Sunday, October 25, 2015

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2015






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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter

Table of Contents:

A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS

B. ARTICLES IN FULL


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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS



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California Speaking Tour of David Sheen, Oct. 25-29, 2015

The Bullet, the Ballot, and the Boycott: Racism in Israel Today


Oct. 21-29, 2015, independent Canadian-Israeli journalist and filmmaker David Sheen will present the Bullet, the Ballot & the Boycott at venues in California.  He will cover Israeli incitement to racist violence, the focus of his on-the-ground reporting for the past five years.

David will describe how top Israeli political and religious leaders use dehumanizing discourse to inspire vigilante attacks toward Palestinians, Africans and other non-Jews, especially during the 2014 assault on the Gaza Strip.  It will include material that Sheen presented at the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in Brussels, as well as new information never before been made public in English.

David's speaking schedule is as follows.  To make arrangements for David to come to your event or to add the name of your organization as a tour endorser, please call 510-236-4250 or write to us at solidarity@ism-norcal.org.


Sun., Oct. 25
2:00pm
Uptown Body & Fender, 401 26th St., Oakland
ISM-NorCal and JVP-Bay Area
510-236-4250, ism-norcal.org
$10 suggested donation


Thu., Oct. 29
TBA
The Markaz, 5998 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles
The Markaz and JVP-LA
www.themarkaz.org 310.657.5511


www.ism-norcal.org
ISM Northern California | Supporting Palestinian-led non...
Northern California branch of the Palestinian-led movement committed to resisting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land using nonviolent, direct-action methods...

View on www.ism-norcal.org
Tour organizer: ISM Support Group in Northern California


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International Committee for Peace, Justice and Dignity

AN EVENING OF SOLIDARITY WITH THE CUBAN PEOPLE

Featuring Kenia Serrano Puig, President of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP)  

Friday November 13, 7:30pm

East Bay Center for the Performing Arts

339 11th Street, Richmond CA 94801-3105

Doors Open 6:30pm

$10-20 Donation at the Door

(nobody turned away for lack of funds)

Students and children free admission


This will be a unique opportunity to hear from the Cuban perspective about the new stage of U.S.-Cuba relations and the role that the U.S. Cuba solidarity movement can play in ending the U.S. blockade.

PROGRAM:

Keynote Speaker, Kenia Serrano Puig, President of ICAP

Welcome by Gayle McLaughlin, Richmond City Council Member
Dr. Laura Gomez, recently graduated from the Latin America School of Medicine (ELAM)
Leima Martinez, ICAP North America Division
Walter Turner, KPFA Host of Africa Today 

Musical performance by a local group

ICAP is a social organization founded on December 30, 1960 for the purpose of promoting and explaining to the peoples of the world the relations of solidarity that sparked the Cuban Revolution. ICAP is the vehicle to reach around the globe to people who are in solidarity with Cuba. ICAP is that interface that strengthens the network of solidarity, while representing the Cuban people, and delivering a strong message that solidarity not only benefits Cuba but the peoples of the world who are aspiring to promote the idea that a better world is possible for all.

Initiated by the International Committee for Peace, Justice and Dignity

Co-sponsors: Global Exchange, Richmond-Regla Sister City Association, Berkeley-Palma Soriano Sister City Association.


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Commute Kevin Cooper's Death Sentence

Sign the Petition:
http://www.savekevincooper.org/pages/petition.php


Urge Gov. Jerry Brown to commute Kevin Cooper's death sentence. Cooper has always maintained his innocence of the 1983 quadruple murder of which he was convicted. In 2009, five federal judges signed a dissenting opinion warning that the State of California "may be about to execute an innocent man." Having exhausted his appeals in the US courts, Kevin Cooper's lawyers have turned to the Inter American Commission on Human Rights to seek remedy for what they maintain is his wrongful conviction, and the inadequate trial representation, prosecutorial misconduct and racial discrimination which have marked the case. Amnesty International opposes all executions, unconditionally.

"The State of California may be about to execute an innocent man." - Judge William A. Fletcher, 2009 dissenting opinion on Kevin Cooper's case

Kevin Cooper has been on death row in California for more than thirty years.

In 1985, Cooper was convicted of the murder of a family and their house guest in Chino Hills. Sentenced to death, Cooper's trial took place in an atmosphere of racial hatred — for example, an effigy of a monkey in a noose with a sign reading "Hang the N*****!" was hung outside the venue of his preliminary hearing.

Take action to see that Kevin Cooper's death sentence is commuted immediately.

Cooper has consistently maintained his innocence.

Following his trial, five federal judges said: "There is no way to say this politely. The district court failed to provide Cooper a fair hearing."

Since 2004, a dozen federal appellate judges have indicated their doubts about his guilt.

Tell California authorities: The death penalty carries the risk of irrevocable error. Kevin Cooper's sentence must be commuted.

In 2009, Cooper came just eight hours shy of being executed for a crime that he may not have committed. Stand with me today in reminding the state of California that the death penalty is irreversible — Kevin Cooper's sentence must be commuted immediately.

In solidarity,

James Clark
Senior Death Penalty Campaigner
Amnesty International USA

News Updates

  • Death Row Stories
    Kevin Cooper's case will be the subject of a new episode of CNN's "Death Row Stories" airing on Sunday, July 26 at 7 p.m. PDT. The program will be repeated at 10 p.m. PDT. The episode, created by executive producers Robert Redford and Alex Gibney, will explore how Kevin Cooper was framed by the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department and District Attorney.Viewers on the east coast can see the program at 10 p.m. EDT and it will be rebroadcast at 1 a.m. EDT on July 27. Viewers in the Central Time zone can see it at 9 p.m. and midnight CDT. Viewers in the Mountain Time zone can see it at 8 p.m. and ll p.m MDT. It will be aired on CNN again during the following week and will also be able to be viewed on CNN's "Death Row Stories" website.
Kevin Cooper: An Innocent Victim of Racist Frame-Up
- from the Fact Sheet at: www.freekevincooper.org
 
Kevin Cooper is an African-American man who was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in 1985 for the gruesome murders of a white family in Chino Hills, California: Doug and Peggy Ryen and their daughter Jessica and their house- guest Christopher Hughes. The Ryens' 8 year old son Josh, also attacked, was left for dead but survived.

Convicted in an atmosphere of racial hatred in San Bernardino County CA, Kevin Cooper remains under a threat of imminent execution in San Quentin.  He has never received a fair hearing on his claim of innocence.  In a dissenting opinion in 2009, five federal judges of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals signed a 82 page dissenting opinion that begins: "The State of California may be about to execute an innocent man." 565 F.3d 581.

There is significant evidence that exonerates Mr. Cooper and points toward other suspects:

  The coroner who investigated the Ryen murders concluded that the murders took four minutes at most and that the murder weapons were a hatchet, a long knife, an ice pick and perhaps a second knife. How could a single person, in four or fewer minutes, wield three or four weapons, and inflict over 140 wounds on five people, two of whom were adults (including a 200 pound ex-marine) who had loaded weapons near their bedsides?

  The sole surviving victim of the murders, Josh Ryen, told police and hospital staff within hours of the murders that the culprits were "three white men." Josh Ryen repeated this statement in the days following the crimes. When he twice saw Mr. Cooper's picture on TV as the suspected attacker, Josh Ryen said "that's not the man who did it."

  Josh Ryen's description of the killers was corroborated by two witnesses who were driving near the Ryens' home the night of the murders. They reported seeing three white men in a station wagon matching the description of the Ryens' car speeding away from the direction of the Ryens' home.

  These descriptions were corroborated by testimony of several employees and patrons of a bar close to the Ryens' home, who saw three white men enter the bar around midnight the night of the murders, two of whom were covered in blood, and one of whom was wearing coveralls.

  The identity of the real killers was further corroborated by a woman who, shortly after the murders were discovered, alerted the sheriff's department that her boyfriend, a convicted murderer, left blood-spattered coveralls at her home the night of the murders. She also reported that her boyfriend had been wearing a tan t-shirt matching a tan t-shirt with Doug Ryen's blood on it recovered near the bar. She also reported that her boyfriend owned a hatchet matching the one recovered near the scene of the crime, which she noted was missing in the days following the murders; it never reappeared; further, her sister saw that boyfriend and two other white men in a vehicle that could have been the Ryens' car on the night of the murders.

Lacking a motive to ascribe to Mr. Cooper for the crimes, the prosecution claimed that Mr. Cooper, who had earlier walked away from custody at a minimum security prison, stole the Ryens' car to escape to Mexico. But the Ryens had left the keys in both their cars (which were parked in the driveway), so there was no need to kill them to steal their car. The prosecution also claimed that Mr. Cooper needed money, but money and credit cards were found untouched and in plain sight at the murder scene.

The jury in 1985 deliberated for seven days before finding Mr. Cooper guilty. One juror later said that if there had been one less piece of evidence, the jury would not have voted to convict.

The evidence the prosecution presented at trial tying Mr. Cooper to the crime scene has all been discredited…         (Continue reading this document at: http://www.savekevincooper.org/_new_freekevincooperdotorg/TEST/Scripts/DataLibraries/upload/KC_FactSheet_2014.pdf)

     This message from the Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal. July 2015

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Free Albert Woodfox!

On June 8, 2015 a federal judge granted Louisiana prisoner Albert Woodfox unconditional release. Albert's conviction had already been overturned three times - most recently in 2013 - yet every time the state has appealed.

Today, Albert is still behind bars after spending four decades in cruel, unjust solitary confinement. He believes that he and fellow prisoners, Herman Wallace and Robert King, were first placed in solitary confinement in retaliation for their activism. All three men were members of the Black Panther Party. Together, they came to be known as the Angola 3.

It is time for the State of Louisiana to stop standing in the way of justice. Call on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal to ensure Albert's cruel and unjust confinement is not his legacy. Learn more

http://act.amnestyusa.org/ea-action/action?ea.client.id=1839&ea.campaign.id=35593&ea.tracking.id=Country_USA~MessagingCategory_PrisonersandPeopleatRisk&ac=W1506EAIAR2&ea.url.id=414689&forwarded=true

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Amnesty for all those arrested demanding justice for Freddie Gray!

 

Amnesty for ALL those arrested
demanding justice for Freddie Gray!

Sign and distribute the petition to drop the charges!
Spread this effort with #Amnesty4Baltimore

"A riot is the language of the unheard"
— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

An estimated 300 people have been arrested in Baltimore in the last two weeks. Many have been brutalized, beaten and pepper-sprayed by police in the streets, and held for days in inhumane conditions. Those arrested include journalists, medics and legal observers.

One individual arrested for property destruction of a police vehicle is now facing life in prison and is being held on $500,000 bail. That's $150,000 more than the officer charged with the murder of Freddie Gray.  

The legal system has made it clear that they care more about broken windows than broken necks; more about a CVS than the lives of Baltimore's Black residents.

They showed no hesitation in arresting Baltimore's protesters and rebels, and sending in the National Guard, but took 19 days to put a single one of the killer cops in handcuffs. This was the outrageous double standard that led to the Baltimore Uprising.

 Sign the petition to drop the charges on all who have been arrested.

Petition to Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake

Download PDF of Petition 

http://www.answercoalition.org/amnesty_for_all_those_arrested_demanding_justice_for_freddie_gray?utm_campaign=baltimore_amn1&utm_medium=email&utm_source=answercoalition

Mayor Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake
City Hall, Room 250,
100 North Holliday St.,
Baltimore, MD 21202

Dear Mayor Rawlings-Blake:

I stand in solidarity with those in Baltimore who are demanding that all charges be dropped against those who rose up against racism, police brutality, oppressive social conditions and delay of justice in the case of Freddie Gray. The whole world now recognizes that were it not for this powerful grassroots movement, in all its forms, there would be no indictment.

It is an outrage that peaceful protesters have been brutalized, beaten and pepper-sprayed by police in the streets, and held for days in inhumane conditions. Those arrested include journalists and legal observers.

Even the youth who are charged with property destruction and looting should be given an amnesty. There is no reason a teenager -- provoked by racists and justifiably angry -- should be facing life in prison for breaking the windows of a police car.

The City of Baltimore should work to rectify the conditions that led to this Uprising, rather than criminalizing those who took action in response to those conditions. Drop the charges now!

Sincerely,
[add your name below]

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CANCEL ALL STUDENT DEBT!

Sign the Petition:

http://cancelallstudentdebt.com/?code=kos


Dear President Obama, Senators, and Members of Congress:


Americans now owe $1.3 trillion in student debt. Eighty-six percent of that money is owed to the United States government. This is a crushing burden for more than 40 million Americans and their families.

I urge you to take immediate action to forgive all student debt, public and private.

American Federation of Teachers
Campaign for America's Future
Courage Campaign
Daily Kos
Democracy for America
LeftAction
Project Springboard
RH Reality Check
RootsAction
Student Debt Crisis
The Nation
Working Families



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MUMIA'S FINAL APPEAL FOR HEALTHCARE DENIED!

Last night Mumia got notice that the final appeal of his PA Department of Corrections grievance was denied. Listen to his reaction here.

This denial comes on top of the magistrate Judge’s proposal to deny Mumia's right to treatment last week.

Remember-- one of the reasons the Judge gave was her claim that Mumia had not "exhausted his administrative remedies" or received a final denial of his request for care. Now he has received that denial.

We know that withholding Mumia’s care is immoral and illegal. We are confident that we will win this battle in court- but we can’t do it alone.





We have 3 days left to raise $2,948 to support Mumia’s legal team in securing his right to hepatitis C treatment!

If you have already joined us, we’re inviting you to ask one friend to match your gift. We need about 50 more freedom fighters to join us to reach our goal— and we want you to make that happen with us!

If you haven’t given yet- now is the time to make a contribution for Mumia. Will you join us?

Health care is a human right- for Mumia, and for all prisoners. Let's prove it.‪ #freemumia #fight4mumia

Reply directly to this email to respond to the campaign owner, Prison Radio . Visit the campaign page to view all comments and updates for this project.

Help spread the word about the campaign!
PRISONRADIO.ORG

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Campaign to Free Lorenzo Johnson
 
Updates from the New "Team Free Lorenzo Johnson":
Thank you all for your relentless effort in the fight against wrongful convictions and your determination to stand behind Lorenzo.

To garner even more support for Lorenzo Johnson, we have been hard at work updating the website and developing an even more formidable and dedicated team. Please take a moment to visit the new site here.

During the month of July, Lorenzo wrote two new articles for The Huffington Post titled "When Prosecutors Deny Justice for the Innocent," and "Hurry Up and Wait for Justice: The Struggle of Innocent Prisoners." In these articles, Lorenzo discusses the flaws in the criminal justice system, which he deems is a "serious problem in this country."

Lastly, Lorenzo has a message to you all.

A Letter from Lorenzo:

July 23, 2015
Dauphin County Prison
Harrisburg, PA

Dear Supporters,

I hope all is well with everyone and your families. As for myself, I'm still on my journey in pursuit of my vindication. Sorry for my website being shut down for a couple of weeks. It was being transferred to a new provider and management. I'm back and will do my best to keep everything up to speed with what's taking place.

I would like to thank ALL of my loyal supporters in the U.S. and in the MANY different counties that have signed on to support my innocence. Thanks for all of the letters, emails, photos, etc. Like I always say, I get energy to carry on and inspiration hearing form you, please stay engaged in my struggle.

As of this moment, nothing has changed, but – the continued delay tactics are constantly being used by my prosecutor, Deputy Attorney General William Stoycos. With the mounting of evidence that supports my innocence and police and prosecution misconduct claims that is steadily piling up, you would think that I would be having a couple of evidentiary hearings on my actual innocence appeal that have been pending since August 5, 2013.

At the time of this writing, I've been moved from SCI-Mahanoy to Dauphin County Prison and locked down for 23 hours and 40 minutes a day. In the 20 minutes I get to come out, I get to take a shower and make a short call. Prosecutor Stoycos had me moved so I can be a witness in his attempt to have my codefendant Corey Walker's attorney removed from representing him. How dare he call into question an attorney who is seeking justice for her client, when prosecutor Stoycos himself violated multiple constitutional rights of mine and Mr. Walker, that led to us being in prison for 20 years and counting.

Prosecutor Stoycos is continuously abusing his power and his endless resources he has at his disposal. He is not tough on crime, he's tough on Innocent Prisoners. Prosecutor Stoycos is doing everything in his power to prevent justice from taking place. I encourage everyone to continue to speak out against my nightmare, invite others to get involved by going to my website and signing my Freedom Petition and whatever else they're willing to do.

On a positive note, I just enrolled in warehouse management trade and started on July 13th. Unfortunately, you're only allowed to miss a couple of days and Prosecutor Stoycos had me temporarily transferred on July 14th … It's extremely hard on Lifers to get into these trades due to the fact that Lifers are placed at the back of the list of ALL vocational classes. I try to further my education every chance I get, so when I do come home, I will be certified in different work.

The month of the hearing has come and left, without me being brought to the courthouse … I'm one of MANY innocent prisoners who endures this non-stop madness in our pursuit of Justice and Freedom. Now that my webpage is almost caught up to speed, I promise prompt updates and as everyone knows that contacted me directly, I personally reply to those in the states and out of the country. For those who can make a financial contribution, everything counts. Take care and let's continue to fight until we achieve Freedom, Justice, and Equality for all innocent prisoners.

"The Pain Within"

Free the Innocent
Lorenzo "Cat" Johnson

[Note: Lorenzo has since been transferred back to SCI Mahanoy and can be reached at his usual address.]

Thank you all for reading this message and please take the time to visit the new website and contribute to Lorenzo's campaign for freedom!

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

 Email: Through JPay using the code:
              Lorenzo Johnson DF 1036 PA DOC
                                     or
              Directly at LorenzoJohnson17932@gmail.com

Have a wonderful day!
- The Team to Free Lorenzo Johnson


freelorenzojohnson.org

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 Join the Fight to Free Rev. Pinkney!

Click HERE to view in browser

http://www.iacenter.org/prisoners/freepinkney-1-28-15/


On December 15, 2014 the Rev. Edward Pinkney of Benton Harbor, Michigan was thrown into prison for 2.5 to 10 years. This 66-year-old leading African American activist was tried and convicted in front of an all-white jury and racist white judge and prosecutor for supposedly altering 5 dates on a recall petition against the mayor of Benton Harbor.

The prosecutor, with the judge's approval, repeatedly told the jury "you don't need evidence to convict Mr. Pinkney." And ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE WAS EVER PRESENTED THAT TIED REV. PINKNEY TO THE 'ALTERED' PETITIONS. Rev. Pinkney was immediately led away in handcuffs and thrown into Jackson Prison.

This is an outrageous charge. It is an outrageous conviction. It is an even more outrageous sentence! It must be appealed.

With your help supporters need to raise $20,000 for Rev. Pinkney's appeal.

Checks can be made out to BANCO (Black Autonomy Network Community Organization). This is the organization founded by Rev. Pinkney.  Mail them to: Mrs. Dorothy Pinkney, 1940 Union Street, Benton Harbor, MI 49022.

Donations can be accepted on-line at bhbanco.org – press the donate button.

For information on the decade long campaign to destroy Rev. Pinkney go to bhbanco.org and workers.org(search "Pinkney").

We urge your support to the efforts to Free Rev. Pinkney!Ramsey Clark – Former U.S. attorney general,
Cynthia McKinney – Former member of U.S. Congress,
Lynne Stewart – Former political prisoner and human rights attorney
Ralph Poynter – New Abolitionist Movement,
Abayomi Azikiwe – Editor, Pan-African News Wire<
Larry Holmes – Peoples Power Assembly,
David Sole – Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice
Sara Flounders – International Action Center

MESSAGE FROM REV. PINKNEY

I am now in Marquette prison over 15 hours from wife and family, sitting in prison for a crime that was never committed. Judge Schrock and Mike Sepic both admitted there was no evidence against me but now I sit in prison facing 30 months. Schrock actually stated that he wanted to make an example out of me. (to scare Benton Harbor residents even more...) ONLY IN AMERICA. I now have an army to help fight Berrien County. When I arrived at Jackson state prison on Dec. 15, I met several hundred people from Detroit, Flint, Kalamazoo, and Grand Rapids. Some people recognized me. There was an outstanding amount of support given by the prison inmates. When I was transported to Marquette Prison it took 2 days. The prisoners knew who I was. One of the guards looked me up on the internet and said, "who would believe Berrien County is this racist."

Background to Campaign to free Rev. Pinkney

Michigan political prisoner the Rev. Edward Pinkney is a victim of racist injustice. He was sentenced to 30 months to 10 years for supposedly changing the dates on 5 signatures on a petition to recall Benton Harbor Mayor James Hightower.

No material or circumstantial evidence was presented at the trial that would implicate Pinkney in the purported5 felonies. Many believe that Pinkney, a Berrien County activist and leader of the Black Autonomy Network Community Organization (BANCO), is being punished by local authorities for opposing the corporate plans of Whirlpool Corp, headquartered in Benton Harbor, Michigan.

In 2012, Pinkney and BANCO led an "Occupy the PGA [Professional Golfers' Association of America]" demonstration against a world-renowned golf tournament held at the newly created Jack Nicklaus Signature Golf Course on the shoreline of Lake Michigan. The course was carved out of Jean Klock Park, which had been donated to the city of Benton Harbor decades ago.

Berrien County officials were determined to defeat the recall campaign against Mayor Hightower, who opposed a program that would have taxed local corporations in order to create jobs and improve conditions in Benton Harbor, a majority African-American municipality. Like other Michigan cities, it has been devastated by widespread poverty and unemployment.

The Benton Harbor corporate power structure has used similar fraudulent charges to stop past efforts to recall or vote out of office the racist white officials, from mayor, judges, prosecutors in a majority Black city. Rev Pinkney who always quotes scripture, as many Christian ministers do, was even convicted for quoting scripture in a newspaper column. This outrageous conviction was overturned on appeal. We must do this again!

To sign the petition in support of the Rev. Edward Pinkney, log on to: tinyurl.com/ps4lwyn.

Contributions for Rev. Pinkney's defense can be sent to BANCO at Mrs Dorothy Pinkney, 1940 Union St., Benton Harbor, MI 49022

Or you can donate on-line at bhbanco.org.

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COURAGE TO RESIST

 http://couragetoresist.org/

New Action--write letters to DoD officials requesting clemency for Chelsea!

Secretary of the Army John McHugh

President Obama has delegated review of Chelsea Manning's clemency appeal to individuals within the Department of Defense.

Please write them to express your support for heroic WikiLeaks' whistle-blower former US Army intelligence analyst PFC Chelsea Manning's release from military prison.

It is important that each of these authorities realize the wide support that Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning enjoys worldwide. They need to be reminded that millions understand that Manning is a political prisoner, imprisoned for following her conscience. While it is highly unlikely that any of these individuals would independently move to release Manning, a reduction in Manning's outrageous 35-year prison sentence is a possibility at this stage.

Take action TODAY – Write letters supporting Chelsea's clemency petition to the following DoD authorities:

Secretary of the Army John McHugh

101 Army Pentagon

Washington, DC 20310-0101

The Judge Advocate General

2200 Army Pentagon

Washington, DC 20310-2200

Army Clemency and Parole Board

251 18th St, Suite 385

Arlington, VA 22202-3532

Directorate of Inmate Administration

Attn: Boards Branch

U.S. Disciplinary Barracks

1301 N. Warehouse Road

Fort Leavenworth, KS 66027-2304

Suggestions for letters send to DoD officials:

The letter should focus on your support for Chelsea Manning, and especially why you believe justice will be served if Chelsea Manning's sentence is reduced.  The letter should NOT be anti-military as this will be unlikely to help.

A suggested message: "Chelsea Manning has been punished enough for violating military regulations in the course of being true to her conscience.  I urge you to use your authorityto reduce Pvt. Manning's sentence to time served."  Beyond that general message, feel free to personalize the details as to why you believe Chelsea deserves clemency.

Consider composing your letter on personalized letterhead -you can create this yourself (here are templates and some tips for doing that).

A comment on this post will NOT be seen by DoD authorities–please send your letters to the addresses above

This clemency petition is separate from Chelsea Manning's upcoming appeal before the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals next year, where Manning's new attorney Nancy Hollander will have an opportunity to highlight the prosecution's—and the trial judge's—misconduct during last year's trial at Ft. Meade, Maryland.

Help us continue to cover 100% of Chelsea's legal fees at this critical stage!


Courage to Resist
484 Lake Park Ave. #41
Oakland, CA 94610
510-488-3559
couragetoresist.org


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B. ARTICLES IN FULL


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1) How Texas Teaches History
By ELLEN BRESLER ROCKMORE

A TEXAS high school student and his mother recently called attention to a curious line in a geography textbook: a description of the Atlantic slave trade as bringing “millions of workers” to plantations in the American South. McGraw-Hill Education, the publisher of the textbook, has since acknowledged that the term “workers” was a misnomer.The company’s chief executive also promised to revise the textbook so that its digital version as well as its next edition would more accurately describe the forced migration and enslavement of Africans. In the meantime, the company is also offering to send stickers to cover the passage.

But it will take more than that to fix the way slavery is taught in Texas textbooks. In 2010, the Texas Board of Education approved a social studies curriculum that promotes capitalism and Republican political philosophies. The curriculum guidelines prompted many concerns, including that new textbooks would downplay slavery as the cause of the Civil War.

This fall, five million public school students in Texas began using the textbooks based on the new guidelines. And some of these books distort history not through word choices but through a tool we often think of as apolitical: grammar.

In September, Bobby Finger of the website Jezebel obtained and published some excerpts from the new books, showing much of what is objectionable about their content. The books play down the horror of slavery and even seem to claim that it had an upside. This upside took the form of a distinctive African-American culture, in which family was central, Christianity provided “hope,” folk tales expressed “joy” and community dances were important social events.

But it is not only the substance of the passages that is a problem. It is also their form. The writers’ decisions about how to construct sentences, about what the subject of the sentence will be, about whether the verb will be active or passive, shape the message that slavery was not all that bad.

I teach freshman writing at Dartmouth College. My colleagues and I consistently try to convey to our students the importance of clear writing. Among the guiding principles of clear writing are these: Whenever possible, use human subjects, not abstract nouns; use active verbs, not passive. We don’t want our students to write, “Torture was used,” because that sentence obscures who was torturing whom.

In the excerpts published by Jezebel, the Texas textbooks employ all the principles of good, strong, clear writing when talking about the “upside” of slavery. But when writing about the brutality of slavery, the writers use all the tricks of obfuscation. You can see all this at play in the following passage from a textbook, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, called Texas United States History:

Some slaves reported that their masters treated them kindly. To protect their investment, some slaveholders provided adequate food and clothing for their slaves. However, severe treatment was very common. Whippings, brandings, and even worse torture were all part of American slavery.

Notice how in the first two sentences, the “slavery wasn’t that bad” sentences, the main subject of each clause is a person: slaves, masters, slaveholders. What those people, especially the slave owners, are doing is clear: They are treating their slaves kindly; they are providing adequate food and clothing. But after those two sentences there is a change, not just in the writers’ outlook on slavery but also in their sentence construction. There are no people in the last two sentences, only nouns. Yes, there is severe treatment, whippings, brandings and torture. And yes, those are all bad things. But where are the slave owners who were actually doing the whipping and branding and torturing? And where are the slaves who were whipped, branded and tortured? They are nowhere to be found in the sentence.

In another passage, slave owners and their institutionalized cruelty are similarly absent: “Families were often broken apart when a family member was sold to another owner.”

Note the use of the passive voice in the verbs “were broken apart” and “was sold.” If the sentence had been written according to the principles of good draftsmanship, it would have looked like this: Slave owners often broke slave families apart by selling a family member to another owner. A bit more powerful, no? Through grammatical manipulation, the textbook authors obscure the role of slave owners in the institution of slavery.

It may appear at first glance that the authors do a better job of focusing on the actions of slaves. After all, there are many sentences in which “slaves” are the subjects, the main characters in their own narrative. But what are the verbs in those sentences? Are the slaves suffering? No, in the sentences that feature slaves as the subject, as the main actors in the sentence, the slaves are contributing their agricultural knowledge to the growing Southern economy; they are singing songs and telling folk tales; they are expressing themselves through art and dance.

There are no sentences, in these excerpts, anyway, in which slaves are doing what slaves actually did: toiling relentlessly, without remuneration or reprieve, constantly subject to confinement, corporal punishment and death.

The textbook publishers were put in a difficult position. They had to teach history to Texas’ children without challenging conservative political views that are at odds with history. In doing so, they made many grammatical choices. Though we don’t always recognize it, grammatical choices can be moral choices, and these publishers made the wrong ones.

Ellen Bresler Rockmore is a lecturer in the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric at Dartmouth.



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2) South African Students Clash With Police in Cape Town Over Tuition
By

JOHANNESBURG — Riot police officers and students protesting against tuition increases clashed on Wednesday outside the Parliament building in Cape Town, the latest in a series of student demonstrations that have gripped South Africa this year.

Police officers fired stun grenades and tear gas as hundreds of university students tried to force their way into the building as the finance minister, Nhlanhla Nene, delivered a speech about the national budget. Television coverage of the protests showed officers holding shields and students, some of them hurling water bottles at the police. Officers and students shoved one another in the tense standoff.

Blade Nzimande, the minister of higher education, could be seen using a megaphone to try to speak to the crowd of thousands, but his words were drowned out by the protests.

Demonstrations have roiled several South African universities this year, often revolving around economic and racial issues. Wednesday’s protest appeared to have been led by students at the University of Cape Town, considered the country’s best university and the focus of many intense demonstrations this year.

Protesters have criticized the university, as well as the country’s other leading universities, of having failed to sufficiently increase the percentage of black students and faculty members a generation after the end of apartheid.

In recent days, students have shut down several universities as part of their opposition to planned tuition increases. Mr. Nzimande has said this week that increases would be capped at 6 percent for 2016, but the South African Students Congress is opposing any increase.


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3) 2015 Likely to Be Hottest Year Ever Recorded
By

Just one year after 2014 set a record as the hottest year in the historical record, 2015 is on track to beat it by a large margin, possibly signaling a return to a sustained period of rapid global warming.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a federal agency that tracks worldwide temperatures, announced on Wednesday that last month had been the hottest September on record, and that the January-to-September period had also been the hottest since 1880. Scientists say the mathematical odds are now overwhelming that the full year will be the hottest ever recorded.
The immediate cause is a strong El Niño weather pattern, in which the ocean releases immense amounts of heat into the atmosphere. But temperatures this year are running far ahead of those during the last strong El Niño, in 1997 and 1998, and scientists said that would likely not have happened without an underlying trend of warming caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.


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4) Takata and Honda Kept Quiet on Study That Questioned Airbag Propellant
By DANIELLE IVORY and

The problem had haunted Honda for years: Why were airbags made by Takata exploding in its cars, sending metal fragments flying into the passenger cabin?By 2010, Honda had recalled more than 800,000 cars to fix the airbags after at least one death. It turned out to be the early stages of what is now one of the largest automotive recalls in American history, involving 12 automakers and at least 19 million vehicles.

Honda assured regulators that the airbags’ design was not to blame, echoing an explanation from Takata, one of the biggest makers of airbags worldwide, that pointed to isolated manufacturing problems.

But behind the scenes, officials from Honda and Takata were exploring another possibility, according to employees of both companies.They wanted to determine whether the propellant used to inflate the airbags might be at the root of the explosions. Without alerting regulators or the general public, Takata commissioned one of the nation’s most respected pyrotechnics labs, the High Pressure Combustion Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University, to study the compound, ammonium nitrate.

As a condition of the study, the Penn State lab was not permitted to publicly link the research to Takata or Honda, according to accounts that were confirmed by Takata. And when the findings were published in a scientific journal, the lab was forbidden to disclose that Takata had paid for the study. Those omissions violated the journal’s statement of ethics.

And when the study’s conclusion in 2012 cast doubt on the use of ammonium nitrate, suggesting it was sensitive to changes in pressure, Takata disputed the methodology, dismissed the conclusion and waited more than two years before sharing the research with regulators, according to accounts confirmed by Takata.

The role ammonium nitrate might play in the exploding of the airbags is still unknown. And federal officials say Takata and Honda broke no laws in keeping the study quiet because the airbags were not the subject of a formal inquiry during that period. An earlier safety investigation into the airbags had been closed, and the current investigation was not opened until late last year.

But given the long history of problems and the seriousness of the exploding airbags — they are now linked to at least eight deaths and more than 100 injuries — some former regulators and safety advocates sharply criticized the companies’ silence.

“This fits into a pattern that they have been involved in from the beginning — to deny, delay, defer and blame other people,” said Joan Claybrook, a former administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and a longtime advocate of auto safety. “Takata has gone a long way to try to suppress information about this disaster with these bad airbags, and this is an important piece of it.”

Today, Takata continues to maintain that ammonium nitrate is safe when properly handled, and it uses the compound in airbags for new cars, as well as in replacement airbags in recalled vehicles. A company spokesman said it was wrong to make too much of the Penn State study, which he described as an “inaccurate and incomplete” depiction of the propellant.

“Takata and Honda pursued the research at Penn State to make sure we weren’t missing something in our analysis,” Jared Levy, a spokesman for Takata, said in written responses to questions from The New York Times. “Takata was doing testing internally, but wanted to seek other experts’ opinions regarding the root cause.”

Honda also defended the delay in submitting the report. “In light of the fact that the Penn State’s findings were preliminary in nature, and presuming that the study would continue, Honda believed it was premature to submit these findings as conclusive,” Chris Martin, a spokesman, said in a written statement.

The lab at Penn State has stood by its research, which was overseen by its founder, Kenneth K. Kuo. The findings were published in 2012 in a journal edited by Mr. Kuo, The International Journal of Energetic Materials and Chemical Propulsion.

Mr. Kuo declined to comment for this article. Another researcher on the study, Eric Boyer, said in a statement that the findings were not meant to be “a universally applicable indictment or confirmation of anything.”

“We hope they contribute to the body of safety knowledge on this issue,” the statement said.

A Penn State spokeswoman said that the university allowed financial sponsors of research to remain anonymous, suggesting it was common practice for major research universities.

The commissioning of the Penn State study, which has not previously been reported, conflicts with public statements made at the time in regulatory filings by Takata and Honda about their internal investigations into the cause of the airbag problems. Both companies minimized the scope of the defect in their interactions with regulators, even as they suspected that a more fundamental problem with the airbags’ design might be at fault, according to the employees.

Apart from the Penn State study, Takata asked another researcher, Vigor Yang, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, for ideas for a new propellant that could replace the ammonium nitrate in its airbag inflaters. Those discussions, in 2010, did not lead to a formal research project, Mr. Yang said.

Eventually, late last year, Honda, under an order by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to produce all relevant documents about the defect, turned over the Penn State study to regulators. That came days after Honda had vastly expanded the airbag recall to cover the entire nation and two weeks after lawmakers had sharply questioned a Takata executive at a contentious congressional hearing.

On Thursday, the safety agency will hold a public meeting in Washington to discuss Takata’s defective airbags and the plan to repair them.

The roots of the Penn State study date at least to the spring of 2010, when representatives from Takata and Honda met with researchers at the Penn State lab. The following year, they signed an agreement with the lab.

In 2012, the researchers came back with results that troubled Takata: Rapidly changing pressure inside an airbag’s steel inflater, the study concluded, could trigger a state known as “dynamic burning,” which in turn could lead to excessive internal pressure and potentially cause the inflater to rupture.

In June of that year, Takata told the researchers that the lab’s tests and data did not match the performance of the airbags in the field. Part of the problem, Takata argued, was that the lab had used propellant manufactured to specifications that were different from the propellant in real-world airbags.

If the lab’s findings were true, Takata’s engineers argued, there would have been far more ruptures than the company was aware of, according to a written account that Takata provided to The Times.

The lab made some changes to the final report, Takata said, but stuck with its focus on dynamic burning. A version of the study was published later that year.

Still unhappy with the findings, Takata, with Honda’s support, urged the lab to carry out further testing, under conditions that more closely mimicked those in real inflaters. They agreed to 10 months of follow-up tests.

But the follow-up research ended in a disagreement over what Takata called its slow pace.

“The Penn State report was inaccurate and incomplete. We asked Penn State to conduct more research, but they did not complete it,” said Mr. Levy, the Takata spokesman. “We also provided the report to two outside experts, both of whom said it was flawed.”

The outside experts were also paid by Takata.

One of those experts was Jochen Neutz, deputy head of the energetic systems department at the Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology in Germany. Dr. Neutz, made available to The Times by Takata, said in an interview that he continued to disagree with the Penn State study and that his lab’s own analyses did not support the study’s findings.

Takata also reached out to Dr. Yang, the head of the School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech, who also said at the time that the study was flawed. The lab’s analyses, he said, were conducted under conditions vastly different from those in the manufacturer’s inflaters. But in an interview, Dr. Yang acknowledged that he could not rule out the possibility that dynamic burning could cause ruptures in airbags.

Ms. Claybrook, the former safety administrator, was skeptical of Takata’s actions.

“This doesn’t pass the taste test,” she said. ”They hired researchers to produce a study. They didn’t like the result, and then they hired more people to look at that study.”

Dr. Yang said Takata also asked him in 2010 for ideas for a new propellant.

“They asked me to look into future propellants. They specifically asked me, ‘What kind of propellant do you see in the future?’” Dr. Yang said. Takata said it was looking for a propellant alternative that was “controllable, low cost and reliable,” he said. “They shared their dream list” of properties, he said.

That discussion did not result in funded research, Dr. Yang said, and he did not put forward any concrete suggestions.

Takata said it was always looking to improve its products. “Takata regularly examines new technologies and consults experts in the field about advancements across all of its products,” Mr. Levy said.

But it was only in May, in connection with a congressional hearing, that Takata publicly acknowledged that its engineers were looking into new types of propellant. At the same time, under pressure from regulators, Takata also admitted that the design of the airbags was defective.

Even today, after millions of cars have been recalled over the last seven years, Takata and automakers are struggling to understand the scope of the problem. Last week, for example, General Motors notified regulators that it would recall about 400 cars from the 2015 model year that have Takata airbags containing ammonium nitrate.

Christopher Jensen contributed reporting.



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5) In Chelsea, a Great Wealth Divide
By

Once a month, Darlene Waters grabs her shopping cart and heads uptown from Chelsea to the Port Authority. Walmart and Sam’s Club beckon, just a bus ride away in Secaucus, N.J. “Right now, they are my two favorite stores,” she said.Ms. Waters doesn’t lack for shops in her neighborhood. But the marinara sauce her grandson likes — Paul Newman’s — goes for “$4 and some change” in Chelsea, she says, about double what it costs across the river. The same goes for toothpaste, rotisserie chicken, mozzarella for her baked ziti. And never mind cake. At Harbs, a bakery that opened last year on Ninth Avenue, a slice of strawberry cake goes for $10.

Ms. Waters, 70, a retired assistant nursery school teacher, lives in public housing, so at least she can afford her rent. But her surroundings have undergone a dizzying economic transformation in the past two to three decades, with an influx of wealth affecting the residents of less means in both obvious and insidious ways. And that change shows no signs of slowing.

“The area is much more beautiful than when I was coming up,” said Ms. Waters, who has lived in Chelsea since she was 11. “We have all sorts of people we can learn from. The big problem is money.”

Today’s Chelsea, the swath west of Sixth Avenue between 14th and 34th Streets, could be the poster neighborhood for what Mayor Bill de Blasio calls the tale of two cities. While the average household income in Chelsea has climbed exponentially, the income at Elliot Houses, the housing project where Ms. Waters lives, has remained more or less steady.

Census and city figures show that the average household income in Chelsea, about $140,000, is almost five times the average for households in public housing in the area. The neighborhood now ranks among those in the city with the greatest income inequality, according to the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University, as the share of households in the highest income brackets — over $250,000 — has grown.

With hyper-gentrification has come hyper-anxiety, and not just in Chelsea. The administration of Mayor de Blasio, a Democrat, plans to rezone parts of the city to build both affordable and market-rate housing, spurring passionate protests in East New York and other corners of the city where residents worry that the envisioned development will end up displacing poor, longtime tenants.

And the mayor’s plan to generate more revenue for the New York City Housing Authority, known as Nycha, by leasing land within housing projects for mixed-income housing has fueled longstanding fears that public housing buildings may ultimately be steamrollered by the hot real estate market — privatized or demolished to make room for richer New Yorkers.

“Is Nycha giving up public housing?” a resident of Wyckoff Gardens in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, one of the housing projects where some of the new housing will be built, asked at a meeting this month of residents with officials from the agency.

“Are we guaranteed that people here will keep their apartment?” asked another.

In long-gentrified Chelsea, the worst fears have yet to come true. The housing projects — Fulton Houses (between 16th and 19th Streets and Ninth and Tenth Avenues) and the neighboring Elliot and Chelsea Houses (in the mid-20s) — with about 2,000 apartments combined, are still there, as they have been since the 1940s (Elliot) and ’60s (Fulton and Chelsea). The brick buildings have deteriorated, however, under the weight of time and as the Housing Authority’s maintenance budget has fallen short, although city officials say they remain committed to preserving public housing. And the neighborhood around them has metamorphosed into an area of luxury apartment towers, renovated storefronts and offices, and spectacular public spaces, like the High Line, leaving some public housing residents feeling both lucky and doomed.

Barbara Sanchez, 42, who grew up at Fulton Houses during Chelsea’s unsavory history of rampant drug-dealing and prostitution on some streets, still marvels that she can let her 11-year-old daughter walk a few blocks home from school on her own, or that they can visit parks she once shunned.

“You could not walk in the park because of drugs,” she said of a small park on 17th Street. “Now, people lunch, jog through, and people are sitting out with their Mac.”

A report commissioned by the city and released in May studied the effects of gentrification on public housing residents and found benefits like safer streets and higher performing schools and students for those in wealthier settings. Coexistence, the researchers found, also led to higher annual earnings for public housing households in high-income areas than their counterparts in poor neighborhoods.

But there were downsides.

“The residents felt profound anxiety,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, director of the Furman Center and principal investigator of the study, of which Abt Associates was co-author.

“They appreciated the safety but they felt a loss, and daily expenses were greater and they felt great alienation.”

In interviews, residents noted that gone were the old mom-and-pop stores, the bodegas, the low-rise buildings and the gathering spots, replaced with higher-end substitutes. Old standbys like lunch counters and delis, inexpensive fishmongers and butchers, laundromats and convenience stores have grown scarcer, or disappeared altogether, amid the proliferation of multimillion-dollar condos, tech companies like Google and fancy restaurants imbuing the area with the ambience of the meatpacking district to the south.

Contrasts abound. On one block, yellow school buses line up on Ninth Avenue at pickup time in front of Public School 33. A block away on 10th Avenue, a parade of Cadillac Escalade S.U.V.s do the same in front of Avenues: The World School, a prekindergarten-to-12th-grade private school that opened in 2012, where annual tuition is $44,000.

As the old Western Beef supermarket turned into the Apple store with the glass staircase, and the pizza place into an eyebrow salon, many residents said they had lost a sense of belonging.


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Ms. Sanchez spoke of the loss of an ethnic enclave when most residents of the area were from Puerto Rico, where her parents came from. Now, she said, she travels to Delancey Street on the Lower East Side to shop for her Puerto Rican dishes as she tries to impart her culture to her daughter and 13-year-old son.

Juwan Stone, a resident of Elliot Houses who aspires to become an actor, spoke of sometimes overwhelming change.

“All the attention is on the businesses,” he said. “You walk past a scaffold and you wonder, What are they going to build now?”

The neighborhood feels welcoming in varying degrees, Mr. Stone said. He has worked summer jobs in the High Line park nearby and said he and his friends appreciated the free concerts and other entertainment the park offered. But he said some upscale retailers around him were “stores I feel would be uncomfortable to go in.”

The struggle with affordability has left some young people in public housing knowing that their neighborhood will not be theirs for long. Ms. Waters’s grandson, Justin Waters, 27, a computer systems analyst for the Hudson Guild, a community agency, said he did not see himself staying in Chelsea despite the advantages of the location. “Every single year, prices increase,” he said. “You shouldn’t constantly struggle to live somewhere. At that point you’re not even enjoying it.”

The chasm between the market rents and what is affordable for most in public housing would preclude even the upwardly mobile in the projects from staying in the neighborhood when they seek to move to private housing. Even former newcomers once viewed as gentrifiers have been priced out.

Art galleries, which came to the scene starting in the 1990s, have been closing or leaving for cheaper rents, said Councilman Corey Johnson, a Democrat who represents Chelsea, Hell’s Kitchen and the West Village. “A ton of small independent art galleries are fleeing to the Lower East Side and Brooklyn because building owners are asking exorbitantly more in west Chelsea,” he said.

Despite a construction boom — Chelsea had the highest number of residential units authorized by new building permits by 2014, according to the Furman Center — the rental supply hasn’t kept up with demand. The median asking rent was $3,490 in 2014, the fourth highest in the city, officials at the center said.

Public housing is not the only low- and middle-income stronghold. Penn South, a major cooperative of middle-income housing with more than 2,800 apartments, and the rent-regulated apartment stock also help Chelsea maintain economic diversity.

But the city has lost many more rent-regulated apartments than have been built over the last two decades, especially now in areas like Chelsea, where market rents are high enough to enable landlords under the state rent law to take apartments out of regulation when there are vacancies.

“The huge loss in rent-regulated units, paired with an influx of luxury rentals, leaves families with few options to stay in their community,” said Barika Williams, deputy director of the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development.

The ever-rising market rates for both homes and businesses have also driven out Chelsea’s once thriving gay community, Mr. Johnson said, citing the departure of gay clubs like Rawhide.“Chelsea has become much less gay,” said Mr. Johnson, who is gay. “People started moving to Hell’s Kitchen, and now people are going to the outer boroughs.”

Mr. Johnson, who lived in Massachusetts public housing while growing up, said he, too, had been affected by higher housing costs. In 2003, he lived in a studio for $900 a month. Five years ago, he moved to another studio across the street where monthly rent was $1,750. He currently pays nearly $1,000 more — $2,700 — for the same 319-square-foot unit.

As government-subsidized tenants, public housing residents are protected by a federal policy that requires them to pay no more than 30 percent of their income in rent. But the fear of displacement persists nevertheless. Three years ago, the city took a parking lot from Elliot and Chelsea Houses to build 168 apartments for low-to-middle-income households, and it now plans another affordable building, at a parking lot and compactor yard at Fulton Houses, Housing Authority officials said.

“It’d be stupid not to think that, because eventually it will happen,” Ms. Sanchez, of Fulton Houses, said. “A company may say, we have enough to buy Nycha out. There’s somebody out there who’s probably saying, ‘How do we do this,’ because it’s prime real estate.”

As ZIP codes get richer, there are other consequences.

Mr. Johnson noted that he did not get as much discretionary money to spend as his Council counterparts representing poorer districts.

In 2012, the Hudson Guild, which operates on Nycha grounds and at other sites, lost half its day-care program when the Bloomberg administration based funding for free and low-cost child care programs on area income, said Ken Jockers, the guild’s executive director. (The Council restored the money, he said, and the center eventually won a federal Head Start grant to continue the program.)

“A ZIP code analysis doesn’t account for block-by-block nuances,” Mr. Jockers said. “Even now, when the city looks at low-income neighborhoods in the city, which informs so much of city policy, that often disregards the fact that if you’re a poor person in Chelsea, you’re just as poor as the person living in Bushwick.”

Some Chelsea businesses have tried to bridge the divide. Mr. Jockers said the fashion company Tommy Hilfiger USA and IAC/Interactive Corporation, the Internet media conglomerate controlled by Barry Diller, have made multiyear, five- and six-figure money commitments to the guild’s programs, which mostly serve public housing residents and also draw volunteers and mentors from local companies.

The Avenues school, which opened in a renovated warehouse and currently serves 1,229 students, mostly from outside the neighborhood, gives nearly $1 million in financial aid to 35 students from its community board district, officials at the school said. They said the school moved to Chelsea looking for a large space and offerings that could enrich the student experience, like the sports facilities at Chelsea Piers, the High Line and the arts scene.

The officials promise more aid as Avenues expands to a second building nearby in 2018, and it has just created a position for someone to work full time on community engagement. “It’s based on our belief that our students will learn more by being part of our community,” said Gardner Dunnan, the academic dean.

To expand Chelsea Market, the food and office complex on Ninth Avenue between 15th and 16th Streets, Jamestown Properties negotiated with the city a pledge of more than $1 million over four years for a technology training program for public housing youth so they can compete for jobs in the area, as well as $12 million for the High Line and about $5 million for a fund to build affordable housing.

But jobs for local residents have not materialized to the extent expected, residents and local officials said. “When you have some of the best known, best paying companies in the United States located in Chelsea,” said Councilman Johnson, “it’d be ideal to try to get young people who are from low-income families to offer paid internships, job training and jobs to get them involved so they could stay in the neighborhood they grew up in.”

More wealth is coming. At the northern edge of Chelsea, the huge new development known as Hudson Yards is rising, with 5,000 luxury apartments, designer stores, new parks and a hotel, continuing the area’s trend toward affluence.

Back in a more modest New York, Ms. Waters gets her hair done at a beauty school on 34th Street for $15, and alternates among three restaurants she can afford for the occasional meal out. As the vice-president of the tenants’ association at Elliot Houses and president of the Hudson Guild’s neighborhood advisory committee, she is now working with other residents to rent a van or a bus in November for a holiday shopping trip to New Jersey. In between cross-state trips, she studies shoppers and saves coupons before she hunts for deals closer to home.

But on balance, she said, “I’d rather have Chelsea as it is today.”

“There’s more people,” she said. “It’s brighter, it’s beautiful, it’s more inviting than it used to be. We’re very lucky to be able to stay in housing that hopefully will not disappear.”



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6) South Africa Freezes Tuition Fees After Student Protests
By

JOHANNESBURG — President Jacob G. Zuma agreed on Friday to freeze tuition fees at South Africa’s public universities, yielding to widening protests by students who streamed into the capital, Pretoria, by the thousands and protested outside his office.In a short televised statement, Mr. Zuma said he had made the decision after meeting with student leaders and top university administrators, but did not elaborate on his thinking. “Government understands the difficulty faced by students from poor households and urges all affected to allow the process to unfold to find long-term solutions in order to ensure access to education by all students,” he said.

In the biggest of the protests organized by university students this year, thousands from campuses across the country rallied Friday at the Union Buildings, the seat of power in South Africa, chanting and holding signs that demanded a freeze on tuition increases and criticized Mr. Zuma’s administration.

Most students protested peacefully. But some started fires and tore parts of a fence around the Union Buildings, hurling rocks at riot police officers and demanding that Mr. Zuma address them directly. The police responded by firing stun grenades and using a water cannon to disperse the crowds, and unfurled barbed wire to prevent protesters from moving inside.

Students celebrated outside the Union Buildings as they learned of Mr. Zuma’s announcement.

“I’m so excited,” said Nonsikelelo Nako, 24, a student from the University of South Africa who was participating in the march. “We’ve been crying for this. Our struggle at the end of the day became a new freedom for us.”

Protests have erupted across many of South Africa’s public universities this year, with anger focusing on the deep-rooted economic and racial cleavages remaining a generation after the end of apartheid.

But in recent days, the protests have spread outside the campuses, as students have leveled their ire directly at the government. Students and police officers clashed outside the Parliament building in Cape Town, and students marched on Wednesday to the headquarters here of the African National Congress, the liberation movement that has governed the country since the end of apartheid in 1994.

Ramabina Mahapa, 23, president of the University of Cape Town’s student government, said that he and others had initially taken their demands about freezing fees to university administrators.

“We wanted them to put pressure on government,” said Mr. Mahapa before he was scheduled to join a student delegation to meet Mr. Zuma. “Then we quickly realized that their hands were tied and that in fact they were to a certain extent sympathetic towards us. Then our efforts changed and were now directed towards government.”

Clashes between the police and some students continued even after Mr. Zuma made his announcement, suggesting lingering anger at the government. The protest in the last few days widened to include students who had not participated in this year’s previous demonstrations.

Thando Khumalo, 25, a communications major at the University of Johannesburg, said she first became involved on Wednesday. Ms. Khumalo said she grew angry last week as discussions over the tuition increases were going nowhere. Her parents, who work as teachers, have paid her fees but would struggle to put her younger brother through college, she said.

“That’s when I realized we’re bring robbed here,” Ms. Kkumalo said after fleeing from the police’s stun guns and water cannon. “That’s when I realized I needed to be part of this.

“People are struggling to pay for higher education in South Africa,” she added. “It’s become a commodity where only the elites are able to access something that’s able to move us from — let’s say if you come from the middle class — move you up higher so that you can do well for your family.”

Referring to the post-apartheid nation of opportunity and equality that the African National Congress had pledged to create, she said, “Why are we still struggling after we were promised so much in 1994?”

Though many South African blacks share deep dissatisfaction with the governing party, there have been few signs so far that the student protests are drawing wide, active support. Unions have expressed solidarity but have yet to offer assistance. Neither have the students received support yet from the vast majority of poor blacks who remain the A.N.C.’s backbone of support.

The A.N.C., as well as the country’s two main opposition parties, has tried to jump onto the protest movement. But students firmly rejected the overtures.

After meeting with students on Wednesday, Gwede Mantashe, the group’s secretary general, urged party members to join the march in Pretoria on Thursday. “It should not be seen as a march that is against the A.N.C.,” Mr. Mantashe said.

But because the organization has nearly single-handedly shaped post-apartheid South Africa, the march on Friday and the yearlong campus protests have amounted to an indictment of it. The A.N.C., especially under Mr. Zuma, has become seen as a corrupt political machine more interested in enriching its members than in lifting up the poor blacks who supported it before and after apartheid.

Though the party’s national standing in South African politics remains unchallenged, its support has been declining steadily. Party leaders have publicly expressed fears that the A.N.C. might suffer significant losses in next year’s elections in metropolitan areas, home to the kind of educated, middle-class blacks that have been leaving the party.

Universities, which say they are underfunded by the government, had proposed significant hikes. The University of the Witwatersrand, a flash point of the demonstrations, had planned a 10.5 percent increase in tuition for next year. In 2015, tuition at the university ranged from $2,400 to $3,500 for a full year at the undergraduate level.

Early this week, Blade Nzimande, the minister of higher education, offered to cap increases for 2016 at 6 percent. But students insisted on no increase.

Xoli Moloi contributed reporting from Pretoria.



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7) Palestinian Anger in Jerusalem and West Bank Gets a Violent Soundtrack
By and RAMI NAZZAL

RAMALLAH, West Bank — The Palestinian teenagers who came one after another into the True Love gift and music shop on a recent afternoon all had the same request: nationalistic songs — the new ones.The proprietor quickly handed over the CDs that he had just started keeping at the checkout counter, like “Jerusalem Is Bleeding,” featuring the track “It’an, It’an” — “Stab, stab” — with its ominous backbeat.

“When I listen to these songs it makes me boil inside,” said one customer, Khader Abu Leil, 15, explaining that the thrumming score has helped pump him up for near-daily demonstrations where he hurls stones at Israeli soldiers.Inspired by this month’s wave of Palestinian attacks against Israeli Jews and deadly clashes with Israeli security forces, musicians in the occupied West Bank and beyond have produced scores of militaristic, often violent tunes. Published and shared on YouTube and Facebook, they form something of an intifada soundtrack, illustrated by videos that include gritty clips from fresh events.

“Stab the Zionist and say God is great,” declares one, a reference to the spate of knife attacks since Oct. 1. “Let the knives stab your enemy,” says another. A third is called “Continue the Intifada” and comes with a YouTube warning — the video shows the Palestinian woman who pulled a knife at an Afula bus station surrounded by Israeli soldiers pointing guns.

“Resist and carry your guns,” the song urges. “Say hello to being a martyr.”

Adnan Balaweneh, the singer-songwriter behind “Continue the Intifada” and four other songs uploaded in recent days, said that when he “saw the soldiers shoot at the girl in Afula” on television, “immediately I felt I needed to write something in order to charge up the Palestinian people.”

Palestinians have a tradition of protest music dating to their uprisings against the British in the 1930s. There are mournful poems about liberating the land, and booming anthems for political parties blared at rallies and funerals. During the war in 2014 between Israel and Gaza Strip militants, pulsing celebrations of rocket attacks on Tel Aviv poured from car radios across the coastal territory.

Several Palestinian musical experts said the scale and style of this new oeuvre were nonetheless unusual, fueled — as the uprising itself — by freewheeling social media. Some praised the songs as a constructive and creative form of resistance against Israel, while others said they were weak musically and only give the enemy more fodder for claims of incitement.

“For me, throwing stones in the first intifada was a way of expression,” said Ramzi Aburedwan, who was famously photographed as a boy throwing a rock in 1988, and now runs music schools in Palestinian refugee camps. “The tool was the stone in the first intifada, and today it’s music.”

“Sound and words reflect the situation,” Mr. Aburedwan added. “I can’t do a song talking about nature and beauty and peaceful things when I’m seeing every day more than 10 videos where some youths are executed.”

But Basel Zayed, a composer, performer and music therapist from East Jerusalem, criticized the instrumentation of the new songs for “using the same fraction of a rhythm and just looping it” and their lyrics as “not very expressive, the main two words are like kill or do or bomb or explode.”

“It was done as a reaction, and that’s a shame because it gives a very negative picture as to how Palestinians can express themselves,” Mr. Zayed added. “I don’t think coming up with a song so fast serves our message in the best way. It’s good to let things sink in first. When you’re inside the trauma, you don’t really understand what’s happening to you.”

New tunes pop up online every day, many by little-known artists and with low production values — the YouTube video for “Intifada of Knives” is a crude collage showing the Dome of the Rock with fire underneath and a man with a kaffiyeh covering his face holding a slingshot, then a dagger that eventually is stained with blood. Several simply lay spoken-word rants over Arabic percussion.

Popular stars have also joined the fray: Mohammed Assaf, the Gazan who became a United Nations good will ambassador after winning “Arab Idol” in 2013, released “Ya Yumma” on Saturday on YouTube, where by Thursday afternoon it had more than 365,000 views. Mr. Assaf’s contribution is more lyrical, less explicit, but also draws from recent events with lines like, “There is no perseverance like yours in Jerusalem and Afula.”

Then there is “Run Over, Run Over the Settler,” created during a series of deadly vehicular attacks a year ago. It was republished Oct. 10 with a remixed video including images from an incident that very day in which a 16-year-old Palestinian was shot dead after slicing the neck of an Israeli Jew outside Jerusalem’s Old City.

Mr. Balaweneh of “Continue the Intifada” is a 37-year-old father of three whose day job is writing for a Palestinian Authority military-style music troupe. He, too, threw rocks in the first intifada. By the second, which started in 2000, he said he was active “with my poems and with my songs.” Now, he does weddings and political events with his trio, “The Storm,” which he said is based in the West Bank town of Nablus. He said they were “against violence.”

“Our songs are not telling people to go and carry out attacks, our songs are more concentrated on telling people to stand up for their rights, their country, their land,” said Mr. Balaweneh, who lives in Nablus. “Now, because of the current situation, our songs need to have a lot of action in them, in order to make the blood flow and boil.”

Another artist, Qassem al-Najjar of the West Bank village Burin, said, “If I see a certain scene on the TV or hear about a certain event that is very disturbing to me, I can write a song in 15 minutes.”

His “Do You Know the Meaning of Intifada?” — which calls for political unity — was first posted on Oct. 9 and had nearly half a million views by Thursday; a coming song — in English — is directed at John Kerry, the American secretary of state.

“Any event that takes place in Palestine, I immediately create a song for it,” he said, citing a 2012 tune he wrote during protests against the Palestinian Authority prime minister, Salam Fayyad, and another about Gaza’s gas crisis. “I’m doing this as a battle of my own.”

Social media is the main outlet for this music, though the songs are also played — along with more traditional nationalist ones — on Palestinian radio and television. Black-marketeers have rapidly burned them onto CDs that go for 10 shekels, or about $2.50, on Ramallah street corners and in stores like True Love.

At the store, near Al-Quds Open University, the owner, Khamees Abu Al Arayas, said he used to get requests for political music maybe once a month. Now, customers ignore the shelves of love songs by famed Egyptian and Lebanese crooners with bare-shouldered women on their CD jackets. Instead, he keeps selling out of “Jerusalem Is Bleeding,” which has a cover featuring the Dome of the Rock shielded by barbed wire dripping red.

Older political songs, Mr. Al Arayas said, mixed protests of Palestinian oppression with dreamy, more optimistic yearnings. He sees the new ones as more blunt.

“This music is made as a way to make the Palestinian people get up and resist,” he said. “The words of these songs, and the music involved with these songs, is a lot more powerful.”

He was interrupted by another young customer, asking, “Do you have any nationalistic songs?”

Mr. Al Arayas asked if he was looking for anything specific.

“I want something hard-core and new,” came the reply. The teenager handed over 20 shekels for two CDs and was gone.





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8) Lawyers Provide Details in Police Shooting of Corey Jones in Florida
By and

MIAMI — In a tearful news conference Thursday, lawyers and the family of Corey Jones, a South Florida drummer who was shot by a plainclothes police officer over the weekend, offered some of the first details of the fatal encounter.The police officer, identified as Nouman K. Raja, fired six times, striking Mr. Jones three times, Benjamin L. Crump, a lawyer for the family, said at the news conference, held in West Palm Beach after the family met with the state prosecutor. Officer Raja has been put on administrative leave.

Mr. Crump said he was given details by state attorneys about the encounter between Mr. Jones and Officer Raja on a highway exit ramp. But he noted that the information was one-sided; Officer Raja was the only known witness to the moment leading up to Mr. Jones’s death. He said the family was seeking answers to what happened and called for a thorough investigation.Mr. Jones’s death is the latest in a string of contentious police shootings, particularly of African-Americans, that have fueled a national debate about the use of force by the police.

He was fatally shot early Sunday on an Interstate 95 exit ramp in Palm Beach County where he had been stranded because of car trouble. Earlier Mr. Jones had left a job playing drums in a band in Jupiter, Fla., Mr. Crump said, and he spoke to his brother, Clinton Jr., on his cellphone at 2:52 a.m. After his vehicle developed trouble, he pulled over to wait for help.

From there, what the police have described as a “confrontation,” turned fatal. It took just minutes: Mr. Jones’s brother said he had called back at 3:19 a.m. and gotten no answer.

Mr. Crump said that Officer Raja pulled up in a van with tinted windows and no lights. He was in plainclothes and did not display a badge. Mr. Crump said he believed that Officer Raja he did not identify himself as a police officer to Mr. Jones, who was in his car. The case is being investigated by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.

Mr. Jones, 31 and black, had a legally purchased handgun with him and had a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

“He doesn’t know if he’s about to be mugged, about to be robbed, about to be killed,” Mr. Crump said, noting that Mr. Jones often carried his drum equipment and cash receipts from the band’s performances.

It was not immediately clear what happened after Officer Raja got out of his van. But Mr. Jones at some point started running, Mr. Crump said, and Officer Raja fired six times. Three bullets struck Mr. Jones, one of which entered his side, passed through his aorta, and lodged in his upper torso, another family lawyer, Daryl D. Parks, said. The other two bullets exited his body. His arm was broken.

Mr. Jones’s body was found about 80 to 100 feet from his vehicle, his handgun was on the ground somewhere in between, Mr. Crump said. Mr. Jones did not fire his gun.

Unlike in most highly publicized police shooting cases, Mr. Jones was armed, but activists are questioning his death because the officer was not in uniform.

The police have declined to say whether words were exchanged or whether Mr. Jones was pointing his weapon. Mr. Crump emphasized that they wanted to know the standard operating procedures for plainclothes officers.

“Why did he feel it necessary to go confront Corey Jones?” Mr. Crump asked.

In the news conference, family members provided more details about Mr. Jones’s life. A resident of Lake Worth, he worked for the Delray Beach Housing Authority, and was an avid drummer in church and at social events, as well as a teacher and mentor for young musicians. He studied at the University of Akron in Ohio.

Mr. Jones’s brother, Clinton Jr., a former player for the New England Patriots and Cleveland Browns, described Corey as the “kindest, closest, happiest person you could ever imagine.”

His sister, Melissa, said Corey would make drums out of books and pans or would just drum at the kitchen table with his knuckles. He believed in security and had urged his sister, who braids hair for a living, to get a gun and a permit.

He could, she said, bring out “the softest part of the hardest person.”

Mr. Jones’s father, Clinton Sr., said he was in Jamaica when he received word. After hearing of the shooting, he said, he called his daughter. He said he had always urged his children to be humble. In a moving speech through tears, he said the family needed answers.

“So today I need some answers,” he said Thursday. “I need to know why! Why is my son gone today?”

After the news conference, a protest rally was held outside the Palm Beach Gardens police department.

Later, a spokeswoman for the city, Candice Turner, released a statement saying the city respected the family and community’s desire for more information.

“We share the family and the community’s deep interest in a timely and thorough investigation of all relevant facts and evidence, and the public disclosure of those findings as soon as possible,” the statement said. “While we are sensitive to the need and desire for investigative conclusions to be shared, it is essential that appropriate time be allotted to determine the facts and the truth — to get it right.”

Frances Robles reported from Miami, and Christine Hauser from New York.



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9) Benjamin Netanyahu and the Hidden History of Zionism:
Who is Benjamin Netanyahu and what is his relationship to Zionism as a political movement and  to the fate of the Jews of Europe?
By Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone, Taking Aim
http://www.takingaim.info/
VIA Email, October 24, 2015

Neve Gordon, Professor of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, is described in Wikipedia as "a third generation Israeli who writes on issues relating to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and Human Rights. He has served as director of Physicians for Human Rights, Israel and is an active member of Ta'ayush - Arab-Jewish Partnership."

In October 1996, Neve Gordon published a Special Report in "Washington Report on Middle East Affairs" entitled "Spook, Terrorist or Criminal? America's Mysterious Files on Netanyahu." It draws upon investigative work of the Israeli weekly, Hai'r, that published the results of four requests for credit approval itemized in the U.S.Social Security File Number 020-36-4537 pertaining to Benjamin Netanyahu.

The results were as follows: "Under each request one finds a different name: Benjamin Netanyahu, Benjamin Nitai, John Jay Sullivan and John Jay Sullivan, Jr. – one man, four names."

In June 1973 Netanyahu submitted a petition to a Boston court to change his name from Netanyahu to Nitai; "I prefer a shorter name," he wrote on his request form. The petition was approved, thus the second name has an explanation. The last two names, however, remain a mystery. Furthermore, the address attached to these names – in Malibu, California – does not exist. Who then is John Jay Sullivan?

Neve Gordon tells us: "Biranit Goren and Einat Berkovitch of "Ha'ir" tried to find out. They looked into Netanyahu's credit account. This file is supposed to hold information regarding bank accounts, loans, credit cards and so forth; yet, surprisingly, the file was empty. It was as if Netanyahu never had a debt, had never taken out a loan and always paid his bills up front and in cash.

"Goren and Berkovitch then attempted to examine Netanyahu's social security file but were denied access. They did find out that Netanyahu's file has a different classification than most. They were denied access not merely due to the 1974 privacy act, but because the file had a "confidential" classification. Goren and Berkovitch explained that such a classification only applies to five categories of people: those who work for three federal agencies – the CIA, CIA, IRS – or those considered to be terrorists or criminals. ... It appears that he was on the payroll of a security agency – the CIA or FBI.

"...according to Israeli law a person who runs for the Knesset cannot hold dual citizenship, yet he is unwilling to grant the Press access to his file located in the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv.... the status of his files in the U.S. has not changed, so according to U.S. law Netanyahu remains a U.S. citizen.

The article delineates the dark underworld of corruption, coercion, brutal predation and permanent war, the very moral universe of imperialism and the mass murder it requires, the Holocaust included, which inspired the noted Israeli theologian, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, to refer to the Zionists and their spokespersons as "Judeo-Nazis."

***

In January 1978, Faris Yahya, the son of Glubb-Pasha,  a friend and political colleague, completed  a seminal work entitled "Zionist Relations With Nazi Germany." Faris' writing reflected original research and documentary work on behalf of the Palestine Research Center in Beirut and delineated a series of revelatory documents pioneered by Akiva Orr. These efforts gave rise to important amplification by Lenni Brenner, as it did the work of Mya Shone and myself in "The Hidden History of Zionism," "Homage to Palestine" and "Prisoners of Israel."

The HIdden History of Zionism (full text at http://www.takingaimradio.com/hhz/index.htm) opens as follows:

The Four Myths

Preface: The Uprising  |  2. Zionist Objectives

It is not accidental that when anyone attempts to examine the nature of Zionism – its origins, history and dynamics – they meet with people who terrorize or threaten them. Quite recently, after mentioning a meeting on the plight of the Palestinian people during an interview on KPFK, a Los Angeles radio station, the organizers of the public meeting were deluged with bomb threats from anonymous callers.

Nor is it easy in the United States or Western Europe to disseminate information about the nature of Zionism or to analyze the specific events which denote Zionism as a political movement. Even the announcement on university campuses of authorized forums or meetings on the subject invariably engenders a campaign designed to close off discussion. Posters are torn down as fast as they are put up. Meetings are packed by flying squads of Zionist youth who seek to break them up. Literature tables are vandalized and leaflets and articles appear accusing the speaker of anti-Semitism or, in the case of those of Jewish origin, of self-hatred.

Vindictiveness and slander are so universally meted out to anti-Zionists because the disparity between the official fiction about Zionism and the Israeli state, on the one hand, and the barbarous practice of this colonial ideology and coercive apparatus, on the other, is so vast. People are in shock when they have an opportunity to hear or read about the century of persecution suffered by the Palestinians, and, thus, the apologists for Zionism are relentless in seeking to prevent coherent, dispassionate examination of the virulent and chauvinist record of the Zionist movement and of the state which embodies its values.

The irony of this is that when we study what the Zionists have written and said – particularly when addressing themselves – no doubt remains about what they have done or of their place in the political spectrum, dating from the last quarter of the 19th century to the present day.

Four overriding myths have shaped the consciousness of most people in our society about Zionism.

The first is that of “A land without a people for a people without a land.” This myth was sedulously cultivated by early Zionists to promote the fiction that Palestine was a remote, desolate place ready for the taking. This claim was quickly followed by denial of Palestinian identity, nationhood or legitimate entitlement to the land in which the Palestinian people have lived throughout their recorded history.

The second is the myth of Israeli democracy. Innumerable newspaper stories or television references to the Israeli state are followed by the assertion that it is the only “real” democracy in the Middle East. In fact, Israel is as democratic as the apartheid state of South Africa. Civil liberty, due process and the most basic human rights are by law denied those who do not meet racial, religious criteria.

The third myth is that of “security” as the motor force of Israeli foreign policy. Zionists maintain that their state must be the fourth largest military power in the world because Israel has been forced to defend itself against imminent menace from primitive, hate-consumed Arab masses only recently dropped from the trees.

The fourth myth is that of Zionism as the moral legatee of the victims of the Holocaust. This is at once the most pervasive and insidious of the myths about Zionism. Ideologues for the Zionist movement have wrapped themselves in the collective shroud of the six million Jews who fell victim to Nazi mass murder. The bitter and cruel irony of this false claim is that the Zionist movement itself actively colluded with Nazism from its inception.

To most people it appears anomalous that the Zionist movement, which forever invokes the horror of the Holocaust, should have collaborated actively with the most vicious enemy ever faced by the Jews. The record, however, reveals not merely common interests but a deep ideological affinity rooted in the extreme chauvinism which they share.

***

Chapter 6 provides a synthesis under the heading "Zionism and the Jews":

If the colonization of Palestine has been characterized by a series of depredations, we should take a moment to examine the attitude of the Zionist movement not only toward its Palestinian victims (to which we shall return), but toward the Jews themselves.

Herzl himself wrote of the Jews in the following fashion: “I achieved a freer attitude toward anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to ’combat’ anti-Semitism." [76] The youth organization of the Zionists, Hashomer Hatzair (young Guard) published the following: "A Jew is a caricature of a normal, natural human being, both physically and spiritually. As an individual in society he revolts and throws off the harness of social obligations, knows no order nor discipline." [77] "The Jewish people," wrote Jabotinsky in the same vein, "is a very bad people; its neighbors hate it and rightly so ... its only salvation lies in a general immigration to the land of Israel." [78] The founders of Zionism despaired of combatting anti-Semitism and, paradoxically, regarded the anti-Semites themselves as allies, because of a shared desire to remove the Jews from the countries in which they lived. Step by step, they assimilated the values of Jew-hatred and anti-Semitism, as the Zionist movement came to regard the anti-Semites themselves as their most reliable sponsors and protectors.

Theodor Herzl approached none other than Count Von Plehve, the author of the worst pogroms in Russia - the pogroms of Kishinev with the following proposition: "Help me to reach the land [Palestine] sooner and the revolt [against Czarist rule] will end." [79] Von Plehve agreed, and he undertook to finance the Zionist movement. He was later to complain to Herzl: “The Jews have been joining the revolutionary parties. We were sympathetic to your Zionist movement as long as it worked toward emigration. You don’t have to justify the movement to me. You are preaching to a convert." [80] Herzl and Weizmann offered to help guarantee Czarist interests in Palestine and to rid Eastern Europe and Russia of those "noxious and subversive Anarcho-Bolshevik Jews".

As we have noted, the same appeal was made by the Zionists to the Sultan of Turkey, the Kaiser in Germany, to French imperialism and to the British Raj.

Zionism and Fascism

The history of Zionism - largely suppressed - is sordid.

Mussolini set up squadrons of the Revisionist Zionist youth movement, Betar, in black shirts in emulation of his own Fascist bands.

When Menachem Begin became chief of Betar, he preferred the brown shirts of the Hitler gangs, a uniform Begin and Betar members wore to all meetings and rallies - at which they greeted each other and opened and closed meetings with the fascist salute.

Simon Petilura was a Ukrainian fascist who personally directed pogroms which killed 28,000 Jews in 897 separate pogroms. Jabotinsky negotiated an alliance with Petilura, proposing a Jewish police force to accompany Petilura’s forces in their counter-revolutionary fight against the Red Army and the Bolshevik Revolution - a process involving the murder of peasant, worker and intellectual supporters of the revolution.

Collaborating with the Nazis

This strategy of enlisting Europe’s virulent Jew-haters, and of aligning with the most vicious movements and regimes as financial and military patrons of a Zionist colony in Palestine, did not exclude the Nazis.

The Zionist Federation of Germany sent a memorandum of support to the Nazi Party on June 21, 1933. In it the Federation noted:

... a rebirth of national life such as is occurring in German life ... must also take place in the Jewish national group.

On the foundation of the new [Nazi] state which has established the principle of race, we wish so to fit our community into the total structure so that for us, too, in the sphere assigned to us, fruitful activity for the Fatherland is possible ... [81]

Far from repudiating this policy, the World Zionist Organization Congress in 1933 defeated a resolution calling for action against Hitler by a vote of 240 to 43.

During this very Congress, Hitler announced a trade agreement with the WZO’s Anglo-Palestine Bank, breaking, thereby, the Jewish boycott of the Nazi regime at a time when the German economy was extremely vulnerable. It was the height of the Depression and people were wheeling barrels full of worthless German Marks. The World Zionist Organization broke the Jewish boycott and became the principal distributor of Nazi goods throughout the Middle East and Northern Europe. They established the Ha’avara, which was a bank in Palestine designed to receive monies from the German-Jewish bourgeoisie, with which sums Nazi goods were purchased in very substantial quantity.

Embracing the S.S.

Consequently, the Zionists brought Baron Von Mildenstein of the S.S. Security Service to Palestine for a six-month visit in support of Zionism. This visit led to a twelve-part report by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, in Der Angriff (The Assault) in 1934 praising Zionism. Goebbels ordered a medallion struck with the Swastika on one side, and on the other, the Zionist Star of David. In May 1935, Reinhardt Heydrich, the chief of the S.S. Security Service, wrote an article in which he separated Jews into "two categories." The Jews he favored were the Zionists: "Our good wishes together with our official good will go with them."[82] In 1937, the Labor "socialist" Zionist militia, the Haganah (founded by Jabotinsky) sent an agent (Feivel Polkes) to Berlin offering to spy for the S.S. Security Service in exchange for the release of Jewish wealth for Zionist colonization. Adolf Eichmann was invited to Palestine as the guest of the Haganah.

Feivel Polkes informed Eichmann:

Jewish nationalist circles were very pleased with the radical German policy, since the strength of the Jewish population in Palestine would be so far increased thereby that in the foreseeable future the Jews could reckon upon numerical superiority over the Arabs. [83]

The list of acts of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis goes on and on. What can account for this incredible willingness of Zionist leaders to betray the Jews of Europe? The entire rationale for the state of Israel offered by its apologists has been that it was intended to be the refuge of Jews facing persecution.

The Zionists, to the contrary, saw any effort to rescue Europe’s Jews not as the fulfilment of their political purpose but as a threat to their entire movement. If Europe’s Jews were saved, they would wish to go elsewhere and the rescue operation would have nothing to do with the Zionist project of conquering Palestine.

Sacrificing Europe’s Jews

The correlative to the acts of collaboration with the Nazis throughout the 1930’s was that when attempts to change the immigration laws of the United States and Western Europe were contemplated in order to provide token refuge for persecuted Jews of Europe, it was the Zionists who actively organized to stop these efforts.

Ben Gurion informed a meeting of Labor Zionists in Great Britain in 1938: "If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative." [84] This obsession with colonizing Palestine and overwhelming the Arabs led the Zionist movement to oppose any rescue of the Jews facing extermination, because the ability to deflect select manpower to Palestine would be impeded. From 1933 to 1935, the WZO turned down two-thirds of all the German Jews who applied for immigration certificates.

Berel Katznelson, editor of the Labor Zionist Davar, described the "cruel criteria of Zionism": German Jews were too old to bear children in Palestine, lacked trades for building a Zionist colony, didn’t speak Hebrew and weren’t Zionists. In place of these Jews facing extermination the WZO brought to Palestine 6,000 trained young Zionists from the United States, Britain and other safe countries. Worse than this, the WZO not merely failed to seek any alternative for the Jews facing the Holocaust, the Zionist leadership opposed belligerently all efforts to find refuge for fleeing Jews.

As late as 1943, while the Jews of Europe were being exterminated in their millions, the U.S. Congress proposed to set up a commission to "study" the problem. Rabbi Stephen Wise, who was the principal American spokesperson for Zionism, came to Washington to testify against the rescue bill because it would divert attention from the colonization of Palestine.

This is the same Rabbi Wise who, in 1938, in his capacity as leader of the American Jewish Congress, wrote a letter in which he opposed any change in U.S. immigration laws which would enable Jews to find refuge. He stated:

It may interest you to know that some weeks ago the representatives of all the leading Jewish organizations met in conference ... It was decided that no Jewish organization would, at this time, sponsor a bill which would in any way alter the immigration laws. [85]

Fighting Asylum

The entire Zionist establishment made its position unmistakable in its response to a motion by 227 British members of Parliament calling on the government to provide asylum in British territories for persecuted Jews. The meager undertaking which was prepared was as follows:

His Majesty’s Government issued some hundreds of Mauritius and other immigration permits in favor of threatened Jewish families.[86]

But even this token measure was opposed by the Zionist leaders. At a Parliamentary meeting on January 27, 1943, when the next steps were being pursued by over one hundred members of Parliament, a spokesperson for the Zionists announced that they opposed this motion because it did not contain preparations for the colonization of Palestine. This was a consistent stance.

Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader who had arranged the Balfour Declaration and was to become the first president of Israel, made this Zionist policy very explicit:

The hopes of Europe’s six million Jews are centered on emigration. I was asked: “Can you bring six million Jews to Palestine?” I replied, “No.” ... From the depths of the tragedy I want to save ... young people [for Palestine]. The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They are dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world ... Only the branch of the young shall survive. They have to accept it. [87]

Yitzhak Gruenbaum, the chairperson of the committee set up by the Zionists, nominally to investigate the condition of European Jews, said:

When they come to us with two plans - the rescue of the masses of Jews in Europe or the redemption of the land - I vote, without a second thought, for the redemption of the land. The more said about the slaughter of our people, the greater the minimization of our efforts to strengthen and promote the Hebraisation of the land. If there would be a possibility today of buying packages of food with the money of the Karen Hayesod [United Jewish Appeal] to send it through Lisbon, would we do such a thing? No. And once again no! [88]

Betraying the Resistance

In July 1944, the Slovakian Jewish leader Rabbi Dov Michael Weissmandel in a letter to Zionist officials charged with these "rescue organizations," proposed a series of measures to save the Jews scheduled for liquidation at Auschwitz. He offered exact mappings of the railways and urged the bombing of the tracks on which the Hungarian Jews were being transported to the crematoria.

He appealed for the bombing of the furnaces at Auschwitz, for the parachuting of ammunition to 80,000 prisoners, for the parachuting of saboteurs to blow up all the means of annihilation and thus end the cremation of 13,000 Jews every day.

Should the Allies refuse the organized and public demand by the "rescue organizations", Weissmandel proposed that the Zionists, who had funds and organization, obtain airplanes, recruit Jewish volunteers and carry out the sabotage.

Weissmandel was not alone. Throughout the late thirties and forties, Jewish spokespersons in Europe cried out for help, for public campaigns, for organized resistance, for demonstrations to force the hand of allied Govemments - only to be met not merely by Zionist silence but by active Zionist sabotage of the meager efforts which were proposed or prepared in Great Britain and the United States.

Here is the cri-de-coeur of Rabbi Weissmandel. Writing to the Zionists in July 1944 he asked incredulously.

Why have you done nothing until now? Who is guilty of this frightful negligence? Are you not guilty, our Jewish brothers: you who have the greatest good fortune in the world - liberty?

We send you – Rabbi Weissmandel wrote again – this special message: to inform you that yesterday the Germans began the deportation of Jews from Hungary ... The deported ones go to Auschwitz to be put to death by cyanide gas. This is the schedule, of Auschwitz from yesterday to the end:

Twelve thousand Jews - men, women and children, old men, infants, healthy and sick ones, are to be suffocated daily.

And you, our brothers in Palestine, in all the countries of freedom, and you ministers of all the Kingdoms, how do you keep silent in the face of this great murder?

Silent while thousands upon thousands, reaching now to six million Jews, are murdered? And silent now, while tens of thousands are still being murdered and waiting to be murdered? Their destroyed hearts cry out to you for help as they bewail your cruelty.

Brutal, you are and murderers, too, you are, because of the coldbloodedness of the silence in which you watch, because you sit with folded arms and do nothing, although you could stop or delay the murder of Jews at this very hour.

You, our brothers, sons of Israel, are you insane? Don’t you know the hell around us? For whom are you saving your money? Murderers! Madmen! Who is it that gives charity: you who toss a few pennies from your safe homes, or we who give our blood in the depths of hell? [90]

No Zionist leader supported his request, nor did the Western capitalist regimes bomb a single concentration camp.

A Pact Against Hungary’s Jews

The culmination of Zionist betrayal was the sacrifice of Hungary’s Jews in a series of agreements between the Zionist movement and Nazi Germany which first became known in 1953. Dr. Rudolph Kastner of the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee in Budapest signed a secret pact with Adolf Eichmann to "settle the Jewish question" in Hungary. This took place in 1944. The pact sealed the fate of 800,000 Jews.

It was to be revealed later that Kastner was under the direction of the Zionist leaders abroad when he made his agreement with Eichmann. The agreement entailed the saving of six hundred prominent Jews on the condition that silence was maintained about the fate of Hungarian Jewry.

When a survivor, Malchiel Greenwald, exposed the pact and denounced Kastner as a Nazi collaborator whose "deeds in Budapest cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews", [91] Greenwald was sued by the Israeli government, whose leaders had drawn up the terms of the Kastner pact.

The Israeli Court came to the following conclusion:

The sacrifice of the majority of the Jews, in order to rescue the prominents was the basic element in the agreement between Kastner and the Nazis. This agreement fixed the division of the nation into two unequal camps, a small fragment of prominents, whom the Nazis promised Kastner to save, on the one hand, and the great majority of Hungarian Jews whom the Nazis designated for death, on the other hand. [92]

The court declared that the imperative condition of this pact was that neither Kastner nor the Zionist leaders would interfere in the action of the Nazis against the Jews. These leaders undertook not only to eschew interference, but they agreed they would not, in the words of the Israeli court, "hamper them in the extermination."

Collaboration between the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee and the exterminators of the Jews was solidified in Budapest and Vienna. Kastner’s duties were part and parcel of the S.S. In addition to its Extermination Department and Looting Department, the Nazi S.S. opened a Rescue Department headed by Kastner. [93]

Saving Nazis, Not Jews

It is not surprising that it was to be revealed that Kastner intervened to save S.S. General Kurt Becher from being tried for war crimes. Becher was one of the leading negotiators of the deal with the Zionists in 1944. He was also an S.S. Major in Poland, a member of the Death Corps "that worked around the clock killing Jews." "Becher distinguished himself as a Jew slaughterer in Poland and Russia." [94] He was appointed Commissar of all Nazi concentration camps by Heinrich Himmler.

What happened to him? He became president of many corporations and headed up the sale of wheat to Israel. His corporation, the Cologne-Handel Gesellschaft, did extensive business with the Israeli government.

A Military Pact with Nazism

On January 11, 1941, Avraham Stern proposed a formal military pact between the National Military Organization (NMO), of which Yitzhak Shamir, the current Prime Minister of Israel, was a prominent leader, and the Nazi Third Reich. This proposal became known as the Ankara document, having been discovered after the war in the files of the German Embassy in Turkey. It states the following:

The evacuation of the Jewish masses from Europe is a precondition for solving the Jewish question; but this can only be made possible and complete through the settlement of these masses in the home of the Jewish people, Palestine, and through the establishment of a Jewish state in its historical boundaries ...

The NMO, which is well-acquainted with the goodwill of the German Reich government and its authorities towards Zionist activity inside Germany and towards Zionist emigration plans, is of the opinion that:

    • Common interests could exist between the establishment of a New Order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO.

    • Cooperation between the new Germany and renewed folkish-national Hebraium would be possible and

    • The establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position of power in the Near East.

Proceeding from these considerations, the NMO in Palestine, under the condition that the above-mentioned national aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement are recognized on the side of the German Reich, offers to actively take part in the war on Germany’s side. [95]

Zionism’s Perfidy

Zionism’s perfidy - the betrayal of the victims of the Holocaust - was the culmination of their attempt to identify the interests of the Jews with those of the established order. Today, the Zionists join their state to the enforcement arm of U.S. imperialism - from the death squads of Latin America to the covert operations of the C.I.A. on four continents.

This sordid history is rooted in the demoralization of the founders of Zionism, who rejected the possibility of overcoming anti-Semitism through popular struggle and social revolution. Moses Hess, Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann chose the wrong side of the barricades - that of state power, class domination and exploitative rule. They propounded a putative disjunction between emancipation from persecution and the necessity of social change. They fully understood that the cultivation of anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews were the work of the very ruling class from whom they curried favor.

In seeking the sponsorship of the anti-Semites themselves, they revealed several motives: the worship of power with which they associated strength; a desire to end Jewish "weakness" and vulnerability, ceasing to be perpetual outsiders.

This sensibility was a short step to assimilating the values and ideas of the Jew-haters themselves. The Jews, the Zionists wrote, were indeed an undisciplined, subversive, dissident people, worthy of the scorn they had earned. The Zionists catered shamelessly to racist Jew-hatred. Worshipping power, they appealed to the anti-Semitic desire of the von Plehves and the Himmlers to be rid of a victim people long radicalized by persecution, a people who filled the ranks of revolutionary movements and whose suffering drew their best minds to intellectual ferment offensive to established values.

The dirty secret of Zionist history is that Zionism was threatened by the Jews themselves. Defending the Jewish people from persecution meant organizing resistance to the regimes which menaced them. But these regimes embodied the imperial order which comprised the only social force willing or able to impose a settler colony on the Palestinian people. Hence, the Zionists needed the persecution of the Jews to persuade Jews to become colonizers afar, and they needed the persecutors to sponsor the enterprise.

But European Jewry had never manifested any interest in colonizing Palestine. Zionism remained a fringe movement among the Jews, who aspired to live in the countries of their birth free of discrimination or to escape persecution by emigrating to bourgeois democracies perceived as more tolerant.

Zionism, therefore, could never answer the needs or aspirations of the Jews. The moment of truth came when persecution gave way to physical extermination. Put to the ultimate and sole test of their real relationship to Jewish survival, the Zionists did not merely fail to lead resistance or defend the Jews, they actively sabotaged Jewish efforts to boycott the Nazi economy. They sought, even then, the sponsorship of the mass murderers themselves, not merely because the Third Reich appeared powerful enough to impose a Zionist colony, but because the Nazi practices were consonant with Zionist assumptions.

There was a common ground between the Nazis and the Zionists, expressed not merely in the proposal of Shamir’s National Military Organization to form a state in Palestine on a "national totalitarian basis." Vladimir Jabotinsky, in his last work, The Jewish War Front, (l940) wrote of his plans for the Palestinian people:

Since we have this great moral authority for calmly envisaging the exodus of Arabs, we need not regard the possible departure of 900,000 with dismay. Herr Hitler has recently been enhancing the popularity of population transfer. [96]

Jabotinsky’s remarkable declaration in The Jewish War Front synthesizes Zionist thought and its moral bankruptcy. The slaughter of the Jews gave Zionism "great moral authority". - For what? "For calmly envisaging the exodus of Arabs.” The lesson of Nazi destruction of the Jews was that it was permissible now for Zionists to visit the same fate upon the entire Palestinian population.

Seven years later, the Zionists emulated the Nazis, whose backing they sought and even at times achieved, and they covered bleeding Palestine in multiple Lidices [97], driving 800,000 people into exile.

The Zionists approached the Nazis in the same spirit they had Von Plehve, acting on the perverse notion that Jew-hatred was useful. Their purpose was not rescue, but forced conscription of the select few - the rest to be consigned to their agonizing fate.

Zionism sought bodies with which to colonize Palestine and preferred Jewish corpses in their millions to any rescue that might settle Jews elsewhere.

If ever a people could be expected to grasp the meaning of persecution, the pain of being perpetual refugees and the humiliation of slander, it ought to have been the Jews.

In place of compassion, the Zionists celebrated the persecution of others, even as they first betrayed the Jews and then degraded them. They selected a victim people of their own on whom to inflict a conquering design. They aligned the surviving Jews with a new genocide against the Palestinian people, cloaking themselves, with savage irony, in the collective shroud of the Holocaust.

NOTES

76. Marvin Lowenthal, ed., The Diaries of Theodor Herzl, p.6. Cited in Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1983) p.6.
77. From Our Shomer “Weltanschauung”, Hashomer Hatzair, December 1936. Originally published in 1917, Brenner, Zionism, p.22.
78. Brenner, The Iron Wall.
79. lbid., p.14.
80. Ibid.
81. Brenner, Zionism, p.48.
82. Ibid., p.85.
83. Ibid., p.99.
84. Ibid., p.149.
85. Ibid.
86. Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, Britain’s chief Rabbi during World War II. Faris Yahya, Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany (Beirut, Lebanon: Palestine Research Center, January 1978), p.53.
87. Chaim Weizmann reporting to the Zionist Congress in 1937 on his testimony before the Peel Commission in London, July 1937. Cited in Yahya, p. 55.
88. Yitzhak Gruenbaum was chairperson of the Jewish Agency’s Rescue Committee. Excerpted from a speech made in 1943. Ibid., p.56.
89. Ibid., p.53.
90. Ibid., pp.59-60.
91. Ibid., p.58.
92. Judgment given on June 22, 1955, Protocol of Criminal Case 124/53 in District Court, Jerusalem. Ibid., p.58.
93. Ibid., p.59.
94. Ben Hecht, Perfidy (New York: 1961), pp.58-59. Ibid., p.60.
95. Proposal of the National Military Organization - Irgun Zvai Leumi - Concerning the Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe and the Participation of the N.M.O. in the War on the side of Germany. Original text found in David Yisraeli, The Palestine Problem in German Politics. 1889-1945. (Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar Ilan University, 1974), pp.315-317, Brenner. Zionism, p.267.
96. Brenner, The Iron Wall, p.107.
97. Lidice was a Czech village razed to the ground by the S.S. It became a symbol of Nazi brutality and was singled out as a war crime during the Nuremberg Trials.



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10) Court by Court, Lawyers Fight Policies That Fall Heavily on the Poor
By


CLANTON, Ala. — In January, Christy Dawn Varden was arrested in a Walmart parking lot, charged with shoplifting and three other misdemeanors, and taken to jail. There, she was told that if she had $2,000, she could post bail and leave. If she did not, she would wait a week before seeing a judge. Ms. Varden, who lived with her mother and two children, had serious mental and physical health problems; her only income was her monthly food stamp allotment.Two days later, a civil rights lawyer named Alec Karakatsanis sued on behalf of Ms. Varden, alleging that bail policies in Clanton, a city of 8,619, discriminated against the poor by imprisoning them while allowing those with money to go free.

The response was quick: Clanton, while defending its policies, told the court that defendants would be able to see a judge within 48 hours. Within a couple of months, the city agreed to release most misdemeanor defendants immediately, without their posting bail.Since then, Mr. Karakatsanis has sued six additional jurisdictions in four different states, representing single mothers, homeless men and people with mental disabilities, all who would have been free but for some ready cash. His novel legal strategy has proved effective: So far five of the cities have changed their policies. The suits, which are now being replicated around the country, have won support from the federal Justice Department and rulings that endorse his assertion that the money bail system is unfair to the poor.

There are many more Clantons among the nation’s 15,000 trial courts, civil rights lawyers say, and the key to broad change lies with state and local governments. So courthouse by courthouse, groups as small as Equal Justice Under Law, founded by Mr. Karakatsanis and a fellow Harvard Law School graduate, Phil Telfeyan, and as large as the American Civil Liberties Union are waging a guerrilla campaign to reverse what they consider unconstitutional but widespread practices that penalize the poor. These include jail time for failure to pay fines, cash and property seizure in the absence of criminal charges, and the failure to provide competent lawyers.

More often than not, they are winning — and even pebble-size victories can have a large ripple effect. After a handful of lawsuits in Alabama accused a private probation company of using the threat of jail to collect high fees, the company announced last week that it would leave the state.

In Ohio, a report from the A.C.L.U. on debtors’ prisonlike practices, which jailed offenders for failing to pay fines, helped win changes without legal action. In Washington State, a similar report on four counties led to changes in three; this month, the A.C.L.U. sued the fourth, Benton County, saying it still refused to assess people’s ability to pay fines before jailing them. Last week, the organization filed another debtors’ prison case against Biloxi, Miss.

“I don’t think we have to sue all of them,” said Nusrat Choudhury, a staff lawyer with the A.C.L.U.’s racial justice program. “What we’re trying to do with these two cases is show that there’s a nationwide recognition.”

Fred Smith Jr., a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said the sustained focus had started to sway federal judges who were normally hesitant to intervene in local courts. “Now that federal courts are exposed to how bad things have gotten in so many jurisdictions, I think that federal judges are shocked and want to do something about it,” Mr. Smith said.

But judges’ power is limited. Because the cities in the bail cases have backed down rather than fighting it out in court, there have been no appeals and thus no opportunity for higher courts, whose rulings would apply more broadly, to weigh in.

“It’s something I think about every day,” Mr. Karakatsanis said. “The legal system doesn’t have any magic cure.”

In addition, out of respect for state and local governments, federal courts have long made a habit of avoiding ruling on substantive issues, instead focusing on procedural ones such as whether a plaintiff has standing to sue or whether the officials being sued have immunity.

But recently, according to Mr. Smith, the legal scholar, there has been a subtle shift in the other direction. He pointed to a debtors’ prison lawsuit by Equal Justice against Montgomery, Ala., where a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction to halt arrests for unpaid traffic tickets.

Like federal courts, state courts can raise technical hurdles against cases that seek systemic change. For instance, judges rejected the claim of clients who complained that the public defenders’ office in Luzerne County, Pa., was severely underfunded, with a waiting list of several hundred people. Courts said the clients could, if convicted, bring individual claims that their lawyers were not effective, but could not contest the office’s funding level in advance. The State Supreme Court has agreed to review the case.

In the bail suits, Equal Justice must find plaintiffs who are already in jail and sue before their first appearance in court, a window of just a few days.

In Clanton, where the courtroom was closed to the public, Mr. Karakatsanis obtained a list of recent arrestees from the Police Department and took it to the jail. (This approach does not always work — though he represents clients for no charge, he has been turned away from jails and even accused of a form of ambulance chasing.) He met Ms. Varden, took her handwritten affidavit and drove to Montgomery to file suit. Shortly after her release, the entire case was threatened when she died unexpectedly, but her family decided to carry on.

Mr. Karakatsanis also devised a new legal strategy. The case law on bail has generally relied on the Constitution’s guarantee of due process or its outright ban on excessive bail. Courts have long held that bail decisions must be individualized, based not solely on the crime but the defendant’s history and community ties. Yet they have also said bail is not excessive simply because the accused cannot afford it.

Mr. Karakatsanis took a different tack, using the Equal Protection Clause to argue that the poor cannot be detained for mere want of money if a wealthy person in a similar situation would go free.

For strategic reasons, Mr. Karakatsanis has limited his suits to jurisdictions that use a fixed bail schedule regardless of the defendant’s record. Conceptually, though, his target is much broader.

“Almost every state law already says that you have to consider a person’s finances when you’re setting bail,” he said. He wants the courts to go one step further and declare, “It’s not just that you have to consider it, it’s that you can’t keep someone in a cage just because they can’t pay.”

Cherise Fanno Burdeen, the executive director of the Pretrial Justice Institute and a longtime advocate of bail reform, said Equal Justice had “revitalized the legal arguments” against money bail.

“We’ve been working on it from a policy level, trying to change the culture of jails,” Ms. Burdeen said. “But a legal strategy of suing about these issues hasn’t been something that people have figured out how to do for decades.”

So far, judges have bought in. “Justice that is blind to poverty and indiscriminately forces defendants to pay for their physical liberty,” Myron H. Thompson, a federal judge in Alabama’s Middle District, wrote in the Clanton case, “is no justice at all.”

Equal Justice has used the Clanton case as a template, working with local legal groups to identify plaintiffs and bring cases against two St. Louis-area cities, Velda City and St. Ann, as well as Moss Point, Miss.; Ascension Parish, La.; Dothan, Ala.; and, most recently, Calhoun, Ga., which has yet to respond to the suit.

In Clanton, the Justice Department filed a statement of interest saying “any bail or bond scheme that mandates payment of prefixed amounts for different offenses in order to gain pretrial release, without any regard for indigence, not only violates the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, but also constitutes bad public policy.”

Vanita Gupta, the Justice Department’s top civil rights prosecutor, said the department filed such statements not only to clarify the law, but also to signal its priorities. Though Clanton is small, she said, the statement was intended to be used in similar suits elsewhere.

“It adds momentum to an area that has much greater focus today than it did 10 years ago,” she said.

The settlements that Equal Justice has reached, however, present another problem: enforceability. Time and again, governments large and small have failed to follow through on their agreements, leading in some cases to renewed legal battles. That has happened even in large, closely watched cases with court-appointed monitors, something the bail settlements do not have.

“What I really worry about,” Mr. Karakatsanis said, “is if you don’t have a lot of people there to enforce it, they’ll just find less blatant ways to do the same thing.”


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11) Directors Say Volkswagen Delayed Informing Them of Trickery
By and

At least three members of Volkswagen’s board said they were left in the dark about the company’s emissions cheating for two weeks after top executives admitted the deception to American environmental officials.During that period, the board was completing the terms of a contract extension for the automaker’s chief executive, Martin Winterkorn. He was pushed out five days after the use of the cheating device became public, though he insisted he had known nothing about it.

The board members’ statements shed new light on flaws in the management structure and lines of communication at Volkswagen, the world’s largest automaker. Volkswagen’s stock has lost about a third of its value since Sept. 18, when the cheating was made public by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.Volkswagen has admitted that some cars were programmed to disable their pollution controls unless the software detected that emission tests were being conducted. With the controls off, the vehicles had better acceleration and fuel economy, but emitted far higher levels of nitrogen oxide, a pollutant linked to lung ailments.

If Mr. Winterkorn did not know about the communication with the American regulators, he was unaware of a fundamental threat to the company. If he was aware, he withheld significant information from members of his 20-member supervisory board.

“That they were not informed about a problem of this dimension, that points to a huge communications problem,” said Markus Kienle, a Frankfurt lawyer who is on the board of a shareholder-advocacy group known by its German initials SdK.

Mr. Winterkorn did not respond to requests for comment Thursday and Friday. A spokesman for Volkswagen declined to comment.

Stephan Weil, a board member who is also prime minister of the German state Lower Saxony, where Volkswagen is based, said he learned of the cheating while watching television news. Babette Fröhlich, another board member and an official with the IG Metall labor union, said she also learned of the scandal from the media. A third board member, Olaf Lies, the Lower Saxony economy minister, has said he was not informed by company officials and read about it online.

The board’s executive committee, which includes Mr. Weil, had formally recommended to the full board the extension of Mr. Winterkorn’s contract by three years. That recommendation was made on Sept. 2, the day before Volkswagen officials told the E.P.A. about the emissions cheating.

It was a “grave mistake” for Volkswagen executives to withhold information as long as they did, Mr. Weil said on Friday in a statement. He noted that American regulators had raised red flags about Volkswagen emissions in 2014. “Talks took place for a full year before Volkswagen admitted the deception,” Mr. Weil said. “This confession should clearly have occurred much earlier.”

Critics of the company previously have said that top managers in Wolfsburg, Germany, where the company is based, hoarded power while discouraging open discussion of problems. Matthias Müller, Volkswagen’s new chief executive, has acknowledged the flaws and promised a more open style of management, although changing a company with 600,000 employees could take years.

The consequences for Volkswagen have been severe. About 11 million cars have the illegal software, mostly in Europe and the United States, and recalling or repairing them is likely to cost billions of dollars. The company faces dozens of lawsuits on both continents from shareholders and customers. Volkswagen has suspended five high-ranking executives who were involved in motor development and is conducting an inquiry.

After the Environmental Protection Agency made public its accusation on Friday, Sept. 18, Mr. Winterkorn acted to quell the crisis. That Sunday, and again the next Tuesday, he publicly apologized on behalf of the company. Those moves did not save him from the angry board. The next day he was out of a job.

“I am stunned that misconduct on such a scale was possible in the Volkswagen Group,” Mr. Winterkorn said in a statement accompanying his resignation. “I am not aware of any wrongdoing on my part.”

Some outsiders expressed surprise that Mr. Winterkorn, known for his attention to detail, would have been unaware that E.P.A. officials had been asking for more than a year why Volkswagen diesel cars had far lower emissions in laboratory tests than on the road. “I find it very improbable,” said Ferdinand Dudenhöffer, a professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen who follows Volkswagen closely. “He was always the one who wanted to know everything.”

Volkswagen initially contested findings by independent researchers and the E.P.A. in 2014 that showed big discrepancies between the pollutants that its cars generated on the road compared to lab tests. Then, on Aug. 21, 2015, at a conference in Pacific Grove, Calif., organized by the University of California, Davis, a Volkswagen official informally mentioned to a senior E.P.A. official that the company had been deceiving regulators.

The revelation surprised the official, Christopher Grundler, who runs the agency’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality. Standing next to him at the time was a regulator with the California Air Resources Board, according to an E.P.A. official who confirmed the events, earlier reported by Reuters.

In a Sept. 3 conference call with officials from the E.P.A. and the state of California, company executives detailed how Volkswagen vehicles were programmed to trick emissions-testing equipment.

An E.P.A. spokeswoman declined to identify the Volkswagen officials who have been in talks with the agency.

Initially, as the scandal broke, Volkswagen’s board avoided criticizing Mr. Winterkorn. When he resigned, the executive committee said in a statement that it had “great respect” for him and that he “had no knowledge of the manipulation of emissions data.”

Subsequently, several members expressed displeasure with Mr. Winterkorn’s failure to keep them in the loop. Mr. Weil, the prime minister of Lower Saxony, complained about it in a speech last week to the state Parliament.

Volkswagen is the largest company by far in the state and employs about 110,000 people there. The state government owns a 20 percent stake in Volkswagen, and by law has veto power over major decisions.

Under German law, at least half of the seats on a company supervisory board are held by labor representatives. A spokesman for members of Volkswagen’s workers’ council, which is separate from the union and also has seats on the board, said he did not know how they learned of the emissions scandal and could not comment.

At Volkswagen, four of the 20 board seats are held by descendants of Ferdinand Porsche, designer of the original Beetle. The family owns a majority of Volkswagen shares through a holding company. A spokesman for the holding company declined to comment.

Volkswagen executives had a duty to inform the supervisory board of the emissions problem, said Ulrich Hocker, a Düsseldorf lawyer who is president of a shareholder advocacy group known by its German initials, D.S.W. But he said only the supervisory board would have legal standing to seek damages from Mr. Winterkorn, who has kept a low profile since leaving.

Some shareholders have complained that Volkswagen did not follow German laws requiring it to publicize information that could affect the stock price.

Mr. Hocker said shareholders are angry and want changes. “The whole company was run from Wolfsburg,” he said. “They have to get away from this centralized management.”




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12) Drugs Intended for Executions Were Impounded by F.D.A.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS



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