Saturday, September 13, 2014

BAUAW NEWSLETTER: SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2014

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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter

Table of Contents:

A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. ARTICLES IN FULL
C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
D. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.


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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS

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Yes on G, Stop the Evictions!
Campaign Kickoff and Volunteer Mobilization
Saturday, September 13th @ 11 am at Harvey Milk Plaza
Please join Cleve Jones, Supervisor Eric Mar, and a citywide coalition of affordable housing advocates, organized labor, tenants and neighborhood leaders on Saturday, September 13 for the official kickoff and volunteer mobilization for theYES on G, Stop the Evictions! Campaign.

On Saturday, September 13th at 11 am we will formally launch this historic campaign to stop rampant real estate speculation from evicting long-time San Francisco residents and harming our neighborhoods.

This will be a great opportunity to get involved, meet fellow volunteers, and make a difference. Immediately following the rally, volunteer teams will fan out across the city to raise the visibility of YES ON G and let voters know that early voting begins in just a few short weeks. Join us Saturday!
Saturday, September 13th | 11 am
Harvey Milk Plaza – Market and Castro Streets

RSVP to stopspeculationsf@gmail.com if you’re fired up and ready to stop evictions! And for anyone who can't make the kick-off for any reason – we’ll be doing voter outreach throughout the City every weekend until Election Day!

*Yes on G window signs can be picked up Monday through Friday, 9-5 pm, at the Housing Rights Committee at 417 South Van Ness Avenue (@15th Street). We have signs in Spanish, Chinese & English - get yours today!

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Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco
427 South Van Ness
San Francisco, California 94103
US
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PEOPLE'S CLIMATE RALLY

n solidarity with the historic September 21 NYC event called by 350.org and
hundreds of local and national environmental, trade union and social justice
organizations across the country.

All Out for Sun., Sept. 21

2 pm – 5 pm

Oakland's Lake Merritt Park Amphitheater

Amphitheater is the new grassy area at the end of Lake Merritt near 12th
Street, across from the Henry J. Kaiser Center, a few blocks from Lake Merritt BART
Station.

The historic NYC protest on Sunday, September 21 is 2 days before the UN
Climate Summit of world leaders. Tragically, more inaction or inadequate
action can be expected.   We want to show the world that the climate crisis
can no longer be ignored, that the planet earth is burning, that massive &
unprecedented measures must be taken now to assure humanity’s future.

The People’s Climate March is shaping up to be one of the largest climate
justice mobilizations in history, with organizers of the march setting a goal of getting a half million people to demonstrate in NYC.

For additional information:  http://peoplesclimatemarch.org

While people all over the country are mobilizing for New York, many of us will
gather in support in Oakland.

Let's make the  West Coast Solidarity action a great success!

• For a world with an economy that works for people and the planet

• For a world safe from the ravages of climate change

• For a world with good jobs, clean air and water, peace and justice and
healthy communities

Bay Area September 21 Coalition: Co-sponsors (Very initial list! Add your
organization now!): 350 Bay Area; Sunflower Alliance; System Change Not
Climate Change; KPFA; Peninsula Peace and Justice Center; Social Justice
Committee/Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists; Our Place in the
World; Adam Hochschild, author/founder Mother Jones magazine; Green Party of
Alameda County; United National Antiwar Coalition; Democratic Socialists East
Bay; Alameda County Peace and Freedom Party; No. Calif. Committees of
Correspondence for Democracy and  Socialism; Socialist Action; Mobilization to
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal; Oakland Socialist Group; Bay Area Solidarity; Dr. Jack
Rasmus, Host, Alternative Visions Radio Show/Progressive Radio Network;
International Socialist Organization; San Francisco Bay View newspaper; One
Hundred Thousand Poets for Change; CodePink Bay Area; Multifaith Voices for
Peace & Justice; Food & Water Watch; Cesar Chavez Holiday Parade and Festival;
San Jose Peace and Justice Center, Bay Area IWW; 350 Santa Cruz; SF Sierra
Club; Peace Action of San Mateo County; Solar Justice; Sonoma County Peace and
Justice Center; Project Censored

Send your endorsement to: endorse@BayAreaSept21.org

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Please forward and post widely

Protest Now! No To Police Censorship of Mumia, and Teachers! 

Reinstate the Urban Dreams Website!

Action Still Needed! Please send messages to the School Board!

- Scroll down for School Board addresses -


Here’s what happened: Under pressure from the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP)—operating through a friendly publicity agent called Fox News—the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) earlier this year shut down an entire website composed of teacher-drafted curriculum material called Urban Dreams.  Why?  Because this site included course guidelines on the censorship of innocent political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal!  The course material compared the censorship of Mumia’s extensive radio commentaries and writings, with that of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s later writings, which focused on class exploitation and his opposition to the US’ imperialist War against Vietnam. Both were effectively silenced by the big media, including in Mumia’s case, by National Public Radio (NPR).

Mumia Is Innocent! But He’s Still a Top Target of FOP

Abu-Jamal has long been a top-row target for the FOP, which tried to get him legally killed for decades.  Mumia was framed by the Philadelphia police and falsely convicted of murdering a Philadelphia policeman in 1982, with the extensive collaboration of lying prosecutors, corrupt courts, the US Justice Department, and key political figures.

Mumia’s death sentence was dropped only when a federal appeals court judge set it aside because of blatantly illegal jury instructions by the original highly racist trial judge.  (The same federal judge upheld every bogus detail of Mumia’s conviction.)  The local Philadelphia prosecutor and politicians chickened out of trying to get Mumia’s original death sentence reinstated due to the fact that all their evidence of his guilt had long been exposed as totally fraudulent! 

FOP: Can’t Kill Him? Silence Him!

The FOP had to swallow the fact that the local mucky-mucks had dropped the ball on executing Mumia, but they were rewarded with a substitute sentence of life without the possibility of parole, imposed by a local court acting in secret.  Mumia is now serving this new and equally unjust sentence of “slow death.”

This gets us back to the FOP’s main point here, which is to silence Mumia. They can’t stop Mumia from writing and recording his world-renownd commentaries (which are available at Prison Radio, www.prisonradio.org). But they look for any opportunity to smear and discredit Mumia, and keep him out of the public eye; and these snakes have found a morsel on the Urban Dreams web site to go after!

Urban Dreams Was Well Used by Teachers

Urban Dreams was initially set up under a grant from the federal Dept. of Education in 1999-2004 and contains teacher-written material on a wide variety of issues.  It is (was) used extensively in California and beyond. The OUSD’s knee-jerk reaction to shut the whole site down because of a complaint from police, broadcast on the all-powerful Fox News network, shows the rapid decline of the US into police-state status.  Why should we let a bunch of lying, vicious cops, whose only real job is to protect the wealthy and powerful from all of us, get away with this?

Fresh from defeating Obama’s nominee to head the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department because he served for a period as Mumia’s attorney, the FOP is attacking a school lesson plan that asks students to think outside the box of system propaganda. But the grave-diggers of capitalist oppression are stirring.

Labor Says No To Police Persecution of Mumia!

In 1999, the Oakland teachers union, Oakland Education Association (OEA), held an unauthorized teach-in on Mumia and the death penalty.  Later the same year, longshore workers in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) shut down all West-Coast ports to Free Mumia.  Other teacher actions happened around the country and internationally.  And now the Alameda County Labor Council, acting on a resolution submitted by an OEA member, has denounced the FOP-inspired shutdown of Urban Dreams, and called for the site’s complete restoration (ie no deletions).

Labor Says No To Censorship of Mumia, and Teachers!

We are asking union members particularly, and everyone else as well, if you abhor police-sponsored censorship of school curricula, and want to see justice and freedom for the wrongfully convicted such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, send your message of protest now to the Oakland School Board, at the three addresses below.

Union members: take the resolution below to your local union or labor council, and get it passed!

 Whatever you do, send a copy of your protest letter or resolution, or a report of your actions, to Oakland Teachers for Mumia, at communard2@juno.com.

Here is the Alameda County Labor Council resolution:

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Labor Speaks: Urban Dreams Censorship Resolution

Alameda County Labor Council

Whereas Mumia Abu-Jamal, an award winning journalist, defender of the rights of the working class, people of color, and oppressed people has been imprisoned since 1982 without parole for a crime he didn’t commit after his death sentence was finally overturned;

Whereas the Oakland Unified School District’s censorship of the Urban Dreams website was in reaction to a Fox News and Fraternal Order of Police attack on a lesson plan asking students to consider a parallel between censorship of Martin Luther King’s radical ideas and censorship of Mumia Abu-Jamal, and;

Whereas it is dangerous and unacceptable to allow the police to determine the curriculum of a major school district like Oakland, or any school district;

Whereas removal of the Urban Dreams OUSD website denies educators and student access to invaluable curriculum resources by Oakland teachers with social justice themes promoting critical thinking, and;

Whereas in 1999, the Oakland Education Association led the teach-in on Mumia Abu-Jamal and the death penalty which helped deepen the debate in the U.S. on the death penalty itself, and greatly intensified the spotlight on the widespread issue of wrongful conviction and demanded justice for Mumia Abu-Jamal, and;

Whereas OEA and Alameda Contra Costa County Service Center of CTA cited the Mumia teach-in and the censored unit on Martin Luther King Jr. in its Human Rights WHO AWARD for 2013;

Be it resolved that the Alameda Labor Council condemns OUSD’s censorship of the Urban Dreams website and demands that it immediately restore access to all materials on the website, reaffirms its demand for justice for Mumia Abu-Jamal, and issues a press release to seek the widest possible support from defenders of free speech and those who seek justice for Mumia.

- Submitted by Keith Brown, OEA

- Passed, Alameda County Labor Council, 14 July 2014
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Now It’s your turn!
Join with Ed Asner, and with the Alameda County Labor Council, in protesting the
Oakland School Board’s censorship of the Urban Dreams web site!
    • Ask your local union, labor council or other organization to endorse the resolution by the Alameda County Labor Council.
    • Demand the School Board reinstate the Urban Dreams website without any deletions!
    • Send your union resolutions or letters of protest to the following; 
        1. Oakland Board of Education: boe@ousd.k12.ca.us 
        2. Board President Davd Kakishiba: David.Kakishiba@ousd.k12.ca.us 
        3. Superintendent Antwan Wilson: Antwan.Wilson@ousd.k12.ca.us

Important: Send a copy of your resolution or email to:
Bob Mandel/Teachers for Mumia at: communard2@juno.com.
Thank you for your support!

-This message is from the Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal,
and Oakland Teachers for Mumia.
communard2@juno.com.

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 B. ARTICLES IN FULL
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1) Fast-Food Workers Seeking Higher Wages Are Arrested During Sit-Ins
By





2) Fast-Food Workers and Allies Arrested in Nationwide Strikes
09/04/2014
By Kenneth Quinnell
http://www.aflcio.org/Blog/Organizing-Bargaining/Fast-Food-Workers-and-Allies-Arrested-in-Nationwide-Strikes




3) The Epic Food Fight Between Corporations and Americans Who Want to Eat Healthy
The United States cannot afford food capitalism, given the interaction between health care costs and the Western diet.
By Ben Agger
September 4, 2014
http://www.alternet.org/food/contested-terrain-american-dinner-plate?akid=12202.229473.lDNhaU&rd=1&src=newsletter1018096&t=14&paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark




4) After 41 Years in Solitary, 'Angola Three' Prisoner Renews Fight for Justice
Albert Woodfox, last remaining prisoner of the Angola Three, seeks to sue prison authorities for constitutional rights violations
by Nadia Prupis
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/09/04/after-41-years-solitary-angola-three-prisoner-renews-fight-justice




5)  The unpublicized impact of a successful BDS action
By Roqayah Chamseddine 
Thu, 2014-09-04 18:13- In Homage to the Struggle
http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/unpublicized-impact-successful-bds-action




6) When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 2
By Nicholas Kristof
"Poverty promotes crime. No job, lousy education, permanent second-class citizenship breaks down self-confidence and the feeling of self-worth. And when there's not enough to go around, the poor are forced to fight amongst themselves for what scraps are available. But what no one is mentioning is that major white crime goes virtually unpunished! What about the corporations who rob us blind every day? What about GM that opted to pay death benefits for their faulty ignitions because it was cheaper than fixing them? What about all the sub-mortgages sold to the poor (many who were Black) designed for them to foreclose? What about the pharmaceutical companies pushing bad drugs? What about all the CEOs getting absurd paychecks while fast-food and home healthcare workers have to apply for food stamps just to survive while working several jobs. That, in fact, is a form of welfare for wealthy thieves! What about the murderous wars perpetrated and paid for by the overwhelmingly wealthy, white U.S. politicians? Who's committing the most horrendous crimes? The wealthy, white ruling class! That's who!" --Bonnie Weinstein]




7) Just 13, and Working Risky 12-Hour Shifts in the Tobacco Fields
[...talk about criminals! How about the whole tobacco industry? ...bw]
By





8) Crime, Bias and Statistics
By
SEPT. 7, 2014 
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/opinion/charles-blow-crime-bias-and-statistics.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region&region=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region&_r=0 




9) A Recovery in Need of a Recovery
How Are American Families Doing? A Guided Tour of Our Financial Well-Being
By Neil Irwin




10) The Rise of the SWAT Team in American Policing
By




11) Some Retail Workers Find Better Deals With Unions
By





12) Ferguson Sets Broad Change for City Courts
By




13) Climate Change Will Disrupt Half of North America’s Bird Species, Study Says
By





14) Vancouver Canada Blocks Israeli Ship: Tremendous Victory
From Free Palestine Movement:
On Sep 9, 2014, at 5:31 PM, FPM Newsletter wrote:
http://freepalestinemovement.org/2014/09/10/vancouver-canada-blocks-israeli-ship-tremendous-victory/
 
 
 
 
15) This Is What an Abortion Looks Like
By MERRITT TIERCE




16) Student Loan Debt Burdens More Than Just Young People
By
 




 








































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1) Fast-Food Workers Seeking Higher Wages Are Arrested During Sit-Ins
By

Twenty-one workers demanding a $15-an-hour wage were arrested while conducting a sit-in outside a McDonald’s in Times Square on Thursday morning as the fast-food movement for the first time embraced widespread civil disobedience to escalate its fight.

Organizers said several hundred fast-food workers planned to sit in at restaurants in dozens of cities on Thursday. Organizers said the police arrested more than 50 workers in Detroit for such action on Thursday morning. The civil disobedience is intended to draw more attention to the “Fight for Fifteen” movement and to step up pressure on the nation’s fast-food chains.

“I’m doing this for better pay,” said Crystal Harris, a McDonald’s worker from St. Louis, minutes before she sat down in the middle of 42nd Street outside a giant McDonald’s restaurant around 7:30 a.m. on Thursday. “I struggle to make ends meet on $7.50 an hour.”

The protesters carried signs saying, “Low Pay Is Not O.K.,” “On Strike to Lift My Family Up,” and “Whatever It Takes: $15 and Union Rights.” The protesters want McDonald’s and other chains to agree not to fight a unionization drive.

The protests on Thursday were the seventh in a series of one-day strikes, with organizers saying that fast-food workers would walk out at restaurants in more than 100 cities across the United States, with civil disobedience for the first time becoming a major ingredient in the protests.

Ever since the fast-food strikes began in just one city, New York, in November 2012, strategists have focused on expanding the effort to more cities and more workers to increase pressure on chains to set a wage floor of $15 an hour.

The Service Employees International Union, which has spent more than $10 million underwriting the fast-food movement, sought to add more protesters and decibels to the efforts on Thursday by getting home-care aides to join the picket lines for the first time. The S.E.I.U., which represents hundreds of thousands of health care workers and janitors, hopes that the push for $15 will help lift the wages of many home-care workers and other low-wage health care workers.

“With the integration of home-care workers into this effort, this is starting to become a larger low-wage workers movement,” said Kendall Fells, organizing director for the movement, known as Fast Food Forward.

Rob Green, the executive director of the National Council of Chain Restaurants, criticized the sit-ins. “Encouraging activities that put both restaurant workers and their customers in danger of physical harm is not only irresponsible, it’s disturbing,” he said in a statement. “Unions are calling it ‘civil disobedience’ when in reality, this choreographed activity is trespassing and it’s illegal.”

McDonald’s and other chains say that they and their franchise operators pay competitive wages and provide job opportunities that allow many to rise to better jobs in the industry. Fast-food chains have said the one-day strikes have hardly affected business, saying that only a handful of workers have walked out at many restaurants.

Restaurant trade groups have repeatedly denounced the call for a $15 wage, saying it would push up menu prices and result in less hiring of fast-food workers, especially of entry level, low-skilled workers. The International Franchise Association says a $15 wage would wipe out the profit margins at many fast-food restaurants.

LaTonya Allen, a home-care aide in Atlanta who earns $9 an hour, said she was joining a fast-food workers’ protest outside a Burger King on Thursday.

“Earning $15 would make a huge difference,” she said. “It would really help me and my husband pay our bills. It would enable us to do more things together as a family. All we do now is work, work, work.”

Home-care workers were expected to join the fast-food protests in six cities — Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Seattle.

“We’d like to see these protests by home-care workers spread to other cities and states,” said Mary Kay Henry, president of the service employees union. “We’d like it to get as big as the fast-food protests.”

Some economists have warned that if wages for home-care workers rose to $15, that could raise the cost for families and for taxpayers who finance much of the nation’s home care through Medicaid and Medicare.


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2) Fast-Food Workers and Allies Arrested in Nationwide Strikes
09/04/2014
By Kenneth Quinnell
http://www.aflcio.org/Blog/Organizing-Bargaining/Fast-Food-Workers-and-Allies-Arrested-in-Nationwide-Strikes

Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) was among numerous people arrested as fast-food workers and their supporters rallied in more than 150 cities on Thursday. Thousands of workers walked out of restaurants and picked up picket signs, demanding that big restaurant chains pay them a living wage of $15-per-hour. Home care workers also participated in the strikes. Moore was arrested in West Milwaukee, Wis., and other arrests were made in New York City, Detroit, Chicago and elsewhere.

"I take great pride in supporting Milwaukee workers as they risk arrest in pursuit of a brighter tomorrow for their families," Moore said in a statement. "I've read their letters, I've heard their calls and I've listened to their stories. I understand their struggle, but more importantly, I see their drive to fight for a future that is equal to their talents and worthy of their dreams."

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka expressed support for the strikers:

"Working families everywhere applaud the courage of the fast-food workers who are striking today and engaging in acts of civil disobedience in over 150 cities. And we applaud the unity and the collective spirit displayed by members of AFL-CIO state federations and labor councils who have joined today’s protests in solidarity.

This nation was built on the fundamental beliefs that work should be a gateway to the middle class, and that no job should ever trap someone in poverty. That’s why the “Fight for Fifteen” movement is surging and the protests are getting ever louder. It’s time for corporations to hear this resounding message: Every worker deserves a fair wage and the right to form a union without retaliation. We support them."

Kendall Fells, organizing director for Fast Food Forward, explained why protesters were willing to take arrest:

"There has to be civil disobedience because workers don't see any other way to get $15 an hour and a union. There's a long history of this, from the civil rights movement to the farm workers movement."
 



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3) The Epic Food Fight Between Corporations and Americans Who Want to Eat Healthy
The United States cannot afford food capitalism, given the interaction between health care costs and the Western diet.
By Ben Agger
September 4, 2014
http://www.alternet.org/food/contested-terrain-american-dinner-plate?akid=12202.229473.lDNhaU&rd=1&src=newsletter1018096&t=14&paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

When I teach food, ears perk up. My students know every weight-loss diet. They quaff almond milk, calculate their BMIs on their devices, and struggle with food addictions. Body image is gendered, as we have known since Susie Orbach published Fat Is a Feminist Issue in the 1970s. Many women think they are overweight, hence imperfect, while men are happier with themselves, although there is now heightened body consciousness among men, who pursue cut abs and arms. My students applaud at the conclusion of the vegan videoFat, Sick and Nearly Dead and they buy juicers to make green kale shakes that save lives in the film.

Everyone knows that the American fast-food diet is broken. The film Super Size Meand Eric Schlosser's book Fast Food Nation have entered the mainstream. But there is still major disagreement about what to have for dinner, with two dominant competing paradigms: high carb, low fat (HCLF) and low carb, high fat (LCHF). The revision of federal food policy hasn't helped much. After two iterations of the recommended food pyramid, the food plate was introduced in 2011, which relies somewhat less on animal protein and fills the plate with three non-meat quadrants taken up by vegetables, fruit and grains. Meat and milk are still on the agenda, but carbs are in the saddle, as they have long been for mainstream nutrition and medicine.

As a Marxist, I find it is easy to see that capitalism makes us sick with the standard Western diet of processed food and abundant sweeteners, for profit, and then heals us with various body industries, also for profit. Neocon angst over the Affordable Care Act would likely turn to hysteria if the federal government embraced veganism on health and environmental grounds. The American right to fast food is as central as the right to bear arms, although the fast-food sandwich, with fries, is far more lethal than the handgun, as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) mortality data suggest. Esselstyn, Ornish, Fuhrman and other prophets of plant-based diets, including Colin Campbell who co-authored The China Study, note that we would save billions in health care costs by eating differently. Plant-based cardiology entered the mainstream with CNN's Sanjay Gupta's 2011 documentary Last Heart Attack. His account features heart patient Bill Clinton's conversion to veganism, following bypass surgery.

These are many low-fat proponents, to whom the competing paradigm, based on the Atkins diet and now Paleo, is a response, also with many adherents. Paleos blame carbs, not meat, for American illness, and they install meat and dairy products at the center of their food plate. They argue that blood glucose does not spike and crash when protein and fat replace refined carbs and grains, breaking a carb addiction that leads to the so-called metabolic syndrome, including hypertension, obesity and diabetes.

Vegans who rely on The China Study's epidemiology and on Esselstyn's and Ornish's clinical experience in stemming and even reversing heart disease are met by recent best-selling books such as Grain Brain (Perlmutter) and Big Fat Surprise (Teicholz), whose authors contend that meat and dairy are healthier than grains, which become addictive.

This food debate, between vegans and Paleos, spills over into an equally ferocious debate about exercise. The plant-based crew, who extol the need for complex carbs from plants, favor endurance training, such as running, while the Paleos disdain "chronic cardio" as unhealthy. The research literature on running has become a battlefield, with studies supporting the health benefits of long slow distance and competing studies finding that more than a little endurance training causes inflammation and even cancer. Paleos praise the gym-based CrossFit, which emphasizes total body fitness, to be achieved through lifting and nothing longer than sprints. Hardcore runners, who post on letsrun.com, disdain anti-running ideology as the easy way out.

I've been running for nearly 40 years, and until recently assumed that I couldn't run and race on protein and fat fumes. Although I knew intellectually that fat burns in a carbohydrate flame - and that fat metabolism is essential when carb-supplied glycogen runs out at 20 miles - I accepted uncritically the high-carb paradigm. I found support for this in exercise physiology, for example in the book Lore of Running by preeminent South African running physiologist Tim Noakes. Self-styled serious runners could also cite the cult classic novel Once a Runner:

Cassidy . . . explained that he was a runner; just an athlete, really, with an absurdly difficult task. He was not a health nut, was not out to mold himself a stylishly slim body. He did not live on nuts and berries; if the furnace was hot enough, anything would burn, even Big Macs.

We wanted to believe that anything would burn in our hot furnaces, giving us license to gorge while we ran it off.

Recently, I experimented and tried to run and live on low carbs. The first hellish week recalled the rigors of kicking caffeine cold turkey, a battle I always lose! The second week was slightly better, and in the third week, I survived a track workout. By then I was on very low carbs and rarely feeling hungry. During the fourth week, something kicked in - perhaps the shift from one metabolic pathway to another. I was suddenly able to do an effortless 64-mile week, followed by another and another. I muttered to my wife, who rolled her eyes, that running had become a hot knife through butter!

So I read around on low-carb running and found that my guru Tim Noakes had recently reversed his field on carbs. This was huge for me, because Noakes is evidence-based and not a crackpot. He was dealing with his own pre-diabetes and weight gain, and he found that running on low carbs energized him, forcing him to rethink conventional wisdom about the need for endless carbs.

My takeaway from the reading I have done and my own recent experiences on the roads is that there is genuine metabolic diversity, with some people accommodating carbs and others resisting them, perhaps for genetic reasons. As a vegan, I could accept the low carb part of Paleo, but not the high fat part, especially where fat is derived from animals and dairy. It is challenging to eat plants and get sufficient protein and fat to run, but not impossible, suggesting low carb, low fat as a dialectical synthesis of the warring paradigms. I knew veganism was right for me, as it is for Scott Jurek (Eat & Run), who won the hundred-mile Western States Endurance Run seven times in a row eating only plants.

Michael Pollan and Alice Waters offer a final perspective on cooking and eating that emphasizes the DIY pastoralism and pragmatism of the 1960s. Waters, emerging from the Berkeley '60s, which saw the Diggers provide free food, revolutionized American cooking by founding Chez Panisse in 1971, which relies on locally sourced food. Pollan, in his recent book Cooked, writes from his own experience about how home cooking is more satisfying and healthier than relying on processed Big (Fast) Food. His simple admonition: "Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mainly Plants."

The United States cannot afford food capitalism, given the interaction between health care costs and the Western diet. But as Thomas Piketty has recently shown, capitalism does not accept limits; the rich get richer - and the sick, sicker. Nearly half a century ago, feminists put bodies on the political agenda. There they remain, as we struggle over what to have for dinner.

Ben Agger is professor of sociology and director of the Center for Theory at the University of Texas-Arlington. Among his recent books are Oversharing and Texting toward Utopia. 

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4) After 41 Years in Solitary, 'Angola Three' Prisoner Renews Fight for Justice
Albert Woodfox, last remaining prisoner of the Angola Three, seeks to sue prison authorities for constitutional rights violations
by Nadia Prupis
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/09/04/after-41-years-solitary-angola-three-prisoner-renews-fight-justice

After serving more than 41 years in solitary confinement, the longest sentence in isolation ever served by a U.S. inmate, Angola Three prisoner Albert Woodfox had a new day in court on Thursday to seek damages against Louisiana prison authorities for constitutional rights violations.

Woodfox, 67, was arrested for armed robbery in 1971 and sentenced to 50 years at Louisiana State Penitentiary — also known as Angola, a prison built on a former slave plantation that quickly became one of the most notorious facilities in the country. He was placed in solitary in April 1972, where he has remained ever since, for allegedly killing a guard, Officer Brent Miller, during riots in the prison that year. He was transferred from Angola to the David Wade correctional center in unincorporated Claiborne Parish in 2010, but was immediately placed in closed-cell restriction there as well.

Woodfox is seeking permission from the U.S. Fifth Circuit appeals court in New Orleans to sue prison officials for violating his constitutional rights, including the Eighth Amendment, which protects prisoners from cruel and unusual punishment.

"This is one more step in what has been a very long, long path towards justice," Jasmine Heiss, senior campaigner with Amnesty International USA, told Common Dreams "[Albert] is still sitting in a tiny solitary confinement cell waiting to hear from an appeals court... Combined, the Angola Three have served more than 100 years in solitary confinement."

The Guardian reports:
If the appeals court upholds an early ruling from a lower court and allows Woodfox’s lawsuit to go to trial next year, the Louisiana authorities face potentially massive financial penalties. Were he to win at trial, not only would the prison service face up to $1m in legal costs but it could also be saddled with seven-figure damages.
Apart from a three-year period in general population, Woodfox has spent 23 hours of every day alone in a 6-by-8-foot cell. His only view is of the prison hallway. In the last hour of the day, he is permitted to walk the hallway, shower, and occasionally walk through the exercise yard — alone. In January, he testified that prison guards forced him to undergo daily strip and cavity searches. In 2008, he described (pdf) the claustrophobia and panic attacks that plagued him in a solitary camp known as 'the Dungeon,' where prisoners are confined at all times except for a 15-minute shower break. "When I have an attack I feel like I am being smothered, it is very difficult to breathe, and I sweat profusely; it seems like the cell walls close in and are just inches from my face," he stated.

But David Wade prison officials are arguing (pdf) that because Woodfox transferred to their facility in 2010, his four-year solitary confinement there should be considered a separate sentence from his decades in Angola — and that four years in isolation does not constitute “atypical and significant hardship.” Authorities also claim that qualified immunity protects them from liability in Woodfox’s case, and that as a prisoner, he could not have expected to have his liberties protected.

Woodfox’s lawyers counter (pdf) that officials’ arguments for keeping Woodfox in solitary confinement are “sham proceedings” and “meaningless board reviews.” They say prison authorities could not have been unaware that decades of solitary confinement counted as “atypical” punishment, and should not be able to invoke qualified immunity in this case. “Immunizing Defendants-Appellants also contravenes the letter of qualified immunity law, which is intended to protect public servants who reasonably believed their conduct was lawful—not shield those who conduct themselves with wanton indifference to the law,” their brief states.

Woodfox’s conviction for the guard's murder has been overturned three times. Federal courts ruled that the trial had violated his constitutional rights through racial discrimination, prosecutorial misconduct, inadequate defense, and suppression of exculpatory evidence.

But instead of freeing Woodfox, Louisiana attorney general Buddy Caldwell decided to contest the most recent federal decision in 2008 and sent him back to live in isolation at Angola.

“Then and now, the fundament of the suit has been this: the continued lockdown confinement of [Albert Woodfox] without legitimate penological interests, in violation of the Constitution,” the lawsuit states.

"Louisiana cannot extend the abuses and injustice against Albert Woodfox another day," said Steven W. Hawkins, executive director of Amnesty International USA. "Louisiana authorities are leading a campaign of vengeance instead of upholding justice. Keeping Woodfox in solitary confinement for over four decades is a dark stain on human rights in the United States and globally. Louisiana must withdraw its legal appeal and allow the federal court ruling to stand. Should this not occur, the Court of Appeal should rule in the interests of justice and pave the way for Albert Woodfox's release."

United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan E. Méndez, in October 2013 called for Albert Woodfox’s immediate release from solitary confinement. “Four decades in solitary confinement can only be described as torture,” he said.

After his imprisonment in 1971, Woodfox was an active member of the Black Panther party on his cell block — having joined the organization after briefly escaping from court on his sentencing date — which angered the guards at Angola. Officer Miller's death led to Woodfox and two other Black Panther inmates, Herman Wallace and Robert King, being accused of his murder. The case was fraught with inconsistencies, lost evidence, and special favors paid between prison officials and inmates, as well as investigators and jury members.

Woodfox and Wallace were tried and convicted by an all-white jury within two hours.

King was never charged, but placed in solitary confinement for 29 years until his release in 2001.

NPR reports:
"You heard hollering and screaming and the bodies being slammed against the walls," says Billy Wayne Sinclair, a white inmate on death row in 1972. "Upstairs you could smell tear gas bombs. They would come in there and set them off. So we would have to wet stuff and put it to our faces and turn our fans on and hope that we could suck as much out as we could. We heard the beatings that were going on for weeks after that."
Several inmates said it was a bad month to be black at Angola. According to court records, prison officials never questioned a single white inmate.

Herman Wallace was set free on October 1, 2013, at age 71, after Amnesty International called for his release on humanitarian grounds. Two days later, a grand jury reindicted him for Miller’s murder, but did not arrest him. He died the next day.

Prison officials have argued that Woodfox should not be freed from solitary confinement because "there has been no rehabilitation [from] practicing Black Pantherism." Over the past several years, Woodfox has testified about the numerous health problems he has suffered from while in solitary confinement.

The Guardian writes:
The prisoner is suffering from several medical ailments including hypertension, heart disease and kidney disease. Psychologically, his lawyers say, Woodfox is remarkably stoic and uncomplaining, but Kendall said there had been a “horrible toll” from prolonged isolation.
"Really the amazing thing about Albert, King, and Herman, was that they have gone through and experienced so beyond the pale what human beings can endure and have come out committed to justice," Heiss said.

"A remedy to the injustice inflicted on Albert Woodfox by the state is long overdue," said Tessa Murphy, USA campaigner at Amnesty International. "Herman Wallace gained his freedom only to die within days. Justice must not again be so cruelly delayed."

King, who Heiss calls Woodfox's "most tireless advocate," has been fighting for Woodfox’s freedom since his own release. “I may be free from Angola,” he writes on his website, "but Angola will never be free of me.”
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5)  The unpublicized impact of a successful BDS action
By Roqayah Chamseddine 
Thu, 2014-09-04 18:13- In Homage to the Struggle
http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/unpublicized-impact-successful-bds-action
 
There is no question as to how immensely successful the Block the Boat protest at the Port of Oakland, led by Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) and arranged with the help of countless organizations, was. Unless you are a supporter of Israel or a journalist at the Oakland Tribune. Thousands of protesters, including an estimated 5,000 who marched on the Port of Oakland on August 16, prevented the Zim Piraeus from unloading by keeping workers from crossing their picket line to enter the port for a historic four days, making it “the longest blockade of an Israeli ship” according to AROC.

The Oakland Tribune, Haaretz, and a number of other outlets, reported that the Israeli-owned Zim Piraeus unloaded its cargo after “delays” but after speaking to a number of distributors whose cargo was being transported by Zim Piraeus I found this to be unmistakably false and misleading.

According to a document from PIERS, a database of US international trade which provides maritime logistics, at least 23 companies are clearly listed as having goods aboard Zim Piraeus – ranging from cucumber pickles and sparkling wine to ceramic tiles and solar swimming pool heaters – with some goods originating in Israel. Though building materials and agricultural produce were listed by PIERS it should be noted that Zim Integrated Shipping Services imports ammunition “manufactured by Israel Manufacturing Industries by Federal Cartridge (Federal Premium Ammunition)” which makes defense ammunition used by U.S. law enforcement and has a weapons contract with the Department of Homeland Security. Federal Premium Ammunition is a subsidiary of Alliant Techsystems, which produces Bushmaster autocannons used by U.S. forces and NATO, the AGM-88 High-speed Anti-Radiation Missile (an air-to-surface missile), Hellfire missile upgrades, and provides other weapons services to the US military and allies. The import report for Zim shows that the ammunitions originated in Israel, at the Port of Haifa and arrived at the Port of Savannah in Georgia.

Zim’s first ship, the Kedmah, was purchased in 1947, before the creation of the State of Israel, and would carry thousand of immigrants to Palestine. In 1948 Zim ships would carry arms and ammunition used to carry out the Nakba, and according to a video published online by Zim Integrated Shipping Services “Zim would play this crucial role every time Israel faced conflict.” Ze'ev Shind, a key Mossad activist who would become managing director of Zim Israel Navigation Co., president of the American-Israel Shipping Co., and Director-General of Israel's Ministry of Communications and Ministry of Defense was the organizers and principal figures organizing immigration to Palestine, according to The Canadian Jewish Chronicle. The role of Zim in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is well documented, even by Zim sources.

Esteson Co., a direct food and beverage importer and distributor in California, posted on their Facebook page that their “garlic is now rotting on its way to Russia to be offloaded unto (sic) another vessel,” and when contacted for comment it was mentioned that a container of Zeos beer never arrived due to the Port action. All in all, Esteson Co. has not received any of their products as of September 3.

Good Stuff Distributors, located in San Francisco, California, told Al-Akhbar English that not only did they not receive their shipment of Zadona cucumber pickles as of September 3 they do not know where the cargo is and are still waiting to hear from Zadona as to where the items are. A spokesperson for Good Stuff Distributors informed Al-Akhbar English that not only were they unaware of Zim’s ties to Israel they have made it clear to Zadona, of Sinokrot Food Company, that they are to “find another vessel” as Good Stuff Distributors will no longer be using Zim.

Alfa Omega Co., which has trading partners in France, Spain and Greece, disclosed to Al-Akhbar English that their business was “greatly affected”, as they did not receive any of their products, including olives. The spokesperson was clearly unhappy, stating that the targeting of Zim by the Block the Boat protesters, specifically, is the reason that they will now look for another vessel to use for their products, despite having worked with Zim “for years”.

The sales and marketing manager at Carmichael International Service, a customs broker and freight forwarder with laminated glass aboard Zim Piraeus, told Al-Akhbar English that customers did not receive their products as of September 3, but it was due to “delays” and “port congestion,” which is undoubtedly a brazen spin on what transpired at the Port of Oakland. When examining the vessel schedule for the Zim Piraeus, dating back to July and after August 20, we find that there are no analogous delays as there was in Oakland as the vessels usually left the same day or a day after, unlike at the Port of Oakland where the “delay” was at least four days long.

Cynara Worldwide Sourcing Inc., located in Fresno, California, said that all products on the Zim Piraeus were not only never unloaded but that they were sent to Shanghai and they wouldn’t receive them until at least the end of the month. As a result of Block the Boat, the spokesperson told Al-Akhbar English that they have put an immediate halt to “everything on Zim” and will now be looking for other vessels they can use.

The most curious case in regards to Block the Boat is that of American Metals and Chemicals, located in Hollywood, Florida. A representative told Al-Akhbar English that they did not receive their shipment of alkyl sulfonic acid, and that the cargo was diverted to Russia. When asked who they were contacted by the representative stated that a letter was delivered from an attorney’s office, though they could not find the letter at the time of the phonecall so as to disclose which office. The letter stated, in part, that their shipment was “turned away because of the strike” at the Port of Oakland. There was also a follow up telephone call from the same office, letting them know that their products were being diverted.

The remaining consignees listed as having cargo delivered to the Port of Oakland by the Zim Piraeus during the Block the Boat campaign were contacted by Al-Akhbar English but did not immediately return calls for comment on the whereabouts of their goods – based on what was revealed by the 6 companies that did supply information it is not difficult to assume that they faced comparable circumstances. Regardless, Block the Boat was not only successful in keeping the Zim Piraeus from unloading the aforementioned cargo but due specifically to this action a number of companies are now either putting a hold on all products using Zim vessels or reconsidering using Zim, which is not only contrary to what the media has reported but an impressive achievement for the movement for boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel.

Roqayah Chamseddine is a Sydney based Lebanese-American journalist and commentator. She tweets @roqchams and writes 'Letters From the Underground.'

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6) When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 2
By Nicholas Kristof

"Poverty promotes crime. No job, lousy education, permanent second-class citizenship breaks down self-confidence and the feeling of self-worth. And when there's not enough to go around, the poor are forced to fight amongst themselves for what scraps are available. But what no one is mentioning is that major white crime goes virtually unpunished! What about the corporations who rob us blind every day? What about GM that opted to pay death benefits for their faulty ignitions because it was cheaper than fixing them? What about all the sub-mortgages sold to the poor (many who were Black) designed for them to foreclose? What about the pharmaceutical companies pushing bad drugs? What about all the CEOs getting absurd paychecks while fast-food and home healthcare workers have to apply for food stamps just to survive while working several jobs. That, in fact, is a form of welfare for wealthy thieves! What about the murderous wars perpetrated and paid for by the overwhelmingly wealthy, white U.S. politicians? Who's committing the most horrendous crimes? The wealthy, white ruling class! That's who!" --Bonnie Weinstein]

IN my column a week ago, “When Whites Just Don’t Get It,” I took aim at what I called “smug white delusion” about race relations in America, and readers promptly fired back at what they perceived as a smugly deluded columnist.

Readers grudgingly accepted the grim statistics I cited — such as the wealth disparity between blacks and whites in America today exceeding what it was in South Africa during apartheid — but many readers put the blame on African-Americans themselves.

“Probably has something to do with their unwillingness to work,” Nils tweeted.

Nancy protested on my Facebook page: “We can’t fix their problems. It’s up to every black individual to stop the cycle of fatherless homes, stop the cycle of generations on welfare.”

There was a deluge of such comments, some toxic, but let me try to address three principal arguments that I think prop up white delusion.

First, if blacks are poor or in prison, it’s all their fault. “Blacks don’t get it,” Bruce tweeted. “Choosing to be cool vs. getting good grades is a bad choice. We all start from 0.”

Huh? Does anybody really think that we all take off from the same starting line?

Slavery and post-slavery oppression left a legacy of broken families, poverty, racism, hopelessness and internalized self-doubt. Some responded to discrimination and lack of opportunity by behaving in self-destructive ways.

One study found that African-American children on welfare heard only 29 percent as many words in their first few years as children of professional parents. Those kids never catch up, partly because they’re more likely to attend broken schools. Sure, some make bad choices, but they’ve often been on a trajectory toward failure from the time they were babies.

These are whirlpools that are difficult to escape, especially when society is suspicious and unsympathetic. Japan has a stigmatized minority group, the burakumin, whose members once held jobs considered unclean. But although this is an occupational minority rather than a racial one, it spawned an underclass that was tormented by crime, educational failure, and substance abuse similar to that of the American underclass.

So instead of pointing fingers, let’s adopt some of the programs that I’ve cited with robust evidence showing that they bridge the chasm.

But look at Asians, Mark protests on my Google Plus page: Vietnamese arrived in poverty — and are now school valedictorians. Why can’t blacks be like that?

There are plenty of black valedictorians. But bravo to Asians and other immigrant groups for thriving in America with a strong cultural emphasis on education, diligence and delay of self-gratification. We should support programs with a good record of inculcating such values in disadvantaged children. But we also need to understand that many young people of color see no hope of getting ahead, and that despair can be self-fulfilling.

A successful person can say: “I worked hard in school. I got a job. The system worked.” Good for you. But you probably also owe your success to parents who read to you, to decent schools, to social expectations that you would end up in college rather than prison. So count your blessings for winning the lottery of birth — and think about mentoring a kid who didn’t.

Look, the basic reason young black men are regarded with suspicion is that they’re disproportionately criminals. The root problem isn’t racism. It’s criminality.It’s true that blacks accounted for 55 percent of robbery arrests in 2012, according to F.B.I. statistics. But, by my calculations, it’s also true that 99.9 percent of blacks were not arrested and charged with robbery in 2012, yet they are still tarred by this pernicious stereotype.

Criminality is real. So is inequity. So is stereotyping.

The United States Sentencing Commission concluded that black men get sentences one-fifth longer than white men for committing the same crimes. In Louisiana, a study found that a person is 97 percent more likely to be sentenced to death for murdering a white person than a black person.

Mass incarceration means that the United States imprisons a higher proportion of its black population than apartheid South Africa did, further breaking up families. And careful studies find that employers are less likely to respond to a job inquiry and résumé when a typically black name is on it.

Society creates opportunity and resiliency for middle-class white boys who make mistakes; it is unforgiving of low-income black boys.

Of course, we need to promote personal responsibility. But there is plenty of fault to go around, and too many whites are obsessed with cultivating personal responsibility in the black community while refusing to accept any responsibility themselves for a system that manifestly does not provide equal opportunity.

Yes, young black men need to take personal responsibility. And so does white America.

 
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7) Just 13, and Working Risky 12-Hour Shifts in the Tobacco Fields
By

PINK HILL, N.C. — On many mornings, as tobacco plants tower around her, Saray Cambray Alvarez pulls a black plastic garbage bag over her 13-year-old body to protect her skin from leaves dripping with nicotine-tinged dew.

When Saray and other workers — including several more teenagers — get to the fields at 6, they punch holes through the bags for their arms. They are trying to avoid what is known as “green tobacco sickness,” or nicotine poisoning, which can cause vomiting, dizziness and irregular heart rates, among other symptoms.

Saray says that she sometimes has trouble breathing in the middle of all the heat, humidity and leaves, and that she often feels weary during her 12-hour shifts, when she moves through the rows to pluck unwanted flowers or pull off oversize leaves for the harvest.

“You get very thirsty,” said Saray, who sometimes waits an hour in 90-plus heat for a drink until her crew returns to the opposite side of a field, where the water jugs are parked. “It’s too hard for me, and it’s too hot.”

Saray says she is lucky not to have become really sick, whereas others have become visibly ill. “Last week, they made us work when it was raining, and I got water in my mouth and I felt dizziness and nausea,” Ana Flores said of exposure to wet tobacco leaves — the plants’ nicotine often dissolves in rain and dew. At 16, she is spending her third summer in the tobacco fields. “I didn’t throw up, but other people did.”

For years, public health experts and federal labor officials have sought to bar teenagers under 16 from the tobacco fields, citing the grueling hours and the harmful exposure to nicotine and other chemicals, but their efforts have been blocked. Three years ago, Hilda Solis, then the labor secretary, proposed declaring work in tobacco fields and with tractors hazardous — making that type of work illegal for those under 16. Opponents of child labor note that Brazil, India and some other tobacco-producing nations already prohibit anyone under 18 from working on tobacco farms.

The Obama administration withdrew Ms. Solis’s proposed rule after encountering intense opposition from farm groups and Republican lawmakers. Agricultural organizations said the move would hurt family farms and make it harder for young people to learn farming skills.

The administration killed the proposal in April 2012, when the president was running for re-election, saying it would not pursue these regulations for “the duration of the Obama administration.” But some proponents still hope to revive the tobacco part of the proposal once this year’s midterm elections are over.

In the meantime, public health experts say hundreds of children under 16 like Saray continue to work in America’s tobacco fields. Dr. Thomas A. Arcury, an expert on tobacco and migrant workers and a professor at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, said tobacco work was particularly harmful to children, pointing to nicotine poisoning, pesticides and dehydration.

“They’re not small adults, they’re children,” he said. “They have more surface area to body mass. They’re still developing neurologically. Their reproductive systems are developing.”

Federal law allows those 12 and older to work on farms for unlimited hours, as long as there is no conflict with school. For nonfarm work, federal law sets 14 as the minimum age and restricts work for children under 16 to eight hours a day.

Tobacco growers say that the practice of using young teenagers is rare, and that many growers decline to employ anyone under 16. But interviews with many teenagers and experts suggest that the practice is still prevalent. Many of the young workers are immigrants or children of migrant workers, whose families often have few employment options and are struggling to make ends meet.

Carl Fillichio, a Labor Department spokesman, declined to discuss the failure of Ms. Solis’s effort, but he said that since then, his agency had stepped up enforcement and urged growers and workers to reduce health risks. “We are concerned about the serious health effects that may be experienced by young people working on tobacco farms,” he said.

Even as smoking has declined in the United States, North Carolina remains the nation’s largest producer of tobacco, with roughly 1,800 tobacco farms employing 30,000 workers picking 400 million pounds of the crop annually.

Graham Boyd, executive vice president for the Tobacco Growers Association of North Carolina, said most tobacco farmers go beyond what is required in terms of labor compliance. “There is absolutely zero benefit in mistreating farm workers,” he said, noting that abusing workers was a quick way to end up without enough people at harvest time. And he acknowledged the danger of nicotine poisoning and other tough conditions in the fields.

“No one is going to say it’s a day at the beach,” Mr. Boyd said.

But few tobacco growers use workers under 18, he said, adding that his organization would be “open-minded” to a ban on workers under 18.

With no government regulations in the offing, 54 groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Consumers League and the A.F.L.-C.I.O., appealed to the major tobacco companies in June, urging them to prohibit their growers from employing anyone under 18.

Big tobacco corporations say they strongly oppose the illegal use of child labor. Philip Morris International bans its growers from using workers under 18, a measure that goes well beyond American law. Some labor contractors, however, evidently flout this requirement without the growers’ knowledge.

“Our standards are generally stricter than U.S. law both in terms of the age limits for children to do work on the farm and for the types of activities that children can do on the farms,” said Miguel Coleta, the company’s director of external labor policies. “We would welcome a strengthening of the U.S. regulatory framework to align with our standards.”

Mr. Coleta said the company had stopped doing business with 20 American growers over the last year because they were using workers under age 18.

Neither Reynolds nor Altria has rules as tough as Philip Morris.

Jeffrey Caldwell, an Altria spokesman, said his company did not “condone the unlawful employment of farm workers, especially under 18.” In a statement, Reynolds said its supplier code of conduct “states that domestic tobacco growers may not assign anyone under 18 to work” that is defined as hazardous. Because federal law and regulations do not define tobacco field work as hazardous, it remains permissible for workers under age 18.

Pat Raines, president of the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association, based in Lexington, Ky., said he believed that the use of young teenagers in tobacco fields was minimal. And he said he agreed that minors should be barred from hazardous tobacco work, like climbing 20-foot ladders in tobacco barns, but added that most field work was not hazardous.

To proponents of higher age limits, however, dangers lurk in many corners. The tobacco fields pose “a whole environment of risk,” said Margaret Wurth, an expert on children’s health at Human Rights Watch. “It’s the nicotine, the pesticides, the heat, the long hours, the pressure they get from employers.”

Last year, Human Rights Watch interviewed 141 tobacco workers, ages 7 to 17, for a lengthy study, finding that three-quarters had suffered nausea, dizziness and rashes.

Esmeralda Juarez, 15, related other problems. With long, dark hair and a shy smile, she told of a labor contractor who had pulled at her clothes, snapped pictures of her from behind and called her “princess” and “baby.” Most tobacco farms, she said, had no portable bathrooms, and while some women go to the woods, “I wait until I get home. I just hold it in.”

“There’s nothing good about this job, except that you get paid,” said Esmeralda, who earns $8.50 an hour. Her sister, Neftali, 19, has been working in the fields since she was 12.

Edinson Bueso Ramirez, 15, recalled summers when he worked with many 12- and 13-year-olds, even a 10-year-old. But this year, he is the youngest on his crew.

“They take advantage of the younger workers,” he said. “They rip you off on pay.” Edinson, whose family fled Honduras because of gang violence, plans to join the Marines after high school.

“My mom, she worries I might get hurt at work,” he said. “I tell her, ‘We need it to pay the bills.’ ”

Many of the teenagers said they worked to help their families.

Jessica Rodriguez, a cashier at Hardees, said she worried about her sons, Fernando, 13, and Brandon, 16, working in tobacco, although she said they could protect themselves from the chemicals.

“If my boys are going to be responsible, I don’t see why they can’t do it,” Ms. Rodriguez said. They work, she explained, because “I was behind on bills. We were close to being evicted last year. That’s why they started.”

Ana Flores, whose mother also works in the fields, shares similar concerns about making ends meet, with younger siblings and little money to go around. “They once sprayed right next to us,” Ana, who runs cross-country for her high school, said of pesticides. “My head was hurting. At night, I could hardly sleep.”

Ana has a brother, 9, and a sister, 11, who will be old enough to work tobacco next summer.

“I wouldn’t want them to be working in this,” Ana said. “But my mom, she’s single and has a lot of kids, and I have to help her.”






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8) Crime, Bias and Statistics
By
SEPT. 7, 2014 
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/opinion/charles-blow-crime-bias-and-statistics.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region&region=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region&_r=0 
Discussions of the relationship between blacks and the criminal justice system in this country too often grind to a halt as people slink down into their silos and arm themselves with their best rhetorical weapons — racial bias on one side and statistics in which minorities, particularly blacks, are overrepresented as criminals on the other.

What I find too often overlooked in this war of words is the intersection between the two positions, meaning the degree to which bias informs the statistics and vice versa.

The troubling association — in fact, overassociation — of blacks with criminality directly affects the way we think about both crime and blacks as a whole.

A damning report released by the Sentencing Project last week lays bare the bias and the interconnecting systemic structures that reinforce it and disproportionately affect African-Americans.

This is the kind of report that one really wants to publish in its totality, for its conclusion is such a powerful condemnation of the perversity of racial oppression. But alas, this being a newspaper column, that’s not possible. Still, allow me to present many of their findings:

• “Whites are more punitive than blacks and Hispanics even though they experience less crime.”

• “White Americans overestimate the proportion of crime committed by people of color and associate people of color with criminality. For example, white respondents in a 2010 survey overestimated the actual share of burglaries, illegal drug sales and juvenile crime committed by African-Americans by 20 percent to 30 percent.”

• “White Americans who associate crime with blacks and Latinos are more likely to support punitive policies — including capital punishment and mandatory minimum sentencing — than whites with weaker racial associations of crime.”

This association of crime with blacks has been noted by others. Lisa Bloom, in her book “Suspicion Nation,” points out: “While whites can and do commit a great deal of minor and major crimes, the race as a whole is never tainted by those acts. But when blacks violate the law, all members of the race are considered suspect.”

She further says: “The standard assumption that criminals are black and blacks are criminals is so prevalent that in one study, 60 percent of viewers who viewed a crime story with no picture of the perpetrator falsely recalled seeing one, and of those, 70 percent believed he was African-American. When we think about crime, we ‘see black,’ even when it’s not present at all.”

As the Sentencing Project report makes clear, the entire government and media machinery is complicit in the distortion.

According to the report:

• “Whether acting on their own implicit biases or bowing to political exigency, policy makers have fused crime and race in their policy initiatives and statements. They have crafted harsh sentencing laws that impact all Americans and disproportionately incarcerate people of color.”• “Many media outlets reinforce the public’s racial misconceptions about crime by presenting African-Americans and Latinos differently than whites — both quantitatively and qualitatively. Television news programs and newspapers overrepresent racial minorities as crime suspects and whites as crime victims.”

• “Disparities in police stops, in prosecutorial charging, and in bail and sentencing decisions reveal that implicit racial bias has penetrated all corners of the criminal justice system.”

The effects of these perceptions and policies have been absolutely devastating for society in general and black people in particular. According to the report:

• “By increasing support for punitive policies, racial perceptions of crime have made sentencing more severe for all Americans. The United States now has the world’s highest imprisonment rate, with one in nine prisoners serving life sentences. Racial perceptions of crime, combined with other factors, have led to the disparate punishment of people of color. Although blacks and Latinos together comprise just 30 percent of the general population, they account for 58 percent of the prison population.”

• “By increasing the scale of criminal sanctions and disproportionately directing penalties toward people of color, racial perceptions of crime have been counterproductive for public safety. Racial minorities’ perceptions of unfairness in the criminal justice system have dampened cooperation with police work and impeded criminal trials. In 2013, over two-thirds of African-Americans saw the criminal justice system as biased against blacks, in contrast to one-quarter of whites. Crime policies that disproportionately target people of color can increase crime rates by concentrating the effects of criminal labeling and collateral consequences on racial minorities and by fostering a sense of legal immunity among whites.”

There is no way in this country to discuss crime statistics without including in that discussion the myriad ways in which those statistics are informed and influenced by the systemic effects of racial distortion.

Individual behavior is not the only component of the numbers; bias is the other.


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9) A Recovery in Need of a Recovery
How Are American Families Doing? A Guided Tour of Our Financial Well-Being
By Neil Irwin

How are we doing?

That is the question that reverberates in every report of the latest economic data. It’s the one that nags Americans as they head to the voting booth. It’s the question that sets our national mood. A new report provides the most exhaustive look at how Americans’ personal finances are faring — and sheds light on why the soaring stock market and occasionally giddy headlines have rarely translated into mass contentment with the economy.

Every three years, the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances interviews thousands of American families (6,026 for the newly published 2013 edition) about their income, savings, investments and debts. It is some of the richest information available about Americans’ financial lives, particularly in the 2010 to 2013 period of halting, inconsistent recovery from the Great Recession.

So how are we doing?

No recovery in incomes for most groups

The most basic measure of financial well-being is how much money people make and how much that money can buy. Many measures, such as per capita personal income, have risen in recent years, even after adjusting for inflation.

But this survey gives us a richer view of how incomes of people in different groups were affected. It is rather depressing.

Incomes rose nicely in the 2010 to 2013 time frame for the top 10 percent of earners (who had a median income of $230,000 last year). They rose slightly, by 0.7 percent, for the 80th to 90th percentile of earners (median of $122,000). But real incomes fell for every other group of earners.

Separate people by age or education, and the same basic pattern applies. Those with a college degree have done fine, but anything less than that and incomes have fallen. Both young adult households (those headed by someone under 35) and those households headed by someone over 75 have seen steep income declines in that same period.

This is the simplest yet most important fact to understand about the current economic recovery: It has not resulted in higher incomes for anyone other than those who were already doing well. And very large groups of Americans have experienced falling incomes.

Wages have fallen as a proportion of income

The survey’s breakdown of where household income is coming from helps explain why this is happening.

Most Americans, particularly those in the middle- and lower-income brackets, derive most of their income from wages and salaries, not from investment income. In the wealthiest 25 percent of households, only 47 percent of their income comes from wages, compared with 70 to 80 percent for the lower three brackets.

Wages have been under pressure for the last several years, as high unemployment has held back the ability of workers to demand raises. Meanwhile, a rise in asset prices for everything from stocks to real estate has meant that those with investments have greater opportunities to sell those assets for capital gains. And while the wealthiest 25 percent receive a meaningful chunk of their income from capital gains, the bottom 75 percent receive a trivial amount.

It isn’t a huge surprise that wages and salaries have fallen as a share of total household income, to 62 percent in 2013 from 68 percent in 2010. Capital gains income rose from 1 percent to 5 percent.

And that goes a long way to explaining the disparate trends in total income among different groups.

Wealth has been stagnant despite markets’ recovery

Income matters, but so does wealth. And here you would expect most everybody to be better off in 2013 than they were three years earlier. After all, the stock market and housing prices both experienced strong increases.

Not quite. The gains in the stock market did not translate into greater wealth for most American families. The median American household was worth $81,200 in 2013, down from $82,800 in 2010 and way down from the $135,400 of 2007. (Those numbers are all inflation-adjusted, using 2013 dollars).

Unlike incomes, a falling net worth is something that the wealthy and the rest of us can complain about together: The top 10 percent, as measured by either income or wealth, also had a slightly lower inflation-adjusted net worth in 2013 than in 2010, and both were still far below 2007 levels.

The housing crash and financial crisis walloped the American household’s finances, in other words, and as of last year there had been no recovery despite surging financial markets.The data contain answers as to why. The sell-off in the stock market in 2008 and 2009 was truly jaw-dropping. And it appears that many Americans — particularly middle-income Americans — decided investing in stocks just wasn’t for them.

Among people in the middle 20 percent of the income distribution, only 9.2 percent owned stocks in 2013, down from 14 percent in 2007. They also have eschewed retirement accounts, the most common vehicle for long-term investment; only 51 percent of middle-income families had a 401(k) or similar account in 2013, down from 56 percent in 2007.

Among all Americans, the proportion owning stocks in some form, either directly or indirectly (via mutual funds or retirement accounts) has fallen from 53 percent before the crisis in 2007 to 49 percent in 2013. The financial crisis appears to have scared Americans, especially middle-income Americans, away from financial investments, which means they have benefited less from the recovery than they otherwise would have.

But there’s been progress reducing debt

Net worth has two components: assets and liabilities. While the news is gloomy on the asset side of Americans’ household balance sheets, things look rather better on the liabilities side. There has been major progress in reducing both the size of Americans’ debts and how much they must pay relative to their incomes to service them.

Among middle-income families, the proportion with mortgage debt on their primary residences fell from 50.5 percent in 2007 to under 40 percent in 2013. Of those in that income bracket who had a home mortgage, the median balance fell 15 percent to $84,800 from $99,600.

Other forms of debt were also paid down. The proportion of families with credit card balances fell from 46 percent in 2007 to 38 percent in 2013.

Meanwhile, the combination of low interest rate policies from the Fed and Americans’ work to reduce debts is having major benefits in terms of decreasing the share of incomes that goes into paying debt. For all families, debt service payment is the lowest share of income it has been in any survey going back to 1989.

For those key middle-income consumers, debt service isn’t the lowest on record, but it has still fallen from nearly 20 percent of income in 2007 to 16 percent today. It may not sound like much, but spending 4 percent less of income to service mortgages, credit cards, auto loans and other debts leaves noticeably more for everything else.

Progress, but frustration

Add it all up, and how are Americans doing? The progress in reducing debt burdens is good news, and it leaves Americans less vulnerable to shocks. But as long as incomes are not rising for most Americans and the booming market is not widely enjoyed, there’s little reason to expect people to be happy with the results they’re getting.



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10) The Rise of the SWAT Team in American Policing
By

Posse comitatus is not a phrase that trips lightly off every tongue. It is typically translated from Latin as “force of the county.” Anyone who has ever watched an old Western movie will instantly recognize the first word as referring to men deputized by the sheriff to chase down some varmints who went thataway. (Rappers and their tag-alongs later gave “posse” a different context.) The full phrase is more obscure, but the concept that it embraces is enshrined in American law. The Posse Comitatus Act, passed in 1878 at the end of Reconstruction and amended but slightly over the decades, prohibits the nation’s armed forces from being used as a police force within the United States. Soldiers, the reasoning goes, exist to fight wars. Chasing local wrongdoers is a job for cops.But many police departments today are so heavily armed with Pentagon-supplied hand-me-downs — tools of war like M-16 rifles, armored trucks, grenade launchers and more — that the principle underlying the Posse Comitatus Act can seem as if it, too, has gone thataway. Questions about whether police forces are overly militarized have been around for years. They are now being asked with new urgency because of the recent turmoil in Ferguson, Mo., where unarmed demonstrators protesting the fatal police shooting of a teenager faced off for a while against mightily armed officers in battle dress and gas masks. What the world saw were lawmen looking more like combat troops in the Mideast than peacekeepers in the Midwest.

The militarized nature of modern American policing infuses this first installment of Retro Report, a weekly video documentary series that examines major news stories from the past and explores what has happened since. The focus this week is on SWAT teams, whose numbers have soared across the country, in rugged cities and in sleepy towns. They are the principal beneficiaries of the heavy-duty military equipment that the federal government has supplied since the early 1990s, in a transfer program that has gained steam in recent years with the withdrawal of American ground forces, first from Iraq and soon from Afghanistan.The video traces the rise of SWAT units from their earliest days in 1960s Los Angeles. There, Daryl F. Gates, who would later become chief of that city’s police force, championed a sturdily armed squad of trained officers as an essential tool of law enforcement after the deadly Watts riots of 1965. Mr. Gates fancied the name Special Weapons Attack Team. “Attack” made some elected officials wince, though. What emerged instead was Special Weapons and Tactics — same acronym but sounding somewhat less aggressive.

Los Angeles’s SWAT team tested its mettle in 1969 against a local Black Panther militia and again in 1974 during a fierce firefight with the Symbionese Liberation Army, a bizarre but dangerous band of radicals best known for having kidnapped the media heiress Patricia Hearst. Its bona fides thus established, SWAT units spread across the national landscape, romanticized in song and on television.

To these units’ defenders, the need could not be more fundamental: The world is dangerous. Some drug lords have weaponry that would be the envy of small armies; the police cannot possibly take them on with mere handguns. Terrorism lurks as an ever-present threat. And sudden menace demanding a well-armed police response can arise even in the most tranquil places. Indeed, the roster of place names identified principally with gun horrors has grown long: Newtown, Columbine, Aurora, Virginia Tech. On and on.

Not surprisingly, critics of militarized policing have a different take.

Some are troubled by what a retired District of Columbia police sergeant, Bill Donnelly, once belittled as “commando-chic regalia.” With all that armored gear and firepower, Mr. Donnelly wrote to The Washington Post in 1997, “one tends to throw caution to the wind.” Another skeptic is Peter B. Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University interviewed by Retro Report. Professor Kraska has studied this issue for decades. Originally, he said, SWAT deployment was supposed to be reserved for truly perilous situations — hostage-takings, high-powered shootouts and the like. Now, these teams execute routine warrants in “no-knock” drug raids, bursting into homes with a show of force that often far exceeds the threat to them. The number of such raids has exploded from a few thousand a year in the early 1980s to tens of thousands today. Other critics, like the American Civil Liberties Union, note a stark racial disparity, with blacks and Latinos more likely than whites to be targets.In the process, relationships between many police departments and the public they serve are intrinsically altered. Officer Friendly has been replaced by someone looking more like G.I. Joe.

The blurring of distinctions between police and the military has troubled people like Lawrence J. Korb, a longtime analyst of national security policies, who was an assistant defense secretary in President Ronald Reagan’s first term. Mr. Korb was not happy when the Reagan administration, in the early 1980s, loosened some restrictions in the Posse Comitatus Act to enable the armed forces to get more involved in the domestic “war on drugs.” His objection was encapsulated in a 1997 interview with The Dallas Morning News. “The military is much more likely to use force of arms because that’s what they’re trained to do,” he said. “The military, to put it bluntly, is trained to vaporize, not Mirandize.”

Over the last two decades, SWAT units have become ever more heavily armed. Under the so-called 1033 Program, named for a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act, the federal government has transferred vast amounts of military equipment — machine guns and ammunition, helicopters, night-vision gear, armored cars — to local police departments. The process accelerated after the Sept. 11 attacks, under both President George W. Bush and President Obama. Inevitably, some people, including police chiefs, have asked if all this amounts to a solution in search of a problem. Take the transfer of MRAPs, the military term for mine-resistant ambush-protected armored vehicles. How many minefields are there on America’s Main Streets?

Also inevitably, mistakes are made. A wrenching example is captured in the Retro Report video, involving a 19-month-old boy who was critically injured in May when a SWAT team in Georgia fired a stun grenade into a house that was the target of a drug raid. The officers were searching for their suspect in the wrong place. Their grenade landed in the infant’s crib.

There is yet another inevitability. After all that happened in Ferguson, a backlash against militarized policing has gained force. In late August, Mr. Obama ordered a review of the equipment-transfer program. Senators said they would hold their own hearings this month. It is much too soon, though, to tell if this longstanding law enforcement strategy is truly about to go thataway.
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11) Some Retail Workers Find Better Deals With Unions
By

By now, the hardships endured by retail workers at clothing stores across New York City are achingly familiar: the frantic scramble to get assigned enough hours to earn a living on painfully low wages; the ever-changing, on-call schedules that upend child care arrangements, college schedules and desperate efforts to find second jobs.

Workers and government officials around the country are increasingly pushing for change. But for an example of more humane workplaces, there is no need to jet to Sweden or Denmark or Mars. We need look no farther than Midtown Manhattan, no farther than Herald Square.

Ladies and gentlemen, step right onto the escalators and glide on up to the sixth floor. Allow me to introduce you to Debra Ryan, a sales associate in the Macy’s bedding department.

For more than two decades, Ms. Ryan has guided shoppers in the hunt for bedroom décor, helping them choose between medium-weight and lightweight comforters, goose-down and synthetic pillows, and sheets and blankets in a kaleidoscope of colors.

But here is what’s truly remarkable, given the current environment in retail: Ms. Ryan knows her schedule three weeks in advance. She works full time and her hours are guaranteed. She has never been sent home without pay because the weather was bad or too few customers showed up for a Labor Day sale on 300-thread-count sheets.

This is no fantasy. This is real life, in the heart of New York.

“I’m able to pay my rent, thank God, and go on vacation, at least once a year,” Ms. Ryan said. “There’s a sense of security.”

So what makes this Macy’s store so different? Its employees are represented by a union, which has insisted on stability in scheduling for its members. (Union workers enjoy similar scheduling arrangements at the Bloomingdale’s, H&M and Modell’s Sporting Goods stores in Manhattan.)

Now, I know the term “union” is a dirty word in some circles, even in this city, where labor still has considerable clout and has catapulted many workers into the middle class. But no one can deny that these union workers savor something that is all too rare in the retail industry right now: guaranteed minimum hours — for part-time and full-time employees — and predictable schedules.

This is no accident.

“The biggest issue for workers today is scheduling,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which negotiated contracts for workers at the Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, H&M and Modell’s stores.

“It’s not just about how much they’re paid per hour,” Mr. Applebaum said, “but how many hours a week they get to work.”

To envision what life is like when you do not have those guarantees, just walk across 34th Street to the Zara clothing store, where Sonica Smith has worked as a sales associate for nearly two years.

Ms. Smith is a 26-year-old single mother of two who loves working in retail. She loves clothes. She loves dressing customers. But her unpredictable work schedule and the relentless struggle to get enough hours wreak constant havoc on her life.

Some weeks, she is assigned 24 hours of work; other weeks, she gets only 16. There is never a guaranteed minimum and there are never enough hours to get close to full time.

“At work, all I’m thinking about is: How am I going to pay the rent for the month?” said Ms. Smith, who earns $11 an hour. “How am I going to pay the person who is caring for my kids today?”

She said her last check amounted to only $396 for two weeks of work. “I nearly cried,” she said.

This is no surprise to anyone who works in retail. In a report scheduled to be released on Monday, Stephanie Luce, an associate professor of labor studies at the City University of New York, and the Retail Action Project, a workers’ advocacy group financed by foundations and Mr. Appelbaum’s union, surveyed 236 retail workers in Manhattan and Brooklyn and found that only 40 percent had set minimum hours per week.

The good news is that some retail companies are promising to do things differently. Last month, Starbucks vowed to improve the “stability and consistency” of the work schedules of its 130,000 baristas. (The company was responding to a New York Times article chronicling the enormous strains that unpredictable scheduling places on workers.)

At Zara, where employees have demanded more predictability, the company has given workers more notice of coming shifts, though workers are still pressing for guaranteed minimum hours. Government officials, meanwhile, are increasingly trying to curb the harsh scheduling practices.

Ms. Ryan, the sales associate at Macy’s, hopes the movement will spread. She knows from personal experience that satisfying, sustainable careers can be built in retail. After 27 years in the business, she earns about $40,000 a year — nearly $20 an hour — and never has to worry from week to week about her pay.

“Thank God, I work for Macy’s,” she said.

Email: swarns@nytimes.com

Twitter: @rachelswarns

Rachel Swarns would like to hear about your experiences in New York’s work world. Please contact her directly by filling out this brief form. She may follow up with you directly for an interview.


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12) Ferguson Sets Broad Change for City Courts
By

FERGUSON, Mo. — In the first major sign of change in this small city since last month’s police killing of an unarmed black teenager, the Ferguson City Council said Monday that it would establish a citizen review board to provide guidance for the Police Department.

It also announced sweeping changes to its court system, which had been criticized as unfairly targeting low-income blacks, who had become trapped in a cycle of unpaid tickets and arrest warrants.

Municipal court fines are the city’s second-highest source of revenue, leading many critics to argue that the authorities had a financial incentive to issue tickets and then impose more fees on those who did not pay.

Young black men in Ferguson and surrounding cities routinely find themselves passed from jail to jail as they are picked up on warrants for unpaid fines, one of the many simmering issues here that helped set off almost two weeks of civil unrest after the teenager, Michael Brown, 18, was killed by a white Ferguson officer on Aug. 9.

Mr. Brown’s killing put a national spotlight on Ferguson, a small city in north St. Louis County. The unrest served to highlight longstanding complaints by a predominantly black community that they were being harassed by the police.

On the eve of what was expected to be a tense City Council meeting on Tuesday, the first meeting since the shooting, the city instead pre-emptively announced many changes activists have long sought.

Among other things, the Council was scheduled to vote on capping how much of the city’s revenue can come from fines. The city also announced a one-month window to quash pending warrants, a major victory for the activists and lawyers who had pressed for change and were expected to force the issue at Tuesday’s meeting.

“The overall goal of these changes is to improve trust within the community and increase transparency, particularly within Ferguson’s courts and police department,” one council member, Mark Byrne, said in a statement. “We want to demonstrate to residents that we take their concerns extremely seriously.”

Lawyers and activists cautioned that the change could be truly meaningful only if other municipalities followed suit, because Ferguson is not alone in its predatory tactics, said Julia Ho, a community organizer at Hands Up United, an organization that formed after Mr. Brown’s killing.

“The bench warrants and traffic fines were a regressive tax on the poor and criminalization of poverty,” Ms. Ho said. “If people no longer receive these charges, that’s huge: It keeps people from getting stuck in modern debtor’s prisons.”

The Arch City Defenders, a nonprofit legal group, and law professors at the St. Louis University School of Law recently wrote a letter to the mayor, James Knowles III, asking him to waive all pending fines and warrants for nonviolent offenses. The letter said that the warrants served as barriers to employment and housing and that waiving them would be an important conciliatory gesture to the community.

Mr. Brown was killed after a brief struggle with the officer, Darren Wilson, who was seated in his vehicle. Although the police said Mr. Brown went for the officer’s gun, witnesses have said that the officer fired at Mr. Brown as he fled and continued shooting after he put his hands up in a sign of surrender. A St. Louis County grand jury is evaluating the case and is expected to make a decision by next month on whether to indict Officer Wilson.

The federal Justice Department has its own civil rights investigation into the shooting and the Police Department’s practices.

Thomas B. Harvey, executive director of the Arch City Defenders, said the changes were about three-quarters of what they had requested. “Although it’s not exactly what we asked for, it’s a substantial step forward,” he said.

Ferguson, a city of just 21,135 people, issued 24,532 warrants for 12,000 cases last year, the group said in a recent report. That amounts to three warrants per Ferguson household.

The city’s traffic fine revenue has increased 44 percent since 2011, city records show. When drivers who could not pay failed to show up for court, the city issued warrants and increased the penalties.

About 20 percent of the city’s $12 million budget is paid through fines, Mr. Harvey said. Under the proposal announced Monday, the city will cap that at 15 percent and spend any excess on special community projects.

“The Council believes that this ordinance sends a clear message that the fines imposed as punishment in the municipal court are not to be viewed as a source of revenue for the city,” Ferguson’s Council said in a statement. “We are hopeful that the Council’s clear statement will encourage the municipal judge and prosecutor to explore and utilize alternative methods of sentencing, such as community service, to punish violators and deter similar unlawful conduct.”

Mr. Harvey said he was concerned about whether the fines would actually decrease and expressed skepticism over the fact that the City Council was endorsing a community service penalty that does not currently exist. “That’s still $1.7 million in fines collected, but it is a million-dollar drop,” he said.The city said it would commit to funding a community improvement program and would hold ward meetings to elicit community input on what other changes should be made.

The city said it would also introduce an ordinance to repeal the “failure to appear” offense in municipal court, eliminating the additional fines imposed on those who do not attend court, and abolish administrative fees, such as the $25 fee to cover the cost of police personnel who arrange for the towing of abandoned vehicles.

Some of the fees the city planned to eliminate, such as the $50 charge to revoke a warrant, were illegal in the first place, Mr. Harvey said.

The city said the municipal judge had established a special docket for defendants who are having trouble making monthly payments on outstanding fines, the city said, giving people the opportunity to renegotiate their payment plans.

At the behest of the City Council, the municipal judge also established a one-month warrant recall program.

Meldon Moffitt, 42, of Ferguson said Monday that he felt the measures did not go far enough.

Mr. Moffitt said he owed more than $600 in fines for a suspended license, even though he had tried to fight the charge in court. He took paperwork to court that the motor vehicles department told him would be sufficient, he said, but the judge levied additional fines anyway.

“To be honest, I don’t see how I should have been fined at all since I did what I was told to do,” Mr. Moffitt said.

Even if the city cuts back on certain fines, he said, the city will still find a way to get the money it needs.

“I need to see that if a person misses a court date, there isn’t a warrant out for their arrest,” he said. “The city needs to stop giving people big old fines for a traffic ticket.”

Julie Bosman contributed reporting from St. Louis.




 
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13) Climate Change Will Disrupt Half of North America’s Bird Species, Study Says
By

The Baltimore oriole will probably no longer live in Maryland, the common loon might leave Minnesota, and the trumpeter swan could be entirely gone.

Those are some of the grim prospects outlined in a report released on Monday by the National Audubon Society, which found that climate change is likely to so alter the bird population of North America that about half of the approximately 650 species will be driven to smaller spaces or forced to find new places to live, feed and breed over the next 65 years. If they do not — and for several dozen it will be very difficult — they could become extinct.

The four Audubon Society scientists who wrote the report projected in it that 21.4 percent of existing bird species studied will lose “more than half of the current climactic range by 2050 without the potential to make up losses by moving to other areas.” An additional 32 percent will be in the same predicament by 2080, they said.Among the most threatened species are the three-toed woodpecker, the northern hawk owl, the northern gannet, Baird’s sparrow, the rufous hummingbird and the trumpeter swan, the report said. They are among the 30 species that, by 2050, will no longer be able to live and breed in more than 90 percent of their current territory.

“Common sense will tell you that with these kinds of findings, it’s hard to believe we won’t lose some species to extinction,” said David Yarnold, the president of the National Audubon Society. “How many? We honestly don’t know. We don’t know which ones are going to prove heroically resilient.”

Can the birds just move? “Some can and some will,” Mr. Yarnold said. “But what happens to a yellow-billed magpie in California that depends on scrub oak habitat? What happens as that bird keeps moving higher and higher and farther north and runs out of oak trees? Trees don’t fly. Birds do.”

The report’s predictions are based on both United Nations estimates of the effects of climate change in 2050 and 2080, and on two voluminous surveys of birds: the Audubon Society’s own Christmas bird count, which thousands of volunteers have worked on for decades, and a more general annual survey of breeding birds. The latter was started by the federal government in 1914; amateur birders began the Christmas bird count a few years earlier.

“The notion that we can have a future that looks like what our grandparents experienced, with the birds they had, is unlikely,” said Gary Langham, the study’s chief author, in an interview. The impact of climate change, he said, will not just harm birds already considered endangered — it is as likely to decimate birds that have robust populations now.

“This whole other threat tends to undo successes we’ve had in the past,” Dr. Langham said.

Terry Root, a Stanford University biologist who specializes in the impact of climate change on the geographic distribution of species, said she found the conclusions in the Audubon survey disturbing indeed. “If we are losing as many species as this is saying, what’s going to happen to all the insects they eat?” she said. “There are going to be winners if you move a species out of a region, and these winners might be mosquitoes and spiders.”

Alternatively, Dr. Root said: “Maybe other avian species will grow in abundance and take up the space. We don’t know.”

On Tuesday, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service and the Smithsonian Institution are scheduled to release their annual state of the birds report, which is also expected to describe declines in bird populations and threats from changing ecosystems. Laury Parramore, a spokeswoman for the Fish and Wildlife Service, said in a statement on Monday that the Audubon Society’s work “provides a tool to help predict future bird distribution and ranges” that will help guide her agency’s conservation plans.

Birds could feel the impact of a changing climate in different ways. Drought in Southern California is blamed for a sharp drop in breeding among California raptors, perhaps because a lack of water is killing the insects and small rodents they feed on.

Puffins, whose reintroduction off the Maine coast had largely been a success story for the Audubon Society, have shown signs of declining both off the American coast and in countries like Iceland and England, perhaps because of climate-driven changes in the ocean food web.

“Every species of plant and animal is very well-tuned to what it does for a living,” Dr. Langham said. “A bird in the desert can’t go to the boreal forest. Everything about every organism is finely tuned.”

On the bright side, Dr. Langham said, his report shows that many species will continue in their current abundance and, mostly, their current locations: American robins, red-tailed hawks, western scrub jays, western meadowlarks, northern cardinals and northern mockingbirds.

And at least one species, popular among poets and jilted lovers, is expected to flourish as warming takes its course, Dr. Langham said. “You want to know what climate change sounds like?” he asked. “It’s the sound of a mourning dove — their climate potential is going to increase.”

Other species may or may not be able to adapt. For example, the brown pelican, a Gulf Coast resident, could move northward and inland, Dr. Langham said, adding, “But really with any bird that shows new climate space opening up, it is far from certain that any bird is going to capitalize on that potential.”

Dr. Langham called for a revised conservation strategy that focuses not only on species in immediate trouble, but those likely to suffer as climate forces them out of their current homes. The Audubon report, he said, is “a framework to focus on which species are predicted to be sensitive and where they are likely to move, and importantly, where they are likely not to move.”

Mr. Yarnold of the Audubon Society said that birds were resilient, but that climate change will test their limits. “We just don’t know whether they’ll be able to find the food sources and the habitat and cope with a new range of predators,” he said. “Maybe they’ll all be incredibly hardy and find ways to survive.”

But, he added, “That doesn’t seem likely, given, one, the number of birds affected, and two, the pace at which these things are happening.”




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14) Vancouver Canada Blocks Israeli Ship: Tremendous Victory
From Free Palestine Movement:
On Sep 9, 2014, at 5:31 PM, FPM Newsletter wrote:
http://freepalestinemovement.org/2014/09/10/vancouver-canada-blocks-israeli-ship-tremendous-victory/

In a four-day standoff pitting human rights groups and organized labor against Israeli shipping giant Zim, the giant was defeated today in Vancouver, Canada. 

The huge container ship Zim Djibouti first docked at the high-tech Deltaport facility on September 5, only to discover that the workers had agreed to respect a picket line set up by human rights advocates.  The coalition of picketers, under the name Block the Boat Vancouver, were trying to prevent the unloading and loading of the ship, as a solidarity protest against Israel's 47-year blockade of the port of Gaza and the recent Israeli sttack on Gaza that killed more than 2000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, as well as 72 Israelis, almost all soldiers.

The ship then returned to open water along the Pacific coast and stayed there several days, until midnight last night.  At that time it set course for Port Angeles, on the US side of the passage to Vancouver.  By unloading at an unexpected US port, the company apparently hoped to circumvent the blockade.

It didn't work.  Perhaps the logistics of arranging passage by land through another country for the hazardous cargo on board was too much, or perhaps the docking facilities were inadequate for the huge ship, but it turned back and returned to the open sea.  At the time of this report, it has still failed to declare a new destination and arrival time.

This is a huge victory for the Vancouver coalition, undoubtedly costing Zim enormous sums in fuel, delays, and having to carry excess cargo to unintended destinations, impeding the other operations.  It also continues the string of Block the Boat actions at ports on the US west coast that began with the August picket in Oakland, California of another Zim ship that ended with similar results.

Let's all congratulate Vancouver and encourage ports all over the world to refuse Israeli ships and ships from Israeli companies.  Customers will have to think twice about using an Israeli line for their cargo, as delivery becomes less certain.  Hopefully this is just the beginning of a world wide
campaign against Zim and all other Israeli shipping, until Israel reconsiders its policy of blocking all shipping to and from Gaza. 
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15) This Is What an Abortion Looks Like
By MERRITT TIERCE

DENTON, Tex. — I MET Wendy Davis, the Texas state senator and Democratic candidate for governor, for the first time last week, and I told her how much it meant to me that she wasn’t afraid to talk about abortion. But we need a much larger conversation about abortion — one that also includes, without prejudice, the stories unlikely to generate much sympathy. Stories like mine.

Ms. Davis’s background feels familiar to me. She became a single mother at 19, her first marriage lasted only two years, and she worked as a receptionist and waitress until she could afford to go back to school. I had two children by the time I was 21, filed for divorce at 23, and worked as a secretary and waitress. Thanks to the support of friends and family, and especially my ex-husband, the father of my children, I was able to go back to school in 2009. And like Ms. Davis, I have also had two abortions.

In her memoir, “Forgetting to Be Afraid,” which came out this week, Ms. Davis writes about the two wanted pregnancies she terminated. The first abortion ended a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy. (That this procedure must even be reported as an “abortion” is a tremendous failure of taxonomy.) The second pregnancy ended in the second trimester because the fetus had an acute brain abnormality.

Abortions like these represent the basic currency of the debate. These are the stories used to teach us the value of abortion, and the standard against which all other abortion stories must be gauged. By repeating only the gut-wrenching, heartbreaking, terrifying abortion stories, we protect a lie: that abortion isn’t normal. We have learned to think of abortion with shame and fear. We have accepted the damaging idea that a person who wants an abortion must grovel before the consciences of others.

I admire Ms. Davis for having the courage to say the word “abortion” over and over for 11 hours, as she did last year, while filibustering a Texas law that would have restricted access to the procedure. And I deeply respect her for telling her own stories now.

But those stories are not groundbreaking. They are politically safe, because no rational person could be anything but sympathetic and thankful that her experiences are extremely rare.

Abortion itself, however, is not rare.

I have been pregnant five times. I had a son, then a daughter, and my third pregnancy ended in abortion at a Planned Parenthood clinic, at a gestation of about six weeks.

I had an abortion because we were poor and I was depressed and I didn’t know who the father was. I had been having an affair. My kids were 2 and 3, and the debilitating morning sickness, which I experienced early in each of my pregnancies, made it difficult to work or care for two toddlers. I got pregnant again soon after, but miscarried. A few years later I had another abortion because the man I was seeing was emotionally abusive. I had no control in that relationship, so I sabotaged my birth control to get some back. The whole situation was a complete abscess. In spite of my awareness of our miserable present and inevitably doomed future, I didn’t really want to have an abortion. I wanted the man to love me or at least be forced to publicly acknowledge our relationship existed. But he didn’t want to have a baby with me, and I knew that having that baby would have been a terrible thing for my children. And for me.

This is how it really is, abortion: You do things you regret or don’t understand and then you make other choices because life keeps going forward. Or you do something out of love and then, through biology or accident, it goes inexplicably wrong, and you do what you can to cope. Or you do whatever you do, however you do it, for whatever reason, because that’s your experience.

It’s not Ms. Davis’s job to be groundbreaking, and I’m sorry that her personal reproductive history has to be declared and described (not to mention leveraged for votes). Do we approve of what she wanted? Did she suffer enough? These questions are not ours to ask.

We have to stop categorizing abortions as justified or unjustified. The best thing you can do if you support reproductive rights is to force people to realize that abortion is common, and the most common abortion is a five-to-15-minute procedure elected early in the first trimester by someone who doesn’t want to be pregnant or have a child. It’s our job to say it’s O.K. if that’s the end of the story. It’s O.K. if it’s boring or not traumatic or if you don’t even know what it was.

The reasons, the feelings, the personal contexts — these we can also talk about, but only after we grant to each woman the right to make and do with her body what she will. Regardless of whether or not a compelling story is on offer.

Merritt Tierce is the author of the novel “Love Me Back.”

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16) Student Loan Debt Burdens More Than Just Young People
By

JANET LEE DUPREE, 72, was surprised when she received her first Social Security benefits seven years ago. About one-fifth of her monthly payment was being withheld and she called the federal government to find out why.

The woman, who is from Citra, Fla., discovered that the deduction from her benefits was to repay $3,000 in loans she took out in the early 1970s to pay for her undergraduate degree.

“I didn’t pay it back, and I’m not saying I shouldn’t,” she said. “I was an alcoholic, and later diagnosed with H.I.V., but I’ve turned my life around. I’ve been paying some of the loan back but that never seems to lower the amount, which is now $15,000 because of interest.

“I don’t know if I can ever pay it back.”

She is among an estimated two million Americans age 60 and older who are in debt from unpaid student loans, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Its August “Household Debt and Credit Report” said the number of aging Americans with outstanding student loans had almost tripled from about 700,000 in 2005, whether from long-ago loans for their own educations or more recent borrowing to pay for college degrees for family members.

The debt among older people is up substantially, to $43 billion from $8 billion in 2005, according to the report, which is based on data from Equifax, the credit reporting agency. As of July 31, money was being deducted from Social Security payments to almost 140,000 individuals to pay down their outstanding student loans, according to Treasury Department data. That is up from just under 38,000 people in 2004. Over the decade, the amounts withheld more than tripled, to nearly $101 million for the first seven months of this year from over $32 million in 2004.

While older debtors account for a small fraction of student loan borrowers, who have accumulated nearly $1 trillion in such debt, the effect of owing a constantly ballooning amount of debt but having a fixed income can be onerous, said Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, chairman of the Senate Special Committee on Aging.

“Those in default on their loans can see their Social Security checks garnished, leaving them with retirement income that leaves them well below the poverty line,” he said at a committee hearing this week to examine the issue.

“Some may think of student loan debt as a young person’s problem,” he said, “but, as it turns out, that is increasingly not the case.”

That is the problem that Rosemary Anderson, 57, described to the committee. The woman, who is from Watsonville, Calif., has a home mortgage that is under water, as well as health and other problems, and $64,000 in unpaid student loans. She borrowed the money in her 30s to fund her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, but fell behind on her student loan payments eight years ago.

As a result of compound interest, her debt has risen to $126,000. With her $526 monthly payment, at an 8.25 percent rate, she estimates that she “will be 81” by the time it is paid, and will have laid out $87,487 more than she originally borrowed.

Mrs. Dupree, in a telephone interview, said she, too, needed some relief. As a part-time substance abuse counselor for a nonprofit based in Ocala, she said she could barely afford the $50 each month that she negotiated with the federal government as payment for her growing debt.

She is supporting a measure introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and a committee member, that would allow people who borrowed money for education before July 2013 to refinance at current, lower interest rates.

A person who took out an unsubsidized loan before July of last year “is locked into an interest rate of nearly 7 percent and older loans run 8 percent to 9 percent and even higher,” Ms. Warren said. The measure would lower the interest rate to 3.86 percent for undergraduate loans and a little higher for graduate and parent loans.

But the future of the bill is unclear. It was stalled in the Senate in June by Republican senators, like Lamar Alexander, of Tennessee, who said college students didn’t need a taxpayer subsidy to help pay off a student loan. “They need a good job.”

The measure would help 25 million people refinance their student loans, but impose a tax increase on people making over $1 million — which Senator Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, the majority leader, labeled a “tax increase bill styled as a student loan bill.”

Adam Brandon, executive vice president of the conservative organization FreedomWorks, which opposed Senator Warren’s bill, said such legislation “only makes the current student loan bubble worse by continuing to encourage people to take out more loans than they can afford.

“The market needs to work out who can afford these loans. We shouldn’t be trying to game the market and have people end up with so much debt they can’t afford their car payments.”

Even though the number of retiree debtors is small, $1,000 deducted from their Social Security payments “can make a real difference for affected senior citizens or disabled adults surviving on Social Security,” said Sandy Baum, a professor at the George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development, and a researcher at the Urban Institute.

For most beneficiaries, she said, “the average monthly payment of $1,200 is the primary source of income.” While the government should be holding student borrowers to account for their debt, “and there may be some who just decide not to pay,” she said “most are people who are not earning money so it doesn’t make sense to ask them to pay.”

As the ranks of retirees grow, more attention is being focused on the education debt incurred by the next group of people approaching retirement, those 50 to 64 years old. A 2013 AARP study of middle-class families found that aging households were carrying increasing amounts of debt.

While mortgages account for most of that debt, education debt levels have been rising for the preretiree group, noted Lori A. Trawinski, a director at the AARP Public Policy Institute.

“As of 2010, 11 percent of preretiree families had education debt with an average balance of $28,000. Growing debt burdens pose a threat to financial security of Americans approaching retirement, since increasing debt threatens their ability to save for retirement or to accumulate other assets, and may end up leading them to delay retirement,” she said.

The Government Accountability Office warned this week about the growth of educational debt among seniors. It released a report that relied on different data from that used by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, but nonetheless painted an ominous picture of lingering debt burden.

“As the baby boomers continue to move into retirement, the number of older Americans with defaulted loans will only continue to increase,” Charles A. Jeszeck, the G.A.O. director of education, work force and income security, testified at the hearing. “This creates the potential for an unpleasant surprises for some, as their benefits are offset and they face the possibility of a less secure retirement.”

More than 80 percent of the outstanding balances are from seniors who financed their own education, the G.A.O. report concluded, and only 18 percent were attributed to loans used to finance the studies of a spouse, child or grandchild.

But the default rate for these loans is 31 percent — a rate that is double that of the default rate for loans taken out by borrowers between the ages of 25 and 49 years old, according to agency data.

“Such debt reduces net worth and income and can erode retirement security,” Mr. Jeszeck said. “The effect of rising debt can be more profound for those who have accumulated few or no financial assets.”

And such student loan debt “can be especially problematic because unlike other types of debt, it generally cannot be discharged in bankruptcy,” he added.

As a result of unpaid student debt, Social Security payments can be reduced to $750 a month, which is a floor Congress set in 1998. Senator Susan M. Collins, Republican of Maine, and a member of the committee on aging, said she was planning to introduce a measure to adjust the amount for inflation “to make sure garnishment does not force seniors into poverty.”

For people like Ms. Anderson, help cannot come too soon.

“I incurred this debt to improve my life,” she told the committee, “but the debt has become my undoing.”

Make the most of your money. Every Monday get articles about retirement, saving for college, investing, new online financial services and much more. Sign up for the Your Money newsletter here.
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C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND
ONGOING CAMPAIGNS


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Free the Whistle-Blowers

An Appeal from Daniel Ellsberg

July 21, 2014 by Daniel Ellsberg

Time Magazine coversNSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, a personal hero of mine, has recently filed to renew his asylum in Russia.  Exiled thousands of miles from friends and family, he awaits his fate. He learned from the example of another top hero of mine, Chelsea Manning.  Manning helped inspire his revelations that if he released his vital information while in this country he would have been held incommunicado in isolation as Chelsea was for over ten months—in Snowden’s case probably for the rest of his life.  And facing comparable charges to Chelsea’s, he would have no more chance than Chelsea to have a truly fair trial—being prevented by the prosecution and judge (as I was, forty years ago) from even raising arguments of public interest or lack of harm in connection with his disclosures.  Contrary to the hollow advice of Hillary Clinton or John Kerry, if he were to return to America he would not be able to “make his case” neither “in court,” nor “to the public” from a prison cell.

 I am immensely thankful to both these young whistle-blowers who have so bravely stood up against the powerful forces of the US government in order to reveal corruption, illegal spying and war crimes.  They were both motivated by their commitments to democracy and justice.  They both chose to reveal information directly to the public, at great cost to themselves, so that citizens and taxpayers could be fully informed of the facts.  They also revealed the amazing potential of new technologies to increase public access to information and strengthen democracy.  It saddens me that our current political leaders, rather than embracing this potential, have chosen to tighten their strangleholds on power and information, turning away from both progress and justice.

 Shockingly, the Obama administration has prosecuted more whistle-blowers under the Espionage Act than every previous president combined. These heroes do not deserve to be thrown in prison or called a traitor for doing the right thing.  Obama’s unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of the Espionage Act—as if it were a British-type Official Secrets Act, never intended by Congress and a violation of our First Amendment—and Manning’s 35-year prison sentence will have a chilling effect on future citizens’ willingness to uncover hidden injustices.  The government has already brought comparable charges against Snowden.

 The only remedy to this chilling precedent, designed to effect government whistle-blowers as a whole, is to overturn the Manning verdict. Given that Manning’s court martial produced the longest trial record in US military history, it will take a top legal team countless hours to prepare their defense.  But as an Advisory Board member for the Chelsea Manning Support Network, I was inspired by the way citizens around the world stepped forward to help fund a strong defense during Manning’s trial.  I remain hopeful that enough people will recognize the immense importance of these appeals and will contribute to help us finish the struggle we started. That struggle, of course, is for a just political system and freedom for our whistle-blowers.

Chelsea Manning has continued to demonstrate uncommon bravery and character, even from behind bars.  With the New York Times Op-Ed she published last month, she has cemented her position as a compelling voice for government reform.  Working as an intelligence analyst in Iraq, Manning was privy to a special view of the inner-workings of our military’s propaganda systems.  Despite her personal struggles, she felt compelled to share her knowledge of what was happening in Iraq with the Americans people.  If the military hadn’t hidden the number of civilian casualties and incidences of torture detailed in the Iraq Logs she released, we would have known far sooner to expect the civil war that has gripped Iraq fully today.  Her exposure of US knowledge of the corruption in Tunisia, by the dictator our government supported, was a critical catalyst of the non-violent uprising which toppled that dictator, in turn directly inspiring the occupation of Tahrir Square in Egypt and then the Occupy movement in the US

 I personally am inspired by Chelsea Manning as I am by Edward Snowden, which is why I have spent countless hours advocating for both of them.  I’m asking you to join me today in supporting what I believe to be one of the most important legal proceedings in our country’s history. We are fortunate to have a truly impressive legal team that has agreed to partner with us.  Already, our new appeals attorney Nancy Hollander and her team have begun to research legal strategies, and are collaborating with Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the international news media to highlight the significance of this case.

 Chelsea is only 26 now, younger than I was when I learned to recognize the injustices of the Vietnam War.  She wishes to complete her education, as I did, and go into public service. Imagine what great things she could both learn and teach the world if she were free. Now imagine if our corrupt government officials are allowed to get their way, holding her behind bars until life has almost passed her by, and extraditing Snowden to suffer the same outcome.  What a sad result that would be for our country and our humanity.

 I have been waiting forty years for a legal process to at long last prove the unconstitutionality of the Espionage Act as applied to whistle-blowers (the Supreme Court has never yet addressed this issue).  This appeals process can accomplish that, and it can reduce Chelsea’s sentence by decades. But unfortunately, without your help today it will not happen. We must raise $100,000 by September 1st, to ensure that Chelsea’s team have the resources to fully fight this stage of the appeals process. 

Unless Manning’s conviction is overturned in appeals, Snowden and many other whistle-blowers, today and in the future, will face a similar fate. And with them will perish one of the most critical lifelines for our democracy.  But you can join me in fighting back.  I’m asking you to do it for Chelsea, to do it for Snowden, and to do it because it’s the right thing to do to preserve our democracy.  We can only win this great struggle with your help. Please contribute to help us fund Chelsea’s legal appeals today.

        It’s time we band together on the right side of history once again.

        Daniel Ellsberg

Please contribute to help us fund Chelsea’s legal appeals today!

Learn now how you can write a letter to be included in Chelsea Manning’s official application for clemency!
Please share this information to friends and community leaders, urging them to add their voice to this important effort before it's too late.
http://www.privatemanning.org/pardonpetition




Help us continue to cover 100%
of Pvt. Manning's legal fees! Donate today.
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38591


COURAGE TO RESIST
http://couragetoresist.org
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610
510-488-3559
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 Only an Innocent Man Would Voluntarily Return
to Prison to Fight Against his Life Sentence
and For Exoneration —
That Courageous Man is Lorenzo Johnson.

The PA Attorney General’s Office Agrees to Investigate New Facts and Witnesses —
  Send Your Message Now to PA AG
Kathleen Kane: Dismiss the Charges!
Free Lorenzo Johnson!

On January 29, 2014 Lorenzo Johnson’s attorney, Michael Wiseman, met with representatives of PA Attorney General Kathleen Kane to discuss the new evidence of Lorenzo Johnson’s innocence contained in legal filings now pending in the Pennsylvania courts. This includes affidavits confirming Johnson’s presence in New York City at the time of the Harrisburg murder and the identity of the actual killers, as well as police and prosecutorial misconduct.

Attorney Wiseman said Kane’s office promised to investigate these new facts in order to assess whether they merit the relief that Lorenzo Johnson seeks in his PCRA petition.

Speaking to AP reporter Mary Claire Dale on February 11, 2014 Wiseman said, “We believe the witnesses we presented to them are credible, and give a coherent version of the events. I take them at their word, that they’re going to do a straightforward, honest review.”  Kane spokesman Joe Peters confirmed the meeting to AP “but said the office won’t comment on the new evidence until the court filing,” (referring to the March 31, 2014 date for the AG’s response to Johnson’s October 2013 court filing).

It is the Office of the PA Attorney General that is responsible for the false prosecution of Lorenzo Johnson from trial through appeals. And just a few months ago, the Attorney General’s office opposed a federal petition based on this new evidence saying there was no prima facie claim for relief. This resulted in the denial of Lorenzo Johnson’s Motion to File a Second Writ of Habeas Corpus in the federal court.

On December 18, 2013 a press conference called by the Campaign to Free Lorenzo Johnson protested these actions of the PA Attorney General and delivered petitions demanding dismissal of the charges and immediate freedom for Lorenzo. Tazza, Lorenzo’s wife, declared, “1,000 signatures means we are not in this alone…I won't stop until he’s home. There is nothing and no one that can stop me from fighting for what’s right.”

This is Lorenzo Johnson’s second fight for his innocence and freedom. In January 2012, after 16 years of court battles to prove his innocence, a federal appeals court held his sentence was based on insufficient evidence – a judicial acquittal. Lorenzo was freed from prison. But after a petition filed by the PA Attorney General the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated Lorenzo Johnson’s conviction and he was re-incarcerated to continue serving a life sentence without parole for a murder he did not commit.

This innocent man drove himself back to prison in June 2012—after less than five months of freedom—leaving his new wife and family, construction job and advocacy on behalf of others wrongfully convicted. The reason Lorenzo Johnson voluntarily returned to prison? Because he is innocent and fighting for full vindication.

In the words of Lorenzo Johnson, “A second is too long to be in prison when you are Innocent, so eighteen years … is Intolerable.”

Add your voices and demand again: Dismiss the charges against Lorenzo Johnson. Free Lorenzo NOW!

 SIGN LORENZO JOHNSON'S FREEDOM PETITION

CONTRIBUTE TO HELP TAZZA AND THE OTHER FAMILY MEMBERS VISIT LORENZO AND STAY IN CONTACT!


Write: Lorenzo Johnson
            DF 1036
            SCI Mahanoy
            301 Morea Rd.
            Frackville, PA 17932

 Email: Lorenzo Johnson through JPAY.com code:
              Lorenzo Johnson DF 1036 PA DOC


 www.FreeLorenzoJohnson.org

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U.S. Court of Appeals Rules Against Lorenzo Johnson’s
New Legal Challenge to His Frame-up Conviction!
Demand the PA Attorney General Dismiss the Charges!
Free Lorenzo Johnson, Now!

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit denied Lorenzo Johnson’s motion to file a Second Habeas Corpus Petition. The order contained the outrageous declaration that Johnson hadn’t made a “prima facie case” that he had new evidence of his innocence. This not only puts a legal obstacle in Johnson’s path as his fight for freedom makes its way (again) through the state and federal courts—but it undermines the newly filed Pennsylvania state appeal that is pending in the Court of Common Pleas.

Stripped of  “legalese,” the court’s October 15, 2013 order says Johnson’s new evidence was not brought into court soon enough—although it was the prosecution and police who withheld evidence and coerced witnesses into lying or not coming forward with the truth! This, despite over fifteen years and rounds of legal battles to uncover the evidence of government misconduct. This is a set-back for Lorenzo Johnson’s renewed fight for his freedom, but Johnson is even more determined as his PA state court appeal continues.

Increased public support and protest is needed. The fight for Lorenzo Johnson’s freedom is not only a fight for this courageous man and family. The fight for Lorenzo Johnson is also a fight for all the innocent others who have been framed and are sitting in the slow death of prison. The PA Attorney General is directly pursuing the charges against Lorenzo, despite the evidence of his innocence and the corruption of the police. Free Lorenzo Johnson, Now!

—Rachel Wolkenstein, Esq.
   October 25, 2013

For more on the federal court and PA state court legal filings.
Hear Mumia’s latest commentary, “Cat Cries”
Go to: www.FreeLorenzoJohnson.org for more information, to sign the petition, and how to help.
 
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 SAVE CCSF!


Two campaigns that need funds – Please donate!
Posted on August 25, 2013

Cartoon by Anthonty Mata for CCSF Guardsman

DOE CAMPAIGN
We are working to ensure that the ACCJC’s authority is not renewed by the Department of Education this December when they are up for their 5-year renewal. Our campaign made it possible for over 50 Third Party Comments to be sent to the DOE re: the ACCJC. Our next step in this campaign is to send a delegation from CCSF to Washington, D.C. to give oral comments at the hearing on December 12th. We expect to have an array of forces aligned on the other side who have much more money and resources than we do.
So please support this effort to get ACCJC authority revoked!

LEGAL CAMPAIGN
Save CCSF members have been meeting with Attorney Dan Siegel since last May to explore legal avenues to fight the ACCJC. After much consideration, and consultation with AFT 2121’s attorney as well as the SF City Attorney’s office, Dan has come up with a legal strategy that is complimentary to what is already being pursued. In fact, AFT 2121’s attorney is encouraging us to go forward.
The total costs of pursuing this (depositions, etc.) will be substantially more than $15,000. However, Dan is willing to do it for a fixed fee of $15,000. He will not expect a retainer, i.e. payment in advance, but we should start payments ASAP. If we win the ACCJC will have to pay our costs.

PLEASE HELP BOTH OF THESE IMPORTANT EFFORTS!
Checks can be made out to Save CCSF Coalition with “legal” in the memo line and sent to:
Save CCSF Coalition
2132 Prince St.
Berkeley, CA 94705
Or you may donate online:  http://www.gofundme.com/4841ns

http://www.saveccsf.org/
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16 Years in Solitary Confinement Is Like a "Living Tomb"

American Civil Liberties Union petition to end long-term solitary confinement:
California Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard: We stand with the prisoners on hunger strike. We urge you to comply with the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons 2006 recommendations regarding an end to long-term solitary confinement.

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
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What you Didn't know about NYPD's Stop and Frisk program !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rfJHx0Gj6ys#at=990

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Egypt: The Next President -- a little Egyptian boy speaks his remarkable mind!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeDm2PrNV1I

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Wealth Inequality in America

[This is a must see to believe video...bw]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QPKKQnijnsM

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Read the transcription of hero Bradley Manning's 35-page statement explaining why he leaked "state secrets" to WikiLeaks.

March 1, 2013

Alternet

The statement was read by Pfc. Bradley Manning at a providence inquiry for his formal plea of guilty to one specification as charged and nine specifications for lesser included offenses. He pled not guilty to 12 other specifications. This rush transcript was taken by journalist Alexa O'Brien at Thursday's pretrial hearing and first appeared on Salon.com.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/bradley-mannings-surprising-statement-court-details-why-he-made-his-historic?akid=10129.229473.UZvQfK&rd=1&src=newsletter802922&t=7

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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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WITNESS GAZA

http://www.witnessgaza.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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Prison vs School: The Tour 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogmtAQlp9HI


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Checkpoint - Jasiri X 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq6Y6LSjulU

Published on Jan 28, 2014
"Checkpoint" is based on the oppression and discrimination Jasiri X witnessed firsthand during his recent trip to Palestine and Israel "Checkpoint" is produced by Agent of Change, and directed by Haute Muslim. Download "Checkpoint" at https://jasirix.bandcamp.com/track/ch....

Follow Jasiri X at https://twitter.com/jasiri_x

 LYRICS
Journal of the hard times tales from the dark side
Evidence of the settlements on my hard drive
Man I swear my heart died at the end of that car ride
When I saw that checkpoint welcome to apartheid
Soldiers wear military green at the checkpoint
Automatic guns that's machine at the checkpoint
Tavors not m16s at the checkpoint
Fingers on the trigger you'll get leaned at the checkpoint
Little children grown adults or teens at the checkpoint
All ya papers better be clean at the checkpoint
You gotta but your finger on the screen at the checkpoint
And pray that red light turns green at the check point

 If Martin Luther King had a dream of the checkpoint
He wake with loud screams from the scenes at the checkpoint
It's Malcolm X by any means at the check point
Imagine if you daily routine was the checkpoint

 Separation walls that's surrounding the checkpoint
On top is barbwire like a crown on the checkpoint
Better have ya permits if your found at the checkpoint
Gunmen on the tower aiming down at the checkpoint
The idea is to keep you in fear of the checkpoint
You enter through the cage in the rear of the checkpoint
It feels like prison on a tier at the check point
I'd rather be anywhere but here at this checkpoint
Nelson Mandela wasn't blind to the check point
He stood for free Palestine not a check point
Support BDS don't give a dime to the checkpoint
This is international crime at the checkpoint
Arabs get treated like dogs at the checkpoint
Cause discrimination is the law at the checkpoint
Criminalized without a cause at the checkpoint
I'm just telling you what I saw at the checkpoint
Soldiers got bad attitudes at the checkpoint
Condescending and real rude at the checkpoint
Don't look em in they eyes when they move at the checkpoint
They might strip a man or woman nude at the checkpoint
Soldiers might blow you out of ya shoes at the checkpoint
Gas you up and then light the fuse at the checkpoint
Everyday you stand to be accused at the checkpoint
Each time your life you could lose at the checkpoint

 If Martin Luther King had a dream of the checkpoint
He wake with loud screams from the scenes at the checkpoint
It's Malcolm X by any means at the check point
Imagine if you daily routine was the checkpoint

 At the airport in Tel Aviv is a checkpoint
They pulled over our taxi at the checkpoint
Passport visa ID at the checkpoint
Soldiers going all through my things at the checkpoint
Said I was high risk security at the checkpoint
Because of the oppression I see at the checkpoint
Occupation in the 3rd degree at the checkpoint
All a nigga wanna do is leave fuck a checkpoint

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Exceptional art from the streets of Oakland:

Oakland Street Dancing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQRRnAhmB58

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqH9s5mwTEY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atyTZ8prhCg

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NYC RESTAURANT WORKERS DANCE & SING FOR A WAGE HIKE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_s8e1R6rG8&feature=player_embedded

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On Gun Control, Martin Luther King, the Deacons of Defense and the history of Black Liberation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzYKisvBN1o&feature=player_embedded

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Fukushima Never Again

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU-Z4VLDGxU

"Fukushima, Never Again" tells the story of the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdowns in north east Japan in March of 2011 and exposes the cover-up by Tepco and the Japanese government.

This is the first film that interviews the Mothers Of Fukushima, nuclear power experts and trade unionists who are fighting for justice and the protection of the children and the people of Japan and the world. The residents and citizens were forced to buy their own geiger counters and radiation dosimeters in order to test their communities to find out if they were in danger.

The government said contaminated soil in children's school grounds was safe and then

when the people found out it was contaminated and removed the top soil, the government and TEPCO refused to remove it from the school grounds.

It also relays how the nuclear energy program for "peaceful atoms" was brought to Japan under the auspices of the US military occupation and also the criminal cover-up of the safety dangers of the plant by TEPCO and GE management which built the plant in Fukushima. It also interviews Kei Sugaoka, the GE nulcear plant inspector from the bay area who exposed cover-ups in the safety at the Fukushima plant and was retaliated against by GE. This documentary allows the voices of the people and workers to speak out about the reality of the disaster and what this means not only for the people of Japan but the people of the world as the US government and nuclear industry continue to push for more new plants and government subsidies. This film breaks

the information blockade story line of the corporate media in Japan, the US and around the world that Fukushima is over.

Production Of Labor Video Project

P.O. Box 720027

San Francisco, CA 94172

www.laborvideo.org

lvpsf@laborvideo.org

For information on obtaining the video go to:

www.fukushimaneveragain.com

(415)282-1908


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1000 year of war through the world

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiG8neU4_bs&feature=share

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Anatomy of a Massacre - Afganistan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6BnRc11aug&feature=player_embedded

Afghans accuse multiple soldiers of pre-meditated murder

To see more go to http://www.youtube.com/user/journeymanpictures

Follow us on Facebook (http://goo.gl/YRw42) or Twitter

(http://www.twitter.com/journeymanvod)

The recent massacre of 17 civilians by a rogue US soldier has been shrouded in

mystery. But through unprecedented access to those involved, this report

confronts the accusations that Bales didn't act alone.

"They came into my room and they killed my family". Stories like this are common

amongst the survivors in Aklozai and Najiban. As are the shocking accusations

that Sergeant Bales was not acting alone. Even President Karzai has announced

"one man can not do that". Chief investigator, General Karimi, is suspicious

that despite being fully armed, Bales freely left his base without raising

alarm. "How come he leaves at night and nobody is aware? Every time we have

weapon accountability and personal accountability." These are just a few of the

questions the American army and government are yet to answer. One thing however

is very clear, the massacre has unleashed a wave of grief and outrage which

means relations in Kandahar will be tense for years to come: "If I could lay my

hands on those infidels, I would rip them apart with my bare hands."

A Film By SBS

Distributed By Journeyman Pictures

April 2012

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Photo of George Zimmerman, in 2005 photo, left, and in a more recent photo.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/02/us/the-events-leading-to-the-sooti\

ng-of-trayvon-martin.html?hp

SPD Security Cams.wmv

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WWDNbQUgm4&feature=player_embedded

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Kids being put on buses and transported from school to "alternate locations" in

Terror Drills

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFia_w8adWQ

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Private prisons,

a recession resistant investment opportunity

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGLDOxx9Vg

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Attack Dogs used on a High School Walkout in MD, Four Students Charged With

"Thought Crimes"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wafMaML17w

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

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

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Rep News 12: Yes We Kony

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68GbzIkYdc8

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

The New Black by The Mavrix - Official Music Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4rLfja8488

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Japan One Year Later

http://www.onlineschools.org/japan-one-year-later/

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

The CIA's Heart Attack Gun

http://www.brasschecktv.com/videos/assassination-studies/the-cias-heart-attack-g\

un-.html

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

The Invisible American Workforce

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/5/new_expos_tracks_alec_private_prison

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

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.


*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

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

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

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.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

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

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVGqE726OAo&feature=player_embedded

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*


School police increasingly arresting American students?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl-efNBvjUU&feature=player_embedded

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

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

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

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/

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*


We Are The People Who Will Save Our Schools

YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFAOJsBxAxY

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

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

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

HALLELUJAH CORPORATIONS (revised edition).mov

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws0WSNRpy3g

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

ONE OF THE GREATEST POSTS ON YOUTUBE SO FAR!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8C-qIgbP9o&feature=share&mid=552

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

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

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

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

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

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

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

FREE THE CUBAN FIVE!

http://www.thecuban5.org/wordpress/index.php

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmS4kHC_OlY&feature=player_embedded

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

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


*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

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

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Coal Ash: One Valley's Tale

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E7h-DNvwx4&feature=player_embedded

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

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