
The odds never favored Mr. Webster, though, at least not this round. Nearly 2,800 other requests for commutation of sentence were pending — including one from his friend Mr. Wintersmith — and before last week, Mr. Obama had commuted the sentence of just one inmate.
Turkeys at Thanksgiving had a better chance at mercy.
“But you’ve got to keep up the hope,” Mr. Webster said, shrugging, before leaving the visitors’ room.
On Thursday, President Obama increased his number of commutations by eight (while also pardoning 13 others). He described his action as “an important step toward restoring fundamental ideals of justice and fairness,” and called on Congress to come up with further sentencing reforms.
That morning, some inmates were gathered in the Greenville prison gymnasium, including Mr. Webster and Mr. Wintersmith. A voice came over the intercom, summoning Mr. Wintersmith to the associate warden’s office. Mr. Webster instantly knew what had happened, and what had not. He later said he was overjoyed for his friend, and hopeful that the president would remember the many, many others, and “spread his grace on us.”
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9) Health Care’s Road to Ruin
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
December 21, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/sunday-review/health-cares-road-to-ruin.html?hp&rref=opinion
HAVING spent the last year reporting for a series of articles on the high cost of American medicine, I’ve heard it all. There was Fred Abrahams, 77, a skier who had surgery on both ankles for arthritis — one in New York for more than $200,000 and one in New Hampshire for less than $40,000. There was Matthew Landman, 41, billed more than $100,000 for antivenin administered in an E.R. after a small rattlesnake bite. There was Robin Miller, a Florida businessman, who needed to buy an implantable defibrillator for his ill brother, who was uninsured; the machine costs tens of thousands of dollars, but he couldn’t get a price for a make or a model.
Extreme anecdotes, perhaps. But the series has prompted more than 10,000 comments of outrage and frustration — from patients, doctors, politicians, even hospital and insurance executives.
As of Jan. 1, the Affordable Care Act promises for the first time to deliver the possibility of meaningful health insurance to every American. But where does that leave the United States in terms of affordable care?
Even supporters see Obamacare as a first step on a long quest to bring Americans affordable medicine, with further adjustments, interventions and expansions needed.
There are plenty of interesting ideas being floated to help repair the system, many of which are being used in other countries, where health care spending is often about half of that in the United States. For example, we could strictly regulate prices or preset payment levels, as is currently done for hospital stays under Medicare, the national insurance program for people over 65, or at least establish fair price corridors for procedures and drugs. We could require hospitals and doctors to provide price lists and upfront estimates to allow consumers to make better choices. We could stop paying doctors and hospitals for each service they performed and instead compensate them with a fixed monthly fee for taking care of each patient. We could even make medical school free or far cheaper and then require service afterward.
But the nation is fundamentally handicapped in its quest for cheaper health care: All other developed countries rely on a large degree of direct government intervention, negotiation or rate-setting to achieve lower-priced medical treatment for all citizens. That is not politically acceptable here. “A lot of the complexity of the Affordable Care Act arises from the political need in the U.S. to rely on the private market to provide health care access,” said Dr. David Blumenthal, a former adviser to President Obama and president of the Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based foundation that focuses on health care.
With that political backdrop, Obamacare deals only indirectly with high prices. By regulating and mandating insurance plans, it seeks to create a better, more competitive market that will make care from doctors and hospitals cheaper. But it primarily relies on a trickle-down theory of cost containment. The Princeton health economist Uwe E. Reinhardt has called it “a somewhat ugly patch” on “a somewhat ugly system.”
With half a billion dollars spent by medical lobbyists each year, according to the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics, our fragmented profit-driven system is effectively insulated from many of the forces that control spending elsewhere. Even Medicare is not allowed to negotiate drug prices for its tens of millions of beneficiaries, and Americans are forbidden by law to re-import medicines made domestically and sold more cheaply abroad.
And so American patients are stuck with bills and treatment dilemmas that seem increasingly Kafkaesque. The hopeful news is that American health care spending has grown at a slower pace over the past four years. While that is partly because of the recession, economists say, many credit the cost-containing forces unleashed by Obamacare with a significant assist. Even at that rate, many models suggest that nearly 25 percent of gross domestic product will be eaten up by health care in 20 years. That is not sustainable.
“It’s like a diet you can’t just stop, because it’s starting to work,” said Michael Chernew, an economist at Harvard Medical School. “And remember, we haven’t even lost weight yet, we’re just gaining weight more slowly.”
Many health economists say we must move away from the so-called fee-for-service model, where doctors and hospitals bill every event, every pill, every procedure, even hourly rental of the operating room. Though insurers try to hold down costs by negotiating discounts or limiting reimbursement, this strategy has limited power because armies of consultants now advise hospitals on what is known as “strategic billing”: Losing money from trauma patients? Hospitals can add on a $10,000-plus “trauma activation fee.” Medicare not paying enough for a broken wrist? Add a separate “casting fee” to the bill.
“People in fee-for-service are very clever — they stay one step ahead of the formulas to maximize revenue,” said Dr. Steven Schroeder, a professor at the medical school of the University of California, San Francisco.
Given that national or even regional rate-setting is out of the question, most health economists argue that the nation needs a new type of payment model, one where doctors and hospitals earn more by keeping patients healthy with preventive care rather than by prescribing expensive tests.
Such models exist: A number of hospital and doctors groups engage in so-called capitated care, where they are paid an annual fee by an employer or individual for all patient needs and must work within that budget. The Affordable Care Act promotes a strategy focused on accountable care organizations, in which similar networks can earn financial rewards for figuring out how to save money while meeting standards for good care. But such models are still far from the norm in a country where a majority of physicians are in business for themselves and doctors and hospitals bill separately.
The new law includes a number of incentives intended to nudge doctors, hospitals and insurers to join groups and focus more on value, “but we don’t know how well they’re going to work,” said John Holahan, a fellow at the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center.
For example, the law will tax premiums for the most expensive insurance plans to keep luxury health care spending down. And Medicare, through a value-based purchasing program set up by the law, is providing bonuses to doctors and hospitals for meeting quality-care standards. But those are tentative steps. In fact, recent research published in the journal Health Affairs concluded that the magnitude of bonuses now offered to hospitals was too small to change behavior, noting that even supermarket coupons tended to offer benefits worth well over 10 percent of total value.
The Affordable Care Act generally requires patients to be responsible for more of their bills — copays and deductibles — so they will become more price-savvy medical consumers. But the deck is stacked against them in a system where doctors and hospitals are not required or expected to provide upfront pricing. Why not? They should tell and patients should ask. (In France, before a hip replacement on a private patient, doctors must sign a contract that includes a price.)
And policy makers need to address two of the biggest drivers of our inflated national health care bill: the astronomical price of hospitalizations and particularly end-of-life care.
Obamacare plans cap an individual’s annual out-of-pocket spending at $6,350 a year. That (happily) prevents bankruptcy, but it also means that patients will still not be very discerning shoppers when it comes to major hospitalizations, since — in the United States — they’ve quite likely surpassed their out of pocket maximum by the time they’ve been formally admitted.
On the private side, some companies and employee health plans are experimenting with new payment models to limit these large bills. They may follow Medicare, which offers hospitals bundled payments for given procedures, or try a technique known as reference pricing, in which they pick a rate they think is fair for a procedure — say $32,000 for a knee replacement, all-inclusive. If a patient wants to go to a hospital with higher fees, the difference comes out of his pocket.
To rein in price increases, companies and insurers have begun offering patients narrower networks, already a major gripe about many Obamacare plans.
And as choices narrow while prices rise, I sense that many patients are no longer so devoted to a market-based health care system. Barbara Felton, 86, was “shocked” when she saw her $12,000 itemized hospital bill for a recent brief stay to repair a fractured femur in Pocatello, Idaho. “I’ve never been in favor of a single payer before, but now I am,” she said, referring to a government-run health system.
The perfect recipe for containing medical costs remains to be written and must be tweaked thoughtfully. After all, the American health care system is a major part of the economy. As Dr. Blumenthal, the former Obama adviser, put it: “If you put our health care system on an island and floated it out into the Atlantic it would have the fifth-largest G.D.P. in the world. It’s like saying you have to change the economy of France.”
But after a year spent hearing from hundreds of patients like Mr. Abrahams, Mr. Landman and Mr. Miller, I know, too, that reforming the nation’s $2.9 trillion health system is urgent, and will not be accomplished with delicate maneuvers at the margins. There are many further interventions that we know will help contain costs and rein in prices. And we’d better start making choices fast.
Elisabeth Rosenthal is a reporter for The New York Times who is writing a series about the cost of health care, “Paying Till It Hurts.”
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10) Subtract Teachers, Add Pupils: Math of Today’s Jammed Schools
By MOTOKO RICH
COATESVILLE, Pa. — The recession may have ended, but many of the nation’s school districts that laid off teachers and other employees to cut payrolls in leaner times have not yet replenished their ranks. Now, despite the recovery, many schools face unwieldy class sizes and a lack of specialists to help those students who struggle academically, are learning English as a second language or need extra emotional support.
Donna Guy’s fourth-grade class at Caln Elementary School here is too big — 30 pupils — for the room, so some of them sit halfway into a coat closet. Across town at Rainbow Elementary School, the 36 third graders in Kristen Pleasanton’s gym class rotate on and off the bench during 25 minutes of seven-a-side soccer games, because she cannot supervise all of them playing at once.
And during social studies class at Scott Middle School, Keith Lilienfeld tries to keep control of a class of 25 students, 10 who need special education services, four who know little or no English and others who need more challenging work than he has time to give.
“I’m up there putting out fires like you wouldn’t believe,” said Mr. Lilienfeld, who used to have the help of two or three classroom aides. “There’s only one of me, and there’s a need for about five of me in there.”
Across the country, public schools employ about 250,000 fewer people than before the recession, according to figures from the Labor Department. Enrollment in public schools, meanwhile, has increased by more than 800,000 students. To maintain prerecession staffing ratios, public school employment should have actually grown by about 132,000 jobs in the past four years, in addition to replacing those that were lost, said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
Coatesville, a diminished steel town with 7,200 students, used to employ more than 600 teachers, psychologists, reading and math specialists, and other certified personnel. Since 2008, the district has cut close to one-fifth of that staff, according to Angelo Romaniello, the district’s assistant superintendent.
“We didn’t cut to the bone,” said Audra Ritter, a middle school special education teacher and president of the Coatesville Area Teachers Association. “We cut into the bone.”
School districts in other hard-hit states, including California, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina and Texas, are coping with similarly squeezed resources. Along with budget cuts at the federal, state and local levels, rising public school enrollment over the past five years has exacerbated the pinch.
The staffing gap has pushed elementary class sizes to 30 students and more in parts of California, where special state funds had been designated since the mid-1990s to keep classes in kindergarten through third grade capped at 20 students. In Dallas this year, the public school district has applied for more than 200 waivers from the state’s maximum class size of 22 students for kindergarten through fourth grade.
Class sizes in some high schools in Charlotte-Mecklenburg County in North Carolina have swelled to as many as 40 students, and some guidance counselors are advising up to 500 students. In Cobb County, Ga., where the district has laid off about 1,300 staff members — or about 16 percent of the teaching force — in the past five years, average class sizes in fourth and fifth grades are now about 33 students, five above the state maximum of 28.
Districts are making these difficult trade-offs at a time when schools are raising academic standards and business leaders are pushing schools to prepare a work force with better skills.
“We can’t have the doublespeak where everybody talks about how important education is to our being globally competitive,” said Daniel A. Domenech, the executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, “and then education is not a priority when it comes to funding.”
In Pennsylvania, although the state’s education budget is now above prerecession levels, a large proportion of money is being diverted to replenish underfunded pensions, leaving less for actual classrooms, said Michael Wood, research director at the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center.
The cutbacks have been particularly pronounced in less affluent school districts, which have trouble raising local property taxes or asking parents’ associations to fill in gaps.
Wealthier communities can lean more on parents and local taxpayers. Just 35 miles from Coatesville, in the Lower Merion School District, which shares a border with the ravaged Philadelphia school district, enrollment has swelled by about 15 percent to 7,900 students in the past five years. Property taxes have increased every year since 2008, and even elementary students now study foreign languages. The district has avoided cutting any staff members, leaving class sizes in the low to mid-20s.
Here in Coatesville, by contrast, where more than half of the district’s students are eligible for free and reduced-price lunches, the school board has twice raised the maximum class size for third through fifth grades in the past five years, with some classes topping out at 33 students.
Staff cuts among reading, special education and English language specialists have hit especially hard.
On a recent afternoon at Scott Middle School, Mr. Lilienfeld placed a red rubber ball atop a stool at the front of the classroom. The setup served as a makeshift buzzer in a quiz game intended to help students review for a coming test.
One English-language learner put his head on his desk and refused to participate. Another girl, who receives special education services, spent the entire period doodling on a notepad. When several boys taunted a girl and she responded with an explosive “Shut up!” Mr. Lilienfeld ordered her out of the room.
“There is no way I could adapt the curriculum to meet the needs of all the kids in my class,” he said. During the next period, 26 students filed into Mr. Lilienfeld’s classroom for a study hall period, which is used to fill out their schedules because the school has cut so many electives.
The cutbacks in staff levels during the recession and its aftermath followed two decades in which the teaching force across the country expanded at a much faster rate than student enrollment.
According to Richard M. Ingersoll, a professor of education and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, the public school population increased by 24 percent from 1987 to 2012, while the number of working teachers grew by 46 percent.
Teachers say the delicate balance of a class ecosystem, with its range of personalities, academic abilities and social skills, can be upset by just a few more students in the room. Still, research on the importance of class size in helping students learn is mixed. Although a study in Tennessee in the 1980s showed that children benefited from smaller class sizes of 13 to 17 students in the early grades, other studies have shown few effects.
Students, nonetheless, take notice. In Mrs. Guy’s fourth-grade class in Coatesville, Julian Rodriguez, 9, said the number of students resulted in “too much noise for the other kids.” Then, mustering the philosophical resilience of a child, Julian, who eagerly waved his hand in the air when Mrs. Guy asked questions, smiled. “But it’s good because you make a lot of friends,” he said.
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11) On Jammed Jets, Sardines Turn on One Another
By JAD MOUAWAD and MARTHA C. WHITE
December 22, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/business/on-jammed-jets-sardines-turn-on-one-another.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1387810850-ZlNIG4Yww8WUVudcJIVfpg
Flying coach can be a bruising experience these days.
Rory Rowland said he was rudely rebuffed after he asked the person in front of him not to recline his seat on a red-eye flight. When he later got up to use the bathroom, and the other passenger had fallen asleep, “I hip-checked his seat like you wouldn’t believe,” Mr. Rowland, a speaker and consultant, said, then feigned innocence when the enraged passenger complained to a flight attendant.
With air travelers increasingly feeling like packed sardines, flying has become a contact sport, nowhere more than over the reclined seat.
Now, it is only getting worse, as airlines re-examine every millimeter of the cabin.
Over the last two decades, the space between seats — hardly roomy before — has fallen about 10 percent, from 34 inches to somewhere between 30 and 32 inches. Today, some airlines are pushing it even further, leaving only a knee-crunching 28 inches.
To gain a little more space, airlines are turning to a new generation of seats that use lighter materials and less padding, moving the magazine pocket above the tray table and even reducing or eliminating the recline in seats. Some are even reducing the number of galleys and bathrooms.
Southwest, the nation’s largest domestic carrier, is installing seats with less cushion and thinner materials — a svelte model known in the business as “slim-line.” It also is reducing the maximum recline to two inches from three. These new seats allow Southwest to add another row, or six seats, to every flight — and add $200 million a year in newfound revenue.
“In today’s environment, the goal is to fit as many seats in the cabin as possible,” said Tom Plant, the general manager for seating products at B/E Aerospace, one of the top airplane seat makers. “We would all like more space on an aircraft, but we all like a competitive ticket price.”
Some carriers are taking the smush to new heights.
Spirit Airlines, for instance, uses seats on some flights with the backrest permanently set back three inches. Call it, as Spirit does, “prereclined.”
The low-cost airline started installing the seats in 2010, squeezing passengers into an industry low of 28 inches. While the Airbus A320 typically accommodates 150 passengers in coach, Spirit can pack 178.
And that is a good thing, Spirit says.
“Customers appreciate the fact that there is no longer interference from the seat in front of you moving up and down throughout the flight,” said Misty Pinson, a spokeswoman for Spirit.
Rick Seaney, the chief executive of FareCompare.com, said the airline business had changed in recent years, after airlines parked older planes and started flying with fewer empty seats. In the past five years, he said, carriers had cut capacity — the number of seats they fly — about 12 percent.
“The flip side is they can’t afford not to fill up their seats,” Mr. Seaney said. “This is a massive sea change.”
With so little space to haggle over, passengers have developed their own techniques for handling the crowded conditions.
“They jam their knee into the back of your seat as hard as they can, and they’ll do it repeatedly to see if they can get a reaction,” said Mick Brekke, a businessman who flies for work a few times a month. “That’s happened to me more than once, and that usually settles down after they realize I’m not going to put it back up.”
The passengers Mr. Brekke has encountered are not even the most extreme: Some have taken to using seat-jamming devices, known as knee guards, that prevent a seat in front from reclining. Airlines ban them, but they work, users say.
Smaller seats are not the only reason passengers feel more constricted these days. Travelers are also getting bigger. In the last four decades, the average American gained a little more than 20 pounds and his or her waist expanded about 2.5 inches, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The dimensions of airplanes, however, have not changed and neither has the average width of a coach seat, which is 17 to 18 inches.
As the cabins grow more crowded, airlines say they are thinking only of their customers, trying to keep costs down. Jude Bricker, the senior vice president for planning at Allegiant, said the airline’s nonreclining seats have fewer moving parts and so require less maintenance, which means lower costs. This allows the airline to keep its fares low, he said.
“We are continually reminded from customers and their behavior that what they want most is convenient service with a low fare,” Mr. Bricker said.
Several budget carriers in Europe have also adopted stiff seats, including Ryanair and EasyJet. Air France, for its domestic flights, which never take more than an hour, has installed nonreclining seats where the magazine pocket has been moved above the tray table to provide more space in the critical area around the knees.
For passengers willing to pay more, of course, airlines offer more room. Business class remains an ultracompetitive market with constant innovation and comfortable amenities, like seats that recline fully. Airlines are also increasingly offering several rows of coach seats with more legroom — also at an extra price.
Still, the squeeze is on for most passengers in coach. On a flight from Washington to Frankfurt last year, Odysseas Papadimitriou, the chief executive of WalletHub.com, a personal finance social network, was challenged by a tall passenger seated behind him when he reclined his seat. “He was like, ‘Hey, watch it, buddy. I don’t fit here with you reclining the seat,’ ” he said.
Mr. Papadimitriou called the flight attendant to mediate the dispute and eventually tilted his seat back, but the price he paid to recline was a fitful night’s sleep, as the other passenger grumbled and pushed against the back of his seat for the rest of the flight.
There are ways of resolving conflicts other than bumping into other passengers, as Mr. Rowland, the speaker and consultant, found. “I lean forward and tap them on the shoulder and say, ‘I’ll buy you a drink if you don’t push your seat back,’ ” Mr. Rowland said. “It’s made flying very pleasant.”
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12) Amid Steady Deportation, Fear and Worry Multiply Among Immigrants
By JULIA PRESTON
NEW ORLEANS — Karen Sandoval’s promising life in this city fell apart in one day last summer when she went to buy school supplies for her two daughters.
Ms. Sandoval, a Honduran immigrant here illegally, was riding with the man her girls have always called their father. Immigration agents, seeing a dilapidated car, pulled them over. They released Ms. Sandoval but detained her partner, a Nicaraguan also here illegally, and he was soon deported.
Now Ms. Sandoval, 28, is grieving her loss and scrambling to support her children without her partner, Enrique Morales, and the income from his thriving flooring business. She sees no future for the girls, who are both American citizens, in her home country or his. So Ms. Sandoval is facing the possibility that she may never see Mr. Morales again.
“It is very difficult to explain to two little girls that Daddy will not be with us anymore,” Ms. Sandoval said.
Since taking office, President Obama has deported more than 1.9 million foreigners, immigration officials announced last week, a record for an American president. The officials said they focused on removing criminals, serious immigration offenders and recent border crossers, with 98 percent of deportees in 2013 in those groups, while sparing workers and their families. Mr. Obama is also pressing for an overhaul of immigration laws with a path to citizenship for those here illegally.
But immigrant leaders say the enforcement has a broad impact on their communities, with deportations still separating bread-winning parents from children and unauthorized immigrants from family members here legally, including American citizens.
Administration officials say the deportation numbers — more than 368,000 this fiscal year — are driven by a congressional requirement that more than 30,000 immigrants be detained daily. They acknowledge that the lines are becoming harder to draw between high-priority violators and those with strong family ties.
For immigrants, the steady deportations have compounded their frustration with Congress, where the House took no action this year after the Senate passed a bipartisan overhaul bill in June. Increasingly advocates are turning their pressure on the president, saying he should use his executive powers to halt removals.
A 24-year-old South Korean, Ju Hong, brought attention to those demands when he repeatedly interrupted Mr. Obama during a speech in San Francisco last month, calling on him to stop deportations of all unauthorized immigrants in the country. In recent days, anti-deportation protesters blocked entrances to immigration detention centers in southwestern Ohio, Northern Virginia and downtown Los Angeles, with more than two dozen people arrested.
In New Orleans, street sweeps by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents this year also led to a protest. On Nov. 14, nearly two dozen demonstrators, including 14 immigrants without legal status, tied up midday traffic at one of the city’s busiest intersections for nearly three hours until the local police arrested them.
“Our people feel they can’t go to the store to buy food or walk their children to school,” said Santos Alvarado, 51, a Honduran construction worker who joined the protest here even though he has legal papers. “We couldn’t be quiet any longer.”
Many immigrants here have been stunned by the arrests, in which some people seemed to be stopped based solely on their Latino appearance, because they had been living here uneventfully since they came in the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to work on reconstruction.
One of those workers, Jimmy Barraza, was unloading a carful of groceries on Aug. 16 when agents pulled up with pistols drawn, handcuffing him as well as his teenage son, a United States citizen. A mobile fingerprint check of Mr. Barraza, who is also Honduran, revealed an old court order for his deportation.
Mr. Barraza, 28, won release from detention but is still fighting to remain. His wife is a longtime legal immigrant, and he has two other younger children who are American citizens.
“If they deport me,” he said, “who will keep my son in line? Who will support my family?”
Another Honduran, Irma Lemus, was packing fishing rods for a day on the bayou when cruising immigration agents spotted her family and stopped. A fingerprint check revealed that Ms. Lemus, too, had a deportation order.
“They handcuffed me in front of my children,” she recalled, speaking of a son who is 2 and a daughter who is 4.
After she spent 18 days in jail, lawyers won her release with an ankle monitor while immigration prosecutors weigh their options.
Ms. Lemus, 35, had steady work here cleaning hotels and a stable family, including a Honduran son, Joseph, who is 9 and in treatment for an eye disease, and her younger children who are American-born citizens. So she might be eligible for prosecutorial discretion, a policy the Obama administration has applied extensively to suspend deportations.
But although Ms. Lemus — like Mr. Morales, Mr. Barraza and many other illegal immigrants — had no criminal history, she did have a civil immigration record because of an earlier brush with enforcement authorities. She had failed to appear at a court hearing after she was stopped in 2006 crossing the southwest border. The judge’s order gave agents the authorization to deport her speedily.
Taking her children to Honduras, with its rampant gang violence and poor medical care, is not an option Ms. Lemus wishes to consider. So they live in anxiety that she could leave them any day.
“I think it would be so sad for all of my family,” her son Joseph said.
Many Republicans say Mr. Obama is deporting too few illegal immigrants. Robert Goodlatte, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said the figures published last week, showing a 10 percent decrease from 2012, were “just more evidence that the Obama administration refuses to enforce our immigration laws.”
Administration officials said removal numbers were determined by a requirement, included by Congress in the immigration agency’s appropriations, to fill a daily average of about 34,000 beds in detention facilities. The mandate, which is closely monitored by oversight committees, amounts to about 400,000 removals a year.
“We are fulfilling the mandate,” John Sandweg, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an interview. “We want to fill the beds with the right people, that is, public safety and national security threats and individuals we are required by law to detain.”
But he noted that agents were encountering many immigrants who fit those priorities but also had family connections that could make them eligible to stay by prosecutorial discretion.
“Many of these cases are very complex and not cut-and-dry,” Mr. Sandweg said.
In New Orleans, administration officials said, the immigration agency halted some operations after the protest. They had been part of an anti-gang campaign with the local police. But random stops of Latinos were not consistent with the agency’s guidelines, the officials said.
Saket Soni, the executive director of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, said deportations had picked up again in recent days.
“If Congress doesn’t act, another 400,000 people will be deported,” said Mr. Soni, whose group helped organize the protest. “This suffering has to stop.”
Advocates argue that Mr. Obama could expand reprieves he gave to young undocumented immigrants last year. But White House officials say the only solution is for Congress to pass a path to citizenship. Cecilia Muñoz, the director of the Domestic Policy Council, said in an interview that Mr. Obama did not have the legal authority for a wholesale curb on deportations. “There are not sufficient tools in his toolbox to address the heart of this problem,” she said.
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13) U.S. Flouts Its Own Advice in Procuring Overseas Clothing
By IAN URBINA
WASHINGTON
— One of the world’s biggest clothing buyers, the United States
government spends more than $1.5 billion a year at factories overseas,
acquiring everything from the royal blue shirts worn by airport security
workers to the olive button-downs required for forest rangers and the
camouflage pants sold to troops on military bases.
But even though the Obama administration has called on Western buyers to use their purchasing power to push for improved industry working conditions after several workplace disasters over the last 14 months, the American government has done little to adjust its own shopping habits.
Labor Department officials say that federal agencies have a “zero tolerance” policy on using overseas plants that break local laws, but American government suppliers in countries including Bangladesh, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, Pakistan and Vietnam show a pattern of legal violations and harsh working conditions, according to audits and interviews at factories. Among them: padlocked fire exits, buildings at risk of collapse, falsified wage records and repeated hand punctures from sewing needles when workers were pushed to hurry up.
In Bangladesh, shirts with Marine Corps logos sold in military stores were made at DK Knitwear, where child laborers made up a third of the work force, according to a 2010 audit that led some vendors to cut ties with the plant. Managers punched workers for missed production quotas, and the plant had no functioning alarm system despite previous fires, auditors said. Many of the problems remain, according to another audit this year and recent interviews with workers.
In Chiang Mai, Thailand, employees at the Georgie & Lou factory, which makes clothing sold by the Smithsonian Institution, said they were illegally docked over 5 percent of their roughly $10-per-day wage for any clothing item with a mistake. They also described physical harassment by factory managers and cameras monitoring workers even in bathrooms.
At Zongtex Garment Manufacturing in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, which makes clothes sold by the Army and Air Force, an audit conducted this year found nearly two dozen under-age workers, some as young as 15. Several of them described in interviews with The New York Times how they were instructed to hide from inspectors.
“Sometimes people soil themselves at their sewing machines,” one worker said, because of restrictions on bathroom breaks.
Federal agencies rarely know what factories make their clothes, much less require audits of them, according to interviews with procurement officials and industry experts. The agencies, they added, exert less oversight of foreign suppliers than many retailers do. And there is no law prohibiting the federal government from buying clothes produced overseas under unsafe or abusive conditions.
“It doesn’t exist for the exact same reason that American consumers still buy from sweatshops,” said Daniel Gordon, a former top federal procurement official who now works at George Washington University Law School. “The government cares most about getting the best price.”
Frank Benenati, a spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget, which oversees much of federal procurement policy, said the administration has made progress in improving oversight, including an executive order last year tightening rules against federal suppliers using factories that rely on debt bondage or other forms of forced labor.
“The administration is committed to ensuring that our government is doing business only with contractors who place a premium on integrity and good business ethics,” he said.
Labor and State Department officials have encouraged retailers to participate in strengthening rules on factory conditions in Bangladesh — home to one of the largest and most dangerous garment industries. But defense officials this month helped kill a legislative measure that would have required military stores, which last year made more than $485 million in profit, to comply with such rules because they said the $500,000 annual cost was too expensive.
Federal spending on garments overseas does not reach that of Walmart, the world’s biggest merchandiser, which spends more than $1 billion a year just in Bangladesh, or Zara, the Spanish apparel seller, but it still is in a top tier that includes H & M, the trendy fashion business based in Sweden, Eddie Bauer and Lands’ End, sellers of outerwear and other clothing.
Like most retail brands, American agencies typically do not order clothes directly from factories. They rely on contractors. This makes it challenging for agencies to track their global supply chain, with layers of middlemen, lax oversight by other governments, few of their own inspectors overseas and little means of policing factories that farm out work to other plants without the clients’ knowledge. When retailers, labor groups or others inspect these factories, the audits often understate problems because managers regularly coach workers and doctor records.
The United States government, though, faces special pressures. Its record on garment contracting demonstrates the tensions between its low-bid procurement practices and high-road policy objectives on labor and human rights issues.
The Obama administration, for example, has favored free-trade agreements to spur development in poor countries by cultivating low-skill, low-overhead jobs like those in the cut-and-sew industry. The removal of trade barriers has also driven prices down by making it easier for retailers to decamp from one country to the next in the hunt for cheap labor. Most economists say that these savings have directly benefited consumers, including institutional buyers like the American government. But free-trade zones often lack effective methods for ensuring compliance with local labor laws, and sometimes accelerate a race to the bottom in terms of wages.
Along a dirt road in Gazipur, about 25 miles north of the Bangladeshi capital, riot police fired tear gas shells, rubber bullets and sound grenades in a fierce clash with garment workers last month, sending scores to the hospital. The protesters demanding better conditions included some from a factory called V & R Fashions. In July, auditors rated that factory as “needs improvement” because workers’ pay was illegally docked for minor infractions and the building was unsafe, illegally constructed and not intended for industrial use.
Unsafe and Repressive
Like dozens of other factories in the area, V & R makes clothes for the American government, which is constantly prowling for the best deals. In interviews, workers at a half-dozen of these suppliers described the effect of such cost pressures.
At Manta Apparels, for example, which makes uniforms for the General Services Administration, employees said beatings are common and fire exits are kept chained except when auditors visit. The local press has described Manta as one of the most repressive factories in the country. A top labor advocate, Aminul Islam, was organizing there in 2010 when he was first arrested by the police and tortured. In April 2012, he was found dead, a hole drilled below his right knee and his ankles crushed.
Several miles from Manta, 40 women from another supplier, Coast to Coast, gathered late one night to avoid being seen publicly talking to a reporter. Dressed in burqas, the women said that prices of the clothing they make for sale on American military bases are now so cheap that managers try to save money by pushing them to speed up production. In the rush, workers routinely burn themselves with irons, they said, often requiring hospitalizations.
Work does not stop, they said, when it rain pours through a six-foot crack in the ceiling of the top floor of the factory — a repurposed apartment building with two extra floors added illegally to increase capacity. Even after the manager swipes their timecards, they say, he orders them to keep sewing.
While giving a tour of the plant, the manager described the building crack as inconsequential and too expensive to repair. He denied the workers’ other allegations. The owner of Manta declined to comment.
Conditions like those are possible partly because American government agencies usually do not know which factories supply their goods or are reluctant to reveal them. Soon after a fire killed at least 112 people at the Tazreen Fashions factory in Bangladesh in November 2012, several members of Congress asked various agencies for factory addresses. Of the seven agencies her office contacted, Representative Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York, said only the Department of the Interior turned over its list.
Over the summer, military officials told Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, that order forms for apparel with Marine Corps logos had been discovered in Tazreen’s charred remains but that the corps had ties to no other Bangladeshi factories. Several weeks later, the officials said they were mistaken and had discovered a half-dozen or so other factories producing unauthorized Marine Corps apparel. On Sunday, the owners of Tazreen and 11 employees were charged with culpable homicide.
President Obama has long pushed for more transparency in procurement. As a senator, he sponsored legislation in 2006 creating the website USASpending.gov, which open-government advocates say has made it far easier to track federal contracting. However, procurement experts fault the website for requiring agencies to name their contractors, but not identifying the specific factories doing the work. Some states and cities already require companies to disclose that information before awarding them public contracts, said Bjorn Skorpen Claeson, senior policy analyst at the International Labor Rights Forum.
Federal officials still have to navigate a tangle of rules. Defense officials, for instance, who spend roughly $2 billion annually on military uniforms, are required by a World War II-era rule called the Berry Amendment to have most of them made in the United States. In recent years, Congress has pressured defense officials to cut costs on uniforms. Increasingly, the department has turned to federal prisons, where wages are under $2 per hour. Federal inmates this year stitched more than $100 million worth of military uniforms.
No sooner had the Transportation Security Administration, or T.S.A., signed a $50 million contract in February for new uniforms for its 50,000 airport security agents and other workers, than the agency was attacked from all sides.
Union officials, opposed to outsourcing work overseas, objected because the Mexican plant making the clothing, VF Imagewear Matamoros, was the same one that had treated uniforms with chemicals that caused rashes in hundreds of T.S.A. agents. Congress called an oversight hearing, where some lawmakers questioned why two-thirds of the uniforms would be made in foreign factories, saying the deal was a missed chance to stimulate domestic job growth. Other lawmakers faulted the agency for spending too much money on clothing, especially on the cusp of a federal budget crisis, no matter where the merchandise was made.
“Bottom line,” John W. Halinski, T.S.A. deputy administrator, told Congress, “we go for the lowest-cost uniform, sir.”
The hunt for lower costs and the expansion of free-trade pacts have meant that more of this work is being done abroad, often in poor countries where the Obama administration is trying to spur competition and development.
In Haiti, for instance, trucks loaded with camouflage pants, shirts and jackets, some of them destined for American military bases, idle in front of a factory called BKI.
By Meridith Kohut
While the Dominican manager of a garment factory in Codevi says the industry is helping improve lives, a worker says conditions are bad for people like him.
Next year, BKI managers hope to double the amount of camouflage clothing made for the American government, part of a contract worth more than $30 million between a division of Propper International, a Missouri-based uniform company, and the General Services Administration, which outfits workers for more than a dozen federal agencies.
Three years ago, much of this camouflage clothing was made in Puerto Rico, where workers earned the minimum wage of about $7.25 an hour. By 2011, many of these jobs moved to a factory in the Dominican Republic called Suprema. Wages there were about 80 cents per hour and unpaid overtime was routine, according to workers in recent interviews and a 2010 audit. Since then, most of these jobs have migrated again, this time to BKI in a Haitian free-trade zone called Codevi. Average hourly wages at BKI are about 8 cents less per hour than those at Suprema, according to workers.
Standing near the factory entrance, several BKI workers said they were proud of the clothes they made for the American government. “We push hard because we know they expect better,” said Rodley Charles, 29, a quality inspector at the factory.
But there is basic math: the average pay of 72 cents per hour (which is illegal and below Haiti’s minimum wage) barely covers food and rent, said Mr. Charles, who has since quit, and two other BKI workers.
These wage pressures may soon intensify. Codevi will soon face new competition from another industrial park called Caracol, which is being built partly with money from the United States Agency for International Development as part of reconstruction efforts after the earthquake of 2010.
American officials predict that Caracol will eventually create 60,000 new jobs. Current wages there? About 57 cents per hour, or roughly 15 cents less than typical wages at Codevi.
Big Business
At a military store in Bethesda, Md., Tori Novo smiled as she looked over a pair of $19.99 children’s cargo pants made in Bangladesh that sell for $39 in most department stores. The best part of living on base, said Ms. Novo, a 31-year-old Navy recruiter, was “savings like these.”
Known as exchanges, these big-box stores on military bases around the world offer a guarantee: to beat or match any price from rivals. That promise puts the exchanges in direct competition with the deep discounts offered by stores like Gap and Target. It also adds to already intense pressure to lower costs by using the cheapest factories, industry analysts say.
These stores, run by the Defense Department, do big business, selling more than $1 billion a year in apparel alone. Exempt from the Berry Amendment, the exchanges get more than 90 percent of their clothes from factories outside the United States, according to industry estimates. The profits from these tax-free stores mostly go toward entertainment services like golf courses, gyms and bowling alleys on bases.
Though the Government Accountability Office criticized the exchanges over a decade ago for exerting less oversight than private retailers and for failing to independently monitor their overseas suppliers, little has improved.
The Marine Corps and Navy still do not require audits of these factories. The Air Force and Army exchanges do, but the audits can come from retailers, and defense officials fail to do routine spot checks to confirm their accuracy.
For example, Citadel Apparels, a factory in a seven-story building in Gazipur, has cut, stitched and shipped more than 11 metric tons of cotton boys’ T-shirts and other clothes for sale at exchanges on Army and Air Force bases in recent months. This summer, lawmakers in Congress asked the Defense Department for proof that Citadel was safe. Defense officials produced an audit conducted for Walmart, another client of the factory, showing that it had an “orange” risk ranking in July 2012, the same high level of alarm that Walmart had given the Tazreen factory before the fatal fire there last year.
While allowing the factory to stay open, the audit offered an alarming statistical snapshot.
Sixty-five percent: number of workers barefoot, some on the building’s roof. Fifty percent: workers without legally required masks to protect against cotton dust. Sixteen percent: workers missing time-sheets, a common sign of forced overtime. Most serious infractions: cracks in the walls that could compromise the building, and partly blocked exit routes and stairwells.
By January, Citadel’s auditors concluded that most of these dangers had been fixed. However, a half-dozen Citadel workers offered a starkly different picture. Virtually none of the original problems had ever been corrected, they said in interviews last month with The Times.
“We aren’t sewing machines,” one worker said. “Our lives are worth more.”
For now, Bangladesh’s garment sector continues to grow, as do purchases from one of its bulk buyers. In the year since Tazreen burned down, American military stores have shipped even more clothes from Bangladesh.
Ian Urbina reported from Bangladesh and Washington. Research was contributed by Susan Beachy in New York, Poypiti Amatatham in Bangkok, Karla Zabludovsky in Mexico City, Malavika Vyawahare in New Delhi and Meridith Kohut in Ouanaminthe, Haiti.
But even though the Obama administration has called on Western buyers to use their purchasing power to push for improved industry working conditions after several workplace disasters over the last 14 months, the American government has done little to adjust its own shopping habits.
Labor Department officials say that federal agencies have a “zero tolerance” policy on using overseas plants that break local laws, but American government suppliers in countries including Bangladesh, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, Pakistan and Vietnam show a pattern of legal violations and harsh working conditions, according to audits and interviews at factories. Among them: padlocked fire exits, buildings at risk of collapse, falsified wage records and repeated hand punctures from sewing needles when workers were pushed to hurry up.
In Bangladesh, shirts with Marine Corps logos sold in military stores were made at DK Knitwear, where child laborers made up a third of the work force, according to a 2010 audit that led some vendors to cut ties with the plant. Managers punched workers for missed production quotas, and the plant had no functioning alarm system despite previous fires, auditors said. Many of the problems remain, according to another audit this year and recent interviews with workers.
In Chiang Mai, Thailand, employees at the Georgie & Lou factory, which makes clothing sold by the Smithsonian Institution, said they were illegally docked over 5 percent of their roughly $10-per-day wage for any clothing item with a mistake. They also described physical harassment by factory managers and cameras monitoring workers even in bathrooms.
At Zongtex Garment Manufacturing in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, which makes clothes sold by the Army and Air Force, an audit conducted this year found nearly two dozen under-age workers, some as young as 15. Several of them described in interviews with The New York Times how they were instructed to hide from inspectors.
“Sometimes people soil themselves at their sewing machines,” one worker said, because of restrictions on bathroom breaks.
Federal agencies rarely know what factories make their clothes, much less require audits of them, according to interviews with procurement officials and industry experts. The agencies, they added, exert less oversight of foreign suppliers than many retailers do. And there is no law prohibiting the federal government from buying clothes produced overseas under unsafe or abusive conditions.
“It doesn’t exist for the exact same reason that American consumers still buy from sweatshops,” said Daniel Gordon, a former top federal procurement official who now works at George Washington University Law School. “The government cares most about getting the best price.”
Frank Benenati, a spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget, which oversees much of federal procurement policy, said the administration has made progress in improving oversight, including an executive order last year tightening rules against federal suppliers using factories that rely on debt bondage or other forms of forced labor.
“The administration is committed to ensuring that our government is doing business only with contractors who place a premium on integrity and good business ethics,” he said.
Labor and State Department officials have encouraged retailers to participate in strengthening rules on factory conditions in Bangladesh — home to one of the largest and most dangerous garment industries. But defense officials this month helped kill a legislative measure that would have required military stores, which last year made more than $485 million in profit, to comply with such rules because they said the $500,000 annual cost was too expensive.
Federal spending on garments overseas does not reach that of Walmart, the world’s biggest merchandiser, which spends more than $1 billion a year just in Bangladesh, or Zara, the Spanish apparel seller, but it still is in a top tier that includes H & M, the trendy fashion business based in Sweden, Eddie Bauer and Lands’ End, sellers of outerwear and other clothing.
Like most retail brands, American agencies typically do not order clothes directly from factories. They rely on contractors. This makes it challenging for agencies to track their global supply chain, with layers of middlemen, lax oversight by other governments, few of their own inspectors overseas and little means of policing factories that farm out work to other plants without the clients’ knowledge. When retailers, labor groups or others inspect these factories, the audits often understate problems because managers regularly coach workers and doctor records.
The United States government, though, faces special pressures. Its record on garment contracting demonstrates the tensions between its low-bid procurement practices and high-road policy objectives on labor and human rights issues.
The Obama administration, for example, has favored free-trade agreements to spur development in poor countries by cultivating low-skill, low-overhead jobs like those in the cut-and-sew industry. The removal of trade barriers has also driven prices down by making it easier for retailers to decamp from one country to the next in the hunt for cheap labor. Most economists say that these savings have directly benefited consumers, including institutional buyers like the American government. But free-trade zones often lack effective methods for ensuring compliance with local labor laws, and sometimes accelerate a race to the bottom in terms of wages.
Along a dirt road in Gazipur, about 25 miles north of the Bangladeshi capital, riot police fired tear gas shells, rubber bullets and sound grenades in a fierce clash with garment workers last month, sending scores to the hospital. The protesters demanding better conditions included some from a factory called V & R Fashions. In July, auditors rated that factory as “needs improvement” because workers’ pay was illegally docked for minor infractions and the building was unsafe, illegally constructed and not intended for industrial use.
Unsafe and Repressive
Like dozens of other factories in the area, V & R makes clothes for the American government, which is constantly prowling for the best deals. In interviews, workers at a half-dozen of these suppliers described the effect of such cost pressures.
At Manta Apparels, for example, which makes uniforms for the General Services Administration, employees said beatings are common and fire exits are kept chained except when auditors visit. The local press has described Manta as one of the most repressive factories in the country. A top labor advocate, Aminul Islam, was organizing there in 2010 when he was first arrested by the police and tortured. In April 2012, he was found dead, a hole drilled below his right knee and his ankles crushed.
Several miles from Manta, 40 women from another supplier, Coast to Coast, gathered late one night to avoid being seen publicly talking to a reporter. Dressed in burqas, the women said that prices of the clothing they make for sale on American military bases are now so cheap that managers try to save money by pushing them to speed up production. In the rush, workers routinely burn themselves with irons, they said, often requiring hospitalizations.
Work does not stop, they said, when it rain pours through a six-foot crack in the ceiling of the top floor of the factory — a repurposed apartment building with two extra floors added illegally to increase capacity. Even after the manager swipes their timecards, they say, he orders them to keep sewing.
While giving a tour of the plant, the manager described the building crack as inconsequential and too expensive to repair. He denied the workers’ other allegations. The owner of Manta declined to comment.
Conditions like those are possible partly because American government agencies usually do not know which factories supply their goods or are reluctant to reveal them. Soon after a fire killed at least 112 people at the Tazreen Fashions factory in Bangladesh in November 2012, several members of Congress asked various agencies for factory addresses. Of the seven agencies her office contacted, Representative Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York, said only the Department of the Interior turned over its list.
Over the summer, military officials told Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, that order forms for apparel with Marine Corps logos had been discovered in Tazreen’s charred remains but that the corps had ties to no other Bangladeshi factories. Several weeks later, the officials said they were mistaken and had discovered a half-dozen or so other factories producing unauthorized Marine Corps apparel. On Sunday, the owners of Tazreen and 11 employees were charged with culpable homicide.
President Obama has long pushed for more transparency in procurement. As a senator, he sponsored legislation in 2006 creating the website USASpending.gov, which open-government advocates say has made it far easier to track federal contracting. However, procurement experts fault the website for requiring agencies to name their contractors, but not identifying the specific factories doing the work. Some states and cities already require companies to disclose that information before awarding them public contracts, said Bjorn Skorpen Claeson, senior policy analyst at the International Labor Rights Forum.
Federal officials still have to navigate a tangle of rules. Defense officials, for instance, who spend roughly $2 billion annually on military uniforms, are required by a World War II-era rule called the Berry Amendment to have most of them made in the United States. In recent years, Congress has pressured defense officials to cut costs on uniforms. Increasingly, the department has turned to federal prisons, where wages are under $2 per hour. Federal inmates this year stitched more than $100 million worth of military uniforms.
No sooner had the Transportation Security Administration, or T.S.A., signed a $50 million contract in February for new uniforms for its 50,000 airport security agents and other workers, than the agency was attacked from all sides.
Union officials, opposed to outsourcing work overseas, objected because the Mexican plant making the clothing, VF Imagewear Matamoros, was the same one that had treated uniforms with chemicals that caused rashes in hundreds of T.S.A. agents. Congress called an oversight hearing, where some lawmakers questioned why two-thirds of the uniforms would be made in foreign factories, saying the deal was a missed chance to stimulate domestic job growth. Other lawmakers faulted the agency for spending too much money on clothing, especially on the cusp of a federal budget crisis, no matter where the merchandise was made.
“Bottom line,” John W. Halinski, T.S.A. deputy administrator, told Congress, “we go for the lowest-cost uniform, sir.”
The hunt for lower costs and the expansion of free-trade pacts have meant that more of this work is being done abroad, often in poor countries where the Obama administration is trying to spur competition and development.
In Haiti, for instance, trucks loaded with camouflage pants, shirts and jackets, some of them destined for American military bases, idle in front of a factory called BKI.
By Meridith Kohut
While the Dominican manager of a garment factory in Codevi says the industry is helping improve lives, a worker says conditions are bad for people like him.
Next year, BKI managers hope to double the amount of camouflage clothing made for the American government, part of a contract worth more than $30 million between a division of Propper International, a Missouri-based uniform company, and the General Services Administration, which outfits workers for more than a dozen federal agencies.
Three years ago, much of this camouflage clothing was made in Puerto Rico, where workers earned the minimum wage of about $7.25 an hour. By 2011, many of these jobs moved to a factory in the Dominican Republic called Suprema. Wages there were about 80 cents per hour and unpaid overtime was routine, according to workers in recent interviews and a 2010 audit. Since then, most of these jobs have migrated again, this time to BKI in a Haitian free-trade zone called Codevi. Average hourly wages at BKI are about 8 cents less per hour than those at Suprema, according to workers.
Standing near the factory entrance, several BKI workers said they were proud of the clothes they made for the American government. “We push hard because we know they expect better,” said Rodley Charles, 29, a quality inspector at the factory.
But there is basic math: the average pay of 72 cents per hour (which is illegal and below Haiti’s minimum wage) barely covers food and rent, said Mr. Charles, who has since quit, and two other BKI workers.
These wage pressures may soon intensify. Codevi will soon face new competition from another industrial park called Caracol, which is being built partly with money from the United States Agency for International Development as part of reconstruction efforts after the earthquake of 2010.
American officials predict that Caracol will eventually create 60,000 new jobs. Current wages there? About 57 cents per hour, or roughly 15 cents less than typical wages at Codevi.
Big Business
At a military store in Bethesda, Md., Tori Novo smiled as she looked over a pair of $19.99 children’s cargo pants made in Bangladesh that sell for $39 in most department stores. The best part of living on base, said Ms. Novo, a 31-year-old Navy recruiter, was “savings like these.”
Known as exchanges, these big-box stores on military bases around the world offer a guarantee: to beat or match any price from rivals. That promise puts the exchanges in direct competition with the deep discounts offered by stores like Gap and Target. It also adds to already intense pressure to lower costs by using the cheapest factories, industry analysts say.
These stores, run by the Defense Department, do big business, selling more than $1 billion a year in apparel alone. Exempt from the Berry Amendment, the exchanges get more than 90 percent of their clothes from factories outside the United States, according to industry estimates. The profits from these tax-free stores mostly go toward entertainment services like golf courses, gyms and bowling alleys on bases.
Though the Government Accountability Office criticized the exchanges over a decade ago for exerting less oversight than private retailers and for failing to independently monitor their overseas suppliers, little has improved.
The Marine Corps and Navy still do not require audits of these factories. The Air Force and Army exchanges do, but the audits can come from retailers, and defense officials fail to do routine spot checks to confirm their accuracy.
For example, Citadel Apparels, a factory in a seven-story building in Gazipur, has cut, stitched and shipped more than 11 metric tons of cotton boys’ T-shirts and other clothes for sale at exchanges on Army and Air Force bases in recent months. This summer, lawmakers in Congress asked the Defense Department for proof that Citadel was safe. Defense officials produced an audit conducted for Walmart, another client of the factory, showing that it had an “orange” risk ranking in July 2012, the same high level of alarm that Walmart had given the Tazreen factory before the fatal fire there last year.
While allowing the factory to stay open, the audit offered an alarming statistical snapshot.
Sixty-five percent: number of workers barefoot, some on the building’s roof. Fifty percent: workers without legally required masks to protect against cotton dust. Sixteen percent: workers missing time-sheets, a common sign of forced overtime. Most serious infractions: cracks in the walls that could compromise the building, and partly blocked exit routes and stairwells.
By January, Citadel’s auditors concluded that most of these dangers had been fixed. However, a half-dozen Citadel workers offered a starkly different picture. Virtually none of the original problems had ever been corrected, they said in interviews last month with The Times.
“We aren’t sewing machines,” one worker said. “Our lives are worth more.”
For now, Bangladesh’s garment sector continues to grow, as do purchases from one of its bulk buyers. In the year since Tazreen burned down, American military stores have shipped even more clothes from Bangladesh.
Ian Urbina reported from Bangladesh and Washington. Research was contributed by Susan Beachy in New York, Poypiti Amatatham in Bangkok, Karla Zabludovsky in Mexico City, Malavika Vyawahare in New Delhi and Meridith Kohut in Ouanaminthe, Haiti.
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14) Alan Turing, Enigma Code-Breaker and Computer Pioneer, Wins Royal Pardon
By EMMA G. FITZSIMMONS
Nearly 60 years after his death, Alan Turing, the British mathematician regarded as one of the central figures in the development of the computer, received a formal pardon from Queen Elizabeth II on Monday for his conviction in 1952 on charges of homosexuality, at the time a criminal offense in Britain.
The pardon was announced by the British justice secretary, Chris Grayling, who had made the request to the queen. Mr. Grayling said in a statement that Mr. Turing, whose most remarkable achievement was helping to develop the machines and algorithms that unscrambled the supposedly impenetrable Enigma code used by the Germans in World War II, “deserves to be remembered and recognized for his fantastic contribution to the war effort and his legacy to science.”
The British prime minister, David Cameron, said in a statement: “His action saved countless lives. He also left a remarkable national legacy through his substantial scientific achievements, often being referred to as the ‘father of modern computing.’ ”
Mr. Turing committed suicide in 1954, two years after his conviction on charges of gross indecency. He was 41. In a 1936 research paper, Mr. Turing anticipated a computing machine that could perform different tasks by altering its software, rather than its hardware.
He also proposed the now famous Turing test, used to determine artificial intelligence. In the test, a person asks questions of both a computer and another human — neither of which they can see — to try to determine which is the computer and which is the fellow human. If the computer can fool the person, according to the Turing test, it is deemed intelligent.
In 2009, Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a formal apology to Mr. Turing, calling his treatment “horrifying” and “utterly unfair.” But Mr. Cameron’s government denied him a pardon last year.
An online petition urging a pardon received more than 35,000 signatures. The campaign has also received worldwide support from scientists, including Stephen Hawking.
When Mr. Turing was convicted in 1952, he was sentenced — as an alternative to prison — to chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He also lost his security clearance because of the conviction. He committed suicide by eating an apple believed to have been laced with cyanide.
The queen has the power to issue a “royal prerogative of mercy” to pardon civilians, but rarely does so. Mr. Grayling said that Mr. Turing’s sentence would today be considered “unjust and discriminatory.” Mr. Turing has been the subject of numerous biographies, as well as “Breaking the Code,” a play based on his life that was presented in London’s West End and on Broadway in the 1980s.
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15) Israelis Shell Gaza After Israeli Fence Repairer Is Killed
By ISABEL KERSHNER
JERUSALEM — An Israeli laborer who was repairing the security fence along the border with Gaza was fatally shot on Tuesday by a Palestinian sniper, according to the Israeli military, and Israel immediately responded by bombing targets it associated with militant groups in the Palestinian coastal territory.
A Palestinian girl, 3, was killed and at least four of her relatives were wounded when a shell landed in front of their home in a refugee camp, according to hospital officials in Gaza.
The deaths were the latest in a growing wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence that comes against the background of difficult peace talks. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had warned that the killing of the laborer would not go unanswered.
“Our policy until now has been to act beforehand and to respond in force and this is how we will act regarding this incident as well,” Mr. Netanyahu said during a visit earlier Tuesday to Sderot, the Israeli town located about a mile from the Gaza border that has been subjected to Palestinian rocket fire for years.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the killing of the Israeli laborer, but anticipating Israeli retaliation, Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls Gaza, evacuated its security facilities. Islam Shahwan, a spokesman for the Hamas government’s Interior Ministry, praised the killing, calling it a “heroic operation.”
Mahmoud Zahar, a senior Hamas official, condemned the Israeli strikes as aggression against the Palestinian people.
In November 2012 Israel launched a military offensive against the militant groups in Gaza that led to eight days of intense cross-border fighting, which ended with an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire.
The recent uptick in violence, involving both the West Bank and the Israel-Gaza frontier, has prompted talk of the possibility of a third Palestinian uprising, especially if the peace talks, scheduled to continue until late April, end in failure.
Israel is negotiating with the West Bank-based mainstream Palestinian leadership headed by President Mahmoud Abbas. Hamas, which rejects Israel’s right to exist, opposes the peace talks.
The Israeli killed on Tuesday was a civilian contractor who had been working for the Israeli Defense Ministry. His death came a day after an Israeli police officer was stabbed and wounded at a West Bank junction. On Sunday, a bomb exploded on a bus in Bat Yam, near Tel Aviv, minutes after the passengers had been warned to exit, preventing casualties. The police said they were working on the assumption that the bomb had been an attempted attack by Palestinian militants.
In addition, three Israeli soldiers and a retired colonel have been killed in recent months by Palestinians from the West Bank.
More than 20 Palestinians have been killed in clashes with Israeli forces this year, according to Palestinian officials.
Fares Akram contributed reporting from Gaza.
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16) $40 Million in Aid Set for Bangladesh Garment Workers
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Eight months after the Rana Plaza factory building collapsed in Bangladesh, killing more than 1,100 workers and leaving hundreds of families bereft and financially adrift, several prominent retailers and labor groups have joined with the Bangladesh government to create an estimated $40 million compensation fund to aid the victims’ families.
So far, four retailers — Bon Marché, El Corte Inglés, Loblaw and Primark — have pledged to contribute to the fund, which is intended to compensate the families of those who died last April 24 in what was the deadliest disaster in garment industry history. The new fund is considered a landmark in compensating families of garment industry victims, in terms of both the amount to be paid and the sophistication of the arrangements. No United States-based retailers have signed on.
Several officials involved in negotiations to establish the fund said in interviews that the families of the dead would receive, on average, more than $25,000 each, while hundreds of workers who were injured or maimed would also receive compensation. Per capita income in Bangladesh is about $1,900 a year.
The fund’s members said they hoped to begin making payments in February, although they have yet to decide how much each firm will contribute, which depends in part on whether governments donate. The money is to be paid in installments to ensure that the families have a steady source of income for years to come. “We think the agreement is a really good result,” said Ineke Zeldenrust, international coordinator of the Clean Clothes Campaign, a European antisweatshop group that has pressed retailers to do far more to help the families of the disaster’s victims. “The agreement will deliver to all the victims and the families of the Rana Plaza disaster full and fair compensation in a credible manner. What we need now is for other companies to agree to pay into the fund.”
Families of the victims have already received several months of short-term emergency aid from the Bangladesh government as well as from Primark, an Anglo-Irish retailer. But these families have been pressing for long-term compensation.
In some families, with the mother dead, children have quit school and gone to work. In other cases, workers who were seriously injured and cannot work are desperate for income.
Talks to establish the fund, coordinated by the International Labor Organization, began in September but stalled over such issues as how to collect information on claims, how to determine which claims were legitimate and who should administer the fund. The amount to be paid will be based on the anticipated wage loss of each worker killed, tied to the number of children, or, if the beneficiary is a parent, to the life expectancy of an adult.
With 1,800 workers having died in garment industry disasters in Bangladesh over the last decade, Dan Rees, program director for the Better Work organization, an affiliate of the International Labor Organization, said: “If you look at the history of compensation efforts in the Bangladesh garment industry, it’s not a good one. But this is a potential breakthrough.”
Among the groups that signed the agreement to create the compensation were the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, IndustriAll Global Union, the Bangladesh Employers Federation and the main Bangladesh coalition of labor unions.
Some retailers and labor rights groups have expressed dismay that no United States retailers have agreed to join the compensation effort.
“Following the collapse, we came very quickly to the conclusion that compensation was not only a necessity for the survivors and their families, but a responsibility for the many retailers sourcing from Rana Plaza,” said Robert Chant, senior vice president for corporate affairs at Loblaw, a Canadian company. “We are still hopeful that other retailers will join us in meeting the obligation, but we’ve already made public our disappointment in the failure of others to step forward.”
Loblaw owns the Joe Fresh apparel chain, with apparel from one of Rana Plaza’s factories.
Amid warnings that its columns were crumbling, the poorly constructed building collapsed, crushing hundreds of workers in tons of concrete and steel.
Labor rights groups say they found documents and remnants of apparel tying 25 European and American retailers and brands to the five garment factories spread across Rana Plaza’s eight floors. Several of the firms have since denied their apparel came from any of the factories. Mango, a Spanish apparel brand, said, for instance, that it only had a test order in a factory there.
Walmart has been urged to help the Rana Plaza families because production documents found in the rubble indicated that a Canadian contractor was producing jeans for Walmart in 2012 at the Ether Tex factory inside the building. Walmart said an unauthorized contractor was producing garments there without its knowledge. It says it is focused on assuring that there are no such disasters in the future.
The Children’s Place, which had obtained apparel from one of the factories inside Rana Plaza, said the factory was not supplying it at the time of the collapse.
A Walmart official said the company had no comment about requests for it to contribute to the fund. The Children’s Place did not respond to inquiries.
“These brands produced at Rana Plaza, yet did nothing to protect the workers who made their clothes, despite a history of deadly building collapses in Bangladesh,” said Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, a monitoring group based in Washington that is financed by American colleges and universities. “Incredibly, some companies do not seem to feel the slightest responsibility to the families whose lives were destroyed as a result of this negligence.”
Officials involved in the compensation fund say they have not yet worked out how much money each participant should contribute. That will depend, in part, on how many retailers ultimately agree to participate and whether various governments agree to give money.
Some industry experts say the American companies are afraid to participate for fear of being exposed to legal liability or appearing hypocritical after denying that they knowingly did business at Rana Plaza at the time of the collapse. Mr. Rees, the I.L.O. official, said contributions would not lead to liability. “At the moment, this effort needs support,” he said. “It needs the backing of companies that were in Rana Plaza when it collapsed, that were there in the recent past before it collapsed and that weren’t in there at all and want to show solidarity with the industry.”
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B. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND
ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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U.S. Court of Appeals Rules Against Lorenzo Johnson’s
New Legal Challenge to His Frame-up Conviction!
Demand the PA Attorney General Dismiss the Charges!
Free Lorenzo Johnson, Now!
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit denied Lorenzo Johnson’s motion to file a Second Habeas Corpus Petition. The order contained the outrageous declaration that Johnson hadn’t made a “prima facie case” that he had new evidence of his innocence. This not only puts a legal obstacle in Johnson’s path as his fight for freedom makes its way (again) through the state and federal courts—but it undermines the newly filed Pennsylvania state appeal that is pending in the Court of Common Pleas.
Stripped of “legalese,” the court’s October 15, 2013 order says Johnson’s new evidence was not brought into court soon enough—although it was the prosecution and police who withheld evidence and coerced witnesses into lying or not coming forward with the truth! This, despite over fifteen years and rounds of legal battles to uncover the evidence of government misconduct. This is a set-back for Lorenzo Johnson’s renewed fight for his freedom, but Johnson is even more determined as his PA state court appeal continues.
Increased public support and protest is needed. The fight for Lorenzo Johnson’s freedom is not only a fight for this courageous man and family. The fight for Lorenzo Johnson is also a fight for all the innocent others who have been framed and are sitting in the slow death of prison. The PA Attorney General is directly pursuing the charges against Lorenzo, despite the evidence of his innocence and the corruption of the police. Free Lorenzo Johnson, Now!
—Rachel Wolkenstein, Esq.
October 25, 2013
For more on the federal court and PA state court legal filings.
Hear Mumia’s latest commentary, “Cat Cries”
Go to: www.FreeLorenzoJohnson.org for more information, to sign the petition, and how to help.
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PUSH CHELSEA'S JAILERS TO RESPECT HER IDENTITY
Call and write Ft Leavenworth today and tell them to honor Manning's wishes around her name and gender:
Chelsea's supporters were awarded the title “absolutely fabulous overall contingent” at the San Francisco Pride Parade
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Call: (913) 758-3600
Write to:
Col. Sioban Ledwith, Commander
U.S. Detention Barracks
1301 N Warehouse Rd
Ft. Leavenworth KS 66027
Private Manning has been an icon both for the government transparency movement and LGBTQ activists because of her fearlessness and acts of conscience. Now, as she begins serving her sentence, Chelsea has asked for help with legal appeals, family visits, education, and support for undergoing gender transition. The latter is a decision she’s made following years of experiencing gender dysphoria and examining her options. At a difficult time in her life, she joined the military out of hope–the hope that she could use her service to save lives, and also the hope that it would help to suppress her feelings of gender dysphoria. But after serving time in Iraq, Private Manning realized what mattered to her most was the truth, personal as well as political, even when it proved challenging.
Now she wants the Fort Leavenworth military prison to allow her access to hormone replacement therapy which she has offered to pay for herself, as she pursues the process to have her name legally changed to ‘Chelsea Elizabeth Manning.’
To encourage the prison to honor her transgender identity, we’re calling on progressive supporters and allies to contact Fort Leavenworth officials demanding they acknowledge her requested name change immediately. Currently, prison officials are not required to respect Chelsea’s identity, and can even refuse to deliver mail addressed to the name ‘Chelsea Manning.’ However, it’s within prison administrators’ power to begin using the name ‘Chelsea Manning’ now, in advance of the legal name change which will most likely be approved sometime next year. It’s also up to these officials to approve Private Manning’s request for hormone therapy.
Call: (913) 758-3600
Write to:
Col. Sioban Ledwith, Commander
U.S. Detention Barracks
1301 N Warehouse Rd
Ft. Leavenworth KS 66027
Tell them: “Transgender rights are human rights! Respect Private Manning’s identity by acknowledging the name ‘Chelsea Manning’ whenever possible, including in mail addressed to her, and by allowing her access to appropriate medical treatment for gender dysphoria, including hormone replacement therapy (HRT).”
While openly transgender individuals are allowed to serve in many other militaries around the world, the US military continues to deny their existence. Now, by speaking up for Chelsea’s right to treatment, you can support one brave whistleblower in her personal struggle, and help set an important benchmark for the rights of transgender individuals everywhere. (Remember that letters written with focus and a respectful tone are more likely to be effective.) Feel free to copy this sample letter.
Earlier this year, the Private Manning Support Network won the title of most “absolutely fabulous overall contingent” at the San Francisco Pride Parade, the largest celebration of its kind for LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning) people nationwide. Over one thousand people marched for Private Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning in that parade, to show LGBTQ community pride for the Iraq War’s most well-known whistleblower.
Help us continue to cover 100%
of Pvt. Manning's legal fees! Donate today.
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38591
COURAGE TO RESIST
http://couragetoresist.org
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610
510-488-3559
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Please sign the NEW petition for Lynne Stewart.
Your signature will send a letter to Bureau of Prisons Director Samuels and to Attorney General Holder requesting that they expedite Lynne Stewart’s current application for compassionate release. The NEW petition is at https://www.change.org/petitions/new-petition-to-free-lynne-stewart-support-compassionate-release
Your signature will send a letter to Bureau of Prisons Director Samuels and to Attorney General Holder requesting that they expedite Lynne Stewart’s current application for compassionate release. The NEW petition is at https://www.change.org/petitions/new-petition-to-free-lynne-stewart-support-compassionate-release
Free Lynne Stewart: Support Compassionate Release
http://www.change.org/petitions/free-lynne-stewart-support-compassionate-release
Renowned defense
attorney Lynne Stewart, unjustly charged and convicted for the “crime”
of providing her client with a fearless defense, is dying of cancer
while imprisoned in the Federal Medical Center, Carswell, Texas.
Your action now can lead to her freedom so that she
may live out her remaining days with the comfort and joy of her family
and those closest to her, including her devoted husband Ralph Poynter,
many children, grandchildren, a great grandchild and lifelong friends.
The conservative medical prognosis by the
oncologist contracted by the prison is that Lynne Stewart has but
16-months to live. Breast cancer, in remission prior to her
imprisonment, reached Stage Four more than a year ago, emerging in her
lymph nodes, shoulder, bones and lungs.
Despite repeated courses of chemotherapy, cancer
advances in her lungs, resistant to treatment. Compounding her dire
condition, Lynne Stewart’s white blood cell count dropped so low that
she has been isolated in a prison hospital room since April 2013 to
reduce risk of generalized infection.
Under the 1984 Sentencing Act, upon a prisoner’s
request, the Bureau of Prisons can file a motion with the Court to
reduce sentences “for extraordinary and compelling reasons,” life
threatening illness foremost among these.
Lynne Stewart’s recent re-application for
compassionate release meets all the criteria specified in guidelines
issued by the Bureau of Prisons in August 2013.
These “new guidelines” followed a searing report
and testimony before Congress by the Department of Justice’s Inspector
General Michael Horowitz. His findings corroborated a definitive report
by Human Rights Watch. Inspector General Horowitz excoriated the Federal
Bureau of Prisons for the restrictive crippling of the compassionate
release program. In a 20-year period, the Bureau had released a scant
492 persons – an average of 24 a year out of a population that exceeds
220,000.
Over 30,000 people of conscience from all walks of
life in the United States and internationally took action to free Lynne
Stewart following her first application for compassionate release in
April of this year.
Among those who raised their voices are former
Attorney General Ramsey Clark – who was co-counsel in the case that led
to Lynne Stewart’s imprisonment, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former
President of the United Nations General Assembly, Father Miguel D’Escoto
Brockmann, Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Ed Asner,
Daniel Berrigan, Liz McAllister Berrigan, Richard Falk, Daniel Ellsberg,
Noam Chomsky, Cornell West, Dick Gregory, Alice Walker and Bianca
Jagger.
They along with thousands of individuals and
organizations, such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, the
National Lawyers Guild and Lawyers Rights Watch Canada, directed
letters, phone calls and public declarations to the Federal Bureau of
Prisons Director Charles E. Samuels, Jr. and to Attorney General Eric H.
Holder, Jr.
Dick Gregory has refused all solid food since April
4 and his remarkable moral witness will not end until Lynne Stewart is
released.
We call upon all to amplify this outpouring of
support. We ask all within our reach to convey to Bureau of Prisons
Director Samuels his obligation to approve Lynne Stewart’s application
and instruct the federal attorney to file the requisite motion for Lynne
Stewart’s compassionate release.
Please sign this new petition and
reach out to others to sign. The letter below will be sent on your
behalf via email to Charles E. Samuels, Jr., Director of the Federal
Bureau of Prisons and to Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. Telephone
calls also can be made to the Bureau of Prisons:
(202) 307-3250/3262.
http://www.change.org/petitions/free-lynne-stewart-support-compassionate-release
Write to Lynne Stewart at:
Lynne Stewart #53504-054Unit 2N
Federal Medical Center, Carswell
P.O. Box 27137
Fort Worth, TX 76127
Federal Medical Center, Carswell
P.O. Box 27137
Fort Worth, TX 76127
or via:
www.lynnestewart.org
What you can do:
Demand Compassionate Release for Lynne Now!
Write and call:
President Obama
The White House
Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500
(202) 456-1111
Attorney General Eric Holder
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20530-0001
(202) 353-1555
Charles E. Samuels, Jr.
Director, Federal Bureau of Prisons
320 First Street, NW
Washington, DC 20534
(202) 307-3250/3262
Write to Lynne Stewart:
Lynne Stewart #53504-054
Unit 2N, Federal Medical Center, Carswell
P.O. Box 27137
Fort Worth, TX 76127
Write to Lynne Stewart Defense Committee at:
Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
1070 Dean Street
Brooklyn, New York 11216
For further information: 718-789-0558 or 917-853-9759
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Kimberly Rivera
Imprisoned pregnant resister seeks early release for birth
495 supporters from around the world write letters in support of clemency applicationBy James Branum and Courage to Resist. November 4, 2013
Fort Carson, Colorado – Imprisoned war resister PFC Kimberly Rivera has submitted a clemency application seeking a reduction by 45 days in the 10 month prison sentence she received for seeking asylum in Canada rather return to her unit in Iraq.
The request for clemency was based on humanitarian reasons due to pregnancy. Unless clemency is granted, Private First Class Kimberly Rivera will be forced to give birth in prison and then immediately relinquish custody of her son while she continues to serve the remainder of her sentence.
Unfortunately military regulations provide no provisions for her to be able to breastfeed her infant son while she is in prison.
Fort Carson Senior Commander Brigadier General Michael A. Bills will be making a decision on PFC Rivera’s clemency request in the coming weeks.
PFC Rivera’s case made international news when she was the first female US soldier in the current era to flee to Canada for reasons of conscience. After a protracted struggle through the Canadian legal system, she was deported back to the United States in September 2012. She was then immediately arrested and sent back to the Army to stand trial.
In an interview with Courage to Resist on the eve of her court-martial,
Rivera said, “When I saw the little girl [in Iraq] shaking in fear, in
fear of me, because of my uniform, I couldn’t fathom what she had been
through and all I saw was my little girl and I just wanted to hold her
and comfort her. But I knew I couldn’t. It broke my heart. I am against
hurting anyone… I would harm myself first. I felt this also made me a
liability to my unit and I could not let me be a reason for anyone to be
harmed—so I left... Even though I did not fill out the official
application to obtain conscientious objector status, I consider myself a
conscientious objector to all war.”On April 29, 2013, PFC Rivera pled to charges of desertion. She was sentenced by the military judge to fourteen months in prison, loss of rank and pay, and a dishonorable discharge; thanks to a pre-trial agreement her sentence was reduced to an actual sentence to ten months of confinement and a bad-conduct discharge.
Kimberly Rivera has been recognized by Amnesty International as a “prisoner of conscience.” She is the mother of four children, ages 11, 9, 4 and 2.
Kimberly Rivera’s request for clemency was accompanied by 495 letters of support, written by family members, friends, as well as members of Amnesty International from 19 countries.
“We have many organizations to thank for the outpouring of support for Kimberly Rivera, including Amnesty International, Courage to Resist, the War Resisters Support Campaign of Canada, Veterans for Peace and Coffee Strong,” said James M. Branum, civilian defense attorney for PFC Rivera. “We also want to recognize the tireless efforts of local supporters in Colorado Springs and San Diego who have taken the time to visit Kim in prison as well as to provide important support to Kim’s family in her absence.”
While the official clemency request is now complete, supporters of PFC Rivera are still encouraged to continue to speak out on her behalf. Letters in support of PFC Rivera’s clemency request can be sent directly to:
Brigadier General Michael A. Bills
c/o Fort Carson Public Affairs Office
1626 Ellis Street
Suite 200, Building 1118
Fort Carson, CO 80913
(fax: 1-719-526-1021)
Supporters are also encouraged to sign an online petition posted at:c/o Fort Carson Public Affairs Office
1626 Ellis Street
Suite 200, Building 1118
Fort Carson, CO 80913
(fax: 1-719-526-1021)
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/752/756/678/free-a-pregnant-war-resister/
Photos: Top-Kimberly with husband Mario
during her court martial. Middle-Kimberly in Canada prior to being
deported. Bottom-Courage to Resist rallies outside Canadian Consulate,
San Francisco CA, prior to Kimberly's forced return.
Initial press release
by The Center for Conscience in Action, an Oklahoma City-based
organization dedicated to the intersection of peace, conscience and
direct action. CCA’s Legal Support Project provides low and no cost
legal representation to military service members seeking discharge on
the grounds of conscience.For more information or to schedule an interview about this subject, please contact James M. Branum, lead defense counsel for PFC Rivera, at 405-494-0562 or girightslawyer(at)gmail(dot)com. Consolidated Brig Miramar generally forbids inmates from doing interviews with the press, but you are welcome to see if an exception can be made by contacting the Brig Public Affairs office at 858-577-7071.
Additional case updates will be posted at couragetoresist.org and freekimberlyrivera.org.
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SAVE CCSF!
Two campaigns that need funds – Please donate!
Cartoon by Anthonty Mata for CCSF Guardsman
DOE CAMPAIGN
We are working to ensure that the ACCJC’s authority is not renewed by the Department of Education this December when they are up for their 5-year renewal. Our campaign made it possible for over 50 Third Party Comments to be sent to the DOE re: the ACCJC. Our next step in this campaign is to send a delegation from CCSF to Washington, D.C. to give oral comments at the hearing on December 12th. We expect to have an array of forces aligned on the other side who have much more money and resources than we do.
So please support this effort to get ACCJC authority revoked!
LEGAL CAMPAIGN
Save CCSF members have been meeting with Attorney Dan Siegel since last May to explore legal avenues to fight the ACCJC. After much consideration, and consultation with AFT 2121’s attorney as well as the SF City Attorney’s office, Dan has come up with a legal strategy that is complimentary to what is already being pursued. In fact, AFT 2121’s attorney is encouraging us to go forward.
The total costs of pursuing this (depositions, etc.) will be substantially more than $15,000. However, Dan is willing to do it for a fixed fee of $15,000. He will not expect a retainer, i.e. payment in advance, but we should start payments ASAP. If we win the ACCJC will have to pay our costs.
PLEASE HELP BOTH OF THESE IMPORTANT EFFORTS!
Checks can be made out to Save CCSF Coalition with “legal” in the memo line and sent to:
Save CCSF Coalition
2132 Prince St.
Berkeley, CA 94705
Or you may donate online: http://www.gofundme.com/4841ns2132 Prince St.
Berkeley, CA 94705
http://www.saveccsf.org/
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16 Years in Solitary Confinement Is Like a "Living Tomb"
American Civil Liberties Union petition to end long-term solitary confinement:
California Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard: We stand with the prisoners on hunger strike. We urge you to comply with the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons 2006 recommendations regarding an end to long-term solitary confinement.
Sign the petition:
https://www.aclu.org/secure/ca-hunger-strike?emsrc=Nat_Appeal_AutologinEnabled&emissue=criminal_justice&emtype=petition&ms=eml_130719_acluaction_cahungerstrike&af=k%2FxKX1cIRdoonPVmvnAfAit8jzOCulLOnCX4AAFljff%2B%2BVOdOHNe6CKwl7glWQSjSakzXt53zF%2FodPf00T3rRHlglO3tjEA6DcMSLJRlTbfVBHAizX6uOxoSy5%2FbP93EBFj5xi6Lwm3RWHjmDOZDARHLBSl1rqTr07kLhONZrnU1UIIgPs0P%2FXQ%2BJL3reyE8%2BoiI1nlfPZPBVhbfYxUzMQ%3D%3D&etname=130719+CA+prisoners+hunger+strike&etjid=946739
In California, hundreds of prisoners have been held in solitary for more than a decade – some for infractions as trivial as reading Machiavelli's "The Prince."
Gabriel Reyes describes the pain of being isolated for at least 22 hours a day for the last 16 years:
“Unless you have lived it, you cannot imagine what it feels like to be by yourself, between four cold walls, with little concept of time…. It is a living tomb …’ I have not been allowed physical contact with any of my loved ones since 1995…I feel helpless and hopeless. In short, I am being psychologically tortured.”
That’s why over 30,000 prisoners in California began a hunger strike – the biggest the state has ever seen. They’re refusing food to protest prisoners being held for decades in solitary and to push for other changes to improve their basic conditions.
California Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard has tried to dismiss the strikers and refuses to negotiate, but the media pressure is building through the strike. If tens of thousands of us take action, we can help keep this issue in the spotlight so that Secretary Beard can’t ignore the inhumane treatment of prisoners.
Sign the petition urging Corrections Secretary Beard to end the use of long-term solitary confinement.
Solitary is such an extreme form of punishment that a United Nations torture rapporteur called for an international ban on the practice except in rare occasions. Here’s why:
The majority of the 80,000 people held in solitary in this country are severely mentally ill or because of a minor infraction (it’s a myth that it’s only for violent prisoners)
Even for people with stable mental health, solitary causes severe psychological reactions, often leading people to attempt suicide
It jeopardizes public safety because prisoners held in solitary have a harder time reintegrating into society.
And to add insult to injury, the hunger strikers are now facing retaliation – their lawyers are being restricted from visiting and the strikers are being punished. But the media continues to write about the hunger strike and we can help keep the pressure on Secretary Beard by signing this petition.
Sign the petition urging Corrections Secretary Beard to end the use of long-term solitary confinement.
Our criminal justice system should keep communities safe and treat people fairly. The use of solitary confinement undermines both of these goals – but little by little, we can help put a stop to such cruelty.
Thank you,
Anthony for the ACLU Action team
P.S. The hunger strikers have developed five core demands to address their basic conditions, the main one being an end to long-term solitary confinement. They are:
-End group punishment – prisoners say that officials often punish groups to address individual rule violations
-Abolish the debriefing policy, which is often demanded in return for better food or release from solitary
-End long-term solitary confinement
-Provide adequate and nutritious food
-Expand or provide constructive programming and privileges for indefinite SHU inmates
Sources
“Solitary - and anger - in California's prisons.” Los Angeles Times July 13, 2013
“Pelican Bay Prison Hunger-Strikers' Stories: Gabriel Reyes.” TruthOut July 9, 2013
“Solitary confinement should be banned in most cases, UN expert says.” UN News October 18, 2011
"Stop Solitary - Two Pager" ACLU.org
What you Didn't know about NYPD's Stop and Frisk program !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rfJHx0Gj6ys#at=990
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Egypt: The Next President -- a little Egyptian boy speaks his remarkable mind!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeDm2PrNV1I
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Wealth Inequality in America
[This is a must see to believe video...bw]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QPKKQnijnsM
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Read the transcription of hero Bradley Manning's 35-page statement explaining why he leaked "state secrets" to WikiLeaks.
March 1, 2013
Alternet
The statement was read by Pfc. Bradley Manning at a providence inquiry for his formal plea of guilty to one specification as charged and nine specifications for lesser included offenses. He pled not guilty to 12 other specifications. This rush transcript was taken by journalist Alexa O'Brien at Thursday's pretrial hearing and first appeared on Salon.com.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/bradley-mannings-surprising-statement-court-details-why-he-made-his-historic?akid=10129.229473.UZvQfK&rd=1&src=newsletter802922&t=7
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Call for a Compassionate Release for Lynne Stewart:
Attorney General Eric Holder: 202-514-2001
White House President Obama: 202-456-1414
Bureau of Prisons Director Charles Samuels: 202-307-3198 ext 3
Urgent: Please sign the petition for compassionate release for Lynne Stewart
http://www.change.org/petitions/petition-to-free-lynne-stewart-save-her-life-release-her-now-2
For more information, go to http://www.lynnestewart.org
Write to Lynne Stewart at:
Lynne Stewart #53504-054
??Federal Medical Center, Carswell
PO Box 27137
Fort Worth, TX 76127
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You Have the Right to Remain Silent: NLG Guide to Law Enforcement Encounters
Posted 1 day ago on July 27, 2012, 10:28 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt
Occupy Wall Street is a nonviolent movement for social and economic justice, but in recent days disturbing reports have emerged of Occupy-affiliated activists being targeted by US law enforcement, including agents from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. To help ensure Occupiers and allied activists know their rights when encountering law enforcement, we are publishing in full the National Lawyers Guild's booklet: You Have the Right to Remain Silent. The NLG provides invaluable support to the Occupy movement and other activists – please click here to support the NLG.
We strongly encourage all Occupiers to read and share the information provided below. We also recommend you enter the NLG's national hotline number (888-654-3265) into your cellphone (if you have one) and keep a copy handy. This information is not a substitute for legal advice. You should contact the NLG or a criminal defense attorney immediately if you have been visited by the FBI or other law enforcement officials. You should also alert your relatives, friends, co-workers and others so that they will be prepared if they are contacted as well.
You Have the Right to Remain Silent: A Know Your Rights Guide for Law Enforcement Encounters
What Rights Do I Have?
Whether or not you're a citizen, you have rights under the United States Constitution. The Fifth Amendment gives every person the right to remain silent: not to answer questions asked by a police officer or government agent. The Fourth Amendment restricts the government's power to enter and search your home or workplace, although there are many exceptions and new laws have expanded the government's power to conduct surveillance. The First Amendment protects your right to speak freely and to advocate for social change. However, if you are a non-citizen, the Department of Homeland Security may target you based on your political activities.
Standing Up For Free Speech
The government's crusade against politically-active individuals is intended to disrupt and suppress the exercise of time-honored free speech activities, such as boycotts, protests, grassroots organizing and solidarity work. Remember that you have the right to stand up to the intimidation tactics of FBI agents and other law enforcement officials who, with political motives, are targeting organizing and free speech activities. Informed resistance to these tactics and steadfast defense of your and others' rights can bring positive results. Each person who takes a courageous stand makes future resistance to government oppression easier for all. The National Lawyers Guild has a long tradition of standing up to government repression. The organization itself was labeled a "subversive" group during the McCarthy Era and was subject to FBI surveillance and infiltration for many years. Guild attorneys have defended FBI-targeted members of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and the Puerto Rican independence movement. The NLG exposed FBI surveillance, infiltration and disruption tactics that were detailed during the 1975-76 COINTELPRO hearings. In 1989 the NLG prevailed in a lawsuit on behalf of several activist organizations, including the Guild, that forced the FBI to expose the extent to which it had been spying on activist movements. Under the settlement, the FBI turned over roughly 400,000 pages of its files on the Guild, which are now available at the Tamiment Library at New York University.
What if FBI Agents or Police Contact Me?
What if an agent or police officer comes to the door?
Do not invite the agents or police into your home. Do not answer any questions. Tell the agent that you do not wish to talk with him or her. You can state that your lawyer will contact them on your behalf. You can do this by stepping outside and pulling the door behind you so that the interior of your home or office is not visible, getting their contact information or business cards and then returning inside. They should cease questioning after this. If the agent or officer gives a reason for contacting you, take notes and give the information to your attorney. Anything you say, no matter how seemingly harmless or insignificant, may be used against you or others in the future. Lying to or misleading a federal agent is a crime. The more you speak, the more opportunity for federal law enforcement to find something you said (even if not intentionally) false and assert that you lied to a federal officer.
Do I have to answer questions?
You have the constitutional right to remain silent. It is not a crime to refuse to answer questions. You do not have to talk to anyone, even if you have been arrested or are in jail. You should affirmatively and unambiguously state that you wish to remain silent and that you wish to consult an attorney. Once you make the request to speak to a lawyer, do not say anything else. The Supreme Court recently ruled that answering law enforcement questions may be taken as a waiver of your right to remain silent, so it is important that you assert your rights and maintain them. Only a judge can order you to answer questions. There is one exception: some states have "stop and identify" statutes which require you to provide identity information or your name if you have been detained on reasonable suspicion that you may have committed a crime. A lawyer in your state can advise you of the status of these requirements where you reside.
Do I have to give my name?
As above, in some states you can be detained or arrested for merely refusing to give your name. And in any state, police do not always follow the law, and refusing to give your name may make them suspicious or more hostile and lead to your arrest, even without just cause, so use your judgment. Giving a false name could in some circumstances be a crime.
Do I need a lawyer?
You have the right to talk to a lawyer before you decide whether to answer questions from law enforcement. It is a good idea to talk to a lawyer if you are considering answering any questions. You have the right to have a lawyer present during any interview. The lawyer's job is to protect your rights. Once you tell the agent that you want to talk to a lawyer, he or she should stop trying to question you and should make any further contact through your lawyer. If you do not have a lawyer, you can still tell the officer you want to speak to one before answering questions. Remember to get the name, agency and telephone number of any investigator who visits you, and give that information to your lawyer. The government does not have to provide you with a free lawyer unless you are charged with a crime, but the NLG or another organization may be able to help you find a lawyer for free or at a reduced rate.
If I refuse to answer questions or say I want a lawyer, won't it seem like I have something to hide?
Anything you say to law enforcement can be used against you and others. You can never tell how a seemingly harmless bit of information might be used or manipulated to hurt you or someone else. That is why the right not to talk is a fundamental right under the Constitution. Keep in mind that although law enforcement agents are allowed to lie to you, lying to a government agent is a crime. Remaining silent is not. The safest things to say are "I am going to remain silent," "I want to speak to my lawyer," and "I do not consent to a search." It is a common practice for law enforcement agents to try to get you to waive your rights by telling you that if you have nothing to hide you would talk or that talking would "just clear things up." The fact is, if they are questioning you, they are looking to incriminate you or someone you may know, or they are engaged in political intelligence gathering. You should feel comfortable standing firm in protection and defense of your rights and refusing to answer questions.
Can agents search my home or office?
You do not have to let police or agents into your home or office unless they have and produce a valid search warrant. A search warrant is a written court order that allows the police to conduct a specified search. Interfering with a warrantless search probably will not stop it and you might get arrested. But you should say "I do not consent to a search," and call a criminal defense lawyer or the NLG. You should be aware that a roommate or guest can legally consent to a search of your house if the police believe that person has the authority to give consent, and your employer can consent to a search of your workspace without your permission.
What if agents have a search warrant?
If you are present when agents come for the search, you can ask to see the warrant. The warrant must specify in detail the places to be searched and the people or things to be taken away. Tell the agents you do not consent to the search so that they cannot go beyond what the warrant authorizes. Ask if you are allowed to watch the search; if you are allowed to, you should. Take notes, including names, badge numbers, what agency each officer is from, where they searched and what they took. If others are present, have them act as witnesses to watch carefully what is happening. If the agents ask you to give them documents, your computer, or anything else, look to see if the item is listed in the warrant. If it is not, do not consent to them taking it without talking to a lawyer. You do not have to answer questions. Talk to a lawyer first. (Note: If agents present an arrest warrant, they may only perform a cursory visual search of the premises to see if the person named in the arrest warrant is present.)
Do I have to answer questions if I have been arrested?
No. If you are arrested, you do not have to answer any questions. You should affirmatively and unambiguously state that you wish to assert your right to remain silent. Ask for a lawyer right away. Do not say anything else. Repeat to every officer who tries to talk to or question you that you wish to remain silent and that you wish to speak to a lawyer. You should always talk to a lawyer before you decide to answer any questions.
What if I speak to government agents anyway?
Even if you have already answered some questions, you can refuse to answer other questions until you have a lawyer. If you find yourself talking, stop. Assert that you wish to remain silent and that you wish to speak to a lawyer.
What if the police stop me on the street?
Ask if you are free to go. If the answer is yes, consider just walking away. If the police say you are not under arrest, but are not free to go, then you are being detained. The police can pat down the outside of your clothing if they have reason to suspect you might be armed and dangerous. If they search any more than this, say clearly, "I do not consent to a search." They may keep searching anyway. If this happens, do not resist because you can be charged with assault or resisting arrest. You do not have to answer any questions. You do not have to open bags or any closed container. Tell the officers you do not consent to a search of your bags or other property.
What if police or agents stop me in my car?
Keep your hands where the police can see them. If you are driving a vehicle, you must show your license, registration and, in some states, proof of insurance. You do not have to consent to a search. But the police may have legal grounds to search your car anyway. Clearly state that you do not consent. Officers may separate passengers and drivers from each other to question them, but no one has to answer any questions.
What if I am treated badly by the police or the FBI?
Write down the officer's badge number, name or other identifying information. You have a right to ask the officer for this information. Try to find witnesses and their names and phone numbers. If you are injured, seek medical attention and take pictures of the injuries as soon as you can. Call a lawyer as soon as possible.
What if the police or FBI threaten me with a grand jury subpoena if I don't answer their questions?
A grand jury subpoena is a written order for you to go to court and testify about information you may have. It is common for the FBI to threaten you with a subpoena to get you to talk to them. If they are going to subpoena you, they will do so anyway. You should not volunteer to speak just because you are threatened with a subpoena. You should consult a lawyer.
What if I receive a grand jury subpoena?
Grand jury proceedings are not the same as testifying at an open court trial. You are not allowed to have a lawyer present (although one may wait in the hallway and you may ask to consult with him or her after each question) and you may be asked to answer questions about your activities and associations. Because of the witness's limited rights in this situation, the government has frequently used grand jury subpoenas to gather information about activists and political organizations. It is common for the FBI to threaten activists with a subpoena in order to elicit information about their political views and activities and those of their associates. There are legal grounds for stopping ("quashing") subpoenas, and receiving one does not necessarily mean that you are suspected of a crime. If you do receive a subpoena, call the NLG National Hotline at 888-NLG-ECOL (888-654-3265) or call a criminal defense attorney immediately.
The government regularly uses grand jury subpoena power to investigate and seek evidence related to politically-active individuals and social movements. This practice is aimed at prosecuting activists and, through intimidation and disruption, discouraging continued activism.
Federal grand jury subpoenas are served in person. If you receive one, it is critically important that you retain the services of an attorney, preferably one who understands your goals and, if applicable, understands the nature of your political work, and has experience with these issues. Most lawyers are trained to provide the best legal defense for their client, often at the expense of others. Beware lawyers who summarily advise you to cooperate with grand juries, testify against friends, or cut off contact with your friends and political activists. Cooperation usually leads to others being subpoenaed and investigated. You also run the risk of being charged with perjury, a felony, should you omit any pertinent information or should there be inconsistencies in your testimony.
Frequently prosecutors will offer "use immunity," meaning that the prosecutor is prohibited from using your testimony or any leads from it to bring charges against you. If a subsequent prosecution is brought, the prosecutor bears the burden of proving that all of its evidence was obtained independent of the immunized testimony. You should be aware, however, that they will use anything you say to manipulate associates into sharing more information about you by suggesting that you have betrayed confidences.
In front of a grand jury you can "take the Fifth" (exercise your right to remain silent). However, the prosecutor may impose immunity on you, which strips you of Fifth Amendment protection and subjects you to the possibility of being cited for contempt and jailed if you refuse to answer further. In front of a grand jury you have no Sixth Amendment right to counsel, although you can consult with a lawyer outside the grand jury room after each question.
What if I don't cooperate with the grand jury?
If you receive a grand jury subpoena and elect to not cooperate, you may be held in civil contempt. There is a chance that you may be jailed or imprisoned for the length of the grand jury in an effort to coerce you to cooperate. Regular grand juries sit for a basic term of 18 months, which can be extended up to a total of 24 months. It is lawful to hold you in order to coerce your cooperation, but unlawful to hold you as a means of punishment. In rare instances you may face criminal contempt charges.
What If I Am Not a Citizen and the DHS Contacts Me?
The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) is now part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and has been renamed and reorganized into: 1. The Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (BCIS); 2. The Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP); and 3. The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). All three bureaus will be referred to as DHS for the purposes of this pamphlet.
? Assert your rights. If you do not demand your rights or if you sign papers waiving your rights, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may deport you before you see a lawyer or an immigration judge. Never sign anything without reading, understanding and knowing the consequences of signing it.
? Talk to a lawyer. If possible, carry with you the name and telephone number of an immigration lawyer who will take your calls. The immigration laws are hard to understand and there have been many recent changes. DHS will not explain your options to you. As soon as you encounter a DHS agent, call your attorney. If you can't do it right away, keep trying. Always talk to an immigration lawyer before leaving the U.S. Even some legal permanent residents can be barred from returning.
Based on today's laws, regulations and DHS guidelines, non-citizens usually have the following rights, no matter what their immigration status. This information may change, so it is important to contact a lawyer. The following rights apply to non-citizens who are inside the U.S. Non-citizens at the border who are trying to enter the U.S. do not have all the same rights.
Do I have the right to talk to a lawyer before answering any DHS questions or signing any DHS papers?
Yes. You have the right to call a lawyer or your family if you are detained, and you have the right to be visited by a lawyer in detention. You have the right to have your attorney with you at any hearing before an immigration judge. You do not have the right to a government-appointed attorney for immigration proceedings, but if you have been arrested, immigration officials must show you a list of free or low cost legal service providers.
Should I carry my green card or other immigration papers with me?
If you have documents authorizing you to stay in the U.S., you must carry them with you. Presenting false or expired papers to DHS may lead to deportation or criminal prosecution. An unexpired green card, I-94, Employment Authorization Card, Border Crossing Card or other papers that prove you are in legal status will satisfy this requirement. If you do not carry these papers with you, you could be charged with a crime. Always keep a copy of your immigration papers with a trusted family member or friend who can fax them to you, if need be. Check with your immigration lawyer about your specific case.
Am I required to talk to government officers about my immigration history?
If you are undocumented, out of status, a legal permanent resident (green card holder), or a citizen, you do not have to answer any questions about your immigration history. (You may want to consider giving your name; see above for more information about this.) If you are not in any of these categories, and you are being questioned by a DHS or FBI agent, then you may create problems with your immigration status if you refuse to provide information requested by the agent. If you have a lawyer, you can tell the agent that your lawyer will answer questions on your behalf. If answering questions could lead the agent to information that connects you with criminal activity, you should consider refusing to talk to the agent at all.
If I am arrested for immigration violations, do I have the right to a hearing before an immigration judge to defend myself against deportation charges?
Yes. In most cases only an immigration judge can order you deported. But if you waive your rights or take "voluntary departure," agreeing to leave the country, you could be deported without a hearing. If you have criminal convictions, were arrested at the border, came to the U.S. through the visa waiver program or have been ordered deported in the past, you could be deported without a hearing. Contact a lawyer immediately to see if there is any relief for you.
Can I call my consulate if I am arrested?
Yes. Non-citizens arrested in the U.S. have the right to call their consulate or to have the police tell the consulate of your arrest. The police must let your consulate visit or speak with you if consular officials decide to do so. Your consulate might help you find a lawyer or offer other help. You also have the right to refuse help from your consulate.
What happens if I give up my right to a hearing or leave the U.S. before the hearing is over?
You could lose your eligibility for certain immigration benefits, and you could be barred from returning to the U.S. for a number of years. You should always talk to an immigration lawyer before you decide to give up your right to a hearing.
What should I do if I want to contact DHS?
Always talk to a lawyer before contacting DHS, even on the phone. Many DHS officers view "enforcement" as their primary job and will not explain all of your options to you.
What Are My Rights at Airports?
IMPORTANT NOTE: It is illegal for law enforcement to perform any stops, searches, detentions or removals based solely on your race, national origin, religion, sex or ethnicity.
If I am entering the U.S. with valid travel papers can a U.S. customs agent stop and search me?
Yes. Customs agents have the right to stop, detain and search every person and item.
Can my bags or I be searched after going through metal detectors with no problem or after security sees that my bags do not contain a weapon?
Yes. Even if the initial screen of your bags reveals nothing suspicious, the screeners have the authority to conduct a further search of you or your bags.
If I am on an airplane, can an airline employee interrogate me or ask me to get off the plane?
The pilot of an airplane has the right to refuse to fly a passenger if he or she believes the passenger is a threat to the safety of the flight. The pilot's decision must be reasonable and based on observations of you, not stereotypes.
What If I Am Under 18?
Do I have to answer questions?
No. Minors too have the right to remain silent. You cannot be arrested for refusing to talk to the police, probation officers, or school officials, except in some states you may have to give your name if you have been detained.
What if I am detained?
If you are detained at a community detention facility or Juvenile Hall, you normally must be released to a parent or guardian. If charges are filed against you, in most states you are entitled to counsel (just like an adult) at no cost.
Do I have the right to express political views at school?
Public school students generally have a First Amendment right to politically organize at school by passing out leaflets, holding meetings, etc., as long as those activities are not disruptive and do not violate legitimate school rules. You may not be singled out based on your politics, ethnicity or religion.
Can my backpack or locker be searched?
School officials can search students' backpacks and lockers without a warrant if they reasonably suspect that you are involved in criminal activity or carrying drugs or weapons. Do not consent to the police or school officials searching your property, but do not physically resist or you may face criminal charges.
Disclaimer
This booklet is not a substitute for legal advice. You should contact an attorney if you have been visited by the FBI or other law enforcement officials. You should also alert your relatives, friends, co-workers and others so that they will be prepared if they are contacted as well.
NLG National Hotline for Activists Contacted by the FBI
888-NLG-ECOL
(888-654-3265)
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Free Mumia NOW!
Prisonradio.org
Write to Mumia:
Mumia Abu-Jamal AM 8335
SCI Mahanoy
301 Morea Road
Frackville, PA 17932
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Rachel Wolkenstein
August 21, 2011 (917) 689-4009
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL ILLEGALLY SENTENCED TO
LIFE IMPRISONMENT WITHOUT PAROLE!
FREE MUMIA NOW!
www.FreeMumia.com
http://blacktalkradionetwork.com/profiles/blogs/mumia-is-formally-sentenced-to-life-in-prison-w-out-hearing-he-s
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"A Child's View from Gaza: Palestinian Children's Art and the Fight Against
Censorship" book
https://www.mecaforpeace.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=25
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Justice for Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace: Decades of isolation in Louisiana
state prisons must end
Take Action -- Sign Petition Here:
http://www.amnesty.org/en/appeals-for-action/justice-for-albert-woodfox-and-herm\
an-wallace
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WITNESS GAZA
http://www.witnessgaza.com/
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Write to Bradley
http://bradleymanning.org/donate
View the new 90 second "I am Bradley Manning" video:
I am Bradley Manning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-P3OXML00s
Courage to Resist
484 Lake Park Ave. #41
Oakland, CA 94610
510-488-3559
couragetoresist.org
"A Fort Leavenworth mailing address has been released for Bradley Manning:
Bradley Manning 89289
830 Sabalu Road
Fort Leavenworth, KS 66027
The receptionist at the military barracks confirmed that if someone sends
Bradley Manning a letter to that address, it will be delivered to him."
http://www.bradleymanning.org/news/update-42811
This is also a Facebook event
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=207100509321891#!/event.php?eid=2071005093\
21891
Courage to Resist needs your support
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
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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The Battle Is Still On To
FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL!
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222 • Oakland CA 94610
www.laboractionmumia.org
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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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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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D. 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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Exceptional art from the streets of Oakland:
Oakland Street Dancing
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NYC RESTAURANT WORKERS DANCE & SING FOR A WAGE HIKE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_s8e1R6rG8&feature=player_embedded
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On Gun Control, Martin Luther King, the Deacons of Defense and the history of Black Liberation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzYKisvBN1o&feature=player_embedded
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Fukushima Never Again
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU-Z4VLDGxU
"Fukushima, Never Again" tells the story of the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdowns in north east Japan in March of 2011 and exposes the cover-up by Tepco and the Japanese government.
This is the first film that interviews the Mothers Of Fukushima, nuclear power experts and trade unionists who are fighting for justice and the protection of the children and the people of Japan and the world. The residents and citizens were forced to buy their own geiger counters and radiation dosimeters in order to test their communities to find out if they were in danger.
The government said contaminated soil in children's school grounds was safe and then
when the people found out it was contaminated and removed the top soil, the government and TEPCO refused to remove it from the school grounds.
It also relays how the nuclear energy program for "peaceful atoms" was brought to Japan under the auspices of the US military occupation and also the criminal cover-up of the safety dangers of the plant by TEPCO and GE management which built the plant in Fukushima. It also interviews Kei Sugaoka, the GE nulcear plant inspector from the bay area who exposed cover-ups in the safety at the Fukushima plant and was retaliated against by GE. This documentary allows the voices of the people and workers to speak out about the reality of the disaster and what this means not only for the people of Japan but the people of the world as the US government and nuclear industry continue to push for more new plants and government subsidies. This film breaks
the information blockade story line of the corporate media in Japan, the US and around the world that Fukushima is over.
Production Of Labor Video Project
P.O. Box 720027
San Francisco, CA 94172
www.laborvideo.org
lvpsf@laborvideo.org
For information on obtaining the video go to:
www.fukushimaneveragain.com
(415)282-1908
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1000 year of war through the world
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiG8neU4_bs&feature=share
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Anatomy of a Massacre - Afganistan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6BnRc11aug&feature=player_embedded
Afghans accuse multiple soldiers of pre-meditated murder
To see more go to http://www.youtube.com/user/journeymanpictures
Follow us on Facebook (http://goo.gl/YRw42) or Twitter
(http://www.twitter.com/journeymanvod)
The recent massacre of 17 civilians by a rogue US soldier has been shrouded in
mystery. But through unprecedented access to those involved, this report
confronts the accusations that Bales didn't act alone.
"They came into my room and they killed my family". Stories like this are common
amongst the survivors in Aklozai and Najiban. As are the shocking accusations
that Sergeant Bales was not acting alone. Even President Karzai has announced
"one man can not do that". Chief investigator, General Karimi, is suspicious
that despite being fully armed, Bales freely left his base without raising
alarm. "How come he leaves at night and nobody is aware? Every time we have
weapon accountability and personal accountability." These are just a few of the
questions the American army and government are yet to answer. One thing however
is very clear, the massacre has unleashed a wave of grief and outrage which
means relations in Kandahar will be tense for years to come: "If I could lay my
hands on those infidels, I would rip them apart with my bare hands."
A Film By SBS
Distributed By Journeyman Pictures
April 2012
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Photo of George Zimmerman, in 2005 photo, left, and in a more recent photo.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/02/us/the-events-leading-to-the-sooti\
ng-of-trayvon-martin.html?hp
SPD Security Cams.wmv
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WWDNbQUgm4&feature=player_embedded
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Kids being put on buses and transported from school to "alternate locations" in
Terror Drills
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFia_w8adWQ
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Private prisons,
a recession resistant investment opportunity
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGLDOxx9Vg
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Attack Dogs used on a High School Walkout in MD, Four Students Charged With
"Thought Crimes"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wafMaML17w
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Common forms of misconduct by Law Enforcement Officials and Prosecutors
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViSpM4K276w&feature=related
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Organizing and Instigating: OCCUPY - Ronnie Goodman
http://arthazelwood.com/instigator/occupy/occupy-birth-video.html
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Rep News 12: Yes We Kony
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68GbzIkYdc8
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The New Black by The Mavrix - Official Music Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4rLfja8488
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Japan One Year Later
http://www.onlineschools.org/japan-one-year-later/
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The CIA's Heart Attack Gun
http://www.brasschecktv.com/videos/assassination-studies/the-cias-heart-attack-g\
un-.html
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The Invisible American Workforce
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/5/new_expos_tracks_alec_private_prison
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Labor Beat: NATO vs The 1st Amendment
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbQxnb4so3U
For more detailed information, send us a request at mail@laborbeat.org.
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The Battle of Oakland
by brandon jourdan plus
http://vimeo.com/36256273
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Officers Pulled Off Street After Tape of Beating Surfaces
By ANDY NEWMAN
February 1, 2012, 10:56 am
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/officers-pulled-off-street-after-ta\
pe-of-beating-surfaces/?ref=nyregion
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This is excellent! Michelle Alexander pulls no punches!
Michelle Alexander, Author of The New Jim Crow, speaks about the political
strategy
behind the War on Drugs and its connection to the mass incarceration of Black
and Brown people in the United States.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P75cbEdNo2U&feature=player_embedded
If you think Bill Clinton was "the first black President" you need to watch this
video and see how much damage his administration caused for the black community
as a result of his get tough attitude on crime that appealed to white swing
voters.
This speech took place at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem on January 12,
2012.
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FREE BRADLEY MANNING
http://www.bradleymanning.org/news/national-call-in-for-bradley
I received the following reply from the White House November 18, 2011 regarding
the Bradley Manning petition I signed:
"Why We Can't Comment on Bradley Manning
"Thank you for signing the petition 'Free PFC Bradley Manning, the accused
WikiLeaks whistleblower.' We appreciate your participation in the We the People
platform on WhiteHouse.gov.
The We the People Terms of Participation explain that 'the White House may
decline to address certain procurement, law enforcement, adjudicatory, or
similar matters properly within the jurisdiction of federal departments or
agencies, federal courts, or state and local government.' The military justice
system is charged with enforcing the Uniform Code of
Military Justice. Accordingly, the White House declines to comment on the
specific case raised in this petition...
That's funny! I guess Obama didn't get this memo. Here's what Obama said about
Bradley:
BRADLEY MANNING "BROKE THE LAW" SAYS OBAMA!
"He broke the law!" says Obama about Bradley Manning who has yet to even be
charged, let alone, gone to trial and found guilty. How horrendous is it for the
President to declare someone guilty before going to trial or being charged with
a crime! Justice in the U.S.A.!
Obama on FREE BRADLEY MANNING protest... San Francisco, CA. April 21, 2011-
Presidential remarks on interrupt/interaction/performance art happening at
fundraiser. Logan Price queries Barack after org. FRESH JUICE PARTY political
action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfmtUpd4id0&feature=youtu.be
Release Bradley Manning
Almost Gone (The Ballad Of Bradley Manning)
Written by Graham Nash and James Raymond (son of David Crosby)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAYG7yJpBbQ&feature=player_embedded
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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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School police increasingly arresting American students?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl-efNBvjUU&feature=player_embedded
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FYI:
Nuclear Detonation Timeline "1945-1998"
The 2053 nuclear tests and explosions that took place between 1945 and 1998 are
plotted visually and audibly on a world map.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9lquok4Pdk&feature=share&mid=5408
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We Are the 99 Percent
We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to
choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are
suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay
and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1
percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.
Brought to you by the people who occupy wall street. Why will YOU occupy?
OccupyWallSt.org
Occupytogether.org
wearethe99percentuk.tumblr.com
http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/
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We Are The People Who Will Save Our Schools
YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFAOJsBxAxY
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In honor of the 75th Anniversary of the 44-Day Flint Michigan sit-down strike at
GM that began December 30, 1936:
According to Michael Moore, (Although he has done some good things, this clip
isn't one of them) in this clip from his film, "Capitalism a Love Story," it was
Roosevelt who saved the day!):
"After a bloody battle one evening, the Governor of Michigan, with the support
of the President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, sent in the National
Guard. But the guns and the soldiers weren't used on the workers; they were
pointed at the police and the hired goons warning them to leave these workers
alone. For Mr. Roosevelt believed that the men inside had a right to a redress
of their grievances." -Michael Moore's 'Capitalism: A Love Story'
- Flint Sit-Down Strike http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8x1_q9wg58
But those cannons were not aimed at the goons and cops! They were aimed straight
at the factory filled with strikers! Watch what REALLY happened and how the
strike was really won!
'With babies & banners' -- 75 years since the 44-day Flint sit-down strike
http://links.org.au/node/2681
--Inspiring
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HALLELUJAH CORPORATIONS (revised edition).mov
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws0WSNRpy3g
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ONE OF THE GREATEST POSTS ON YOUTUBE SO FAR!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8C-qIgbP9o&feature=share&mid=552
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ILWU Local 10 Longshore Workers Speak-Out At Oakland Port Shutdown
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JUpBpZYwms
Uploaded by laborvideo on Dec 13, 2011
ILWU Local 10 longshore workers speak out during a blockade of the Port of
Oakland called for by Occupy Oakland. Anthony Levieges and Clarence Thomas rank
and file members of the union. The action took place on December 12, 2011 and
the interview took place at Pier 30 on the Oakland docks.
For more information on the ILWU Local 21 Longview EGT struggle go to
http://www.facebook.com/groups/256313837734192/
For further info on the action and the press conferernce go to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz3fE-Vhrw8&feature=youtu.be
Production of Labor Video Project www.laborvideo.org
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UC Davis Police Violence Adds Fuel to Fire
By Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News
19 November 11
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/275-42/8485-uc-davis-police-violence-add\
s-fuel-to-fire
UC Davis Protestors Pepper Sprayed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AdDLhPwpp4&feature=player_embedded
Police PEPPER SPRAY UC Davis STUDENT PROTESTERS!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuWEx6Cfn-I&feature=player_embedded
Police pepper spraying and arresting students at UC Davis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmJmmnMkuEM&feature=player_embedded
*---------*
UC Davis Chancellor Katehi walks to her car
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CZ0t9ez_EGI#!
Occupy Seattle - 84 Year Old Woman Dorli Rainey Pepper Sprayed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTIyE_JlJzw&feature=related
*---------*
THE BEST VIDEO ON "OCCUPY THE WORLD"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S880UldxB1o
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Shot by police with rubber bullet at Occupy Oakland
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0pX9LeE-g8&feature=player_embedded
*---------*
Copwatch@Occupy Oakland: Beware of Police Infiltrators and Provocateurs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrvMzqopHH0
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Occupy Oakland 11-2 Strike: Police Tear Gas, Black Bloc, War in the Streets
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Tu_D8SFYck&feature=player_embedded
*----*
Quebec police admitted that, in 2007, thugs carrying rocks to a peaceful protest
were actually undercover Quebec police officers:
POLICE STATE Criminal Cops EXPOSED As Agent Provocateurs @ SPP Protest
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoiisMMCFT0&feature=player_embedded
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Quebec police admit going undercover at montebello protests
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAfzUOx53Rg&feature=player_embedded
G20: Epic Undercover Police Fail
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrJ7aU-n1L8&feature=player_embedded
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WHAT HAPPENED IN OAKLAND TUESDAY NIGHT, OCTOBER 25:
Occupy Oakland Protest
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlPs-REyl-0&feature=player_embedded
Cops make mass arrests at occupy Oakland
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R27kD2_7PwU&feature=player_embedded
Raw Video: Protesters Clash With Oakland Police
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpO-lJr2BQY&feature=player_embedded
Occupy Oakland - Flashbangs USED on protesters OPD LIES
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqNOPZLw03Q&feature=player_embedded
KTVU TV Video of Police violence
http://www.ktvu.com/video/29587714/index.html
Marine Vet wounded, tear gas & flash-bang grenades thrown in downtown
Oakland
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMUgPTCgwcQ&feature=player_embedded
Tear Gas billowing through 14th & Broadway in Downtown Oakland
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU4Y0pwJtWE&feature=player_embedded
Arrests at Occupy Atlanta -- This is what a police state looks like
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YStWz6jbeZA&feature=player_embedded
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Labor Beat: Hey You Billionaire, Pay Your Fair Share
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY8isD33f-I
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Voices of Occupy Boston 2011 - Kwame Somburu (Paul Boutelle) Part I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA48gmfGB6U&feature=youtu.be
Voices of Occupy Boston 2011 - Kwame Somburu (Paul Boutelle) Part II
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjKZpOk7TyM&feature=related
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#Occupy Wall Street In Washington Square: Mohammed Ezzeldin, former occupier of
Egypt's Tahrir Square Speaks at Washington Square!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziodsFWEb5Y&feature=player_embedded
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#OccupyTheHood, Occupy Wall Street
By adele pham
http://vimeo.com/30146870
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Live arrest at brooklyn bridge #occupywallstreet by We are Change
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yULSI-31Pto&feature=player_embedded
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FREE THE CUBAN FIVE!
http://www.thecuban5.org/wordpress/index.php
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmS4kHC_OlY&feature=player_embedded
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One World One Revolution -- MUST SEE VIDEO -- Powerful and beautiful...bw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE3R1BQrYCw&feature=player_embedded
"When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty." Thomas Jefferson
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Japan: angry Fukushima citizens confront government (video)
Posted by Xeni Jardin on Monday, Jul 25th at 11:36am
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVuGwc9dlhQ&feature=player_embedded
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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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Coal Ash: One Valley's Tale
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E7h-DNvwx4&feature=player_embedded
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