NOT GUILTY of 'Aiding the Enemy'
"Do
the right thing!" Maj. Gen. Buchanan can reduce any sentence Bradley
receives after having been convicted today on 19 charges.
|
By the Bradley Manning Support Network. July 30, 2013
http://www.bradleymanning.org/featured/bradley-manning-not-guilty-of-aiding-the-enemy-convicted-on-19-other-counts
“We won the battle, now we need to go win the war,” shared defense attorney David Coombs following today’s verdict. “Today is a good day, but Bradley is by no means out of the fire,” he said to dozens of emotional supporters outside of the Fort Meade, Maryland military courtroom. Coombs expressed subdued optimism going into the expected month-long sentencing phase of the court martial that will determine how long Bradley Manning will remain in confinement.
Bradley Manning had previously accepted responsibility for providing classified information to WikiLeaks, actions covered by ten of the 22 charges. Military judge Colonel Denise Lind found him guilty of 20 of those 22 charges, so PFC Manning still faces the possibility of over 100 years behind bars.
Five of the more serious charges PFC Manning was convicted of today are ripe for appeal as Judge Lind altered the charges only a week ago in order to match up with Government’s evidence presented, long after the defense closed its case.
Amnesty International criticized the verdict, and the government’s refusal to investigate exposed crimes:
The government’s priorities are upside down. The US government has refused to investigate credible allegations of torture and other crimes under international law despite overwhelming evidence. Yet they decided to prosecute Manning who it seems was trying to do the right thing – reveal credible evidence of unlawful behaviour by the government.Following sentencing, supporters will appeal to Major General Jeffery Buchanan to use his ability as Convening Authority of these proceedings to reduce any sentence handed down by Judge Lind.
Additionally, a campaign to urge President Barack Obama to pardon Bradley Manning will follow. Last week, a full page ad in The New York Times, noted, “Bradley Manning believed you, Mr. President, when you came into office promising the most transparent administration in history, and that you would protect whistle-blowers. Now would be a good time to start upholding that pledged transparency, beginning with PFC Manning.”
Bradley Manning’s family released the following reaction this afternoon:
While we are obviously disappointed in today’s verdicts, we are happy that Judge Lind agreed with us that Brad never intended to help America’s enemies in any way. Brad loves his country and was proud to wear its uniform.
We want to express our deep thanks to David Coombs, who has dedicated three years of his life to serving as lead counsel in Brad’s case. We also want to thank Brad’s Army defense team, Major Thomas Hurley and Captain Joshua Tooman, for their tireless efforts on Brad’s behalf, and Brad’s first defense counsel, Captain Paul Bouchard, who was so helpful to all of us in those early confusing days and first suggested David Coombs as Brad’s counsel.
Most of all, we would like to thank the thousands of people who rallied to Brad’s cause, providing financial and emotional support throughout this long and difficult time, especially Jeff Paterson and Courage to Resist and the Bradley Manning Support Network. Their support has allowed a young army private to defend himself against the full might of not only the US army but also the US government.*********
Major General Jeffery S. Buchanan is the Convening Authority for Manning’s court martial, which means that he has the authority to decrease Manning’s sentence, no matter what the judge decides. Demand he do the right thing by calling, faxing, and e-mailing his Public Affairs Office.
The convening authority can reduce the sentence after the Judge makes her ruling. Let's Remind Maj. General Buchanan:
* that Bradley was held for nearly a year in abusive solitary confinement, which the UN torture chief called “cruel, inhuman, and degrading”
* that President Obama has unlawfully influenced the trial with his declaration of Bradley Manning's guilt.
* that the media has been continually blocked from transcripts and documents related to the trial and that it has only been through the efforts of Bradley Manning's supporters that any transcripts exist.
* that under the UCMJ a soldier has the right to a speedy trial and that it was unconsciable to wait 3 years before starting the court martial.
* that absolutely no one was harmed by the release of documents that exposed war crimes, unnecessary secrecy and disturbing foreign policy.
* that Bradley Manning is a hero who did the right thing when he revealed truth about wars that had been based on lies.
Remind General Buchanan that Bradley Manning's rights have been trampled - Enough is enough!
Please help us reach all these important contacts:
Adrienne Combs, Deputy Officer Public Affairs (202) 685-2900 adrienne.m.combs.civ@mail.mil
Col. Michelle Martin-Hing, Public Affairs Officer (202) 685-4899 michelle.l.martinhing.mil@mail.mil
The Public Affairs Office fax #: 202-685-0706
Try e-mailing Maj. Gen. Buchanan at jeffrey.s.buchanan@us.army.mil
The Public Affairs Office is required to report up the chain of command the number of calls they receive on a particular issue, so please help us flood the office with support for whistleblower Bradley Manning today!
https://www.facebook.com/events/539072056158643/
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COURAGE TO RESIST
http://couragetoresist.org
http://bradleymanning.org
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610
510-488-3559
For more info about Bradley Manning:http://bradleymanning.org
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United Labor Rally for BART Workers
Thursday, August 1 at 5pm at Frank Ogawa Plaza (Oscar Grant Plaza).
When BART workers went on strike July 1, the whole Bay Area was affected. BART hired a major union buster to put the workers on strike, then blame the workers in a highly visible battle to bring Wisconsin-style attacks to the Bay Area and drive down living standards for all of us. The 30-day contract extension expires Sunday, August 4 at midnight, yet BART management still refuses to negotiate, likely forcing the workers out again starting Monday, August 5.
BART workers represented by ATU 1555 and SEIU 1021 invite all workers to stand up against Wisconsin-style attacks in the Bay Area on Thursday, August 1 at 5pm at Frank Ogawa Plaza (Oscar Grant Plaza).
BART management is following suit with other bosses who try to pit the public who relies on public services against the workers providing the public services. BART cried poor and pressured workers to give up major concessions for the last eight years, though it was discovered BART had tens of millions in surpluses. BART’s records now show a $125 Million annual surplus, but they believe they can generate enough public hostility against the workers or keep them out on strike long enough that they are forced once again to take major concessions.
This struggle is not just about BART. We’ve seen the same attacks on the city workers of Oakland, Hayward, San Francisco, at the Oakland airport and Port of Oakland, and throughout the area. Workers who are more vulnerable – those without unions, or undocumented workers – face even greater struggles. The plan to close City College of San Francisco adds to attacks on current faculty and staff jobs by denying access to education and jobs for many future workers. We invite all affected by and concerned with these struggles to help plan and organize the August 1st rally to fight privatization and defend decent jobs for the Bay Area.
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HUNGER STRIKE DAY 16:
CDCR Refuses to Negotiate, Strikers Issue New Statement
Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity
Oakland, July 23, 2013 — With the California prisoner hunger strike in its 3rd week, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) and medical receiver officials agreed to meet with a mediation team working on behalf of the hunger strikers. While the mediators were hopeful that the CDCR would discuss negotiations around the strikers‘ demands, they were quickly disappointed and dismayed by the CDCR’s conduct.
“The CDCR refused to let family members of strikers who are part of our team join in the discussions, they refused to negotiate or even address the strikers’ five demands, and they failed in any way to appreciate the urgency of this situation,” said mediator Ron Ahnen. The mediation team’s meeting with the federal health receiver’s office overseeing the California prison system left some assurances that the strikers would receive due medical care and left open prospects for future communication and discussions.
“This is a matter of life and death for both the strikers and their families,” said mediator Barbara Becnel. “We object in the strongest possible terms to the complacency of the CDCR.” Mediators have urged CDCR Secretary Beard to meet with them as soon as possible. His office has yet to respond.
Meanwhile strikers being held in Administrative Segregation at Pelican Bay Prison are reported to be feeling strong and in high spirits. They issued a statement today, which reads:
Greetings of solidarity and respect to all of our supporters, all people of conscience around the world, and all similarly situated prisoners. You should know that once again our peaceful protest is making history, bringing international attention to our collective efforts to bring an end, once and for all, to the inhumane conditions and torture of indefinite solitary confinement.
We are being tortured each day by state officials (Governor Brown, his appointee CDCR Secretary Beard, and all his underlings). Increased retaliation has been perpetuated upon defenseless and starving prisoners who only seek what any human being strives for—humane treatment, dignity, equality, and justice for our families, loved ones, and ourselves. These are the fundamental rights of all people, including those incarcerated by the state. We are doing all we can, together with our outside supporters, to bring about a positive changes. Gov. Brown is not above the will of the people of California, and if he refuses to recognize the legitimacy of our human and civil rights struggle against the practices of this prison system, then it is the responsibility of the federal government and President Obama to use their powers to stop the harm being done to thousands of prisoners being held in solitary confinement.
CDCR officials are attempting to undermine the voluntary actions of prisoners who truly want better treatment and living conditions by wrongfully accusing us of forcing tens-of-thousands of prisoners across California, along with our supporters in the free world, to participate in our protest. Prisoners across the state are participating because of the inhumane conditions they are being subjected to. As HUMAN BEINGS prisoners are collectively resisting such treatment, and they are doing so peacefully. The attempted repression of our protest has not broken our spirits. In fact it has only helped to strengthen each of us—individually and collectively. Despite CDCR’s retaliations and propaganda, we remain steadfast in our commitment. We will see our peaceful hunger strike through to victory, even if this requires us to endure the torture of force-feeding. We believe at this point in our struggle we are prepared to do what is necessary in order for Gov. Brown and the CDCR to realize how serious we are, and how far and long we are willing to go to have our reasonable demands implemented.
We are hopeful that all those brave men and women across the state who are participating in this strike—all who are able health-wise—will be encouraged to issue public statements of their own, via media outlets across the country, letting the world know why they have taken part in this historic, collective struggle.
In closing, we want to inform the world that this hunger strike is far from over. We are in it for the long haul. Thus, we strongly urge Gov. Brown to return from his “get-away” vacation overseas and deal urgently with this crisis before more prisoners suffer serious health damage or death. If any deaths do occur, the responsibility for them will fall squarely on Brown and the CDCR in their callousness and inaction.
We believe that we will prevail.
In Solidarity,
PBSP-SHU Short Corridor Representatives
- Todd Ashker, C-58191, PBSP-SHU, D4-121
- Arturo Castellanos, C-17275, PBSP-SHU, D1-121
- Sitawa Nantambu Jamaa (Dewberry), C-35671, PBSP-SHU,D1-117
- Antonio Guillen, P-81948, PBSP-SHU, D2-106
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IMMEDIATE UPDATE ON THE COURT HEARING CONCERNING LYNNE STEWART
Ten minutes ago the hearing today (July 31) before Judge John Koetl concluded. The following is a synopsis of what transpired as reported in a telephone call with Ralph Poynter:
Lynne Stewart's attorneys filed an emergency Motion (2255) with Judge Koetl seeking Lynne's "immediate conditional release" pending consideration of the legal issues presented in their brief.
The judge asked why they chose to exhaust their one time right to an emergency motion. The Defense response was that Lynne Stewart is terminally ill. The luxury of time is not available to her or her counsel. An expeditious response from the Court is imperative in the face of her medical condition and in the light of the Bureau of Prisons' unwarranted denial of her application for compassionate release and protracted delays that could be expected if she submitted another application.
The Prosecution, acting for the Justice Department of Barack Obama, asserted that the Judge has no standing because there is no motion for Compassionate Release before him from Federal Bureau of Prisons Director Charles E. Samuels, Jr. as specified in the 1984 Sentencing Act.
The Defense presented a Brief which documents that the Federal Bureau of Prisons had violated separation of powers as the 1984 Congressional Statute assigns to the Court the right to modify a prison sentence in light of facts not available at the time of trial, notably those pertaining to terminal illness. "The BOP has implemented its own interpretation and refused to notify the sentencing judge of objectively 'extraordinary and compelling circumstances,' including but not limited to imminent death, unless, in its own judgment, a motion should be granted. Between 2000 and 2008, on average, 21.3 motions were filed each year. In about 24% of those motions, the prisoner died before the district court ever had a chance to rule on the motion."
"Lynne Stewart is dying," wrote her attorneys. She does not want to die in prison or become another statistic of someone who dies while the Bureau of Prisons delays its reconsideration of another application for compassionate release that she plans to file soon.
Judge Koetl gave a directive to the Federal Attorney to set out its case by next Tuesday and also to explain why the Bureau of Prisons has refused to disclose or release the records that provide the basis for its denial of Lynne Stewart's recent application for compassionate release.
Lynne Stewart's defense attorneys will have one day to answer before the next hearing scheduled for Thursday, August 8 at 2 p.m.
Judge Koetl has the authority to mandate immediate conditional release to Lynne Stewart.
**********
Message from Lynne Stewart
7/25/13
To All:
By Now we will have filed papers which take us back into Federal Court in New
York City to request that Judge Koeltl overturn the barbaric decision by the
Bureau of Prisons and allow me to leave this empty loveless Prison and go home
to People and Places familiar and beloved. I certainly am sick enough--even
my oncologist revised her prognosis down to 18 months now. However, my spirit
remains undaunted and when I compare myself to other far worse off than I am--
the Guantanamo and Pelican Bay prisoners, Marie Mason, Afra Siddiqui, Hugo
Yogi Pinell, those under death Penalty like Kevin Cooper, the remaining Angola
2, Ruchel Magee and my fellow New Yorkers Jalil, Sekou, Herman, Seth, David,
Abdul --let me stop before I choke up here... I know we MUST win my fight and
the struggle for all other political prisoners to be freed. And then we must
struggle for all to be free in this country.
How much can we, the People, take? Their austerity is barbaric cruelty with
food stamps gone and public housing unavailable, permanently. How long can
the 1% continue to rule and the corporations call the shots? There is so much
wrong but we are not allowed to despair since we have been given sight in this
land of the blind and hopeless and heartless, So, that said, let's once again
get out there as often as needs be--for all the causes, for all the humanity.
for the future. Forward, ever Forward !!
Lynne
Rally to Free Lynne Stewart
Thursday, August 1, Noon
Federal Building
7th and Mission in San Francisco
Free Lynne Stewart Now!
Send a message to Bureau of Prisons Director Charles E. Samuels Jr. that he must reverse his decision.
Long-time National Lawyers Guild member and activist lawyer Lynne Stewart needs our help and she needs it now! The Federal Bureau of Prisons has denied Lynne Stewart’s application for compassionate release, despite recommendations in favor from the warden at her facility, the Regional Office Director, and vetting of Stewart’s release plans by the Federal Probation Office in New York.
Lynne Stewart’s condition is deteriorating rapidly. Medical treatment to arrest the cancer that is metastasizing in her body has been halted because she is too weak to receive it. She remains in isolation, as her white blood cell count is so low that she is at risk for generalized infection.
For over 30 years, Lynne Stewart devoted her life to the oppressed – a constant advocate for the countless many deprived in the United States of their freedom and their rights. She, herself, was targeted and prosecuted because she defended vigorously her unpopular clients – people the U.S. government sought to execute, disappear, and demonize.
In 2006, Lynne Stewart was sentenced to 28-months. In 2009, she was resentenced to 10 years in federal prison in response to the vindictive dictates of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. In the fall, the Supreme Court will consider her Certiorari petition on the basis of both Lynne’s and her client’s first amendment rights.
Lynne Stewart’s prosecution and continued imprisonment are an attempt to intimidate all attorneys who would represent unpopular clients, particularly those accused of being terrorists. It is a message to those of us in the legal community who understand how important it is that everyone accused of a crime, especially those accused of the most serious crimes, have a capable attorney both able and willing to zealously defend them.
The struggle to free Lynne Stewart continues on many fronts:
• Join Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Dick Gregory, Alice Walker, Bianca Jagger, Pete Seeger, Ed Asner, Father Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, Daniel Berrigan, Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, and 25,000 others in the United States and internationally who have signed the petition to free Lynne Stewart – at www.lynnestewart.org.
Encourage others to sign the petition to Free Lynne Stewart:
directly at:
http://www.change.org/petitions/petition-to-free-lynne-stewart-save-her-life-release-her-now-2
or via:
www.lynnestewart.org
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
"DISAPPOINTED BUT NOT DEVASTATED" – A POIGNANT AND POWERFUL SUMMONS FROM LYNNE STEWART:
Disappointed but Not Devastated
My Dear Friends, Supporters, Comrades:
I know we are all disappointed to the marrow of our bones and the depths of our hearts by the news that the Bureaucrats, Kafka like, have turned down my request for compassionate release.
Let me say, that we are planning ahead. The letter from the BOP (soon to be posted on the website) is flawed, to put it mildly. Both factually and medically it has major problems. We intend to go to court and raise these in front of my sentencing Judge Koeltl. At the first sentencing he responded to a query by one of the lawyers that he didn't want me to die in prison -- we'll see if he can now live up to that. He is of course the same Judge who increased my sentence to 10 years -- but this IS very different and we can only hope that we can prevail. Stay tuned for what we need from you. We will never give up.
In the meantime, once again, I grieve for my children and grandchildren who love me so much and had such great expectations of enjoying life together again in our beloved NYC and not just trying to, in the prison visiting room. My Ralph, too, whose dedication and love are only exceeded by the work he does on my behalf -- but he is a born fighter and although he hurts, it all comes more naturally to him.
But for everyone else, I hope that your affront at this crass bureaucratic denial of the request which you by your signatures and letters and phone calls demanded -- How far can we let this go? when a 73-year old woman who IS dying of cancer (maybe not on their timetable,) her life of good works ignored, be shunted aside … "she does not present circumstances considered extraordinary and compelling ... at this time." We must show them that I cannot be ignored, that YOU cannot be ignored."
Fight On -- All of Us or None of Us. An affront to one is an affront to all.
Love Struggle,
Lynne Stewart
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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) New York City fast food workers kick off seven-city week of walkouts
Mon Jul 29, 2013 at 07:19 AM PDT
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/29/1227370/-New-York-City-fast-food-workers-kick-off-seven-city-week-of-walkouts?detail=action
Each step in the recent months' mobilization of fast food workers has made its own little piece of history. The first time fast food workers at multiple restaurants across a city ever went on strike was in New York City in November, and after a second one-day strike in New York, city after city followed. With high unemployment, unions under attack and on the defensive, and labor law that does little to protect workers, low-wage workers in a decentralized industry were just about the last people who were supposed to rise up and demand more. But this week, fast food workers in seven cities will be walking out.
Today, Monday, is a day of widespread rallies and walkouts, with members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and city council members on hand to support the strikers. But:This week’s wave of strikes got an early start Friday night, when workers walked out at a Brooklyn Domino’s to protest the firing of an activist co-worker, Gregory Reynoso, following their April strike. Striker Jose Cruz told Salon that about 90% of the workers on the busy evening shift joined the work stoppage, forcing cancellations of deliveries. (Workers at two other Domino’s locations, a Papa John’s, and a McDonald’s also took part in Friday’s prequel strike.)On Friday, state Sen. Eric Adams helped deliver letters in support of Reynoso to Domino's.
Today, workers and allies will rally at multiple locations in New York City at noon and at Union Square at 3pm. In coming days, workers in Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Milwaukee, Kansas City, and Flint, Michigan, will also strike, and workers in Seattle—who raised complaints of wage theft last week—will take action in other ways. This isn't a short-term fight, but the beginning of what will likely be a long campaign building pressure on the fast food industry to change. If you see workers striking outside a fast food restaurant, join them if you can. But whatever you do, don't weaken the fight by crossing their line and going inside.
Send fast food workers your message of solidarity
The largest walkout of fast food workers in history began in seven cities Monday morning, as workers across the country demanded a $15 / hour living wage. There was also a strike in New York City last week where workers at McDonald’s walked out after a coworker collapsed from heat exhaustion in a kitchen that lacked air conditioning.
Unsafe working conditions and low wages are the inspiration for these nonunion workers who say that they are tired of suffering.
Tell these brave fast food workers that you stand in solidarity with them!
To striking fast food workers:
Your brave struggle for a living wage and safe working conditions is admirable. You have many allies and I’m proud to stand in solidarity with you as you fight for fairness and justice at work! Great work!
Your brave struggle for a living wage and safe working conditions is admirable. You have many allies and I’m proud to stand in solidarity with you as you fight for fairness and justice at work! Great work!
http://campaigns.dailykos.com/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=507
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2) Labor makes a stand - first in Wisconsin, now BART
Two years ago, Wisconsin public workers and services were under assault. Hundreds of thousands of workers converged on the state capital, Madison, to fight austerity cuts proposed by Gov. Scott Walker. The International Longshore Workers Union Local 10 shut down Bay Area ports in solidarity with the Wisconsin struggle. Now BART workers and the Bay Area are in the crosshairs of the national labor struggle, and Wisconsin South Central Labor Council President Kevin Gundlach has pledged solidarity with BART workers.
The BART unions' temporary work agreement ends Sunday night and a new strike is likely. During the BART strike in early July, media coverage suggested these were "greedy workers" making life miserable for the public and jeopardizing the economy. That's not what I found.
Workers told me, "We're fighting for all of us, to say 'No more cuts.' "
I'm convinced they are.
Four years ago, the unions agreed to wage and hiring freezes that saved BART about $100 million. Compared to 2009, BART has fewer workers; work-related injuries have increased. Those concessions were made in bad times. Now times are good (BART projects a $125 million-a-year surplus for 10 years). But management demands more concessions, seeking cuts to pensions, health care and compensation. BART management wants to jeopardize rider safety by cutting vehicle safety inspectors.
BART unions want a three-year contract with better safety conditions, no more cuts to pensions or health care and modest pay increases to keep them on par with the Bay Area's cost of living. The money's there, more than enough to improve safety and increase pay. Even a modest levy on developers and corporations, whose property values soar when BART expands, could reduce or eliminate fares.
Transit strikes make getting around a pain in the neck. But who's causing the pain? BART spent $399,000 on negotiator Thomas Hock, who has provoked strikes in several cities.
Wall Street and banks want to privatize and squeeze profits out of everything Americans have won through generations of struggle. We must fight back.
It will take solidarity from AC Transit and port workers, City College of San Francisco workers, teachers and students, city and county workers, nurses and postal workers, the unemployed and the underemployed. All of us.
The Bay Area has a proud tradition of labor and community unity going back to the 1934 general strike. The rank-and-file of AFSCME 3993, angered by their president, who directed them to cross BART strikers' picket lines, removed her as their chief negotiator in the BART dispute.
Let's turn the tide on austerity. Business depends on BART to deliver their workers and their customers. If BART workers shut it down and win a decent contract, it'll be a victory for us all.
Rally to support BART workers
Who: Called by Amalgamated Transit Union Locals 1555 and 192, Service Employees International Union 1021, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees 3993, International Longshore Workers Union 10
Where: Frank Ogawa Plaza, at Broadway and 14th St., Oakland
When: 5 p.m., Thursday
Jack Gerson, a retired Oakland public schoolteacher, lives in Oakland and rides BART.
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3) The ‘Soul Sisters’ in the Kitchen
By REBECCA SHARPLESS
FORT WORTH — DORA CHARLES and Idella Parker, two black Southern cooks, were born nearly a half century apart and likely never met. But if they did, they would be soul sisters.
Ms. Parker, born in 1914, would understand Ms. Charles’s story of cooking for Paula Deen, whose downfall over charges of racism got a little steeper last week, when Ms. Charles detailed her own fraught history with the celebrity chef. She would understand the fabulous food drenched in butter and sugar, the 15-hour days on tired feet, the wages insufficient to pay for health care. She would understand the famous boss with romantic notions of the South and its cuisine.
What Idella Parker might not understand is how conditions could have changed so little since she left the kitchen of her generation’s Paula Deen, the author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, in 1950. Ms. Charles’s and Ms. Deen’s conflicting accounts about their relationship loudly echo the experiences of generations of African-American cooks and their white employers.
Since the arrival of Europeans and Africans in the South in the early 17th century, black women have labored in kitchens controlled by white women, melding foods from three continents into a distinctive regional cuisine. And many of those white women have long taken credit for black women’s work, whether through their acclaimed “Southern” hospitality, their popular books about party hosting or their fortunes made from selling the food cooked by black women in taverns and restaurants.
Ms. Parker, like Ms. Charles, provided the means for her employer to shine as a food expert, cooking for Ms. Rawlings at her home in the village of Cross Creek, Fla., throughout the 1940s.
Ms. Rawlings, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the novel “The Yearling,” brought New York literati and Hollywood stars to her orange farm to enjoy fine meals of the freshest local ingredients. In 1942, she published “Cross Creek Cookery,” a compendium of her favorite local recipes, like “Utterly Deadly Southern Pecan Pie.” The book made her one of the country’s foremost food celebrities.
When she published her memoir a half-century later, Ms. Parker recalled her participation in producing the cookbook. “Many of the recipes in the book were mine, but she only gave me credit for three of them, including ‘Idella’s Biscuits,’ ” she said. “And of course it was me who did most of the cooking when we were trying all the recipes out. All I ever got from the cookbook was an autographed copy, but in those days I was grateful for any little crumb that white people let fall, so I kept my thoughts about the cookbook strictly to myself.”
The pair’s experience was hardly unique. Long before the Food Network, cookbooks showcased the South’s culinary splendors. Black women, whether willingly or not, shared their recipes with white women, who wrote them down for publication and then claimed the credit. While the cooks knew they were sharing something of value, the authors had little regard for their intellectual property. Hundreds of cookbooks appeared with recipes, from collard greens to puff pastry, attributed to “Beppie” or “Aunt Polly” or even “Mammy,” 70 and 80 years after the end of slavery.
Sometimes even that meager credit was withheld. After the white cookbook writer Marion Brown asked a friend for her clam chowder recipe, she wrote: “Mrs. Clinkscales promised that she would let me have it, if she could persuade her Negro cook to give exact proportions. After a long period of waiting, the recipe arrived with the notation, ‘This is as near it as possible.’ ”
Ms. Brown titled the recipe “Mrs. Clinkscales’ Clam Chowder.”
Of course, white employers typically believed that their cooks loved them and cooked for them out of that love. When Ms. Deen claimed that she and Ms. Charles were “soul sisters,” she fell squarely into the tradition of declaring an employee to be just like a member of the family.
But black employees, like Ms. Charles, have always realized that the marketplace was squarely at the center of the relationships. They struggled to negotiate favorable hours, wages and working conditions, and turnover was frequent. Some cooks did stay for decades with the same families, as Ms. Charles did with Ms. Deen, but they were the exception rather than the rule. And racism permeated the homes of Southern employers, with the employees segregated into the kitchen with separate eating utensils.
Speaking out against this unequal system takes courage. Ms. Parker left Ms. Rawlings in 1950 and later became active in civil rights, but she held her thoughts about the famous author until she published her memoir in 1992. Ms. Charles has more to lose, going public against a media icon still beloved by many.
That risk, sadly, is something Idella Parker would also understand. And she would grieve to know that life in a Southern kitchen still resembles the one she walked out of more than 60 years ago.
Rebecca Sharpless, an associate professor of history at Texas Christian University, is the author of “Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960.”
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4) Hurricane Tips From Cuba
By JEAN FRIEDMAN-RUDOVSKY
HAVANA — Old computer processors whirred and paint crumbled from the walls in the National Prognostic Center of Cuba’s Meteorological Institute,
set on a rise above Havana’s old city. Half a dozen meteorologists
shifted their gaze between satellite images on large video screens and a
giant overhead map of the United States.
They monitor the region’s weather every day, but their gaze grows especially intense in hurricane season. As the center’s director, José Rubiera, explained, almost every hurricane that strikes the Southern United States passes through Cuba first. “A hurricane that hits Cuba doesn’t ask for a visa before entering the United States,” he said.
This shared destiny has led to a rare truce between the two nations, which have had no bilateral relations for more than 50 years. Their meteorological agencies exchange satellite data, jointly analyze radar and collaborate on storm forecasting.
When a storm is approaching, “we call the National Prognostic Center or they call us, whoever gets to the phone first,” said Lixion Avila, a senior specialist at the United States government’s National Hurricane Center.
Dr. Avila called Cuba one of the United States’ most valuable meteorological partners. “Cuba has a long history of excellent forecasting with a tremendous record of data,” he said.
Or as Michael T. Clegg, foreign secretary of the National Academy of Sciences, put it, “It seems that the substantial threat to the human population” posed by storms “is taken seriously enough to make cooperation more desirable.”
And some experts on both sides wish that cooperation would extend to the nonmeteorological aspects of storms. The countries’ disaster management agencies have no direct communication.
“Cuba manages hurricanes well,” said Russel L. Honoré, the retired lieutenant general who commanded military relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005. He has since become a specialist on disaster preparedness and has traveled to Cuba three times in recent years. “We could be learning from them,” he added.
Cuba consistently weathers Category 4 and 5 hurricanes with relatively few casualties. The Center for International Policy, a research and advocacy group based in Washington, says a person is 15 times as likely to be killed by a hurricane in the United States as in Cuba. The island did suffer a body blow last fall from Hurricane Sandy, the second-biggest storm in Cuban history. Before it struck the United States’ Eastern Seaboard, Sandy slammed into Santiago de Cuba, the island’s second-largest city. Eleven people died, and President Raúl Castro said that Santiago looked “like a bombed city.”
Half of its buildings were damaged; almost 16,000 in the city and the surrounding province were destroyed. There were small outbreaks of cholera and dengue fever. Some residents interviewed for this article said they went almost a month without electricity.
“Cuba has an enormous amount of deteriorated buildings that can’t withstand natural disasters,” said Ricardo Mena, a United Nations official responsible for disaster risk reduction in the Americas. He added that while a hospital, for example, might need rebuilding, “that’s very costly and they don’t have the resources to do it.”
Still, he and other analysts emphasized that Cuba would have suffered a great deal more if not for its well-rehearsed storm preparation system.
It is a multilevel process that starts with the young. Grade school students practice evacuations; high-school students monitor neighborhoods to identify weak trees and other hazards.
Dr. Rubiera is the nation’s sole hurricane forecaster, much praised by Cubans for his calm, authoritative manner. “We trust Rubiera because he knows what he’s talking about,” said Camilo Guara, a Havana resident.
In the event of a storm, the head of every institution — schools, hospitals, hotels — is considered a member of the Cuban Civil Defense force, responsible for the well-being of people around them. Tight state control means Cuba can mandate evacuations, mobilize quickly and put Dr. Rubiera’s face on every TV screen. “Cuba is not a model that could be fully replicated anywhere else,” Mr. Mena said.
In Pinar del RÃo, the province most vulnerable, the government deploys large brigades to prepare for disaster.
“If you have nowhere to go, then there’s the state shelters with food and water and doctors,” said MarÃa Fajardo, a resident.
Still, evacuees are more likely to take shelter with family members, friends or strangers, according to the relief organization Oxfam. “We have learned to take care of ourselves and not just rely on the state,” said Yesi MejÃa, 43, of Havana.
In that way, they are no different from storm survivors in the United States. Barbara Morita, a first responder from California who visited Cuba to learn more about its disaster preparations, said that after Hurricane Katrina, “so many people told me, ‘I wouldn’t be alive if my neighbor hadn’t come over.’ ” And she added, “Maybe more could have been saved if we were better prepared.”
Noah Friedman-Rudovsky contributed reporting from Santiago de Cuba.
They monitor the region’s weather every day, but their gaze grows especially intense in hurricane season. As the center’s director, José Rubiera, explained, almost every hurricane that strikes the Southern United States passes through Cuba first. “A hurricane that hits Cuba doesn’t ask for a visa before entering the United States,” he said.
This shared destiny has led to a rare truce between the two nations, which have had no bilateral relations for more than 50 years. Their meteorological agencies exchange satellite data, jointly analyze radar and collaborate on storm forecasting.
When a storm is approaching, “we call the National Prognostic Center or they call us, whoever gets to the phone first,” said Lixion Avila, a senior specialist at the United States government’s National Hurricane Center.
Dr. Avila called Cuba one of the United States’ most valuable meteorological partners. “Cuba has a long history of excellent forecasting with a tremendous record of data,” he said.
Or as Michael T. Clegg, foreign secretary of the National Academy of Sciences, put it, “It seems that the substantial threat to the human population” posed by storms “is taken seriously enough to make cooperation more desirable.”
And some experts on both sides wish that cooperation would extend to the nonmeteorological aspects of storms. The countries’ disaster management agencies have no direct communication.
“Cuba manages hurricanes well,” said Russel L. Honoré, the retired lieutenant general who commanded military relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005. He has since become a specialist on disaster preparedness and has traveled to Cuba three times in recent years. “We could be learning from them,” he added.
Cuba consistently weathers Category 4 and 5 hurricanes with relatively few casualties. The Center for International Policy, a research and advocacy group based in Washington, says a person is 15 times as likely to be killed by a hurricane in the United States as in Cuba. The island did suffer a body blow last fall from Hurricane Sandy, the second-biggest storm in Cuban history. Before it struck the United States’ Eastern Seaboard, Sandy slammed into Santiago de Cuba, the island’s second-largest city. Eleven people died, and President Raúl Castro said that Santiago looked “like a bombed city.”
Half of its buildings were damaged; almost 16,000 in the city and the surrounding province were destroyed. There were small outbreaks of cholera and dengue fever. Some residents interviewed for this article said they went almost a month without electricity.
“Cuba has an enormous amount of deteriorated buildings that can’t withstand natural disasters,” said Ricardo Mena, a United Nations official responsible for disaster risk reduction in the Americas. He added that while a hospital, for example, might need rebuilding, “that’s very costly and they don’t have the resources to do it.”
Still, he and other analysts emphasized that Cuba would have suffered a great deal more if not for its well-rehearsed storm preparation system.
It is a multilevel process that starts with the young. Grade school students practice evacuations; high-school students monitor neighborhoods to identify weak trees and other hazards.
Dr. Rubiera is the nation’s sole hurricane forecaster, much praised by Cubans for his calm, authoritative manner. “We trust Rubiera because he knows what he’s talking about,” said Camilo Guara, a Havana resident.
In the event of a storm, the head of every institution — schools, hospitals, hotels — is considered a member of the Cuban Civil Defense force, responsible for the well-being of people around them. Tight state control means Cuba can mandate evacuations, mobilize quickly and put Dr. Rubiera’s face on every TV screen. “Cuba is not a model that could be fully replicated anywhere else,” Mr. Mena said.
In Pinar del RÃo, the province most vulnerable, the government deploys large brigades to prepare for disaster.
“If you have nowhere to go, then there’s the state shelters with food and water and doctors,” said MarÃa Fajardo, a resident.
Still, evacuees are more likely to take shelter with family members, friends or strangers, according to the relief organization Oxfam. “We have learned to take care of ourselves and not just rely on the state,” said Yesi MejÃa, 43, of Havana.
In that way, they are no different from storm survivors in the United States. Barbara Morita, a first responder from California who visited Cuba to learn more about its disaster preparations, said that after Hurricane Katrina, “so many people told me, ‘I wouldn’t be alive if my neighbor hadn’t come over.’ ” And she added, “Maybe more could have been saved if we were better prepared.”
Noah Friedman-Rudovsky contributed reporting from Santiago de Cuba.
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5) Obama Offers to Cut Corporate Tax Rate as Part of Jobs Deal
By MARK LANDLER
WASHINGTON — President Obama, in a bid to break a stalemate with the Republican-controlled House, will announce Tuesday that he will agree to cut corporate tax rates in return for a commitment from Republicans to invest in middle-class jobs.
Using a cavernous Amazon distribution center in Chattanooga, Tenn., as his backdrop, Mr. Obama will describe a “grand bargain” on jobs that White House officials say will stimulate the economy, as well as give businesses the lower tax rates they have long sought. It will be the first new proposal of his economic offensive.
The choice of Amazon will illustrate Mr. Obama’s theme of a resurgence in jobs. The company recently announced it planned to hire an additional 5,000 workers at 17 centers around the country, where it packs and ships customer orders. It currently employs 20,000 people.
Under the terms of Mr. Obama’s plan, the corporate tax rate would be reduced to 28 percent, from 35 percent, with a lower rate of 25 percent for manufacturers. The White House did not offer details on the size of the jobs program.
The Republicans have rejected the bulk of Mr. Obama’s initiatives to create jobs by investing in community college education and public-works projects.
Mr. Obama has proposed to cut corporate tax rates before, but usually in the context of a broader overhaul of the tax code. By presenting the corporate tax cut as a stand-alone proposal, coupled with a jobs program, the White House hopes to make it more palatable to Republicans.
But Republicans were quick to dismiss the proposal, saying it was less a “bargain” than an effort to extract a major new fiscal stimulus program while offering a cut in corporate taxes that was designed to raise billions of dollars in additional revenue.
“It’s the opposite of a concession,” said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John A. Boehner.
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6) A Mixed Verdict on Manning
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Lurking just behind a military court’s conviction of Pfc. Bradley Manning, on charges that included multiple violations of the Espionage Act, is a national-security apparatus that has metastasized into a vast and largely unchecked exercise of government secrecy and the overzealous prosecution of those who breach it.
Private Manning, a 25-year-old former intelligence analyst who served in Iraq, was arrested in 2010 and charged with the largest military leak in United States history. Private Manning shared 700,000 documents with the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks, and several international news organizations, including The New York Times, published extensive excerpts and articles on the documents.
Private Manning’s original leaks seemed careless in some ways, including names and details of American operations that The Times and other organizations did not publish. But there was also real value for the public in the documents about the conduct of the war in Iraq, including a video of a military helicopter shooting at two vans and killing civilians, including two Reuters journalists.
The judge in the court-martial, Col. Denise Lind, was wise to acquit Private Manning on the most serious charge against him — that he had “aided the enemy,” in this case Al Qaeda, by uploading the documents to the Internet, where he should have known Al Qaeda would be able to get them. Aiding the enemy is punishable by death. To convict under this law without requiring at least an intent to communicate with an enemy would have severely chilling implications for free speech, particularly in the age of the Internet.
There is no question that Private Manning broke laws. In February he pleaded guilty to 10 of the less serious charges against him, which exposed him to up to 20 years in prison. But prosecutors continued to press the more serious charges, which included violations of the Espionage Act, a 1917 law that has become the Obama administration’s hobbyhorse to go after government workers whose actions look nothing like spying. Under President Obama, the government has brought espionage charges more than twice as often under that particular law as all previous administrations combined.
Americans accept that material must be classified in the interest of national security. But that acceptance is severely tested when the government classifies more than 92 million documents in a year. In addition to the administration’s overuse of the Espionage Act and its overly aggressive leak investigations, the trust between the government and the public has been strained by the National Security Agency’s indiscriminate collection of all Americans’ telephone logs, based on a spurious reinterpretation of the Patriot Act.
The administration’s effort to chill connections between the news media and confidential sources in government did not work with Edward Snowden, who revealed the phone records sweep last month. And there are 4.2 million people who have security clearance to view classified information. But investigative journalists are reasonably concerned that prosecutions will cut off their access to critical sources of information.
When he entered his guilty plea, Private Manning said he was trying to shed light on the “day-to-day reality” of American war efforts. He hoped the information “could spark a debate about foreign policy in relation to Iraq and Afghanistan.” These are not the words of a man intent on bringing down the government. On the contrary, Private Manning continues to express his devotion to his country, despite being held without trial for three years, nine months of which amounted to punitive and abusive solitary confinement. Private Manning still faces the equivalent of several life sentences on the espionage counts regarding disclosure of classified information. The government should satisfy itself with a more moderate sentence and then do something about its addiction to secrecy.
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7) On the Verdict in Bradley Manning Court-Martial
Statement by Julian Assange
30 July 2013, 19:30 UTC
http://wikileaks.org/Statement-by-Julian-Assange-on.html
Today Bradley Manning, a whistleblower, was convicted by a military court at Fort Meade of 19 offences for supplying the press with information, including five counts of ’espionage’. He now faces a maximum sentence of 136 years.
The ’aiding the enemy’ charge has fallen away. It was only included, it seems, to make calling journalism ’espionage’ seem reasonable. It is not.
Bradley Manning’s alleged disclosures have exposed war crimes, sparked revolutions, and induced democratic reform. He is the quintessential whistleblower.
This is the first ever espionage conviction against a whistleblower. It is a dangerous precedent and an example of national security extremism. It is a short sighted judgment that can not be tolerated and must be reversed. It can never be that conveying true information to the public is ’espionage’.
President Obama has initiated more espionage proceedings against whistleblowers and publishers than all previous presidents combined.
In 2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama ran on a platform that praised whistleblowing as an act of courage and patriotism. That platform has been comprehensively betrayed. His campaign document described whistleblowers as watchdogs when government abuses its authority. It was removed from the internet last week.
Throughout the proceedings there has been a conspicuous absence: the absence of any victim. The prosecution did not present evidence that - or even claim that - a single person came to harm as a result of Bradley Manning’s disclosures. The government never claimed Mr. Manning was working for a foreign power.
The only ’victim’ was the US government’s wounded pride, but the abuse of this fine young man was never the way to restore it. Rather, the abuse of Bradley Manning has left the world with a sense of disgust at how low the Obama administration has fallen. It is not a sign of strength, but of weakness.
The judge has allowed the prosecution to substantially alter the charges after both the defense and the prosecution had rested their cases, permitted the prosecution 141 witnesses and extensive secret testimony. The government kept Bradley Manning in a cage, stripped him naked and isolated him in order to crack him, an act formally condemned by the United Nations Special Rapporteur for torture. This was never a fair trial.
The Obama administration has been chipping away democratic freedoms in the United States. With today’s verdict, Obama has hacked off much more. The administration is intent on deterring and silencing whistleblowers, intent on weakening freedom of the press.
The US first amendment states that "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". What part of ’no’ does Barack Obama fail to comprehend?
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8) Florida Cops Shoot Unarmed Black Man In His Mother’s Driveway
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9) U.S. Outlines N.S.A.’s Culling of Data for All Domestic Calls
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Wednesday released formerly classified documents outlining a once-secret program of the National Security Agency that is collecting records of all domestic phone calls in the United States, as top officials testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
As the hearing began, The Guardian newspaper published another document from the archives of Top Secret surveillance matters leaked to it by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden. It was a 32-page presentation describing the N.S.A.'s XKeyscore program, by which N.S.A. analysts can mine vast databases of phone and Internet information the agency has vacuumed up.
The documents released by the government, meanwhile, include an April ruling by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that supported a secondary order — also leaked by Mr. Snowden — requiring a Verizon subsidiary to turn over all of its customers’ phone logs for a three-month period.
It said the government may access the logs only when an executive branch official determines that there are “facts giving rise to a reasonable, articulable suspicion” that the number searched is associated with terrorism.
The releases also included two formerly classified briefing papers to Congress from 2009 and 2011, when the provision of the Patriot Act that the court relied on to issue that order was up for reauthorization. The papers outlined the bulk collection of “metadata” logging all domestic phone calls and e-mails of Americans and are portrayed as an “early warning system” that allowed the government to quickly see who was linked to a terrorism suspect.
“Both of these programs operate on a very large scale,” the 2011 briefing paper said, followed by something that is redacted, and then: “However, as described below, only a tiny fraction of such records are ever viewed by N.S.A. intelligence analysts.”
Both programs traced back to the surveillance efforts the Bush administration secretly started after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and which initially operated outside statutory authority or court oversight. The Bush administration later obtained orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to continue them.
The Obama administration has said it shut down the program that collected e-mail “metadata” in 2011, but it is not clear whether such collection has continued under a different program.
The newly disclosed XKeyscore presentation focuses in particular on Internet activities, including chats and Web site browsing activities, as intelligence analysts search for terrorist cells by looking at “anomalous events” like who is using encryption or “searching the web for suspicious stuff.”
In contrast to the domestic-call tracking program, the example cited in the XKeyscore presentation — which said it had generated intelligence that resulted in the capture of more than 300 terrorists — appeared to be focused on overseas activity.
Several of the pages on the presentation were redacted by The Guardian.
But the presentation shows that while much of the focus from Mr. Snowden’s revelations so far has been on communications — whether calls or e-mails — that are linked, directly or indirectly, to a known suspect, the N.S.A. is also collecting and searching through massive amounts of Web-browsing activity.
“A large amount of time spent on the Web is performing actions that are anonymous,” the presentation explains, saying the XKeyscore system can extract and store retrospective activity from “raw unselected bulk traffic” that is collected and stored for 30 days.
As one example, it cited trying to locate for a target who speaks German but is known to be in Pakistan by looking for German-language Internet activity in that country. As another, a slide said: “My target uses Google Maps to scope target locations — can I use this information to determine his e-mail address? What about the Web-searches — do any stand out and look suspicious?”
At the start of Wednesday’s hearing, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, expressed deep skepticism about the domestic phone records program. He criticized intelligence officials and defenders of the program for misleadingly saying it helped prevent 54 terrorist events, a number that conflates the usefulness of N.S.A. surveillance activities targeted at noncitizens abroad with the usefulness of the database of Americans’ phone calls.
A classified list of “terrorist events” that N.S.A. surveillance helped to prevent, he said, “simply does not reflect dozens or even several terrorist plots” that the domestic call log program “helped thwart or prevent, let alone 54, as some have suggested.”
Citing the “massive privacy implications” of the program, Mr. Leahy said: “If this program is not effective it has to end. So far I’m not convinced by what I’ve seen.”
But Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee who is also on the judiciary panel, said that while the program could be changed with greater restrictions and safeguards, it should be preserved because it would place the nation “in jeopardy” to eliminate it.
Robert Litt, the top lawyer in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, testified that the Obama administration was also “open to re-evaluating this program” to create greater public confidence that it protects privacy while “preserving the essence of the program.”
Last week, the House of Representatives voted narrowly to defeat an amendment to shut down the N.S.A.'s domestic phone record tracking program. The 217-to-205 vote was far closer than expected and came as members of both parties defied their leadership to oppose continuing the domestic call logging program, suggesting that momentum against it was building.
Before Mr. Snowden’s leaks made clear what the government was doing with the Patriot Act program, several senators on the Intelligence Committee had made cryptic warnings that it was interpreting the law in a twisted way to do something alarming and made reference to the 2011 briefing paper. The New York Times filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain that document.
The lawsuit contended that the abstract legal analysis outlining what the government believed the Patriot Act meant could not be withheld from the public as properly classified and should be released, even if the passages detailing the program that relied upon that interpretation was redacted. The Obama administration had argued that it could withhold that document entirely, and in May 2012 a Federal District Court judge, William H. Pauley III, agreed to dismiss the lawsuit after reading the briefing paper, finding that the details of the classified program were “inextricably intertwined” with the rest, so releasing it in redacted form was “neither feasible nor warranted.”
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10)Over a Million Are Denied Bank Accounts for Past Errors
By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG
Mistakes like a bounced check
or a small overdraft have effectively blacklisted more than a million
low-income Americans from the mainstream financial system for as long as
seven years as a result of little-known private databases that are used
by the nation’s major banks.
The problem is contributing to the growth of the roughly 10 million households in the United States that lack a banking account, a basic requirement of modern economic life.
Unlike traditional credit reporting databases, which provide portraits of outstanding debt and payment histories, these are records of transgressions in banking products. Institutions like Bank of America, Citibank and Wells Fargo say that tapping into the vast repositories of information helps them weed out risky customers and combat fraud — a mounting threat for banks.
But consumer advocates and state authorities say the use of the databases disproportionately affects lower-income Americans, who tend to live paycheck to paycheck, making them more likely to incur negative marks after relatively minor banking missteps like overdrawing accounts, amassing fees or bouncing checks.
When the databases were created more than 20 years ago, they were intended to help banks guard against serial fraud artists, like those accused of writing bogus checks. Since then, though, the databases have ensnared millions of low-income Americans, according to interviews with financial counselors, consumer lawyers and more than two dozen low-income people in California, Illinois, Florida, New York and Washington.
Jonathan Mintz, the commissioner of the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs, says banks’ growing reliance on customer databases has frustrated efforts to help an estimated 825,000 New Yorkers without bank accounts gain access to the mainstream financial system.
“Hundreds of thousands of Americans are being shut out for relatively small mistakes,” Mr. Mintz said.
As a result, many have no choice but to turn to costly fringe operations to cash checks, pay bills and wire money. Saving for the future, financial counselors say, can be especially difficult.
The ranks of those without bank accounts have swelled — up more than 10 percent since 2009, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation — as banks have sharpened their focus on more affluent customers who typically generate twice the revenue of their lower-income counterparts. Many banks are closing branches in poor areas and expanding in wealthier ones, according to an analysis of federal data.
Rejection for would-be bank customers can come as a shock. Tiffany Murrell of Brooklyn says a credit union denied her checking account application in September 2012 even though she had a job as a secretary and was up to date on her bills.
The obstacle, it turned out, was a negative report from ChexSystems, a consumer credit reporting firm that provides customer data to virtually every major bank and credit union in the nation. The black mark stemmed from a overdraft of roughly $40 in June 2010, according to a copy of a letter that the 31-year-old Ms. Murrell later received from ChexSystems. While she repaid the amount, plus interest and fees, before applying for a new account, the incident, she says, has barred her from opening an account at nearly every bank she has tried, an experience she called “insulting and frustrating.”
While many Americans have at least a vague idea that their credit report is crucial when applying for a loan, few realize that a parallel report is used for bank accounts.
“Most of my clients have no idea these databases exist, let alone what they did to end up in them,” said Kristen Euretig, a financial counselor with Neighborhood Trust Financial Partners, a nonprofit group in New York.
The largest database, founded in the 1970s, is run by ChexSystems, a subsidiary of FIS, a financial services company in Jacksonville, Fla. Subscribers — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank and Wells Fargo among them — “regularly contribute information on mishandled checking and savings accounts,” ChexSystems says on its Web site. “A consumer may dispute any information in their file and ChexSystems will facilitate the resolution of the dispute on the consumer’s behalf,” the company said in a statement. A rival, Early Warning, which is owned by Bank of America, BB&T, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, says roughly 80 percent of the 50 largest American banks pay a fee to subscribe to its deposit-check service.
“Client banks are focused on leveraging intelligence to mitigate fraud from going into the system,” said Frank Caruana, the company’s chief marketing officer.
But the databases are coming under scrutiny from consumer lawyers and federal regulators, who say it can be challenging to remove inaccurate information or get copies of the reports, a requirement under federal law.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has fielded complaints about the databases and is determining whether they comply with the Fair Credit Reporting Act, a federal law meant to stanch the flow of inaccurate consumer information, according to people familiar with the investigation. Banks are required to provide a reason for rejecting an applicant.
Some databases, though, provide scant details of the reason for the negative mark, according to a review of more two dozen letters. Mr. Caruana of Early Warning says the company gives the fine details to its clients, outlining, for example, how much of outstanding debt is principal and how much is fees.
Culling information from the databases is one prong in an assessment, as lenders vet potential customers and screen for fraud. Losses from fraud on new bank accounts surged to $9.8 billion last year, up 50 percent from a year earlier, according to Javelin Strategy and Research.
JPMorgan says a negative report in ChexSystems will rarely bar someone from obtaining an account. Others, like Bank of America, Citibank and Wells Fargo, say they use the information carefully, distinguishing between people who have made mistakes and those who have a history of fraud. Some banks have introduced second-chance checking accounts for people who do not qualify for traditional bank accounts.
Ultimately, Mr. Caruana said, the decision rests with the banks. He noted the soundness of the reports — of the 50 million the company issued last year, only 3,600 were disputed for inaccuracy. And banks and credit unions say that they work to ensure that customers are not penalized for minor mistakes.
Yet the interviews with officials, consumer advocates and the people denied accounts offer a starkly different picture.
“We have had too many experiences where even banks that have offered to be flexible with us find their own internal risk management systems mean that their hands are tied,” said Mr. Mintz, New York’s commissioner of consumer affairs.
The problem, said Jerry DeGrieck, a senior policy adviser to Mayor Mike McGinn of Seattle, is that “lenders just don’t want to take a risk on these clients.”
Recent regulations, which rein in the fees that banks can charge — including overdraft protection, a big moneymaker on lower-income customers’ accounts — have made lenders more reluctant to take gambles on customers with tarnished records, analysts say. Simply put, it is less economical for banks to provide inexpensive financial services and it is tougher for banks to generate revenue on lower-income customers who typically maintain small account balances. Still, banks say they are committed to provide banking services broadly.
The sting of being rejected, though, can make lower-income individuals feel like second-class citizens.
“I just don’t understand why they wouldn’t want me,” said Ms. Murrell, the Brooklyn secretary. “It feels unfair.”
The costs of not having a bank account for seven years — the longest amount of time that a negative report remains in the databases — can quickly add up. David Korzeniowski, 23, said an employee at a bank in Lansing, Mich., had told him that an overdrawn account reported to ChexSystems very likely scuttled his chances of a checking account until 2016.
Mr. Korzeniowski, who acknowledges “he made a mistake,” says the fees he pays for cashing checks, paying bills and wiring money cannibalize the paycheck he gets from part-time construction work. “Everything is more expensive,” he said.
The problem is contributing to the growth of the roughly 10 million households in the United States that lack a banking account, a basic requirement of modern economic life.
Unlike traditional credit reporting databases, which provide portraits of outstanding debt and payment histories, these are records of transgressions in banking products. Institutions like Bank of America, Citibank and Wells Fargo say that tapping into the vast repositories of information helps them weed out risky customers and combat fraud — a mounting threat for banks.
But consumer advocates and state authorities say the use of the databases disproportionately affects lower-income Americans, who tend to live paycheck to paycheck, making them more likely to incur negative marks after relatively minor banking missteps like overdrawing accounts, amassing fees or bouncing checks.
When the databases were created more than 20 years ago, they were intended to help banks guard against serial fraud artists, like those accused of writing bogus checks. Since then, though, the databases have ensnared millions of low-income Americans, according to interviews with financial counselors, consumer lawyers and more than two dozen low-income people in California, Illinois, Florida, New York and Washington.
Jonathan Mintz, the commissioner of the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs, says banks’ growing reliance on customer databases has frustrated efforts to help an estimated 825,000 New Yorkers without bank accounts gain access to the mainstream financial system.
“Hundreds of thousands of Americans are being shut out for relatively small mistakes,” Mr. Mintz said.
As a result, many have no choice but to turn to costly fringe operations to cash checks, pay bills and wire money. Saving for the future, financial counselors say, can be especially difficult.
The ranks of those without bank accounts have swelled — up more than 10 percent since 2009, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation — as banks have sharpened their focus on more affluent customers who typically generate twice the revenue of their lower-income counterparts. Many banks are closing branches in poor areas and expanding in wealthier ones, according to an analysis of federal data.
Rejection for would-be bank customers can come as a shock. Tiffany Murrell of Brooklyn says a credit union denied her checking account application in September 2012 even though she had a job as a secretary and was up to date on her bills.
The obstacle, it turned out, was a negative report from ChexSystems, a consumer credit reporting firm that provides customer data to virtually every major bank and credit union in the nation. The black mark stemmed from a overdraft of roughly $40 in June 2010, according to a copy of a letter that the 31-year-old Ms. Murrell later received from ChexSystems. While she repaid the amount, plus interest and fees, before applying for a new account, the incident, she says, has barred her from opening an account at nearly every bank she has tried, an experience she called “insulting and frustrating.”
While many Americans have at least a vague idea that their credit report is crucial when applying for a loan, few realize that a parallel report is used for bank accounts.
“Most of my clients have no idea these databases exist, let alone what they did to end up in them,” said Kristen Euretig, a financial counselor with Neighborhood Trust Financial Partners, a nonprofit group in New York.
The largest database, founded in the 1970s, is run by ChexSystems, a subsidiary of FIS, a financial services company in Jacksonville, Fla. Subscribers — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank and Wells Fargo among them — “regularly contribute information on mishandled checking and savings accounts,” ChexSystems says on its Web site. “A consumer may dispute any information in their file and ChexSystems will facilitate the resolution of the dispute on the consumer’s behalf,” the company said in a statement. A rival, Early Warning, which is owned by Bank of America, BB&T, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, says roughly 80 percent of the 50 largest American banks pay a fee to subscribe to its deposit-check service.
“Client banks are focused on leveraging intelligence to mitigate fraud from going into the system,” said Frank Caruana, the company’s chief marketing officer.
But the databases are coming under scrutiny from consumer lawyers and federal regulators, who say it can be challenging to remove inaccurate information or get copies of the reports, a requirement under federal law.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has fielded complaints about the databases and is determining whether they comply with the Fair Credit Reporting Act, a federal law meant to stanch the flow of inaccurate consumer information, according to people familiar with the investigation. Banks are required to provide a reason for rejecting an applicant.
Some databases, though, provide scant details of the reason for the negative mark, according to a review of more two dozen letters. Mr. Caruana of Early Warning says the company gives the fine details to its clients, outlining, for example, how much of outstanding debt is principal and how much is fees.
Culling information from the databases is one prong in an assessment, as lenders vet potential customers and screen for fraud. Losses from fraud on new bank accounts surged to $9.8 billion last year, up 50 percent from a year earlier, according to Javelin Strategy and Research.
JPMorgan says a negative report in ChexSystems will rarely bar someone from obtaining an account. Others, like Bank of America, Citibank and Wells Fargo, say they use the information carefully, distinguishing between people who have made mistakes and those who have a history of fraud. Some banks have introduced second-chance checking accounts for people who do not qualify for traditional bank accounts.
Ultimately, Mr. Caruana said, the decision rests with the banks. He noted the soundness of the reports — of the 50 million the company issued last year, only 3,600 were disputed for inaccuracy. And banks and credit unions say that they work to ensure that customers are not penalized for minor mistakes.
Yet the interviews with officials, consumer advocates and the people denied accounts offer a starkly different picture.
“We have had too many experiences where even banks that have offered to be flexible with us find their own internal risk management systems mean that their hands are tied,” said Mr. Mintz, New York’s commissioner of consumer affairs.
The problem, said Jerry DeGrieck, a senior policy adviser to Mayor Mike McGinn of Seattle, is that “lenders just don’t want to take a risk on these clients.”
Recent regulations, which rein in the fees that banks can charge — including overdraft protection, a big moneymaker on lower-income customers’ accounts — have made lenders more reluctant to take gambles on customers with tarnished records, analysts say. Simply put, it is less economical for banks to provide inexpensive financial services and it is tougher for banks to generate revenue on lower-income customers who typically maintain small account balances. Still, banks say they are committed to provide banking services broadly.
The sting of being rejected, though, can make lower-income individuals feel like second-class citizens.
“I just don’t understand why they wouldn’t want me,” said Ms. Murrell, the Brooklyn secretary. “It feels unfair.”
The costs of not having a bank account for seven years — the longest amount of time that a negative report remains in the databases — can quickly add up. David Korzeniowski, 23, said an employee at a bank in Lansing, Mich., had told him that an overdrawn account reported to ChexSystems very likely scuttled his chances of a checking account until 2016.
Mr. Korzeniowski, who acknowledges “he made a mistake,” says the fees he pays for cashing checks, paying bills and wiring money cannibalize the paycheck he gets from part-time construction work. “Everything is more expensive,” he said.
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11) House Plan on Food Stamps Would Cut 5 Million From Program
By RON NIXON
WASHINGTON
— Nearly half a million people who receive food stamps but still do not
get enough to eat would lose their eligibility for the program under
proposed cuts that are expected to be taken up again by Congress. An
additional 160,000 to 305,000 recipients who do get enough to eat would
also lose their eligibility and the ability to adequately feed
themselves.
In total, about 5.1 million people would be eliminated from the program, according to a new report.
The Health Impact Project, a Washington research group, released a study on Tuesday about the impact of the proposed cuts to the food stamp program. The project is a collaboration between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts.
The report said the cuts to the program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, would not only affect the ability of low-income households to feed themselves but would also increase poverty.
The combination of poverty and a lack of food would lead to increases in illnesses like heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure among adults, the study found. In children, the cuts would lead to higher rates of asthma and depression. Diabetes alone could increase federal and state health care costs by nearly $15 billion over the next 10 years, the report found.
“The SNAP program has implications for health, and we wanted to make sure that health is part of the debate,” said Dr. Aaron Wernham, the director of the project. “There is a large body of public health research which shows how food insecurity affects health.”
The report comes as Congress is working to pass a new farm bill. A Senate bill passed in May would cut about $4.5 billion from the food stamp program, mainly by changing the eligibility requirements. A House farm bill with $20.5 billion in cuts to food stamps failed to pass in June.
The House then approved a farm bill this month that for the first time since 1973 did not include the food stamp program. Lawmakers said they would take up a separate bill on food stamps, but they did not give a timetable. The $20.5 billion in cuts is expected to be the starting point for a new measure, and the Health Impact Project used that amount as the basis for its study.
The food stamp program has become a target for conservatives in Congress as it has grown over the past decade. Nearly 48 million people currently receive food stamp benefits, and the program costs about $80 billion a year.
Many Republicans say the program is rife with fraud, with hundreds of ineligible people receiving benefits. The Agriculture Department says that fraud rates are low and that the people who receive the benefits need them because of a tough economy.
“These are the poorest of the poor,” said Kevin Concannon, under secretary for food, nutrition and consumer services at the Agriculture Department. “In many cases, these are people who are working who just can’t make ends meet.”
People like Christine Tucker, 46, a mother of four in Queens.
Ms. Tucker, who was born in Jamaica and works as a health aide, said she began receiving food stamps in April. “It’s a big help,” she said. “If it goes, I don’t know what is going to happen. After paying rent and other bills, there is often nothing left for food.”
Dr. Wernham said people like Ms. Tucker were typical of many food stamp recipients.
“It’s a trade-off between paying for rent, medicine or food,” he said. “Policy makers need to understand what the health impacts are going to be if they make the kinds of changes they are considering to the SNAP program.”
In total, about 5.1 million people would be eliminated from the program, according to a new report.
The Health Impact Project, a Washington research group, released a study on Tuesday about the impact of the proposed cuts to the food stamp program. The project is a collaboration between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts.
The report said the cuts to the program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, would not only affect the ability of low-income households to feed themselves but would also increase poverty.
The combination of poverty and a lack of food would lead to increases in illnesses like heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure among adults, the study found. In children, the cuts would lead to higher rates of asthma and depression. Diabetes alone could increase federal and state health care costs by nearly $15 billion over the next 10 years, the report found.
“The SNAP program has implications for health, and we wanted to make sure that health is part of the debate,” said Dr. Aaron Wernham, the director of the project. “There is a large body of public health research which shows how food insecurity affects health.”
The report comes as Congress is working to pass a new farm bill. A Senate bill passed in May would cut about $4.5 billion from the food stamp program, mainly by changing the eligibility requirements. A House farm bill with $20.5 billion in cuts to food stamps failed to pass in June.
The House then approved a farm bill this month that for the first time since 1973 did not include the food stamp program. Lawmakers said they would take up a separate bill on food stamps, but they did not give a timetable. The $20.5 billion in cuts is expected to be the starting point for a new measure, and the Health Impact Project used that amount as the basis for its study.
The food stamp program has become a target for conservatives in Congress as it has grown over the past decade. Nearly 48 million people currently receive food stamp benefits, and the program costs about $80 billion a year.
Many Republicans say the program is rife with fraud, with hundreds of ineligible people receiving benefits. The Agriculture Department says that fraud rates are low and that the people who receive the benefits need them because of a tough economy.
“These are the poorest of the poor,” said Kevin Concannon, under secretary for food, nutrition and consumer services at the Agriculture Department. “In many cases, these are people who are working who just can’t make ends meet.”
People like Christine Tucker, 46, a mother of four in Queens.
Ms. Tucker, who was born in Jamaica and works as a health aide, said she began receiving food stamps in April. “It’s a big help,” she said. “If it goes, I don’t know what is going to happen. After paying rent and other bills, there is often nothing left for food.”
Dr. Wernham said people like Ms. Tucker were typical of many food stamp recipients.
“It’s a trade-off between paying for rent, medicine or food,” he said. “Policy makers need to understand what the health impacts are going to be if they make the kinds of changes they are considering to the SNAP program.”
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12) Warrantless Cellphone Tracking Is Upheld
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
In a significant victory for law enforcement, a federal appeals court on Tuesday said that government authorities could extract historical location data directly from telecommunications carriers without a search warrant.
The closely watched case, in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, is the first ruling that squarely addresses the constitutionality of warrantless searches of historical location data stored by cellphone service providers. Ruling 2 to 1, the court said a warrantless search was “not per se unconstitutional” because location data was “clearly a business record” and therefore not protected by the Fourth Amendment.
The ruling is likely to intensify legislative efforts, already bubbling in Congress and in the states, to consider measures to require warrants based on probable cause to obtain cellphone location data.
The appeals court ruling sharply contrasts with a New Jersey State Supreme Court opinion in mid-July that said the police required a warrant to track a suspect’s whereabouts in real time. That decision relied on the New Jersey Constitution, whereas the ruling Tuesday in the Fifth Circuit was made on the basis of the federal Constitution.
The Supreme Court has yet to weigh in on whether cellphone location data is protected by the Constitution. The case, which was initially brought in Texas, is not expected to go to the Supreme Court because it is “ex parte,” or filed by only one party — in this case, the government.
But the case could renew calls for the highest court to look at the issue, if another federal court rules differently on the same question. And two other federal cases involving this issue are pending.
“The opinion is clear that the government can access cell site records without Fourth Amendment oversight,” said Orin Kerr, a constitutional law scholar at George Washington University Law School who filed an amicus brief in the case.
For now, the ruling sets an important precedent: It allows law enforcement officials in the Fifth Circuit to chronicle the whereabouts of an American with a court order that falls short of a search warrant based on probable cause.
“This decision is a big deal,” said Catherine Crump, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s a big deal and a big blow to Americans’ privacy rights.”
The group reviewed records from more than 200 local police departments last year, concluding that the demand for cellphone location data had led some cellphone companies to develop “surveillance fees” to enable police to track suspects.
In reaching its decision on Tuesday, the federal appeals court went on to agree with the government’s contention that consumers knowingly give up their location information to the telecommunications carrier every time they make a call or send a text message on their cellphones.
“That means it is not protected by Fourth Amendment when the government goes to a third-party service provider and issues something that is not a warrant to demand production of those records,” said Mark Eckenwiler, a former Justice Department lawyer who worked on the case and is now with the Washington law firm Perkins Coie. “On this kind of historical cell site information, this is the first one to address the core constitutional question.”
Historical location data is crucial to law enforcement officials. Mr. Eckenwiler offered the example of drug investigations: A cellphone carrier can establish where a suspect met his supplier and how often he returned to a particular location. Likewise, location data can be vital in establishing people’s habits and preferences, including whether they worship at a church or mosque or whether they are present at a political protest, which is why, civil liberties advocates say, it should be accorded the highest privileges of privacy protection.
The decision could also bear implications for other government efforts to collect vast amounts of so-called metadata, under the argument that it constitutes “business records,” as in the National Security Agency’s collection of Verizon phone records for millions of Americans.
“It provides support for the government’s view that that procedure is constitutional, obtaining Verizon call records, because it holds that records are business records,” said Mr. Kerr, of George Washington University. “It doesn’t make it a slam dunk but it makes a good case for the government to argue that position.”
An important element in Tuesday’s ruling is the court’s presumption of what consumers should know about the way cellphone technology works. “A cell service subscriber, like a telephone user, understands that his cellphone must send a signal to a nearby cell tower in order to wirelessly connect his call,” the court ruled, going on to note that “contractual terms of service and providers’ privacy policies expressly state that a provider uses a subscriber’s location information to route his cellphone calls.”
In any event, the court added, the use of cellphones “is entirely voluntary.”
The ruling also gave a nod to the way in which fast-moving technological advances have challenged age-old laws on privacy. Consumers today may want privacy over location records, the court acknowledged: “But the recourse for these desires is in the market or the political process: in demanding that service providers do away with such records (or anonymize them) or in lobbying elected representatives to enact statutory protections.” Cellphone privacy measures have been proposed in the Senate and House that would require law enforcement agents to obtain search warrants before prying open location records. Montana recently became the first state to require a warrant for location data. Maine soon followed. California passed a similar measure last year but Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, vetoed it, saying it did not strike what he called the right balance between the demands of civil libertarians and the police.
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13) Debtors' Prisons Are Alive and Well in America
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14) Russia Grants Snowden 1-Year Asylum
By ANDREW E. KRAMER
MOSCOW — After a month holed up in the transit zone of Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow, Edward J. Snowden, the former intelligence contractor wanted by the United States for leaking details of surveillance programs, has received temporary refugee status in Russia and left the airport, his lawyer said Thursday.
The movement from the airport’s international transit zone was a significant change in Mr. Snowden’s status for the first time since he left the United States and began leaking details of the National Security Agency’s surveillance.
The refugee status in Russia was the first formal support from another government for Mr. Snowden, 30, and seems likely to elicit strong objections from the United States.
The temporary refugee status allows Mr. Snowden to move freely within the country and is valid for one year, Anatoly Kucherena, a Russian lawyer assisting Mr. Snowden with the asylum request, said in a telephone interview.
Mr. Snowden has left the airport, Mr. Kucherena said, but declined to say where he had gone. “Yes, it is true he is out,” he said, but declined to disclose details.
Mr. Snowden had lived in the international transit zone of the airport since he arrived on June 23, one step ahead of an extradition request filed by the United States in his first stopover in Hong Kong.
For reasons that were unclear, the Russian Federal Migration Service delayed for longer than the typical week the processing of his temporary asylum application.
While the bureaucratic process has unfolded slowly, Russian officials, including President Vladimir V. Putin, have made clear that they have no intention of extraditing him to the United States — a position that has infuriated the Obama administration.
Mr. Putin has insisted that Mr. Snowden’s presence in Russia should not harm relations between the two countries, even as the White House has signaled that President Obama, amid mounting frustration, may cancel a planned summit meeting in Moscow in September. The United States State Department had said that any move outside the airport — signaling a formal acceptance of Mr. Snowden as an asylum seeker — would be “deeply disappointing,” but has not publicly laid out any ramifications for Russia.
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15) A Day’s Strike Seeks to Raise Fast-Food Pay
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
From
New York to several Midwestern cities, thousands of fast-food workers
have been holding one-day strikes during peak mealtimes, quickly drawing
national attention to their demands for much higher wages.
What began in Manhattan eight months ago first spread to Chicago and Washington and this week has hit St. Louis, Kansas City, Detroit and Flint, Mich. On Wednesday alone, workers picketed McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Popeye’s and Long John Silver’s restaurants in those cities with an ambitious agenda: pay of $15 an hour, twice what many now earn.
These strikes, which are planned for Milwaukee on Thursday, carry the flavor of Occupy Wall Street protests and are far different from traditional unionization efforts that generally focus on a single workplace. The national campaign, underwritten with millions of dollars from the Service Employees International Union, aims to mobilize workers — all at once — in numerous cities at hundreds of restaurants from two dozen chains.
None of the nation’s 200,000-plus fast-food restaurants are unionized.
The strategists know they want to achieve a $15 wage, but they seem to be ad-libbing on ways to get there. Perhaps they will seek to unionize workers at dozens of restaurants, although some labor leaders scoff at that idea because the turnover rate among fast-food employees is about 75 percent a year. Or the strategists and strikers might press city councils to enact a special “living wage” for fast-food restaurants. Or perhaps by continually disrupting the fast-food marketplace from counter to counter across the country, they can get McDonald’s, KFC and others to raise wages to end the ruckus. The protests’ organizers acknowledge that yet another goal is to push Congress to raise the federal minimum wage and pressure state legislatures to raise the state minimums.
“These companies aren’t magically going to make our lives better,” said Terrance Wise, who earns $9.30 an hour after working for eight years at a Burger King in Kansas City, plus $7.40 an hour at his second job at Pizza Hut. “We can sit back and stay silent and continue to live in poverty or, on the other hand, we can step out and say something and let it be known that we need help.”
In explaining why her union is pouring dozens of organizers and significant sums into the effort, Mary Kay Henry, the S.E.I.U. president, said, “Our union’s members think that economic inequality is the No. 1 problem our nation needs to solve. We think it’s important to back low-wage workers who are willing to stand up and have the courage to strike to make the case that the economy is creating jobs that people can’t support their families on.”
The protests in Detroit on Wednesday had a particularly poignant backdrop, given that the city has declared bankruptcy. Dozens of workers, joined by members of various unions and community groups, picketed in front of McDonald’s and Taco Bell, shouting chants like, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, $7.40 has got to go” — the amount per hour many of them are paid.
“Fifteen dollars an hour would be great – we’d be able to pay our living costs,” said Christopher Drumgold, 32, a father of two who earns $7.40 an hour after a year working at a McDonald’s on Seven Mile Road in Detroit. “On what I’m earning right now you have to choose between paying your rent and eating the next day.”
Restaurant industry officials say the strikers’ demand for $15 an hour is ludicrous because it amounts to more than twice the federal minimum wage. (The median pay for fast-food workers nationwide is $9.05 an hour.) Industry officials say a $15 wage might drive many restaurants out of business and cause restaurant owners to hire fewer workers and replace some with automation — perhaps by using more computerized gadgets where customers punch in the orders themselves.
Scott DeFife, executive vice president of the National Restaurant Association, said the one-day walkouts were not really strikes, but rather public-relations-minded protests that have caused very few restaurants to close.
“It is an effort to demonize the entire industry in order to make some organizing and political points,” he said, adding that only a small percentage of restaurant jobs pay the minimum wage. He said most of those positions were held by workers younger than 25.
Organizers of the protests — called Fast Food Forward in New York and Fight for 15 in Chicago — say that it seems to be catching fire. Some fast-food workers in St. Louis, inspired by the strikes in New York and Chicago, held their own one-day walkout.
“Things are going phenomenally. Workers all over the country are taking action in an industry where there had literally been no action or traction a year ago,” said Jonathan Westin, executive director of New York Communities for Change, which played a crucial role organizing the first fast-food strike in New York last November.
Explaining the focus on fast-food workers, Mr. Westin added, “In a lot of low-income neighborhoods, probably the largest employer is the fast-food industry, and we’re not going to reduce the level of poverty in those neighborhoods unless we try to get that industry to provide jobs that pay a living wage.”
Late Wednesday morning, 100 people protested in front of a Taco Bell on Eight Mile Road in Detroit, with organizers saying that 11 of the restaurant’s employees were on strike.
One Taco Bell worker, Sharise Stitt, 27, joined the strike, saying the $8.09 she earns after five years there was insufficient to support her family.
She was evicted from her Detroit apartment and moved her family to her sister’s house in Taylor, Mich. That means a 45-minute commute each way and a gas bill of $50 every four days. After taxes, she has about $900 a month to feed and clothe her three children. They receive food stamps.
“Sometimes my phone will go out because that isn’t a priority,” she said. “Giving my kids a roof over their heads is.”
She would love a $15 minimum wage. “I wouldn’t have to worry about school supplies or things like that,” she added.
Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said he doubted the fast-food strikes would result in unionization. While unions might be excited by the current burst of enthusiasm, he said unions had learned to be cautious, adding, “You pour in a lot of resources, saying, ‘Yes it does work,’ and a year later it disintegrates.”
Nonetheless, he said the periodic chaos the one-day walkouts cause could influence the industry to pay more and could nudge lawmakers to raise the minimum wage (which Republicans in Washington strongly oppose).
Dorian T. Warren, who teaches a course on labor organizing at Columbia University, noted that most of the urban workers taking part in the single-day strikes were black and Hispanic, demographic groups that often lean in favor of unions.
“I think a vast majority would vote for unionization,” he said. “Many are earning so little they have nothing to lose.”
“Will they get $15 an hour?” he added. “I don’t know. If they get to $10 or $12, that’d be huge.”
Jaclyn Trop contributed reporting.
What began in Manhattan eight months ago first spread to Chicago and Washington and this week has hit St. Louis, Kansas City, Detroit and Flint, Mich. On Wednesday alone, workers picketed McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Popeye’s and Long John Silver’s restaurants in those cities with an ambitious agenda: pay of $15 an hour, twice what many now earn.
These strikes, which are planned for Milwaukee on Thursday, carry the flavor of Occupy Wall Street protests and are far different from traditional unionization efforts that generally focus on a single workplace. The national campaign, underwritten with millions of dollars from the Service Employees International Union, aims to mobilize workers — all at once — in numerous cities at hundreds of restaurants from two dozen chains.
None of the nation’s 200,000-plus fast-food restaurants are unionized.
The strategists know they want to achieve a $15 wage, but they seem to be ad-libbing on ways to get there. Perhaps they will seek to unionize workers at dozens of restaurants, although some labor leaders scoff at that idea because the turnover rate among fast-food employees is about 75 percent a year. Or the strategists and strikers might press city councils to enact a special “living wage” for fast-food restaurants. Or perhaps by continually disrupting the fast-food marketplace from counter to counter across the country, they can get McDonald’s, KFC and others to raise wages to end the ruckus. The protests’ organizers acknowledge that yet another goal is to push Congress to raise the federal minimum wage and pressure state legislatures to raise the state minimums.
“These companies aren’t magically going to make our lives better,” said Terrance Wise, who earns $9.30 an hour after working for eight years at a Burger King in Kansas City, plus $7.40 an hour at his second job at Pizza Hut. “We can sit back and stay silent and continue to live in poverty or, on the other hand, we can step out and say something and let it be known that we need help.”
In explaining why her union is pouring dozens of organizers and significant sums into the effort, Mary Kay Henry, the S.E.I.U. president, said, “Our union’s members think that economic inequality is the No. 1 problem our nation needs to solve. We think it’s important to back low-wage workers who are willing to stand up and have the courage to strike to make the case that the economy is creating jobs that people can’t support their families on.”
The protests in Detroit on Wednesday had a particularly poignant backdrop, given that the city has declared bankruptcy. Dozens of workers, joined by members of various unions and community groups, picketed in front of McDonald’s and Taco Bell, shouting chants like, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, $7.40 has got to go” — the amount per hour many of them are paid.
“Fifteen dollars an hour would be great – we’d be able to pay our living costs,” said Christopher Drumgold, 32, a father of two who earns $7.40 an hour after a year working at a McDonald’s on Seven Mile Road in Detroit. “On what I’m earning right now you have to choose between paying your rent and eating the next day.”
Restaurant industry officials say the strikers’ demand for $15 an hour is ludicrous because it amounts to more than twice the federal minimum wage. (The median pay for fast-food workers nationwide is $9.05 an hour.) Industry officials say a $15 wage might drive many restaurants out of business and cause restaurant owners to hire fewer workers and replace some with automation — perhaps by using more computerized gadgets where customers punch in the orders themselves.
Scott DeFife, executive vice president of the National Restaurant Association, said the one-day walkouts were not really strikes, but rather public-relations-minded protests that have caused very few restaurants to close.
“It is an effort to demonize the entire industry in order to make some organizing and political points,” he said, adding that only a small percentage of restaurant jobs pay the minimum wage. He said most of those positions were held by workers younger than 25.
Organizers of the protests — called Fast Food Forward in New York and Fight for 15 in Chicago — say that it seems to be catching fire. Some fast-food workers in St. Louis, inspired by the strikes in New York and Chicago, held their own one-day walkout.
“Things are going phenomenally. Workers all over the country are taking action in an industry where there had literally been no action or traction a year ago,” said Jonathan Westin, executive director of New York Communities for Change, which played a crucial role organizing the first fast-food strike in New York last November.
Explaining the focus on fast-food workers, Mr. Westin added, “In a lot of low-income neighborhoods, probably the largest employer is the fast-food industry, and we’re not going to reduce the level of poverty in those neighborhoods unless we try to get that industry to provide jobs that pay a living wage.”
Late Wednesday morning, 100 people protested in front of a Taco Bell on Eight Mile Road in Detroit, with organizers saying that 11 of the restaurant’s employees were on strike.
One Taco Bell worker, Sharise Stitt, 27, joined the strike, saying the $8.09 she earns after five years there was insufficient to support her family.
She was evicted from her Detroit apartment and moved her family to her sister’s house in Taylor, Mich. That means a 45-minute commute each way and a gas bill of $50 every four days. After taxes, she has about $900 a month to feed and clothe her three children. They receive food stamps.
“Sometimes my phone will go out because that isn’t a priority,” she said. “Giving my kids a roof over their heads is.”
She would love a $15 minimum wage. “I wouldn’t have to worry about school supplies or things like that,” she added.
Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said he doubted the fast-food strikes would result in unionization. While unions might be excited by the current burst of enthusiasm, he said unions had learned to be cautious, adding, “You pour in a lot of resources, saying, ‘Yes it does work,’ and a year later it disintegrates.”
Nonetheless, he said the periodic chaos the one-day walkouts cause could influence the industry to pay more and could nudge lawmakers to raise the minimum wage (which Republicans in Washington strongly oppose).
Dorian T. Warren, who teaches a course on labor organizing at Columbia University, noted that most of the urban workers taking part in the single-day strikes were black and Hispanic, demographic groups that often lean in favor of unions.
“I think a vast majority would vote for unionization,” he said. “Many are earning so little they have nothing to lose.”
“Will they get $15 an hour?” he added. “I don’t know. If they get to $10 or $12, that’d be huge.”
Jaclyn Trop contributed reporting.
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16) In Missouri, Race Complicates a Transfer to Better Schools
By JOHN ELIGON
ST.
CHARLES, Mo. — When the Missouri Supreme Court upheld a law in June
allowing students from failing school districts to transfer to good
ones, Harriett Gladney saw a path to a better education for her
9-year-old daughter.
But then she watched television news clips from a town hall meeting for the Francis Howell School District, the predominantly white district here that her daughter’s mostly black district, Normandy, had chosen as a transfer site. Normandy, in neighboring St. Louis County, has one of the worst disciplinary rates in the state, and Francis Howell parents angrily protested the transfer of Normandy students across the county line, some yelling that their children could be stabbed and that the district’s academic standards would slip.
“When I saw them screaming and hollering like they were crazy, I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, this is back in Martin Luther King days,’ ” said Ms. Gladney, 45. “ ‘They’re going to get the hoses out. They’re going to be beating our kids and making sure they don’t get off the school bus.’ ”
Public schools here in the St. Louis region, as in many other metropolitan areas across the country, have struggled for decades to bridge a wide achievement gap between school districts — a divide that often runs along racial and socioeconomic lines. By affirming the right to transfer students out of failing school districts, the State Supreme Court opened the doors for hundreds of families to cross the lines and move their children into better schools.
But the ensuing contention has shown that the process remains a tricky one, complicated by class, race, geography and social perceptions.
“Most folks are for having equal opportunity, having good schools for everyone,” said Patrick J. Flavin, an assistant professor of political science at Baylor University who recently wrote a report on the black-white achievement gap in schools. “We’re all about that in the abstract. You start to see support levels drop when it turns into a real-life thing.”
In 2010, nearly three out of four black students and four out of five Latino students in the United States attended schools made up mostly of minority students, according to a report published last year by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles.
More than half of the 28 public school districts — excluding charter and specialty districts — in the city of St. Louis, St. Louis County and St. Charles County combined are at least 75 percent black or white. Of the nine districts that are at least three-quarters white, all but one scored a perfect 14 on the state’s performance rating scale. The six mostly black districts scored an average of 7.
Racial segregation has lingered in this region, the result of generations of discriminatory zoning and real estate practices. Efforts to reverse it have included a court-ordered program that has been busing thousands of black St. Louis students to mostly white suburban schools since the early 1980s.
The separate transfer law, which the Legislature passed two decades ago, did not directly target segregation, but it addresses the issue in practice. Unaccredited districts, so classified based on a state performance formula, must designate a district to which they will send students wishing to transfer. Parents may choose to send their children to a different accredited district, but then they will be responsible for their own transportation.
The transfer law was invoked several years back when Normandy, which is 97 percent black, took in students from another predominantly black district that eventually dissolved. Supporters of the law noted that there was no outcry when students from that mostly black district were transferring to Normandy, which at that time had been accredited.
Normandy, Riverview Gardens and the Kansas City Public Schools are currently the state’s only unaccredited districts. Those districts will remain responsible for paying for students who have transferred.
“I think they’re already killing schools like ours indirectly because they’re taking the resources,” Ty McNichols, the Normandy superintendent, said of the law. “It’s going to negatively impact us because of the financial side.”
Educators and parents also argue that the law could leave students facing instability because they would have to return to their home district if schools regained their accreditation.
Many administrators and parents raised concerns of crowded classes and of teachers having to slow down to allow students from struggling districts to catch up. Some school districts are setting class-size policies, but it is unclear whether they would legally be able to refuse transfer students even if they reach the capacity they set.
Normandy and Riverview Gardens, also in St. Louis County, have each received transfer requests from about 1,000 students. Riverview Gardens administrators chose a second district, Kirkwood, to bus their students to, because their first choice, Mehlville, said it could not accommodate all of the transfers.
Some parents have criticized the law for not giving taxpayers a say in what happens in their own districts and accused the state of abandoning the unaccredited districts instead of working to improve them.
“We have been made like we’re going to stand on the steps the first day of school and spit on them,” said Andrea Stopke, 35, who has three children at Francis Howell and started an online petition to change the transfer law. “That’s not the case. We are going to welcome these kids and we’re going to help them. But because we’re doing that it doesn’t mean that something doesn’t need to be done to fix it.”
For decades, St. Louis’s urban population has been dwindling, often because parents seek better schools for their children in the suburbs. That was the case for many parents in the Francis Howell district, who insisted that their opposition had nothing to do with race, but with school performance data and news reports that painted Normandy as the state’s most dangerous district.
“I think that any time you disturb a culture — you’re bringing in a variable that is unknown — I think it has the ability to create some unrest because you don’t know how the variable’s going to play out in the culture you already have,” said Pam Sloan, the Francis Howell superintendent.
But some Francis Howell parents have said that the transfer students could bring much-needed diversity to their district, and some argued that concerns were overblown because the transfer program would attract mostly good students.
“I don’t really see gang-related kids busing themselves an hour to go to St. Charles to sell drugs and pick fights,” Chris Mellor, 45, who has three children in the Francis Howell district, said as he stood on the deck of a pool in his subdivision of multistory brick-and-siding houses.
But Joseph Zakrzewski, 51, who has one child in the Francis Howell district and another who recently graduated, said he thought that some “troublemakers” would be among the transfers, and that Normandy students might struggle to keep pace academically.
“Their A and B kids are probably going to be our C and D kids,” he said.
For Patrice McHaskell, who is black, the decision to transfer four of her children from the Normandy district to the Francis Howell district was personal. From fifth grade through high school, she rode about an hour on a bus each morning from her north St. Louis home to a mostly white suburban district.
The experience, she explained, was life-changing. Ms. McHaskell, 39, said she even became friends with a boy who was part of a racist group called the Skullheads. They bonded in shop class, collaborating on a project to build a bench and a birdhouse.
“Having that, being able to have the diversity, being around different cultures and everything,” she said, “has taught me how to handle the world.”
But then she watched television news clips from a town hall meeting for the Francis Howell School District, the predominantly white district here that her daughter’s mostly black district, Normandy, had chosen as a transfer site. Normandy, in neighboring St. Louis County, has one of the worst disciplinary rates in the state, and Francis Howell parents angrily protested the transfer of Normandy students across the county line, some yelling that their children could be stabbed and that the district’s academic standards would slip.
“When I saw them screaming and hollering like they were crazy, I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, this is back in Martin Luther King days,’ ” said Ms. Gladney, 45. “ ‘They’re going to get the hoses out. They’re going to be beating our kids and making sure they don’t get off the school bus.’ ”
Public schools here in the St. Louis region, as in many other metropolitan areas across the country, have struggled for decades to bridge a wide achievement gap between school districts — a divide that often runs along racial and socioeconomic lines. By affirming the right to transfer students out of failing school districts, the State Supreme Court opened the doors for hundreds of families to cross the lines and move their children into better schools.
But the ensuing contention has shown that the process remains a tricky one, complicated by class, race, geography and social perceptions.
“Most folks are for having equal opportunity, having good schools for everyone,” said Patrick J. Flavin, an assistant professor of political science at Baylor University who recently wrote a report on the black-white achievement gap in schools. “We’re all about that in the abstract. You start to see support levels drop when it turns into a real-life thing.”
In 2010, nearly three out of four black students and four out of five Latino students in the United States attended schools made up mostly of minority students, according to a report published last year by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles.
More than half of the 28 public school districts — excluding charter and specialty districts — in the city of St. Louis, St. Louis County and St. Charles County combined are at least 75 percent black or white. Of the nine districts that are at least three-quarters white, all but one scored a perfect 14 on the state’s performance rating scale. The six mostly black districts scored an average of 7.
Racial segregation has lingered in this region, the result of generations of discriminatory zoning and real estate practices. Efforts to reverse it have included a court-ordered program that has been busing thousands of black St. Louis students to mostly white suburban schools since the early 1980s.
The separate transfer law, which the Legislature passed two decades ago, did not directly target segregation, but it addresses the issue in practice. Unaccredited districts, so classified based on a state performance formula, must designate a district to which they will send students wishing to transfer. Parents may choose to send their children to a different accredited district, but then they will be responsible for their own transportation.
The transfer law was invoked several years back when Normandy, which is 97 percent black, took in students from another predominantly black district that eventually dissolved. Supporters of the law noted that there was no outcry when students from that mostly black district were transferring to Normandy, which at that time had been accredited.
Normandy, Riverview Gardens and the Kansas City Public Schools are currently the state’s only unaccredited districts. Those districts will remain responsible for paying for students who have transferred.
“I think they’re already killing schools like ours indirectly because they’re taking the resources,” Ty McNichols, the Normandy superintendent, said of the law. “It’s going to negatively impact us because of the financial side.”
Educators and parents also argue that the law could leave students facing instability because they would have to return to their home district if schools regained their accreditation.
Many administrators and parents raised concerns of crowded classes and of teachers having to slow down to allow students from struggling districts to catch up. Some school districts are setting class-size policies, but it is unclear whether they would legally be able to refuse transfer students even if they reach the capacity they set.
Normandy and Riverview Gardens, also in St. Louis County, have each received transfer requests from about 1,000 students. Riverview Gardens administrators chose a second district, Kirkwood, to bus their students to, because their first choice, Mehlville, said it could not accommodate all of the transfers.
Some parents have criticized the law for not giving taxpayers a say in what happens in their own districts and accused the state of abandoning the unaccredited districts instead of working to improve them.
“We have been made like we’re going to stand on the steps the first day of school and spit on them,” said Andrea Stopke, 35, who has three children at Francis Howell and started an online petition to change the transfer law. “That’s not the case. We are going to welcome these kids and we’re going to help them. But because we’re doing that it doesn’t mean that something doesn’t need to be done to fix it.”
For decades, St. Louis’s urban population has been dwindling, often because parents seek better schools for their children in the suburbs. That was the case for many parents in the Francis Howell district, who insisted that their opposition had nothing to do with race, but with school performance data and news reports that painted Normandy as the state’s most dangerous district.
“I think that any time you disturb a culture — you’re bringing in a variable that is unknown — I think it has the ability to create some unrest because you don’t know how the variable’s going to play out in the culture you already have,” said Pam Sloan, the Francis Howell superintendent.
But some Francis Howell parents have said that the transfer students could bring much-needed diversity to their district, and some argued that concerns were overblown because the transfer program would attract mostly good students.
“I don’t really see gang-related kids busing themselves an hour to go to St. Charles to sell drugs and pick fights,” Chris Mellor, 45, who has three children in the Francis Howell district, said as he stood on the deck of a pool in his subdivision of multistory brick-and-siding houses.
But Joseph Zakrzewski, 51, who has one child in the Francis Howell district and another who recently graduated, said he thought that some “troublemakers” would be among the transfers, and that Normandy students might struggle to keep pace academically.
“Their A and B kids are probably going to be our C and D kids,” he said.
For Patrice McHaskell, who is black, the decision to transfer four of her children from the Normandy district to the Francis Howell district was personal. From fifth grade through high school, she rode about an hour on a bus each morning from her north St. Louis home to a mostly white suburban district.
The experience, she explained, was life-changing. Ms. McHaskell, 39, said she even became friends with a boy who was part of a racist group called the Skullheads. They bonded in shop class, collaborating on a project to build a bench and a birdhouse.
“Having that, being able to have the diversity, being around different cultures and everything,” she said, “has taught me how to handle the world.”
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17) Lawmakers in Uruguay Vote to Legalize Marijuana
By SIMON ROMERO
RIO DE JANEIRO — Uruguay’s
lower house late Wednesday night approved a sweeping bill to legalize
marijuana, opening the way for the authorities to create one of Latin
America’s most ambitious nationwide endeavors in overhauling drug
policy.
Following hours of debate, legislators in Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo, voted 50 to 46 in favor of the legislation, which now goes to the Senate, where lawmakers have assured President José Mujica that they have a comfortable majority to approve it. Mr. Mujica supports the bill, arguing that it is needed to redirect police resources toward fighting street crime and smugglers involved in trafficking other types of drugs.
“This is a very innovative bill, with the state deciding to regulate the entire chain of production, distribution and access to the substance,” said Laura Blanco, president of Uruguay’s Cannabis Studies Association. She said the bill sent an “encouraging” sign to other Latin American nations, as political leaders in parts of the region debate whether to follow Uruguay’s example.
Under Mr. Mujica, 78, an outspoken former guerrilla, Uruguay has emerged as a laboratory for socially liberal policies. A small nation of 3.3 million people, the country has also enacted a groundbreaking abortion rights law, moved to legalize same-sex marriage and is seeking to become a center for renewable energy ventures.
The marijuana bill has been under consideration for more than a year, with Mr. Mujica urging legislators last year to postpone voting on it after polls showed a majority of Uruguayans were opposed.
A majority in Uruguay is still thought to be against the legalization, but lawmakers moved ahead with the vote after nonprofit groups banded together in an educational campaign to explain the medicinal uses of marijuana and the economic benefits of cultivating the plant in Uruguay, where criminal networks now smuggle marijuana largely from Paraguay.
Under the bill, which could become law as early as this month, people would be allowed to grow marijuana in their homes, limited to six plants per household. They would also be permitted to form cooperatives allowed to cultivate 99 plants. In addition, private companies could grow marijuana under the bill, though their harvests could be bought only by the government, which would market the drug in licensed pharmacies.
To buy marijuana in pharmacies, Uruguayans would be required to enter their names into a federal registry, which is intended to remain confidential, and would be limited to buying 40 grams per month. And in a move to prevent foreign tourists from flocking to Uruguay to smoke marijuana, the legislation would restrict legal purchases to Uruguayans. Marijuana use is already largely tolerated by the Uruguayan authorities.
Some people in Uruguay remain opposed to the bill, contending that it would increase marijuana use among the young. “This is an adventure which may end up endangering an entire generation,” said Gerardo Amarilla, an opposition legislator with Uruguay’s National Party.
But in Latin America and beyond, supporters of relaxing drug laws say the Uruguayan measure, along with similar legislation in parts of the United States, could embolden efforts to legalize marijuana in other countries.
“This vote is destined to have a big impact, with regional and even global repercussions for drug policy,” said John Walsh, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group. “Uruguay’s timing is right. Because of last year’s Colorado and Washington State votes to legalize, the U.S. government is in no position to browbeat Uruguay or others who may follow.”
Legislators in the governing coalition, the Broad Front, have argued that the legislation forms part of a tradition in Uruguay of asserting state control over certain areas of the economy and searching for progressive solutions to social problems. “This bill doesn’t promote consumption,” said Sebastián Sabini, the legislator sponsoring the bill. “It regulates it.”
Mauricio Rabuffetti contributed reporting from Montevideo, Uruguay.
Following hours of debate, legislators in Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo, voted 50 to 46 in favor of the legislation, which now goes to the Senate, where lawmakers have assured President José Mujica that they have a comfortable majority to approve it. Mr. Mujica supports the bill, arguing that it is needed to redirect police resources toward fighting street crime and smugglers involved in trafficking other types of drugs.
“This is a very innovative bill, with the state deciding to regulate the entire chain of production, distribution and access to the substance,” said Laura Blanco, president of Uruguay’s Cannabis Studies Association. She said the bill sent an “encouraging” sign to other Latin American nations, as political leaders in parts of the region debate whether to follow Uruguay’s example.
Under Mr. Mujica, 78, an outspoken former guerrilla, Uruguay has emerged as a laboratory for socially liberal policies. A small nation of 3.3 million people, the country has also enacted a groundbreaking abortion rights law, moved to legalize same-sex marriage and is seeking to become a center for renewable energy ventures.
The marijuana bill has been under consideration for more than a year, with Mr. Mujica urging legislators last year to postpone voting on it after polls showed a majority of Uruguayans were opposed.
A majority in Uruguay is still thought to be against the legalization, but lawmakers moved ahead with the vote after nonprofit groups banded together in an educational campaign to explain the medicinal uses of marijuana and the economic benefits of cultivating the plant in Uruguay, where criminal networks now smuggle marijuana largely from Paraguay.
Under the bill, which could become law as early as this month, people would be allowed to grow marijuana in their homes, limited to six plants per household. They would also be permitted to form cooperatives allowed to cultivate 99 plants. In addition, private companies could grow marijuana under the bill, though their harvests could be bought only by the government, which would market the drug in licensed pharmacies.
To buy marijuana in pharmacies, Uruguayans would be required to enter their names into a federal registry, which is intended to remain confidential, and would be limited to buying 40 grams per month. And in a move to prevent foreign tourists from flocking to Uruguay to smoke marijuana, the legislation would restrict legal purchases to Uruguayans. Marijuana use is already largely tolerated by the Uruguayan authorities.
Some people in Uruguay remain opposed to the bill, contending that it would increase marijuana use among the young. “This is an adventure which may end up endangering an entire generation,” said Gerardo Amarilla, an opposition legislator with Uruguay’s National Party.
But in Latin America and beyond, supporters of relaxing drug laws say the Uruguayan measure, along with similar legislation in parts of the United States, could embolden efforts to legalize marijuana in other countries.
“This vote is destined to have a big impact, with regional and even global repercussions for drug policy,” said John Walsh, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group. “Uruguay’s timing is right. Because of last year’s Colorado and Washington State votes to legalize, the U.S. government is in no position to browbeat Uruguay or others who may follow.”
Legislators in the governing coalition, the Broad Front, have argued that the legislation forms part of a tradition in Uruguay of asserting state control over certain areas of the economy and searching for progressive solutions to social problems. “This bill doesn’t promote consumption,” said Sebastián Sabini, the legislator sponsoring the bill. “It regulates it.”
Mauricio Rabuffetti contributed reporting from Montevideo, Uruguay.
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18) In Sentencing, U.S. Tries to Prove Harm by Manning
By EMMARIE HUETTEMAN
FORT MEADE, Md. — As the sentencing phase began Wednesday in the court-martial of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the government tried to demonstrate how his disclosure of hundreds of thousands of military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks had sown mistrust and damaged the United States.
Prosecutors suggested a maximum punishment of 136 years in prison, but legal experts say it is unlikely that he will receive a sentence that long. Prosecutors also recommended a reduction of rank, forfeiture of pay, dishonorable discharge and a fine.
During more than three hours of testimony, Robert A. Carr, a retired brigadier general who led a Defense Intelligence Agency task force investigating the leak, described the Pentagon’s fears that the revelations would erode trust between nations, between citizens and leaders, and between American soldiers and civilians in places like Afghanistan, among others.
“We were very concerned that folks might choose not to talk to us anymore because the information that came out could be detrimental to their livelihood,” General Carr said.
Pressed by one of Private Manning’s lawyers, Mr. Carr could not cite specific data showing the effect of the leak on the number of foreign civilians and emissaries talking to the United States, though he said he knew of examples.
Asked whether he was aware of anyone who had been harmed by the disclosures, General Carr said he knew of an Afghan national who had been killed by the Taliban. But a defense lawyer jumped in, objecting that the individual’s name had not been found in leaked documents, a point that General Carr acknowledged. But he added that the Taliban had tried to tie the death to the WikiLeaks disclosures. The judge, Col. Denise R. Lind, said she would disregard that part of his testimony.
John Kirchhofer, a former deputy chief of counterintelligence at the Defense Intelligence Agency, discussed his background before the court closed for classified testimony.
Colonel Lind acquitted Private Manning on Tuesday of the most serious charge, “aiding the enemy,” but found him guilty of most of the other charges against him, including six counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917. The judge has yet to release the findings behind her verdict, leaving those who are following the trial to speculate about her reasoning. On Wednesday, she offered no guidance on when they would be made public.
The judge said Wednesday that Private Manning had served about three and a half years of pretrial confinement to date, including a credit of 112 days for “unlawful” confinement. The Army private was held in solitary confinement and even stripped of his clothing before his trial began.
The sentencing phase resembles the trial, with both the government and the defense calling more than 20 witnesses to try to influence the severity of the punishment. It is expected to take weeks. Private Manning has the option to testify, but it is unclear whether he will.
The court-martial is continuing on Thursday.
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B. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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Rally to Free Lynne Stewart
Thursday, August 1, Noon
Federal Building
7th and Mission in San Francisco
Free Lynne Stewart Now!
Rally in Support of Activist lawyer and Guild Member Lynne Stewart
Send a message to Bureau of Prisons Director Charles E. Samuels Jr. that he must reverse his decision.
Long-time National Lawyers Guild member and activist lawyer Lynne Stewart needs our help and she needs it now! The Federal Bureau of Prisons has denied Lynne Stewart’s application for compassionate release, despite recommendations in favor from the warden at her facility, the Regional Office Director, and vetting of Stewart’s release plans by the Federal Probation Office in New York.
Lynne Stewart’s condition is deteriorating rapidly. Medical treatment to arrest the cancer that is metastasizing in her body has been halted because she is too weak to receive it. She remains in isolation, as her white blood cell count is so low that she is at risk for generalized infection.
For over 30 years, Lynne Stewart devoted her life to the oppressed – a constant advocate for the countless many deprived in the United States of their freedom and their rights. She, herself, was targeted and prosecuted because she defended vigorously her unpopular clients – people the U.S. government sought to execute, disappear, and demonize.
In 2006, Lynne Stewart was sentenced to 28-months. In 2009, she was resentenced to 10 years in federal prison in response to the vindictive dictates of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. In the fall, the Supreme Court will consider her Certiorari petition on the basis of both Lynne’s and her client’s first amendment rights.
Lynne Stewart’s prosecution and continued imprisonment are an attempt to intimidate all attorneys who would represent unpopular clients, particularly those accused of being terrorists. It is a message to those of us in the legal community who understand how important it is that everyone accused of a crime, especially those accused of the most serious crimes, have a capable attorney both able and willing to zealously defend them.
The struggle to free Lynne Stewart continues on many fronts:
• Join Guild members for a rally Thursday, August 1, noon to 2:00 pm at the Federal building at 7th and Mission Streets.
• Join Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Dick Gregory, Alice Walker, Bianca Jagger, Pete Seeger, Ed Asner, Father Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, Daniel Berrigan, Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, and 25,000 others in the United States and internationally who have signed the petition to free Lynne Stewart – at www.lynnestewart.org.
Encourage others to sign the petition to Free Lynne Stewart:
directly at:
http://www.change.org/petitions/petition-to-free-lynne-stewart-save-her-life-release-her-now-2
or via:
www.lynnestewart.org
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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BAY AREA LABOR SOLIDARITY RALLY TO DEFEAT EMPLOYER ATTACKS ON UNIONS
Thursday, August 1, 2013, 5:00 P.M.
Oakland City Hall across the street from the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA)
WHEREAS, the ILWU is facing attacks from maritime employers on our medical benefits, our mechanic jobs at APL and the proposed closure of the Matson terminal to build a sports stadium at Jack London Square and most importantly by United Grain and Columbia Grain in the Northwest locking out longshoremen and using scabs to break our union, and
WHEREAS, these vicious employer attacks are a lead up to the 2014 longshore negotiations and we need to prepare for that struggle NOW by beating back these attacks, and
WHEREAS, other transport unions in the Bay Area like the BART workers are also under attack by their employers under the guise of fighting austerity, , and
WHEREAS, the Port Commission has allowed Oakland airport fast food companies to fire and victimize workers trying to organize a union, and
WHEREAS, the Oakland Port Commission insulted ILWU Local 10 by calling an emergency meeting for the SSA-Port deal on Bloody Thursday when all West Coast ports are closed to commemorate the police killing of two workers during the Big Strike of 1934, and
WHEREAS, today’s attacks on the ILWU, on BART workers, and indeed on all of labor are part of the austerity attacks on all working people, since the bosses and the state are not only demanding cuts to jobs, wages, and medical and pension benefits, they’re trying to take away everything that workers have won through generations of struggle, forcing millions of home foreclosures, cuts to essential services, downsizing of public education, looting the public treasury to “bail out” Wall Street, and destroying the environment, and
WHEREAS, these attacks are enforced by the kind of state surveillance and police repression used against longshore workers on picket lines in the Northwest grain conflict, in the 2003 Oakland port anti-war demonstrations and in the street protests today against the unjust, racist verdict in the Trayvon Martin case, a verdict that effectively declares open season on young black men,
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT Local 10 supports ATU Local 1555's call for a labor solidarity rally on Thursday August 1 at Oakland City Hall across the street from PMA. This time BART workers will not stand alone. We will march under the ILWU banner “An injury to one is an injury to all” to BART headquarters and then to the Oakland Port Commission, protesting these anti-worker attacks,
FURTHERMORE, we will join with the BART workers unions ATU Local 1555, SEIU Local 1021, AFSCME Local 3993 and ATU Local 192 seek the support of all transport unions and those affected by austerity cuts as well as the Alameda, San Francisco and South Bay Labor Councils in a show of solidarity in the BART workers fight for a decent contract. A victory for the BART workers is a victory for all of labor!
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HIROSHIMA COMMEMORATION
Unfinished Business and Our Most Urgent Responsibility;
Banning the Bomb at the Livermore Lab and Globally
TUESDAY, AUGUST 6, 2013
PROGRAM: 7 AM ~ MARCH: 8:15 AM
Sixty-eight years after the United States dropped atomic bombs on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, the threat of nuclear annihilation remains. Nuclear devastation could come by accident, miscalculation, madness or malevolent intent. Events like Fukushima demonstrate the dangers of nuclear technologies derived from the bomb. And, while instructions on how to "duck and cover" to survive a nuclear bomb may seem quaint, modern propaganda still blinds many to our most urgent and unfinished business: the total abolition of nuclear weapons.
Participate in a rally with musicians, speakers (Keynote Address: DANIEL ELLSBERG), Taiko drummers and more. Immediately following will be a short march and nonviolent direct action at the West Gate. We will gather at the location where U.S. nuclear weapons scientists are developing the world's first so-called "interoperable" warhead to deliver annihilation interchangeably from land or sea.
GATHER AT LIVERMORE LAB NORTHWEST CORNER,
AT VASCO & PATTERSON PASS ROADS - LIVERMORE
Parking set up along Patterson Pass Road.
BART van pick-ups at the Dublin-Pleasanton BART Station
(reservations required).
Info: (925) 443-7148 or (510) 839-5877, www.trivalleycares.org or www.wslfweb.org
Cosponsored by American Friends Service Committee, Asian Americans for Peace & Justice, Dominican Sisters of San Rafael, Ecumenical Peace Institute, Grandmothers for Peace International, Green Party of Alameda, Livermore Conversion Project, Modesto Peace Life Center, Monterrey Peace & Justice Center, Mt. Diablo Peace & Justice Center, No Nukes Action Committee, Northern CA 9/11 Truth Alliance, Pax Christi Fremont, Peace Action West, Peace & Freedom Party-State Central Committee, Peace Fresno, Peaceworkers, People's World, Physicians for Social Responsibility San Francisco-Bay Area Chapter, San Jose Peace & Justice Center, Tri-Valley CAREs, United Nations Association-SF, Veterans for Peace, and Western States Legal Foundation. Additional co-sponsors are welcome.
2013 PEACE CAMP OUT
Monday, August 5, Check-in 2:00 - 9:00 PM
A group Camp Out in conjunction with the annual Hiroshima Commemoration, Rally and Action at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab
WHERE: Eagle View group camp ground, Del Valle Regional Park, Del Valle Road off Mines Road, about 9 miles outside of Livermore
At 6:00 AM the next morning, Tuesday, August 6, we will caravan to the Lab (the park gate opens at 5:00 AM)
PARKING: Parking is limited at the campground, so carpooling is suggested.
COST: $10 per person (no additional charge for parking)
RSVP to: Scott Yundt at Tri-Valley CAREs: (925) 443-7148 or scott@trivalleycares.org
RSVP IS REQUIIRED * Musical instruments are welcome * Pets are not allowed
No alcohol * Bring your own food and beverages
http://www.peaceandjusticeparkhere.net/EPI/2013UpdatedAugustAction.pdf
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HANDS OFF ASSATA!
The California Coalition for Women Prisoners and
The Freedom Archives present
Eyes of the Rainbow
Thursday, August 8th, 7pm
518 Valencia Street
$10 donation, no one turned away
Eyes of the Rainbow, the 1997 classic film about Black revolutionary leader Assata Shakur, is directed by Cuban filmmaker, Gloria Rolando. The film visits with Assata in Cuba where she has lived in political exile since 1984, and tells the story of her herstory and life.
Poetry by devorah major
Discussion after the film
On May 2, The FBI added Assata Shakur to its “Most Wanted Terrorist” list and doubled the reward for her capture to $2 million. Now is the time to educate our communities about who Assata is and why she still poses such a threat to the US government 40 years after she was first captured on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973. Together we must be clear - HANDS OFF ASSATA!
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C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND
ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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We need to save City College of San Francisco. The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges
(ACCJC) should be disbanded.
Sign the petition:
http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/save-city-college-of?source=mo&id=71563-24372784-v5AC0qx
That's why we started a petition to the Department of Education, which says:
Reverse the ACCJC's unjust decision to cancel City College of San Francisco's accreditation. The Department of Education must immediately rescind its recognition of the ACCJC. The ACCJC has violated state and federal laws as well as their own policies. Their agenda to downsize and privatize public education has tremendously harmed the diverse communities of the San Francisco Bay Area.
We call on the Department of Education to save CCSF by revoking its recognition of the ACCJC and replacing it with a transparent and publicly-accountable accreditation body.
Click here to add your name to this petition, and then pass it along to your friends.
–Save City College of SF Coalition
This petition was created on MoveOn's online petition site, where anyone can start their own online petitions. Save City College of SF Coalition didn't pay us to send this email—we never rent or sell the MoveOn.org list.
Want to support our work? MoveOn Civic Action is entirely funded by our 8 million members—no corporate contributions, no big checks from CEOs. And our tiny staff ensures that small contributions go a long way.
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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 & 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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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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*
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
*----*
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
*----*
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
*---------*
Labor Beat: Hey You Billionaire, Pay Your Fair Share
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY8isD33f-I
*---------*
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
*---------*
#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
*---------*
#OccupyTheHood, Occupy Wall Street
By adele pham
http://vimeo.com/30146870
*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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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