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BAY AREA UNITED AGAINST WAR (BAUAW) CONTINUES!

After meeting last evening, BAUAW has decided to continue our
organizing efforts and our work. While we are, admittedly, a small
group we have achieved much and, have made an impact and, we
are all dedicated activists anyway. So, we continue...

Our next meeting is Monday, January 15, 2007, 7:00 P.M.
Centro del Pueblo
474 Valencia Street (near 16th Street, SF)
(In the conference room--first floor, left and then
to the right at the end of the hall.)
All are welcome!

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Note to Newsletter Readers:

Upon suggestion, I have reorganized the newsletter to put the
news articles and links first and detailed and general announcements
at the end. I hope you find this more helpfull....bw

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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Waiting for Answers
By BOB HERBERT
December 7, 2006
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/opinion/07herbert.html?hp

2) Welcome Political Cover
New York Times Editorial
December 7, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/opinion/07thu1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

3) Senate Confirms Gates as Secretary of Defense
By DAVID S. CLOUD
December 7, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/washington/07gates.html

4) If Castro Had a Talk Show, It Might Sound a Bit Like This
By ANDY NEWMAN
December 7, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/us/07cuba.html?ref=us

5) Altoona, With No Immigrant Problem, Decides to Solve It
By SEAN D. HAMILL
December 7, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/us/07altoona.html?ref=us

6) Report Says Oil Royalties Go Unpaid
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
December 7, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/washington/07royalty.html?ref=us

7) Sitcom’s Precarious Premise: Being Muslim Over Here
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
December 7, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/arts/television/07mosq.html

8) Widows Become the Silent Tragedy
Inter Press Service
Dahr Jamail and Ali Al-Fadhily
http://dahrjamailiraq.com

9) Israel demolishes entire Bedouin village in the Negev
Press Release, Regional Council for the Unrecognized Villages,
6 December 2006

10) FIGHTBACK! A Collection of Socialist Essays
By Sylvia Weinstein
Cuba: Land of the Free, Home of the Brave (1991)
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-cuba-land-of-the-free.html
The United States v. Cuba (1992)
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-us-v.-cuba.html
Malcolm and Fidel in Harlem (1993)
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-malcolm-and-fidel-in-harlem.html
Adrienne Rich, Poet of Honor (1997)
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-adrienne-rich.html
Dorothy Day: A Saint? (1997)
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-dorothy-day.html
If We Are United, We Cannot Lose (2001) (speech)
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-if-we-are-united.html

11) Havana Journal
Hippocrates Meets Fidel, and Even U.S. Students Enroll
By MARC LACEY
NY Times, December 8, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/08/world/americas/08havana.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

12) It's still about oil in Iraq
A centerpiece of the Iraq Study Group's report is its advocacy
for securing foreign companies' long-term access to Iraqi oil fields.
By Antonia Juhasz
December 8, 2006
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-juhasz8dec08,0,4717508.story?track=tottext

13) 33,000 San Franciscans
Editorial by Willie Ratcliff
San Francisco Bay View

14) Protesters Jam Beirut to Urge Government’s Ouster
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
December 10, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/world/middleeast/10cnd-beirut.html?hp&ex=1165813200&en=8464694b4adc25d3&ei=5094&partner=homepage

15) Signs of Lean Times for Home Equity, the American Piggy Bank
By FLOYD NORRIS
December 9, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/09/business/09charts.html

16) U.S. Imprisons More People Than Any Other Nation
By James Vicini, Reuters
"The United States has 5 percent of the world's population
and 25 percent of the world's incarcerated population.
We rank first in the world in locking up our fellow citizens,"
[The U.S. incarceration rate of 737 per 100,000 people
is the highest in the world.
[But the article doesn't break down the disproporionate r
ates for Blacks and Latinos.
[U.S. incarceration rates by race, June 30, 2004:
[ http://www.prisonsucks.com/
[-Whites: 393 per 100,000
[-Latinos: 957 per 100,000
[-Blacks: 2,531 per 100,000
[-Females: 123 per 100,000
[-Males: 1,348 per 100,000...Rolandgarret@aol.com ]
December 9, 2006
http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/us-imprisons-more-people-than-any-other/20061209111509990004

17) CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
“three strike and you’re out” targets Blacks and Poor
"There are more Black youth in the prison system than there are
in college (even though it now costs twice as much to send
a person to prison as it does to send a person to college.) "
By Roland Sheppard
http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret/iWeb/Site/Crime%20and%20Punishment.html

18) Ecumenical Peace Institute/CALC calls on Human Rights Watch
to Re-evaluate its Criticism of the Nonviolent Action
of Palestinian Civilians in Gaza Refugee Camp
Hayward, California, December 7, 2007
For Immediate Release:

19) Cornered Military Takes to Desperate Tactics
Inter Press Service
Dahr Jamail and Ali Al-Fadhily
December 9, 2006
http://dahrjamailiraq.com

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1) Waiting for Answers
By BOB HERBERT
December 7, 2006
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/opinion/07herbert.html?hp

I don’t know whether the undercover cops who shot and killed Sean Bell
and wounded his two friends should be criminally indicted. I wasn’t
there and not enough information has emerged publicly to make
a determination.

What I do know is that the investigation of this shooting in Jamaica,
Queens, in which the victims were unarmed and seemed to have
no intention of threatening the police, is not being conducted
in a timely or effective fashion.

While the local community is seething with anger over the shooting,
there are investigators scrambling like mad to find dirt to throw
on the victims and locate any evidence that might, however
remotely, tend to justify the shooting. But the authorities have
not even asked the cops, who fired 50 bullets at the car with
the three men inside, what happened. That is insane.

The office of the Queens district attorney, Richard Brown,
is leading the investigation into the shooting. For procedural
reasons that have to do with concerns about inadvertently
conferring some degree of immunity on the officers, the D.A.
has asked the Police Department not to interview the officers
who shot at the car.

But the D.A.’s office has been moving in super-slow motion
on the case, and no one from that office has interviewed the
cops, either. Mr. Brown told me yesterday that he has
a tremendous amount of additional information to gather
before his office attempts to speak to the cops. “I’ve got
no business talking to these cops,” he said, “until I know,
or am reasonably satisfied, as to what the facts are.”

He said he hopes to speak to the officers next week, but
he does not know when the matter might be presented
to a grand jury. “You never go before a grand jury with
a case,” said Mr. Brown, “unless you’ve got all the T’s
crossed and the I’s dotted.”

A veteran investigator told me yesterday that there have
been several meetings in the D.A.’s office about the Sean
Bell case but that Mr. Brown and his top aides are not
yet sure how to proceed.

The truth is that neither the Police Department nor the
district attorneys in New York are equipped to properly
investigate controversial police shootings. The prosecutors
and the cops have a special, co-dependent relationship
that exists around-the-clock, year-in and year-out.
They work together all the time on criminal cases and
other matters. They view one another as members
of a close-knit criminal justice family. They watch
each other’s backs.

When cops are involved in shootings that may not seem
justified, there is an instinctive institutional response
from other cops and prosecutors to close ranks around
the accused officers. The instinct is to protect them,
not to indict them.

(Tugging against those instincts in this case, as in the
Amadou Diallo killing in 1999, is the sensational nature
of the shooting and the tremendous public outcry and
press coverage it has generated.)

The interests of the larger community can be served only
when problematic police shootings are thoroughly and fairly
investigated by objective, impartial and independent investigators.
The police have shown over many years that they are not up
to this important task, and neither are the district attorneys.
This is why so few cops have been brought to justice over
the years in cases of blatant police misconduct and brutality.

There is an inherent and apparently insurmountable conflict
of interest at work when district attorneys investigate cases
of alleged police brutality. It’s time for New York to face
up to this. It’s time to establish a truly independent office —
perhaps a special state prosecutor, or a permanent, fully
staffed independent office at the district attorney’s level —
to investigate this type of police misconduct.

The victims of unjustifiable police killings are most often
(but not always) black, and in most cases they are black
men. It’s time to recognize that racial stereotyping and race
prejudice are still big problems in New York, and that the
police often behave differently when confronting people
who are black.

A special investigative office, which could look at these
incidents and encounters only after the fact, is not enough.
There is also a need for Mayor Bloomberg and Police
Commissioner Ray Kelly to become proactive, to acknowledge
that racism is still an issue in the Police Department
and to overhaul police training and address poisonous
police attitudes in an effort to prevent these senseless tragedies.

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2) Welcome Political Cover
New York Times Editorial
December 7, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/opinion/07thu1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

When President Bush insisted that the Iraq Study Group would
not provide cover for the White House to chart a “graceful exit” of
American troops, he was missing the whole point. The much-anticipated
report from the bipartisan panel is precisely about political cover.
That is a good thing, if only Mr. Bush has the sense to embrace it.

Iraq is so far gone that nobody expected the panel to come up with
a breakthrough solution. As the co-chairmen — former Secretary
of State James Baker and former Representative Lee Hamilton —
began their letter accompanying yesterday’s report, “there is no
magic formula to solve the problems of Iraq.” And the study was
never going to change the basic facts: there is no victory to be
had in Iraq, and however American troops withdraw, they will
leave behind a deadly mess.

Its real mission was to avert the worst scenario, in which a stubborn
George W. Bush spends the next two years blindly insisting
he will accept nothing short of victory, while Iraq keeps spiraling
out of control and the Iraqis get no closer to being able
to contain the chaos after the Americans leave.

That is a recipe for years more of savagery, a spillover
of terrorism and instability across the Middle East, more
sacrifice of American soldiers and more cynicism and division
among the American people. Avoiding it is not the same
as winning the war, but it is a way to cut one’s losses.

If Mr. Bush has the capacity to seriously reassess his Iraq
strategy, he will need exactly the kind of political cover that
the Baker-Hamilton group was meant to provide. The central
point of the group’s 79 unanimous recommendations is that
Washington should focus far more aggressively on training
Iraqi forces and prepare for a withdrawal of American troops.
The report says all combat brigades could be out by early
2008, but that would still leave tens of thousands of soldiers
behind to hold the Iraqi Army together.

That is to be combined with a lot more pressure on the
Iraqis to make political compromises and take responsibility
for their own security (the report lays out clear milestones
and says the United States should reduce its military and
economic support if the Iraqis resist) and more aggressive
regional diplomacy, including talks with Iran and Syria that
Mr. Bush has ruled out.

Make no mistake, the report is a stunning indictment of
Mr. Bush’s failure — in Iraq and no less in Washington. But
its recommendations are still couched in language vague
enough to allow the president to pretend it is the “new way
forward” his aides are now talking up, rather than a timetable
for withdrawal, which is on Mr. Bush’s no-go list. Predictably,
the first reaction of Tony Snow, the White House spokesman,
was to insist that “there is nothing in here about pulling back
militarily.”

The world has watched as Mr. Bush painted himself into
a corner and then insisted it was a strategic decision. Even
the Iraqis are trying to provide cover to for him to come
tiptoeing back to the real world. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal
al-Maliki’s call for a regional conference on Iraq would allow
the administration to get past its refusal to talk to Tehran
and Damascus, by saying that ban was never meant
to include Iraqi initiatives.

The Iraq report is a deeply diplomatic document, stuffed
with “coulds” and “mights.” It is, all in all, exactly the kind
of shades-of-gray thinking that Mr. Bush despises, and
exactly what he needs to get the country out of the hole he has dug.

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3) Senate Confirms Gates as Secretary of Defense
By DAVID S. CLOUD
December 7, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/washington/07gates.html

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 — The Senate voted overwhelmingly on
Wednesday to confirm Robert M. Gates as defense secretary
in a 95-to-2 vote.

The decision came after a confirmation hearing and floor debate
that unfolded in less than 48 hours, reflecting the bipartisan
sentiment that a course change in Iraq is vital as well as
a strong desire to quickly replace Defense Secretary Donald
H. Rumsfeld, who announced his intention to resign last month.

Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman, said Mr. Gates
would be sworn in and formally begin work on Dec. 18, more
than a week after his confirmation, because he wanted to
participate in fall commencement at Texas A&M University
before resigning as the school’s president.

With the White House expected to be discussing strategy changes
in Iraq over the next week, Ms. Perino said that Mr. Gates would
be involved in meetings and conference calls until his formal
swearing-in, “so he can hit the ground running.”

Mr. Gates, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency,
said during his confirmation hearing Tuesday that one of his
first acts would be to travel to Iraq to consult with American
ground commanders.

A Texas A&M spokesman, Lane Stephenson, said he could
not confirm Mr. Gates’s plans regarding the university’s
commencement ceremonies, but he said the event was
scheduled for Dec. 15 and 16 and it was customary for
the university president to preside.

The nomination was approved hours after the public release
of a report by the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel
headed by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III
and a retired congressman, Lee H. Hamilton, which urged
direct negotiations with Syria and Iran as well as a clear
declaration that the United States would reduce its support
to Iraq unless that government made “substantial progress”
on security in coming months.

Mr. Gates has not endorsed any specific strategy shift in Iraq,
and several senators warned against overestimating his
ability or desire to make sweeping and rapid changes in Iraq.

“We see the possibilities of a new chapter,” said Senator
Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, but he added,
“It is up to the commander in chief to structure a change
in policy.”

The two senators who voted against Mr. Gates were both
Republicans, Jim Bunning of Kentucky and Rick Santorum
of Pennsylvania, who lost his re-election bid in November.

In a floor statement after the vote, Mr. Santorum said he
opposed the nomination because he believed that Mr. Gates
was in favor of engagement with Iran, a country the lawmaker
blamed for contributing to the conflict in Iraq. “We should
confront them,” Mr. Santorum said.

Mr. Bunning gave a similar explanation. Mr. Gates, he said,
“believes in directly engaging rogue nations such as Iran and
Syria that are known sponsors of terrorist groups in Iraq,
Lebanon and the West Bank and Gaza. I do not support
inviting terrorists to the negotiating table.”

President Bush telephoned Mr. Gates to congratulate him
during the Senate vote after it became clear he would be
approved by an overwhelming margin, Ms. Perino said.

In a statement issued by the White House, President Bush
thanked the Senate and called Mr. Gates “an experienced,
qualified and thoughtful man who is well respected by
members of both parties and is committed to winning
the war on terror.”

Though the statement did not mention Iraq or the White
House strategy review that is under way, Mr. Bush said
Mr. Gates “will help our country meet its current military
challenges and prepare for emerging threats.”

During a perfunctory Senate floor debate on his nomination,
the handful of senators who spoke endorsed Mr. Gates and
said he represented the possibility of a strategy change
in Iraq, which lawmakers from both parties said was necessary.

“I do not believe he is invested in the decisions, many of
them bad, made in the Department of Defense over the last
five years,” said Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island.
“He is a good listener, and I think he will draw on a cross
section of views in making decisions.”

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4) If Castro Had a Talk Show, It Might Sound a Bit Like This
By ANDY NEWMAN
December 7, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/us/07cuba.html?ref=us

MIAMI, Dec. 6 — At the far right end of the AM radio dial, a broadcast
from a parallel universe emerges from the static:

Come-hither advertisements from Cuba’s state travel agency. Reportage
from last weekend’s Fidel Castro birthday parade in Havana, complete
with an admiring assessment of Soviet-era tanks. Excerpts from
speeches by whichever Castro brother is running the country.

It is not a signal-jamming effort beamed from the Cuban coast like
some kind of reverse Radio Martí. It is not, compadre, a joke of any sort.

It is Francisco Aruca, onetime Cuban political prisoner turned
Castro admirer, speaking out from a little radio station on the
industrial north side of Miami or, more often these days, from
the comfort of his home office in the lush suburb of Pinecrest.

For 15 years, Mr. Aruca, founder of the first American company
to run charter flights to Cuba, has doubled as on-air apologist
for a man whom the vast majority of Cuban-Americans in Miami
consider a despicable and murderous dictator.

In doing so, Mr. Aruca speaks to — and for — a tiny community
of committed Cuban-American leftists who have endured years
of public scorn, threats and, in the not-too-distant past, violence.

“I listen every day; it’s the only way you can keep fairly informed
in the Banana Republic of Miami,” said Eddie Levy, chairman of the
Cuban American Defense League, a civil rights group. “I consider
him a hero. We come and go, but Aruca’s there every day.”

Mr. Aruca’s legions of critics dismiss his show, “Ayer en Miami
(Yesterday in Miami),” as a glorified infomercial for his business,
Marazul Tours, which depends on good relations with the Cuban
government and would benefit handsomely from the lifting
of travel restrictions to Cuba, one of Mr. Aruca’s many causes.
Mr. Aruca buys his time slot, an hour every weekday morning,
on the station, WOCN-AM (1450).

Whatever its means of support, the very persistence of the show
has made it into something of an institution, however widely
ridiculed. While it is anyone’s guess how many of Miami-Dade
County’s 700,000 Cubans actually listen to the program,
Mr. Aruca remains a perennial target on mainstream Spanish-
language radio, the dominant medium of Cuban-American
political discourse here. A popular song these days has
a character impersonating Mr. Castro and discarding his
customary fatigues in favor of “the Adidas outfit that Aruca
bought me at Dolphin Mall,” where much of Miami shops.

During the call-in segment of Mr. Aruca’s show on Monday,
all four phone lines were constantly busy. On the other end
were at least as many foes as fans, which is how Mr. Aruca, 66,
says he likes it.

“I really believe that what I’m doing is useful for the Cubans
in Cuba, for the Cuban-American community in Miami, that
it is useful in the U.S., which has wrong relations with Cuba,”
said Mr. Aruca, a cheerful, box-shaped man with a face like
a friendly bulldog. “And given the mediocrity and lack of freedom
of expression and diversity that is in Miami, I have found that
doing something I’ve always enjoyed, which is talking,
I can be useful.”

Mr. Aruca, born 60 miles west of Havana, was a student at
a Jesuit school when Mr. Castro took power in 1959, and he
became part of the counterrevolution soon after. He said he
organized student strikes against the government’s crackdown
on free speech and was promptly arrested and sentenced
to 30 years in jail. He escaped a few weeks later.

Mr. Aruca rethought his politics after he made his way to
Georgetown University, where he earned degrees in economics.
“I was in Washington during the Vietnam War and the civil rights
movement, and came to realize that anti-Communism was
not enough reason to go to war,” he said. He now identifies
himself as a “Christian socialist, not a Marxist,” though he
said he considered Mr. Castro a “political genius.”

Mr. Aruca started Marazul Tours in 1979, soon after the American
government began allowing family visits to Cuba. When he
opened an office in Miami in 1986, he said, his windows were
routinely smashed. His office was later firebombed, and
a Human Rights Watch report on right-wing intimidation
in South Florida singled out Mr. Aruca as a leading victim.

Joe Garcia, the former executive director of the Cuban
American National Foundation, the leading voice of the Cuban
exile community, said Mr. Aruca was first and foremost “a man
who does business with a loathsome regime.” As for his on-air
opinions, Mr. Garcia said, “He calls things as he says he sees
it and as he benefits from seeing it.”

Mr. Aruca’s company and a few other tour operators are his
show’s only sponsors other than the Cuban travel agency.
He said most businesses dared not advertise with him for
fear of boycotts.

One segment on Monday was a report that Mr. Aruca recorded
after birthday parade in Havana, which the ailing honoree
did not attend. “Somebody sitting next to me said that the
Cuban infantry is not supposed to be able to march,”
Mr. Aruca says on the tape. “Looks to me like they’re
marching pretty well.”

After playing (and praising) an excerpt from a speech at the
parade by Mr. Castro’s brother, Raúl, inviting the United
States to begin diplomatic discussions, Mr. Aruca opened
the phones.

“Did Fidel give you sneakers, the sneakers he used there?”
a man asked.

“If you’re going to joke around, go to other shows,”
Mr. Aruca said, hanging up on the caller. “Besides, Fidel
doesn’t know my shoe size.”

Terry Aguayo contributed reporting.

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5) Altoona, With No Immigrant Problem, Decides to Solve It
By SEAN D. HAMILL
December 7, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/us/07altoona.html?ref=us

ALTOONA, Pa., Nov. 30 — By now the pattern is familiar. New
businesses move to town, creating low-paying, low-skill jobs
that are quickly filled by immigrants. Most are Hispanics who
speak little English. Some may be in the country illegally. After
a few years, local leaders fume that school enrollment has surged,
social services are stretched and crime has increased, and they
blame the illegal immigrants.

Since June, when Hazleton, Pa., some 130 miles east of here,
began debating what to do about illegal immigrants, more than
60 local governments in 21 states have followed its lead and
considered new ordinances to drive them away. At least 15
have approved the measures, typically intended to punish
landlords who rent to illegal immigrants and business owners
who employ them.

Altoona, an old railroad town nestled in an Appalachian
Mountain valley about 100 miles east of Pittsburgh, is one
of those 15. It approved its ordinance, which threatens
to withdraw the business licenses of employers and rental
licenses of landlords who hire or rent to illegal immigrants,
in October. But it does not fit the same pattern.

“If you were to look for the area for the fewest immigrant
settlements in the country, you would look to south central
Pennsylvania,” said Steven A. Camarota, director of research
for the Center for Immigration Studies, a research organization
in Washington that favors tougher immigration policies.
“There just aren’t many immigrants — legal or illegal —
around Altoona because there aren’t many jobs.”

If Hazleton, where the immigrant population grew sharply
in just a few years, started the current trend for dealing with
a surge in illegal immigrants, Altoona may be the beginning
of the next wave: trying to prevent a situation from
developing in the first place.

“We don’t have a problem here with immigrants,” said
Joe Rieker, 40, one of five members of the Altoona City
Council who voted in favor of the new ordinance. “But we
want to stay ahead of the curve.” One member voted against.

When places like Altoona pass such laws, it is a sign of
a growing frustration with the federal government’s lack
of immigration enforcement, said Ira Mehlman, spokesman
for the Federation for American Immigration Reform. The
group’s legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute,
has aided several towns, including Altoona, in writing
similar laws.

“We certainly hope we see more towns like Altoona” approving
ordinances restricting illegal immigrants, Mr. Mehlman said.
“And as the message gets out that there aren’t a lot of
communities that are welcoming, it will be a deterrent.”

But the legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union
in Pennsylvania, Vic Walczak, worries that a different
message is being sent.

“When you have towns like Altoona enacting a solution
in search of a problem, you worry if there’s a nativist impulse
there,” Mr. Walczak said. “There’s a fair bit of politics involved
here, and illegal immigrants are an easy and effective
scapegoat for a small town’s problems.”

Founded in 1849 by the Pennsylvania Railroad, Altoona
grew as waves of German, Irish and Italian immigrants
moved here. But immigrants have long since bypassed
Altoona as the city’s economic fortunes dwindled along
with those of the railroad business. In the 2000 census,
the city had just 295 foreign-born residents, about one-
half of 1 percent of its 49,523 residents, and no one thinks
that figure has changed much over the past six years.

“You see a car here with four Mexicans in it, I do feel bad
about it, but they do stand out in an area that’s mostly
white and of European descent,” said Mr. Rieker, whose
wife, Vanessa, is a Peruvian immigrant going through
the lengthy and complex process of becoming a United
States citizen.

But Altoona does have at least one factor in common
with Hazleton: both ordinances were passed after local
killings that have been attributed to illegal immigrants.

In Hazleton, a local man was shot and killed in May.
Two illegal immigrants from the Dominican Republic
have been charged in his death.

In Altoona, Miguel Padilla, 27, was convicted in September
in the killings of three men outside a nightclub on Aug. 28, 2005.
Though he had moved to a nearby town as a boy and graduated
from a high school there, Mr. Padilla was an illegal immigrant
from Mexico. He had previously been arrested and his illegal
status had been reported to the federal government.

Mayor Wayne Hippo and other members of the Council have s
aid the Padilla case had nothing to do with the city’s ordinance.

But for local residents who support the ordinance, the murders
were the biggest reason Altoona needed the ordinance.

“We just had three murders here,” Sandy Serbello, 64, a lifelong
resident said in explaining her support of the measure.
“We look at everybody differently now.”

Ms. Serbello said she avoided talking to anyone she suspected
of being an illegal immigrant, “because we don’t want to be
one of their victims.”

That is the kind of sentiment that worries the Rev. Luke
Robertson, executive director of Catholic Charities in Altoona,
which along with the local Roman Catholic diocese strongly
opposed the ordinance.

“I don’t think they thought through the unintended
consequences,” said Father Robertson, 49, a Franciscan
priest. “It promotes bigotry.”

Moreover, said Bishop Joseph V. Adamec of the diocese,
the ordinance could discourage businesses from opening
in or relocating to Altoona when Interstate 99, which runs
through town, is completed, connecting Interstates 80 and 76.

“They’re not going to build here if we aren’t welcoming,”
said Bishop Adamec, who has overseen the diocese for 19 years.

He is not swayed by those who say that the three murders might
have been prevented if the ordinance had been in effect in 2005.

“The one who did it, he came here when he was a boy and went
to our schools,” Bishop Adamec said. “He didn’t come here already
formed. He’s one of us.”

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6) Report Says Oil Royalties Go Unpaid
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
December 7, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/washington/07royalty.html?ref=us

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 — An eight-month investigation by the
Interior Department’s chief watchdog has found pervasive problems
in the government’s program for ensuring that companies pay
the royalties they owe on billions of dollars of oil and gas pumped
on federal land and in coastal waters.

In a scathing report to Congress, the Interior Department’s inspector
general says the agency’s data are often inaccurate, that its officials
rely too heavily on statements by oil companies rather than actual
records and that only about 9 percent of all oil and gas leases
are being reviewed.

The report undermines claims by top Interior officials that the
department is aggressively pursuing underpayments and outright
cheating by companies that drill on property owned by the
American public.

And though investigators did not attempt to estimate the amount
of money that the government might be losing, they cited a host
of weaknesses that make the government vulnerable to being
short-changed.

Interior officials defended the program on Wednesday, but
announced that they would develop “an action plan” to
address the inspector general’s recommendations.

The report comes as lawmakers in both parties have been
attacking the Interior Department for failing to correct
blunders that department officials now concede could
cost the government as much as $10 billion over the
next five years.

It also reinforces complaints by critics, from auditors within
the agency to lawmakers in both parties, who have said
that enforcement has become superficial, prone to errors
and overly deferential to oil companies.

These are among the inspector general’s findings:

-Since 2000, the number of audits has declined by 22 percent
and the number of auditors has been reduced by 15 percent,
even though soaring energy prices have doubled the total
amount of money at stake, to about $10 billion a year.

-Though the Interior Department says it has “reviewed”
about 72 percent of all revenues from federal leases, it actually
examined only 9 percent of all properties and 20 percent
of all companies.

-The department’s “compliance review” system, a computerized
form of fact-checking that has increasingly replaced audits,
essentially relies on the word of the oil companies being monitored.
Officials conducting such reviews do not ask companies
for their actual records.

-Government data are incomplete and often inaccurate, making
it almost impossible for enforcement officials to develop strategies
for selecting companies for special scrutiny.

The report said the agency’s follow-up efforts were often sketchy,
because officials who identified underpayments by companies did
not have a procedure for verifying that the agency actually billed
the companies or collected the money.

It also said the agency’s statistics about recovering money were
incomplete, inaccurate and sometimes misleading. The investigators
said they could not even determine how many audits the government
completed each year or whether the government recovered as much
it had identified in underpayments.

In response to the report, the Interior Department said it was
preparing a “comprehensive plan” to act on many of the
recommendations. In a written statement, the department’s
Minerals Management Service, which oversees the royalty
collection program, said it would deliver the plan to the inspector
general within 30 days.

“We appreciate the work of the Inspector General’s office,” Johnnie
M. Burton, director of the department’s Minerals Management
Service, said in a written statement.

Last month, the Interior Department said that it had created an
independent advisory panel to review complaints about the
royalty program. But at the time, officials said they did not
believe there were serious problems.

“While I think there’s a lot of room for improvement, I’ve not
been able to find anything that’s drastically wrong,” C. Stephen
Allred, assistant secretary of the Interior for Land and Minerals
Management, said in an interview last month.

The new panel will be led by a man with close ties to the oil
industry, David T. Deal, a former assistant general counsel
for the American Petroleum Institute.

Democratic lawmakers said the new report amounted to a broad
indictment of the Interior Department’s unwillingness to
scrutinize oil companies and protect the interests of taxpayers.

“This report is a blistering, scalding indictment of the Minerals
Management Service,” said Representative Edward J. Markey,
Democrat of Massachusetts and a longtime critic of the
Interior Department’s handling of the royalty program.
“It says that, rather than being a cop on the beat, they
were turning a blind eye to obvious flaws in the auditing
system.”

Representative Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York
and a member of the House Government Reform Committee,
said the report would lead to broader investigations of the
oil and gas leasing program when Democrats take control
of the House and Senate in January.

“That gushing sound you hear is our government leaking
royalties owed to American taxpayers from the oil and gas
companies,” Ms. Maloney said Wednesday. “They are going
to have some explaining to do next year when there’s new
leadership in Congress.”

Since President Bush took office, the Interior Department
has shifted as much enforcement effort as possible from
traditional audits of oil companies to the computerized
“compliance review” system.

The new report is the result of an investigation that began
in March, in response to questions posed by the Senate
Energy Committee after The New York Times reported that
royalties for natural gas had climbed far more slowly than
market prices and that both federal and state auditors were
complaining that the new system was inadequate.

Earl E. Devaney, the Interior Department’s inspector general,
has sharply criticized the department on numerous occasions.
In 2004, his office described the royalty auditing program
as frequently unprofessional, with auditors who were often
unqualified and supervisors who were often ineffective.

In September, Mr. Devaney told the House Government
Reform Committee that the Interior Department had tolerated
cronyism, ethical breaches and cover-ups of major
management blunders.

The new report does not condemn the department’s growing
use of “compliance review,” noting that the Internal Revenue
Service has long used computerized systems to spot signs
of cheating.

“Compliance reviews are a legitimate tool for evaluating the
reasonableness of company-reported royalties,” the report said.

But the investigators warned that the reviews “do not provide
the same level of assurance as an audit, and should only be
used in conjunction with audits.”

When asked by the Senate Energy Committee whether the
agency was spending enough money to do its job properly,
the investigators said they could not answer because the agency
“lacked reliable information to allow us to conduct such an analysis.”

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7) Sitcom’s Precarious Premise: Being Muslim Over Here
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
December 7, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/arts/television/07mosq.html

TORONTO — The handsome, clean-cut young man of evidently
Pakistani or Indian origin is standing in an airport line, gesticulating
emphatically as he says into his cellphone, “If Dad thinks that’s
suicide, so be it,” adding after a pause, “This is Allah’s plan for me.”

As might be expected, a cop materializes almost instantly and drags
the man off, telling him that his appointment in paradise will have
to wait, even though the suicide he is referring to is of the career
kind; he’s giving up the law to pursue a more spiritual occupation.

The scene unrolls early in the pilot of a new Canadian comedy
series called “Little Mosque on the Prairie.”

Yet that fictional moment is an all-too-possible occurrence,
as witnessed when six imams were hauled off a US Airways plane
in Minnesota in November after apparently spooking at least
one fellow passenger by murmuring prayers that included
the word Allah.

“Little Mosque on the Prairie” ventures into new and perhaps
treacherous terrain: trying to explore the funny side of being
a Muslim and adapting to life in post 9/11 North America.
Its creators admit to uneasiness as to whether Canadians
and Americans can laugh about the daily travails of those
who many consider a looming menace.

“It’s a question we ask ourselves all the time,” said Mary Darling,
one of the show’s three executive producers and an American
who has lived in Canada for the last decade. “If 9/11 is still
too raw, it might not work,” she said.

There is the other side of that coin too — what will Muslims
think? — which the show’s creators usually summarize in one
long sentence that mentions the uproar prompted by Salman
Rushdie as well as the Danish cartoons about the Prophet
Muhammad.

This concern stems from the almost automatic presumption
that “to look at Muslims in an entertaining way is going
to be controversial because they will riot in the streets,”
said Al Rae, one of the show’s writers, who noted that he
does research by bouncing potential scenarios off cab drivers
here. Or as Amaar, the young man detained in the opening
airport scene, puts it sardonically, “Muslims all over the
world are known for their sense of humor.”

The strongest insurance against outrage from the faithful
is that “Little Mosque” is the brainchild of Zarqa Nawaz,
a Canadian Muslim of Pakistani origin whose own assimilation,
particularly after she left Toronto for Regina, Saskatchewan,
10 years ago, provides much of the comic fodder.

“It rests on my shoulders to get the balance right between
entertainment and representing the community in a reasonable
way,” Ms. Nawaz, a 39-year-old mother of four, said
in an interview here. “You have to push the boundaries
so you can grow and evolve as a community.”

During one recent episode being filmed at a neighborhood
swimming pool, two Muslim characters who are normally
veiled leave the changing room to discover that a man has
replaced their usual female instructor. The horrified women
lunge for bath towels to use as temporary hijabs, or veils,
to cover their hair.

Ms. Nawaz, veiled since she was in ninth grade, coached
both actresses to be less relaxed. “I didn’t feel that they
were panicked enough,” she said. “It’s a big deal for
a hijab-wearing woman to be seen without one.”

Ultimately the solution is found when, as the script describes,
“Fatima comes out dressed in the Haz-Mat Islamic swimsuit.”
The costume designer unearthed a swimsuit on the Internet
from Jordan that covers her from scalp to ankle and had
it shipped to Canada.

The struggle over what constitutes modest dress is central
to the show. When a Muslim girl flounces into her immigrant
father’s presence with her navel showing, he recoils in horror,
saying, “You look like a Protestant.”

She counters, “Dad, you mean a prostitute?”

He responds, “No, I meant a Protestant.”

Ms. Nawaz’s humor also emerges in the pool episode.
Johnny, the male water aerobics instructor, is gay, and
he pointedly says that the sight of the women’s hair would
not be the least bit arousing.

“I always try to start these debates in my community like:
Does gay count? Do you have to cover your hair in front of
a gay man?” Ms. Nawaz said with a chuckle. (It is not the kind
of question that arises in Muslim countries, where being openly
gay is virtually out of the question; such behavior is punishable
by a death sentence in some places.)

Fellow Muslims often dismiss her thoughts and questions
as too outrageous, she admitted. “But now I have a whole
series to express them.”

Amaar, for example, is abandoning a law career to become
the new imam, or prayer leader, in the small town of Mercy.
His predecessor as imam preaches sermons like, “First there
was ‘American Idol,’ and now there is ‘Canadian Idol.’ All idols
must be smashed.”

Ms. Nawaz wanted the show to look at how a native-born imam,
exceedingly rare at the moment, might deal with issues differently
from the standard imported imams. The actor who plays
the young imam, Zaib Shaikh, is the only Muslim in the cast,
although the creators said they had hoped more would audition.

Another episode focuses on the anguished debate among
strict Muslim families about allowing their children to dress
up and collect candy on Halloween, a Christian affair built atop
a pagan festival. Most North American Muslims eventually
compromise because the day has been drained of religion.
“Little Mosque on the Prairie” turns it into “Halal-oween,” halal
being the Arabic word for anything religiously permissible.

The sitcom grew out of the battle in Ms. Nawaz’s mosque
in Regina over whether women had to pray behind a partition,
a heated controversy across the United States and Canada. She
vehemently opposed the idea, ultimately making a documentary
released this year called “Me and the Mosque” about the
tug-of-war with her own imam as well as similar segregation
battles in Chicago and West Virginia.

The documentary sparked her idea that all manner of tension
between moderate and conservative Muslims — one episode
focuses on the partition issue — would make both Muslims
and non-Muslims laugh. There were 600,000 Muslims in
Canada in the 2001 census, with the number now estimated
around 800,000. Estimates for the American population are
around six million.

In an earnest manner not atypical of Canadians, one goal
of the show is to explain Muslim behavior, or at least make
Muslims seem less peculiar, much as humor about Jews,
Italians or gays helped those groups assimilate.

“On the news all you ever hear are voices from the extreme
end of the spectrum,” Ms. Darling said. “This gives voice
to ordinary people who look just like other ordinary people.”

With its small-town setting and affable cast of characters —
even a talk radio host who labels Muslims as terrorists comes
across as rather lighthearted — the show unrolls a bit like
“Mary Tyler Moore” or some other 1970s sitcom. It is scheduled
to start on CBC on Jan. 9, with eight episodes. More are under
negotiation. Pitches will be made to networks in the United
States in December, so at first only Americans in border states
will be likeley to have access to it.

Test audiences have been somewhat divided, the producers
said. Younger viewers, especially Muslims, tend to laugh
openly with recognition. Others, particularly the older
generation — whether Muslim or not — hesitate.

“Nobody has done a comedy about Muslims before, so they
are not sure how to take it,” Ms. Nawaz said. “Some non-Muslims
wonder, ‘Are we allowed to laugh?’ ”

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8) Widows Become the Silent Tragedy
Inter Press Service
Dahr Jamail and Ali Al-Fadhily
http://dahrjamailiraq.com

*BAGHDAD, Dec. 7 (IPS) - Hundreds of thousands of widows are becoming
the silent tragedy of a country sliding deeper into chaos by the day.*

Widows are the flip side of violence that has meant more than a million
men dead, detained or disabled, Iraqi NGOs estimate. These men's wives
or mothers now carry the burden of running the families.

"The total figure of men who have been killed, disabled or detained for
long periods of time adds up to more than one and a half million,"
Khalid Hameed, chief of the Iraqi al-Raya human rights organisation told
IPS. "The average number of Iraqi family members is seven, so about ten
million Iraqis are facing the worst living circumstances."

In these circumstances, he said, women have had to "search for ways to
survive and support their families at a time when not much help comes
from the international community."

Most international NGOs left the country by last year apparently on the
advice of governments of their countries pointing to growing violence
and dangers to NGO members.

"International NGOs were conducting support projects for Iraqi women
before they suddenly quit and left the country in a rush in October
2005," Faris Daghistani, who was project manager at the Baghdad mission
for the Italian humanitarian aid organisation in Iraq INTERSOS told IPS.

"There was a wide focus on working women and how to support them by
training and providing them with necessary tools to raise income on
their own," he said. "It is a pity that most of our productive projects
have stopped, and we had to leave women to face their fate on their own."

The violence since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is not the first to have
taken its toll. Hundreds of thousands of men were killed, taken prisoner
or disabled during the 1980-1988 war between Iran and Iraq.

"We have never lived our lives as human beings should live," 42-year-old
Dr Shatha Ahmed told IPS at her home in Baghdad. "The Iraq-Iran war took
our fathers, and now the Bush war is taking our husbands and sons."

Women now face a long struggle surviving and bringing up families on
their own, she said. "We could not even dream of developing our own skills."

Dr. Shatha's husband, also a doctor, was killed by Muqtada al-Sadr's
Mehdi Army in September this year when he was leaving the Ministry of
Health offices in Baghdad. She now has to support her family, and her
husband's parents as well.

Some help is on offer to widows through groups such as the Iraqi Red
Crescent, the Islamic Party, the Muslim Scholars Association and
non-governmental organisations. But this support is not well organised,
and is insufficient to help the growing number of widows.

The Social Affairs Office of the government has started paying the
equivalent of about 100 dollars monthly to widows. But this payment
cannot support whole families, given particularly the shooting inflation.

And the payment is not easy to get. "I had to pay a lot of money as
bribes to government officials in order to get the monthly support
payment, and that is not enough to support my big family," 47-year-old
widow Haja Saadiya Hussein from Baghdad told IPS.

"Americans killed my husband last year near a checkpoint, and now I have
to work as a servant in government officials' houses to earn a living
for my six children. I have stopped them going to school, to cut my
expenses."

Some widows have attempted to remarry in order to find support. Some
second husbands, who are usually older, offer to take care of their new
sons for religious reasons.

"There can be no compensation for losing a husband," a spokesperson from
the Iraqi Red Crescent's social support department told IPS. "The world
is responsible for these women who lost their spouses in the name of the
international community."

(c)2006 Dahr Jamail.

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9) Israel demolishes entire Bedouin village in the Negev
Press Release, Regional Council for the Unrecognized Villages,
6 December 2006

At 5:00am hundreds of police accompanied six bulldozers and
demolished 17 homes and three animal shacks in the village
of Twail Abu-Jarwal. The entire village is demolished. People
are sitting by the piles of tin that were their modest dwellings
and wondering what to do, where to go - even their family
cannot host them, as no one has a house standing.

This is the fourth time this year that the government demolished
in this village. This time they got it "right" - no house
is left standing.

But the villagers have nowhere to go to. They lived on the
outskirts of the Bedouin town of Laqia, the old folk paid for
plots of land to build homes in the 1970s, they still hold on the
receipt, hoping someday to receive the plots. For the last
30 years they have been living on land belonging to others,
in shacks, the housing becoming ever more crowded, until
there was no room left for another baby. They turned to the
government for a solution - the option for joining the rest
of the residents of Laqia, in a regular house, on a regular
plot of land. But the authorities had no options for them.
The owners of the land on which they were living requested
that they leave - 30 years is enough. So eventually they left
back to their own ancestral land - only a couple of miles
south of Laqia - by the old ruined school, by their old cemetery.
The adult sons built their old mother a modest brick home.
The rest built tin shacks.

A year ago the government came and destroyed several houses -
including the brick home. Some of the people of Twail Abu Jarwal
rebuilt, some moved into more crowded homes with their adult
siblings. The government came nine months later and demolished
seven more homes. Again, some rebuilt their shacks, some moved
in with family. The government came back last month and just
to harass, uprooted fences, holding the sheep. And now they
came in order to make sure the work is complete.

Israel's Minister of Interior, Roni Bar-On, two days ago was
invited to give answers to the Internal Affairs Committee in the
Knesset, as to what solutions the government is advancing
in order to solve the issue of the unrecognized Bedouin villages
in the Negev, and why the government is demolishing homes
while these people have no "legal" options for building homes.
Bar-On claimed that everything is just fine, he is doing all he
can to deal with this issue, but a criminal must be punished,
and therefore all the "illegal" Bedouin homes in the Negev must
be demolished. He claimed that as far as he is concerned, there
are not enough demolitions in the Negev. And now he has
proved that he is a man of his word - 17 homes demolished
in one foul swoop.

Of the 150,000 Bedouin citizens of Israel living in the Negev,
over 50% live in villages that the government as policy has left
"unrecognized", meaning that there are no options for building
permits, as well as running water, electricity, roads, sewer
systems and trash removal, additionally there are very minimal
education and health facilities. This policy's aim is to force the
Bedouins off their ancestral lands and to concentrate the Bedouins
in urban townships, regardless of their wishes or their culture.
However, there are also no options for living in the concentration
towns the government has built, as there are no available plots
of land for homes, as in the case of the families of the Twail abu-
Jarwal village. Therefore the government can "legally" demolish
the homes of 80,000 members of this community, while they
cannot build one "legal" home.

We need help! Both financial and political.

Please donate to help the people of the village re-build their
homes (tin shacks that stand as homes...) Checks can be sent
to RCUV - al Awna Fund (the Regional Council for the
Unrecognized Villages), POBox 10002, Beer Sheva,
zipcode 84105, ISRAEL.

Please write to your representatives! And tell of the quiet
and brutal demolitions of homes and lives in the Israeli Negev,
demand that they do something about it.

The Regional Council for the Unrecognized Villages is an NGO
and was created in 1997 as the representative body for the
residents of the 45 Bedouin unrecognized villages in the Israeli
Negev. Hssein al-Rafaia is the elected head of the RCUV.
For more information, please contact Yeela Raanan, 054 7487005,
or via email at yallylivnat@ gmail.com, Civil Society Activities
Coordinator, Regional Council for the Unrecognized Villages.

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10) FIGHTBACK! A Collection of Socialist Essays
By Sylvia Weinstein

Cuba: Land of the Free, Home of the Brave (1991)
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-cuba-land-of-the-free.html

The United States v. Cuba (1992)
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-us-v.-cuba.html

Malcolm and Fidel in Harlem (1993)
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-malcolm-and-fidel-in-harlem.html

Adrienne Rich, Poet of Honor (1997)
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-adrienne-rich.html

Dorothy Day: A Saint? (1997)
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-dorothy-day.html

If We Are United, We Cannot Lose (2001) (speech)
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-if-we-are-united.html

Introduction
by Carole Seligman and Roland Sheppard
First Edition. March 2005.

You have in your hands a wonderful book. It is a complete collection
of the monthly columns written by Sylvia Weinstein for Socialist Action
newspaper from 1984 through February of 2001, and for the first
four issues of Socialist Viewpoint magazine, May through
September, 2001. She engaged in revolutionary socialist journalism
until she died at age 75 on August 14, 2001. This collection also
includes the transcript of a presentation Sylvia gave to a university
women’s rights celebration in Baltimore, Maryland in 1993, in which
she reviewed her personal history as a fighter for women’s rights.

She was born Sylvia Mae Profitt in 1926, on the outskirts of Lexington,
Kentucky. Fifty-six of those years, her entire adult life since she
was 19 years old, was spent as an active participant in the
revolutionary workers movement: 38 years in the Socialist Workers
Party, and 18 years in Socialist Action, of which she was a founding
member and full-time worker. During the last few months of her
life, she was a founder and leader of Socialist Workers Organization
and Business Manager of Socialist Viewpoint magazine.

During her 38 years in the Socialist Workers Party, she took
assignments as secretary of the New York City branch of the
party, as an activist in the Civil Rights Movement in the Brooklyn
branch of the NAACP, and as a full time worker in The Militant
newspaper office, among many others.

She was arrested for sitting in at Coney Island Hospital at an
NAACP action there to force the hiring of Black workers in the
construction of more hospital buildings. She picketed at Woolworths
in solidarity with the southern sit-ins. Like many socialists during
the McCarthy era witch-hunt she was visited at home and harassed
many times by the FBI. Of course that never stopped her. She
not only increased her activism, she even ran in socialist election
campaigns for public office in New York City and later in San Francisco.

Sylvia was a staunch defender of the Cuban Revolution and
an activist in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. When Fidel Castro
came to New York City to address the United Nations after the
victory of the Cuban revolution, Sylvia was a key organizer in the
committee that arranged a big reception for Fidel and the Cuban
delegation to meet with their U.S. supporters and Black community
leaders at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem. Sylvia remained very proud
of that experience.

But it was the feminist movement of the 1970s that inspired Sylvia
to take a leadership role, especially in the struggles for abortion
rights and childcare. These issues had a deep personal meaning
for Sylvia. In those struggles, Sylvia was an organizer and activist.
She did countless mailings and handed out hundreds of thousands
of flyers. But the feminist movement also brought out Sylvia’s
tremendous leadership talents.

Sylvia made her own experiences as a young mother who was
forced to obtain illegal, terrifying, and unsafe abortions the
property of the movement as a whole. She testified at speak-outs
to legalize abortion, and later, when it was legal, she organized
to defend the clinics from the attacks of the rightwing anti-abortion
terrorists. She became a spokeswoman and teacher. In the 1970s
she was the main leader of the movement for childcare in San
Francisco. She became known throughout San Francisco as the
“childcare lady,” and as an advocate for all human rights.

She set an example of unalterable opposition to the capitalist
government which stood in the path of women’s liberation. Her
campaign for Board of Education in San Francisco was run on
a financial shoe string, but Sylvia got about 10,000 votes. She
came up against powerful politicians—representatives of the rich—
in the course of her work for women’s rights. S.F. Mayor Willie
Brown, who was then speaker of the California State Assembly,
tried to elbow her off the stage in the middle of her speech at
a Day in the Park for Women’s Rights. That was an annual
demonstration that Sylvia had helped initiate during the struggle
for childcare in San Francisco. Sylvia also found herself face
to face in opposition to Senator Dianne Feinstein, who was then
president of the Board of Supervisors of the City of San Francisco.
Feinstein tried to use the childcare issue to gain political power
for herself but not to expand childcare services for families. Sylvia
fought her on this, and fought successfully against the S.F. chapter
of the National Organization for Women endorsing Feinstein for mayor.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, Sylvia was both the main spokeswoman
for the militant wing of the feminist movement and also the most
respected feminist speaker among the masses of working women
who demonstrated for women’s rights. Behind the scenes, powerful
politicians moved in to try to isolate Weinstein and her collaborators
from the NOW members by initiating a public red-baiting campaign
in the San Francisco media. To Sylvia, this campaign only showed
how effective militant independence in the feminist movement was.

Her last important political work was in founding the Socialist Workers
Organization after the demise of democracy within Socialist Action.
She continued the regular monthly column, “Fightback!” that she
had written for Socialist Action newspaper for the first three issues
of Socialist Viewpoint magazine.

Sylvia Weinstein had the unique ability to make masses of people
feel justified in their anger at their oppression and in the justness
of their cause. She also imparted a strong sense that masses
of oppressed, working together, could exert their power and
change things for the better. She believed that the working class
was fully capable of taking control over society and ruling in the
interests of themselves and all humankind. She was sure that
eventually masses of people would join with her to change things,
to make a socialist revolution. Perhaps it was because she exuded
a deep belief in the goodness of her fellow workers, that people
gravitated to her and were so affected by her.

In the women’s movement, during its ascendancy, Sylvia was able
to impart that attitude of class consciousness to thousands
of women. In the socialist movement she was able to impart
that confidence to her comrades. Her legacy is as a partisan
fighter for human rights and advocate of a socialist future
for humanity.

Sylvia’s columns are infused with revolutionary spirit, optimism,
respect for the potential of the working class, love for the working
people of the world, and hatred for the oppressor class. The
columns exhibit the very essence of Marxist political analysis—
a deep understanding that society is divided into social classes
with diametrically opposed social, political, and economic interests.
But they are in no sense dry or academic. Sylvia spoke and wrote
with a colorful style full of invective for the brutality and arrogance
of the capitalist class and the stupidity of its stooges in government.

Many of the columns also reveal the strong personal motivation
for Sylvia’s tireless revolutionary work—her personal background
of extreme rural poverty, her childhood experience in labor
organizing, her two dangerous illegal abortions, her active
participation in the working class, Civil Rights, antiwar, and
especially the women’s liberation movements. Because Sylvia
played a leadership role in the campaigns for child care, the
Equal Rights Amendment, and abortion rights, her columns
on those topics are especially fierce.

This book will be useful for all who oppose the horrors the
capitalist system is perpetrating upon the peoples of the world
today. It provides a revolutionary socialist perspective on the
last two decades of the 20th century U.S. empire. It contains
useful history on some of the most important developments
of those two decades, such as the several wars waged by the
U.S. on developing countries, on the status of women—
particularly with respect to women’s reproductive rights—
on the growth of the prison-industrial complex and
America's political prisoners, on the first Palestinian
intifada, and the major events of the end of the 20th century.

Sylvia had the gift of finding and re-telling the stories of
ordinary people that reveal great truths about our society.
She found stories in the daily newspapers, such as the story
of the Russian mother who went to Chechnya to bring her
soldier son home, and let the readers see how this strong
act of love and personal sacrifice applied to all mothers and
all working people. Through this story she showed how reactionary
wars against national liberation were not only against the
interests of workers and soldiers of the oppressed nation,
but against those of the oppressor nation as well.

The book does much more than provide a useful history of this
period. The basic politics of these columns is very relevant today.
These writings advocate policies of complete working class
independence from ruling class politics. They advocate working
class methods, strategies, and tactics, such as mass street
demonstrations to oppose war or to support important reforms
such as reproductive rights for women and the Equal Rights
Amendment. The columns are particularly useful in understanding
capitalist electoral politics. Many are scathing attacks on the
reformist policy of supporting so-called lesser-evil, pro-capitalist
candidates in elections, and the de-railing of important social
justice movements in the process. These columns are particularly
useful in understanding the present predicament of the antiwar
movement in the aftermath of U.S. wars against Afghanistan and
Iraq, current continuing occupations of both of these countries,
and a presidential election approaching with no genuine working
class political party in place to contest capitalist political power.
In this context, Sylvia Weinstein’s writings are not only interesting
but prophetic.

The series of articles in this book are indicative of her compassion
for the oppressed and her unswerving confidence in the power
of the working class to construct a socialist world humanitarian
society in harmony with nature. Sylvia was a rebel woman who
knew how to fightback. “Fightback!” was the name of her monthly
column, and therefore, it is the title of this book.

—Carole Seligman and Roland Sheppard


FIGHTBACK! A Collection of Socialist Essays
By Sylvia Weinstein

Socialist Viewpoint Publishing Association
ISBN: 0-9763570-0-3
360 pp.

To order your copy of FIGHTBACK!
Send a check for $25.00 plus $5.95 for shipping and handling to:

Socialist Viewpoint
333 Valencia Street, Suite 407
San Francisco, CA 94110
415-920-9323

Please be sure to include your name, address, city, state and zip code.

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11) Havana Journal
Hippocrates Meets Fidel, and Even U.S. Students Enroll
By MARC LACEY
NY Times, December 8, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/08/world/americas/08havana.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

HAVANA, Dec. 7 ˜ Anatomy is a part of medical education everywhere.
Biochemistry, too. But a course in Cuban history?

The Latin American School of Medical Sciences, on a sprawling former naval
base on the outskirts of this capital, teaches its students medicine Cuban
style. That means poking at cadavers, peering into aging microscopes and
discussing the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power 48 years ago.

Cuban-trained doctors must be able not only to diagnose an ulcer and treat
hypertension but also to expound on the principles put forward by „el
comandante.‰

It was President Castro himself who in the late 1990s came up with the idea
for this place, which gives potential doctors from throughout the Americas
and Africa not just the A B C‚s of medicine but also the basic philosophy
behind offering good health care to the struggling masses.

The Cuban government offers full scholarships to poor students from abroad,
and many, including 90 or so Americans, have jumped at the chance of a free
medical education, even with a bit of Communist theory thrown in.

„They are completing the dreams of our comandante,‰ said the dean, Dr. Juan
D. Carrizo Estévez. „As he said, they are true missionaries, true apostles
of health.‰

It is a strong personal desire to practice medicine that drives the
students here more than any affinity for Mr. Castro. Those from the United
States in particular insist that they want to become doctors, not
politicians. They recoil at the notion that they are propaganda tools for
Cuba, as critics suggest.

„They ask no one to be political ˜ it‚s your choice,‰ said Jamar Williams,
27, of Brooklyn, a graduate of the State University of New York at Albany.
„Many students decide to be political. They go to rallies and read
political books. But you can lie low.‰

Still, the Cuban authorities are eager to show off this school as a sign of
the country‚s compassion and its standing in the world. And some students
cannot help responding to the sympathetic portrayal of Mr. Castro, whom the
United States government tars as a dictator who suppresses his people.

„In my country many see Fidel Castro as a bad leader,‰ said Rolando
Bonilla, 23, a Panamanian who is in his second year of the six-year
program. „My view has changed. I now know what he represents for this
country. I identify with him.‰

Fátima Flores, 20, of Mexico sympathized with Mr. Castro‚s government even
before she was accepted for the program. „When we become doctors we can
spread his influence,‰ she said. „Medicine is not just something
scientific. It‚s a way of serving the public. Look at Che.‰

Che Guevara was an Argentine medical doctor before he became a
revolutionary who fought alongside Mr. Castro in the rugged reaches of
eastern Cuba and then lost his life in Bolivia while further spreading the
cause.

Tahirah Benyard, 27, a first-year student from Newark, said it was Cuba‚s
offer to send doctors to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, which was
rejected by the Bush administration, that prompted her to take a look at
medical education in Cuba.

„I saw my people dying,‰ she said. „There was no one willing to help. The
government was saying everything is going to be fine.‰

She said she had been rejected by several American medical schools but
could not have afforded their high costs anyway. Like other students from
the United States, she was screened for the Cuba program by Pastors for
Peace, a New York organization opposed to Washington‚s trade embargo
against the island.

Ms. Benyard hopes that one day she will be able to practice in poor
neighborhoods back home. Whether her education, which is decidedly low
tech, is up to American standards remains to be seen, although Cedric
Edwards, the first American student to graduate, last year, passed his
medical boards in the United States.

If she makes it, Ms. Benyard will become one of a small pool of
African-American doctors. Only about 6 percent of practicing physicians are
members of minority groups, says the Association of American Medical
Colleges, which recently began its own program to increase the number of
minority medical students.

Even before they were accepted into Cuba‚s program, most of the Americans
here said they had misgivings about the health care system in their own
country. There is too much of a focus on the bottom line, they said, and
not enough compassion for the poor.

„Democracy is a great principle,‰ said Mr. Williams, who wears long
dreadlocks pulled back behind his head. „The idea that people can speak for
themselves and govern themselves is a great concept. But people must be
educated, and in order to be educated, people need health.‰

The education the students are receiving here extends outside the classroom.

„I‚ve learned to become a minimalist,‰ Mr. Williams said. „I don‚t
necessarily need my iPod, all my gadgets and gizmos, to survive.‰

There are also fewer food options. The menu can be described as rice and
beans and more rice and beans. Living conditions are more rugged in other
respects as well. The electricity goes out frequently. Internet access is
limited. Toilet paper and soap are rationed. Sometimes the water taps are dry.

Then there is the issue of personal space.

„Being in a room with 18 girls, it teaches you patience,‰ said Ms. Benyard,
who was used to her one-bedroom apartment back home and described her
current living conditions as like a military barracks.

Other students cited the American government‚s embargo as their biggest
frustration. The blockade, which is what the Cuban government and many of
the American students call it, means no care packages, no visits from Mom
and Dad, and the threat that their government might penalize them for
coming here.

Last year Washington ordered the students home, but the decision was
reversed after protests from the Congressional Black Caucus, which supports
the program.

One topic that does not come up in classes is the specific ailment that put
Mr. Castro in the hospital, forced him to cede power to his brother Raúl
and has kept him out of the public eye since late July. His diagnosis, like
so much else in Cuba, is a state secret.

www.marxmail.org

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12) It's still about oil in Iraq
A centerpiece of the Iraq Study Group's report is its advocacy
for securing foreign companies' long-term access to Iraqi oil fields.
By Antonia Juhasz
December 8, 2006
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-juhasz8dec08,0,4717508.story?track=tottext

ANTONIA JUHASZ is a visiting scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies
and author of "The Bush Agenda: Invading the World,
One Economy at a Time."

WHILE THE Bush administration, the media and nearly all the Democrats
still refuse to explain the war in Iraq in terms of oil, the ever-pragmatic
members of the Iraq Study Group share no such reticence.

Page 1, Chapter 1 of the Iraq Study Group report lays out Iraq's
importance to its region, the U.S. and the world with this reminder:
"It has the world's second-largest known oil reserves." The group
then proceeds to give very specific and radical recommendations
as to what the United States should do to secure those reserves.
If the proposals are followed, Iraq's national oil industry will
be commercialized and opened to foreign firms.

The report makes visible to everyone the elephant in the room:
that we are fighting, killing and dying in a war for oil. It states
in plain language that the U.S. government should use every
tool at its disposal to ensure that American oil interests and
those of its corporations are met.

It's spelled out in Recommendation No. 63, which calls on the
U.S. to "assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry
as a commercial enterprise" and to "encourage investment
in Iraq's oil sector by the international community and by
international energy companies." This recommendation would
turn Iraq's nationalized oil industry into a commercial entity
that could be partly or fully privatized by foreign firms.

This is an echo of calls made before and immediately after
the invasion of Iraq.

The U.S. State Department's Oil and Energy Working Group,
meeting between December 2002 and April 2003, also said
that Iraq "should be opened to international oil companies
as quickly as possible after the war." Its preferred method
of privatization was a form of oil contract called a production-
sharing agreement. These agreements are preferred by the
oil industry but rejected by all the top oil producers in the
Middle East because they grant greater control and more
profits to the companies than the governments. The Heritage
Foundation also released a report in March 2003 calling
for the full privatization of Iraq's oil sector. One representative
of the foundation, Edwin Meese III, is a member of the Iraq
Study Group. Another, James J. Carafano, assisted in the
study group's work.

For any degree of oil privatization to take place, and for it
to apply to all the country's oil fields, Iraq has to amend its
constitution and pass a new national oil law. The constitution
is ambiguous as to whether control over future revenues from
as-yet-undeveloped oil fields should be shared among its
provinces or held and distributed by the central government.

This is a crucial issue, with trillions of dollars at stake, because
only 17 of Iraq's 80 known oil fields have been developed.
Recommendation No. 26 of the Iraq Study Group calls for
a review of the constitution to be "pursued on an urgent basis."
Recommendation No. 28 calls for putting control of Iraq's oil revenues
in the hands of the central government. Recommendation No. 63 also
calls on the U.S. government to "provide technical assistance to the
Iraqi government to prepare a draft oil law."

This last step is already underway. The Bush administration hired the
consultancy firm BearingPoint more than a year ago to advise the Iraqi
Oil Ministry on drafting and passing a new national oil law.

Plans for this new law were first made public at a news conference
in late 2004 in Washington. Flanked by State Department officials,
Iraqi Finance Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi (who is now vice president)
explained how this law would open Iraq's oil industry to private
foreign investment. This, in turn, would be "very promising to the
American investors and to American enterprise, certainly to oil
companies." The law would implement production-sharing
agreements.

Much to the deep frustration of the U.S. government and American
oil companies, that law has still not been passed.

In July, U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman announced in Baghdad
that oil executives told him that their companies would not enter
Iraq without passage of the new oil law. Petroleum Economist
magazine later reported that U.S. oil companies considered
passage of the new oil law more important than increased
security when deciding whether to go into business in Iraq.

The Iraq Study Group report states that continuing military, political
and economic support is contingent upon Iraq's government
meeting certain undefined "milestones." It's apparent that these
milestones are embedded in the report itself.

Further, the Iraq Study Group would commit U.S. troops to Iraq
for several more years to, among other duties, provide security
for Iraq's oil infrastructure. Finally, the report unequivocally
declares that the 79 total recommendations "are comprehensive
and need to be implemented in a coordinated fashion. They
should not be separated or carried out in isolation."

All told, the Iraq Study Group has simply made the case for
extending the war until foreign oil companies — presumably
American ones — have guaranteed legal access to all of Iraq's
oil fields and until they are assured the best legal and financial
terms possible.

We can thank the Iraq Study Group for making its case publicly.
It is now our turn to decide if we wish to spill more blood for oil.

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13) 33,000 San Franciscans
Editorial by Willie Ratcliff
San Francisco Bay View

It’s December, and 33,000 San Francisco voters are still waiting for
justice. All summer, in every neighborhood in the city, people eagerly
signed our referendum petition to stop the Bayview Hunters Point
Redevelopment Plan. We needed 21,000 signatures; we turned in
over 33,000 – and the Elections Department verified them. We were
jubilant. We – 33,000 San Franciscans – had stopped the biggest
land grab in the city’s history.

Then in September, at the request of Mayor Gavin Newsom and
Supervisors Aaron Peskin and Sophie Maxwell, City Attorney Dennis
Herrera threw out the signatures of over 33,000 San Franciscans with
the ridiculous excuse that each petition should have been as thick
as a phone book. No matter that our petitions had been thoroughly
examined and approved by all the appropriate officials before
we circulated them.

So much for democracy in San Francisco ! The Redevelopment
Agency and its developer friends, hungry for our neighborhood,
San Francisco ’s sunniest and most scenic, began to sink its teeth
into Bayview Hunters Point, to chew us up and spit us out.

We see three ways to justice: 1) We want to sue the City but
haven’t yet found attorneys we can afford who are willing to take
the case. 2) We want at least six members of the Board of Supervisors
to reconsider and rescind their approval of the Redevelopment Plan,
and we’re encouraging them to do so. 3) We want a law passed
at the local, state or federal level to prohibit the kind of eminent
domain that seizes property from one private owner and gives
it to a richer one. That would incapacitate the Redevelopment
Agency and stop the land grab.

This week, we have a slim chance to pull off the third option. The U.S.
Senate could pass federal eminent domain reform before Congress
adjourns if we push them hard enough. H.R. 4128 passed the House
over a year ago 376-38. The identical Senate bill, S. 3873, could pass
this week if 33,000 San Franciscans and our friends all over the country
call our Senators. In California , we need to call Sen. Barbara Boxer
at (202) 224-3553 and Sen. Dianne Feinstein at (202) 224-3841,
and we need to do it TODAY!

We still need to limit eminent domain in California too. Prop 90,
which would have done that, failed because of some additional
language about “takings.” I feel vindicated to learn that in Nevada ,
where a similar measure was on the ballot this year, the courts
struck down the “takings” language, leaving only the language limiting
eminent domain, and the voters passed it. I had proposed that route
for California . Too bad we missed the opportunity.

We should demand that the California legislature limit eminent domain,
as 34 other states have done in the past year. If our legislators
refuse – as they refused last year – we’ll know they’re still in the
clutches of the big developers and their big campaign donations.
And we’ll know that they don’t give a damn about us in Bayview
Hunters Point – or about 33,000 San Franciscans seeking justice.

And why not limit eminent domain in San Francisco ? According
to www.propertyfairness.org: “On June 6, 2006 , voters in Orange
County , California , approved a countywide eminent domain
measure. The measure was approved with 75 percent of the
vote. Orange County was the first local jurisdiction in the
nation to weigh in on eminent domain restrictions at the ballot
box. The measure prohibits eminent domain for economic
development.”

If the voters can do it in Orange County , the Board of Supervisors
can do it in San Francisco . How about it, Supervisors? Do at least
six of you have the courage to give 33,000 San Franciscans
the justice they seek?

P.S. The headline “33,000 San Franciscans” was inspired by a lady
I’d never met who came by recently with a box full of 1,000 plain
white postcards printed on one side in bold black letters:
“33,000 San Franciscans.” “I don’t know what you can do with
these,” she said, “but I signed the petition and I’m so angry our
signatures were thrown out that I had to do something.”

Supervisors, your constituents are furious. They call and email
me constantly wondering what we’re going to do, what they can
do and, most of all, what you’re going to do. Your constituents,
33,000 of them, demand justice. It’s yours to give.

Contact Bay View Publisher Willie Ratcliff at
publisher@sfbayview.com or (415) 671-0789.

To reach the Bay View, email editor@sfbayview.com.
To subscribe to this list, email sfbayview-subscribe@lists.riseup.net.

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14) Protesters Jam Beirut to Urge Government’s Ouster
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
December 10, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/world/middleeast/10cnd-beirut.html?hp&ex=1165813200&en=8464694b4adc25d3&ei=5094&partner=homepage

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Dec. 10 — The center of Beirut was packed with
hundreds of thousands of pro-Hezbollah and allied demonstrators
today, pressing their call for the Lebanese government to resign
in a jubilant mass of protest and carnival.

The pounding of martial music, the roaring din of the excited crowd
floated up a nearby hill to pierce the thick walls of the stately
government building, the Grand Serail, as Prime Minister Fouad
Sinoria, entered a ceremonial room for a news conference. “I don’t
understand what is this great cause that is making them create
this tense political mess and stage open ended demonstrations,”
he said to a small group of reporters.

Over and over, the crowd, the speakers, the posters, offered clear
explanations. They did not want a government controlled by the
so-called March 14 coalition, an amalgam of Sunni, Christian and Druse
parties. They did not want a government aligned with Washington.
In short, a very large number of Lebanese citizens said they
did not want the present leadership.

A banner that hung down the side of a building, showing a picture
of the prime minister hugging Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
“Thanks Condy,” it said just beneath another image of dead children,
referring to Lebanese civilian casualties during Israel’s war with
the militant Shiite group Hezbollah during the summer.

“There is no longer a place for America in Lebanon,” Hezbollah’s
deputy leader, Naim Qassem, said in remarks that boomed through
loudspeakers.

“Do you not recall that the weapons fired on Lebanon are American
weapons?” he added.

Prime Minister Sinoria’s somewhat surprising expression
of bewilderment seemed to capture the spirit dividing this country
of just four million people. There are government supporters
who appear afraid and threatened, and there are opponents of the
government, particularly those who support Hezbollah, who seem
empowered and confident that they stand at the threshold of victory.

In a subdued ceremony that seemed a reverse image of the boisterous
protests, several thousand people gathered to mark the anniversary
of the assassination of Gibran Tueni, the anti-Syrian newspaper
publisher killed in a car bombing last year. The front of the convention
center was filled with Range Rovers, Jaguars and Mercedes-Benzes.
Inside, the audience was dressed for a funeral, suits and ties,
and cuff links for the men.

“Everyone is afraid,” said Michel Khoury, a former governor of the
central bank as he left the memorial, a shiny new Motorola cell
phone pressed to his ear. “The Shiite community is very important.
It is the first time it is monolithic, the first time in the history
of this country you have one of the communities united.”

And in Tripoli today, tens of thousands of pro-government
demonstrators rallied.

This fight between Lebanese factions, defined primarily along
sectarian lines, is a fight for control of the government that will
help determine Lebanon’s future, whether it will eventually lean
toward Iran and Syria, as would like, or toward the United States
and Europe, as the governing alliance would like.

“We are today at the last phase of our struggle before we consolidate
our independence, freedom and sovereignty because the government
has proven to be a failure at all levels,” said the former Gen. Michel
Aoun in a live video broadcast to the demonstrators in Beirut. “They
have failed to isolate the Lebanese people from one another and
we are here today to represent unity and we are leading this struggle
together.” He has aligned his Christian party, the Free Patriotic
Movement, with Hezbollah.

He said that within a few days, the allied groups would press to
form an interim cabinet and then early parliamentary elections.
There have been rumors flying around Beirut that the next step
will be attempts to block roads, the airport, and the ports, to grind
the country to a halt. But there has so far been nothing official.

Hezbollah and its allies have managed for 10 days to control the
center of Beirut with a loud, peaceful, organized protest. In many
ways, Hezbollah has adopted a strategy that has been cheered
by the White House in the past, in places like Ukraine, and even
Lebanon itself, leaning on large, peaceful crowds to force unpopular
governments to resign and pave the way for elections. But this time
Washington and its allies have said the protest amounts to
a coup d’état, fueling charges that America supports democratic
practices only when its allies are winning.

“Does Bush want national expression in Lebanon?” Sheik Qassem
said to the crowd. “Does the West and Arabs want the voice of the
people in Lebanon? Tell them, ‘Death to America.’ Tell them,
‘Death to Israel.’ Tell them, ‘Glory to a free Lebanon.’ ”

The Hezbollah alliance took its protests to the streets after the
governing coalition refused its demands to give Hezbollah and
its allies more power, including the ability to veto all government
action. The current demonstration began on Friday, with hundreds
of thousands of people pouring into the center of the city, many
bused in from the poor, war-ravaged Shia communities of the
south. The government appeared to hope that the protesters would
grow weary and go back to the negotiating table.

But today, there was the huge crowd, a vista of humanity pressed
shoulder to shoulder, flying flags and calling for the government
to resign.

“We want a clean cabinet,” read one banner.

“Victory, change, is coming,’ read another.

The gravity of the situation was underlined by roads sealed by
soldiers and razor wire, and the many shops and restaurants
that remained closed.

But high spirits seemed dominant. “I am having fun overthrowing
the cabinet,” said Hassan Katteya, 10, as he walked with his mother,
Reema, through the crowd.

“We feel that we are the strong party,” Mrs. Katteya said. “The
government is the weak party. They are hiding up there in the
Grand Serail.”

Nada Bakri contributed reporting.

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15) Signs of Lean Times for Home Equity, the American Piggy Bank
By FLOYD NORRIS
December 9, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/09/business/09charts.html

MUCH of the growth of the United States in recent years has been
financed by homeowners’ rising wealth. But now the growth in that
wealth has almost vanished.

The government reported this month that it estimated the equity
of Americans in their homes — what the homes are worth less
the money owed on mortgages — rose a scant 0.1 percent
in the third quarter. At an annual rate, that was just 0.5 percent,
the smallest gain in more than a decade.

From late 2003 through the first quarter of this year, the gain
in home equity was running at more than 10 percent a year, more
than enough to keep Americans feeling richer and to provide cash —
through refinancings or home equity loans — for other uses.

The amount of money being borrowed has also begun to slow,
although not nearly as rapidly as the increase in the value
of real estate might indicate. In the third quarter, the outstanding
balances of mortgage loans rose at an annual rate of 7.9 percent.
That is less than half the pace of just two years ago, and the lowest
figure for any quarter since early 2001, when the economy
was going into recession.

That American homes face more leverage than they once did
is clear from the chart showing mortgages as a percentage
of value over the last half century.

Over all, homes are still worth more than twice what is owed
on them, which hardly sounds alarming even if relative debt
levels doubled over the 50 years.

The real issue is the spread of that debt. There is no question
that more homes now have very high loan-to-value ratios,
or that more mortgages have features that could cause monthly
payments to soar. Either could cause severe distress for some
homeowners if home prices fall or a recession threatens
incomes. Owners could find they own homes worth less
than they owe or that they cannot afford the new monthly
payment. A wave of defaults could come even when most
homeowners have ample financial flexibility.

It used to be that in eras when home values rose rapidly,
the amount of outstanding mortgages rose more slowly. That
stood to reason, because most homes were not sold in any given
year and mortgages were primarily used to buy homes. Those
who owned homes might have felt wealthier, but they did
not take on additional debt.

That stayed true even in the late 1990’s, when home prices
were rising at a good clip and mortgage balances rose more
slowly. But the relationship has vanished. For the best two
and a half years of the real estate boom — ending this past
March — the value of home equity in America rose at a very
impressive annual rate of 11.8 percent. But the total amount
of mortgages outstanding rose at a rate of 13.5 percent.

Some of that borrowing came from home buyers who needed
to borrow to pay the high prices, and some from homeowners
refinancing their homes. But a lot also came from an increased
willingness of Americans to use home equity lines of credit —
and from the expansion of the asset-backed securities market
that funds many such loans. The amount outstanding under
them rose at a compounded annual rate of 22.9 percent
over that period.

It seems like a paradox: the more homes are worth, the more
many owners owe, even if they purchased the homes many years
before for far less than they are now worth.

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16) U.S. Imprisons More People Than Any Other Nation
By James Vicini, Reuters
"The United States has 5 percent of the world's population
and 25 percent of the world's incarcerated population.
We rank first in the world in locking up our fellow citizens,"
[The U.S. incarceration rate of 737 per 100,000 people
is the highest in the world.
[But the article doesn't break down the disproporionate r
ates for Blacks and Latinos.
[U.S. incarceration rates by race, June 30, 2004:
[ http://www.prisonsucks.com/
[-Whites: 393 per 100,000
[-Latinos: 957 per 100,000
[-Blacks: 2,531 per 100,000
[-Females: 123 per 100,000
[-Males: 1,348 per 100,000...Rolandgarret@aol.com ]
December 9, 2006
http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/us-imprisons-more-people-than-any-other/20061209111509990004

WASHINGTON (Dec. 9) -- Tough sentencing laws, record numbers
of drug offenders and high crime rates have contributed to the
United States having the largest prison population and the
highest rate of incarceration in the world, according to criminal
justice experts.

A U.S. Justice Department report released on November 30 showed
that a record 7 million people -- or one in every 32 American adults
-- were behind bars, on probation or on parole at the end of last
year. Of the total, 2.2 million were in prison or jail.

According to the International Center for Prison Studies at King's
College in London, more people are behind bars in the United
States than in any other country. China ranks second with
1.5 million prisoners, followed by Russia with 870,000.

The U.S. incarceration rate of 737 per 100,000 people is the
highest, followed by 611 in Russia and 547 for St. Kitts and
Nevis. In contrast, the incarceration rates in many Western
industrial nations range around 100 per 100,000 people.

Groups advocating reform of U.S. sentencing laws seized
on the latest U.S. prison population figures showing admissions
of inmates have been rising even faster than the numbers
of prisoners who have been released.

"The United States has 5 percent of the world's population
and 25 percent of the world's incarcerated population. We rank
first in the world in locking up our fellow citizens," said Ethan
Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, which supports
alternatives in the war on drugs.

"We now imprison more people for drug law violations than
all of western Europe, with a much larger population,
incarcerates for all offenses."

Ryan King, a policy analyst at The Sentencing Project, a group
advocating sentencing reform, said the United States has
a more punitive criminal justice system than other countries.

"We send more people to prison, for more different offenses,
for longer periods of time than anybody else," he said.

Drug offenders account for about 2 million of the 7 million
in prison, on probation or parole, King said, adding that
other countries often stress treatment instead of incarceration.

Commenting on what the prison figures show about U.S.
society, King said various social programs, including those
dealing with education, poverty, urban development, health
care and child care, have failed.

"There are a number of social programs we have failed
to deliver. There are systemic failures going on," he said. "
A lot of these people then end up in the criminal justice
system."

Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal
Foundation in California, said the high prison numbers
represented a proper response to the crime problem in the
United States. Locking up more criminals has contributed
to lower crime rates, he said.

"The hand-wringing over the incarceration rate
is missing the mark," he said.

Scheidegger said the high prison population reflected
cultural differences, with the United States having far higher
crimes rates than European nations or Japan. "We have more
crime. More crime gets you more prisoners."

Julie Stewart, president of the group Families Against Mandatory
Minimums, cited the Justice Department report and said drug
offenders are clogging the U.S. justice system.

"Why are so many people in prison? Blame mandatory sentencing
laws and the record number of nonviolent drug offenders
subject to them," she said.

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17) CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
“three strike and you’re out” targets Blacks and Poor
"There are more Black youth in the prison system than there are
in college (even though it now costs twice as much to send
a person to prison as it does to send a person to college.) "
By Roland Sheppard
http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret/iWeb/Site/Crime%20and%20Punishment.html

1994 Fact: Due to institutionalized racism of American society,
Blacks are seven times more likely to be incarcerated than whites.
The rate for whites is 289 per 100,00; the rate for African
Americans is 1860 per 100,00

In the aftermath of the rebellion in South Central L.A. two years
ago, there has been a massive media blitz to make "violent crime"
the major issue of the day. After all the hype, polls have been
taken that show crime as the "major" issue—ahead
of unemployment, health, taxes, etc.

According to a recent survey by the Center for Media and Public
Affairs, the three major TV networks aired more than twice
as many crime stories last year than in 1992. Meanwhile the
crime rate has remained virtually the same.

President Clinton and most of the political representatives
of the rich have taken the proper cue and picked up the call
for a "three strikes and your out" solution to the problem
of crime. Both California and the state of Washington have
already passed "three strikes" legislation.

The California law stipulates that after a third conviction,
a defendant will receive 25 years to life imprisonment or
triple the usual sentence for the offense, which ever is greater.
Second-time offenders will get double the usual sentence.
Even first-time offenders will have time off for good behavior
reduced from 50 percent to 20 percent.

The California law will face challenges in court. Most controversial
are the provisions that extend the penalties to youth; many
youth have been convicted without even a jury trial.

Nevertheless, according to California Gov. Pete Wilson,
"There’s 30 other states who are watching closely to see
how this goes." "Three strikes" will be the main campaign
issue during the election year, as the Democrats and
Republicans try to outdo each other as being the hardest
on crime.

The causes of crime--ie., uneployment, lack of education,