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

BARRIO UNIDO FOR GENERAL AND UNCONDITIONAL
AMNESTY FOR ALL!
EMERGENCY PICKET LINE
FRIDAY, JANUARY 12, 2007, 4:00 - 7:00 P.M.
FEDERAL BUILDING
450 GOLDEN GATE AVE.
BETWEEN POLK AND LARKIN STREETS, S.F.
STOP THE ICE RAIDS! FREE THE WORKERS!
STOP THE DEPORTATIONS!
THE WORKERS SHOULD GET THEIR JOBS BACK!
WE DEMAND IMMEDIATE, GENERAL AND UNCONDITIONAL
AMNESTY FOR ALL! DEFEND THE RIGHT OF
ALL WORKERS TO ORGANIZE UNIONS IN THEIR OWN DEFENSE

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
ARTICLES IN FULL:
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

1) US Army might break Goodyear strike
By Bernard Simon in Toronto
Financial Times
Updated: 7:12 p.m. AKT Dec 15, 2006
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16226231/

2) Commission Seeks School System Overhaul
By NANCY ZUCKERBROD, AP Education Writer
"including ending high school at the 10th grade "
Thursday, December 14, 2006
(12-14) 12:32 PST WASHINGTON (AP)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/12/14/national/w073654S29.DTL&hw=new+school+year+proposal&sn=003&sc=494

3) Pentagon eyes $468.9 bln budget for fiscal 2008
By Andrea Shalal-Esa and Jim Wolf
Fri Dec 15, 2006 11:39 PM ET
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2006-12-16T043904Z_01_N15422822_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUDGET-PENTAGON.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsArt-C2-NextArticle-2

4) HIGH BLACK ARREST RATE RAISES CALL FOR INQUIRY
Range of explanations offered by experts, officials
for S.F.'s disparity with other cities
- Susan Sward, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, December 17, 2006
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/12/17/MNGF8N04MD1.DTL

5) About Face: Soldiers Call for Iraq Withdrawal
by MARC COOPER
[posted online on December 16, 2006]
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070101/cooperweb

6) Powell Says U.S. Forces Are Overstretched in Iraq
By BRIAN KNOWLTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/world/middleeast/17cnd-powell.html?hp&ex=1166418000&en=a0cfd8c18d0fe1a6&ei=5094&partner=homepage

7) Brainstorming on Iraq
The Capital Awaits a Masterstroke on Iraq
By HELENE COOPER
WASHINGTON
December 17, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/weekinreview/17cooper.html?hp&ex=1166418000&en=d2978f837abd747c&ei=5094&partner=homepage

8) Mexico’s Federal Forces Pull Out of Oaxaca
By REUTERS
December 17, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/world/americas/17mexico.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

9) Abuse Claims Are Settled in Washington
"The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington has agreed to pay
$1.3 million to 16 men who said they were sexually abused by eight
priests from 1962 to 1982."
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 17, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/us/17priests.html

10) Protesters Denounce Police Killing
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
December 17, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/nyregion/17protest.html?ref=nyregion

11) Goldman’s Season to Reward and Shock
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
December 17, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/business/yourmoney/17deal.html?ref=business

12) Report on the Thursday, December 7, 2006 BAUAW meeting and
BAUAW Open Letter to the Board of Education
December 17, 2006
www.bauaw.org

13) Swift Raids
New York Times Editorial
December 18, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/opinion/18mon1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

14) Castro to Recover but Not Return, Cubans Say
By JULIA PRESTON
December 18, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/world/americas/18cuba.html?ref=world

15) Engels Would Gasp, and Locals Gripe, at a Golden Mile
By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY
December 18, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/world/europe/18moscow.html?ref=world

16) In Memory-Bank ‘Dialogue,’ the Brain Is Talking to Itself
By NICHOLAS WADE
December 18, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/science/18memory.html

17) It's Either Occupation or Education
Inter Press Service
Dahr Jamail and Ali al-Fadhily
Dahr Jamail's MidEast Dispatches
BAGHDAD, Dec 18 (IPS)
http://dahrjamailiraq.com

18) Youths want no migration controls
December 4, 2006
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/6205378.stm

19) What are they scared of?
by Kevin Cooper
[via email...bw]

20) FBI: Recruiters caught in drug probe
December 17, 2006
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061217/ap_on_re_us/military_recruiters_cocaine

21) Offer to Invest in Delphi Adds to Pressure on Union
By MICHELINE MAYNARD
December 19, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/19/business/19delphi.html?ref=business

22) Suit filed to reinstate referendum against Redevelopment Plan
for Bayview Hunters Point, San Francisco
SF Bay View
editor@sfbayview.com
[via email...bw]

23) Perpetual War for Peace?
…Iraq…Iran…& the Corporate Agenda
http://www.traprockpeace.org/traprock_video/index.php/2006/12/16/perpetual-war-for-peace-part-1/

24) Indict, Convict, & Jail the Killer Cops!
Stop the Raids and Intimidation Against the Community!
Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation!
No more Stolen Lives!
[This is only one of at least four demonstrations scheduled this week
throughout New York. Too many have suffered at the hands of the
NYPD. I hope these demonstrations are massive...bw]
The October 22 Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the
Criminalization of a Generation calls on you to join in a
M A S S P R O T E S T
Wednesday, December 20, 2006 at 6pm
Corner of Archer Avenue & Sutphin Boulevard, Jamaica, Queens
(E/J/Z train to Sutphin Boulevard-Archer Avenue)

25) Why we stand for immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq
Chomsky, Zinn et al: US Out of Iraq Now!
please sign and circulate widely
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/OutNow/
[Unfortunately, you can't sign this petition without donating
money through PayPall. Not good...bw]

26) Only the Jailers Are Safe
New York Times Editorial
December 20, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/20/opinion/20wed1.html?hp

27) Bush Concedes Iraq War More Difficult Than He Expected
By JOHN HOLUSHA
December 20, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/20/washington/20cnd-prexy.html?hp&ex=1166677200&en=51f2a36039e215ed&ei=5094&partner=homepage

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

1) US Army might break Goodyear strike
By Bernard Simon in Toronto
Financial Times
Updated: 7:12 p.m. AKT Dec 15, 2006
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16226231/

The US Army is considering measures to force striking workers back
to their jobs at a Goodyear Tire & Rubber plant in Kansas in the face
of a looming shortage of tyres for Humvee trucks and other military
equipment used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A strike involving 17,000 members of the United Steelworkers
union has crippled 16 Goodyear plants in the US and Canada
since October 5.

The main issues in dispute are the company's plans to close
a unionised plant in Texas, and a proposal for workers to
shoulder future increases in healthcare costs.

An army spokeswoman said on Friday that "there's not a shortage
right now but there possibly will be one in the future".

According to Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House of Representatives
armed services committee, the strike has cut output of Humvee
tyres by about 35 per cent.

Mr Hunter said that the army had stopped supplying tyres to units
not related to the Central Command, which is responsible for
operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tyres were also not being
provided to army repair depots.

While concern has centred on the Humvees, tyres are also
critical to aircraft and other military equipment.

Goodyear brushed off concerns of looming shortages, saying
that production at the Kansas plant, where the Humvee tyres
are made, "is near normal levels and will be back to 100 per
cent in the near future."

It added that "we're in daily contact with the military to ensure
delivery of the required Humvee tyres".

The company said it was using salaried and temporary workers
to keep the Kansas plant running. It has taken similar measures
at other plants, as well as stepping up imports from overseas
factories to maintain supplies to the car and truck industry.

The union claims that the strikebound plants are running at
about 20 per cent of capacity. Goodyear has said that North
American output is at about half normal levels, including
non-union plants.

According to Mr Hunter, the army is exploring a possible
injunction under the Taft-Hartley Act to force the 200 Kansas
workers back to their jobs.

He proposed that they return under their current terms
of employment, on the understanding that any settlement
would be extended to them.

© The Financial Times Ltd 2006. "FT" and "Financial Times"
are trademarks of the Financial Times.Copyright The Financial
Times Ltd. All rights reserved.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16226231/

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

2) Commission Seeks School System Overhaul
By NANCY ZUCKERBROD, AP Education Writer
"including ending high school at the 10th grade "
Thursday, December 14, 2006
(12-14) 12:32 PST WASHINGTON (AP)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/12/14/national/w073654S29.DTL&hw=new+school+year+proposal&sn=003&sc=494

Education and business leaders urged an overhaul of the U.S. school
system, including ending high school at the 10th grade for many
students. Current teaching is failing to prepare young Americans
for the global economy, members of a bipartisan panel said Thursday.

Beginning teachers should earn more, according to the group,
and money for this idea could come from the scrapping
of conventional teacher pension plans in favor of other
benefits such as 401(k)s.

"People have got to understand what we've got is not working.
It's not working for kids, but it's not working for teachers either,"
said William Brock, a former congressman who was labor secretary
and trade representative in the Reagan administration.

The Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce was
organized by people who launched a group by the same name
about 16 years ago. That commission made a series
of recommendations, several of which were enacted.

Under the new group's proposal, students would finish 10th
grade and then take exams. Depending on how well the students
perform, they could go on to community college or stay in school
and study for more advanced tests that could earn them a place
at a four-year college. Somewhat similar systems are in place
in other countries.

The report says that by not spending today's resources on 11th-
and 12th-graders and through other changes, the government
could eventually save an estimated $60 billion.

The money could pay, for example, for new pre-kindergarten
programs and higher teacher salaries, which the report said would
help recruit top graduates into the profession.

The commission recommends paying beginning teachers about
$45,000 per year, currently the median amount paid to teachers —
meaning half earn more than that and half earn less.

To help cover the cost, the commission recommends moving away
from traditional, defined benefit pensions to less generous
retirement plans commonly found in the private sector.

Antonia Cortese, executive vice president of the American
Federation of Teachers, said teachers should not have to lose
benefits in order to make more.

One other major shift would put independent contractors
in charge of operating schools, though the schools would remain
public. States would oversee the funding.

Cortese also was critical of that idea. "Blowing up the governance
system is very drastic, and we don't know what will happen
in its place," she said.

Chuck Saylors, a school board member and parent in Taylors, S.C.,
said shifting control to the states from the local districts would
be controversial. "Mainly because we have done it the same way
for so long," Saylors said, adding that he was glad the group had
put forward thought-provoking ideas.

The report notes the U.S. had 30 percent of the world's population
of college students three decades ago, but that has fallen to 14 percent.
The commission also cites poor performance by U.S. students
in exams when compared with students in other advanced
industrial nations.

"We may want to wait to think about these changes, but quite
simply the world will not wait for us to catch up," said Thomas
Payzant, a commission member who recently stepped down
as Boston's school superintendent.

The commission's work was financed by several foundations,
including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Among the initiatives from the first commission that the government
enacted were a push for states to develop achievement standards
and stepped-up training for high school graduates going directly
into the work force.

The current commission includes are former education secretaries
Rod Paige and Richard Riley; former Labor Secretary Ray Marshall;
former Michigan Gov. John Engler; and Joel Klein, chancellor
of the New York City schools.

On the Net:

Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce:

www.skillscommission.org/

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

3) Pentagon eyes $468.9 bln budget for fiscal 2008
By Andrea Shalal-Esa and Jim Wolf
Fri Dec 15, 2006 11:39 PM ET
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2006-12-16T043904Z_01_N15422822_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUDGET-PENTAGON.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsArt-C2-NextArticle-2

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House has approved
a $468.9 billion budget for the Pentagon in fiscal year 2008,
a six-percent increase over last year's request, according to
a Defense Department document obtained by Reuters.

It is also asking the Pentagon to cover some Army and Marine
Corps war costs in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of the regular
budget, rather than through emergency budget requests.

The 2008 budget request is $4.7 billion more than the level
the Pentagon forecast in its 2007 budget documents.

Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England welcomed the
increase in a letter to Rob Portman, director of the White House
Office of Management and Budget.

But he strongly objected to OMB's orders that "costs to accelerate
Army and Marine Corps combat and combat support units, Army Force
Readiness and replacement of additional aircraft losses" should
be funded as part of the 2008 budget.

England said that violated the Pentagon's earlier agreement with
the White House that the extra spending would be used to cover
Army budget shortfalls, and that war costs would continue to be
funded through supplemental budgets.

The Bush administration is continuing to discuss budgets with various
government agencies, including the Pentagon, and will submit a fiscal
2008 budget to Congress in February.

"The inconsistency ... is that adding war costs in the budget would
effectively negate the prior agreement for a topline increase," England
said in the December 14 memorandum.

Offsets proposed by White House budget officials would "significantly
weaken the department's strategic position" and jeopardize the
Pentagon's joint warfighting concept, he said.

England did not give details on the proposed offsets.

However, he said the Pentagon's initial budget proposal -- before
the suggested offsets -- was based on thousands of hours of work,
and the best judgment by senior military and civilian leaders.

"It is balanced and provides for our nation's defense at a time
of diverse and dramatic threats," England said.

WAR COSTS

U.S. lawmakers have grown increasingly frustrated about the Pentagon's
use of supplemental budgets to fund war costs, given that the costs
are no longer "unanticipated," said Steven Kosiak of the Center for
Strategy and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington-based research group.

But he said lawmakers wanted more oversight of that spending than
permitted in the supplemental budgets, and there was no suggestion
that they would curb funding for the war.

"They would like the administration to ask for most of the funding
up front," he said.

Kosiak also rejected England's statement in the memo that the 2008
increase "reverses a trend of declining real growth", calling England's
description "flat-out wrong".

"There has been a upward trend in real terms, above the rate of
inflation," he said, citing a 23 percent real increase, above inflation,
in the Pentagon's budget from 2000 to 2007.

Loren Thompson of the Virginia-based Lexington Institute, said England's
letter revealed the Pentagon's growing concern about being able
to modernize its forces and fund new weapons programs while
paying escalating war bills.

"This has real significance for the Pentagon in terms of being able
to fund other items besides the war," he said.

The Pentagon is likely to ask for an additional $100 billion to fund
the Iraq and Afghanistan wars early next year.

The Pentagon's 2008 overall budget request of $468.9 for fiscal 2008
is 6.3 percent higher than its fiscal 2007 budget request of $441.2 billion.

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

4) HIGH BLACK ARREST RATE RAISES CALL FOR INQUIRY
Range of explanations offered by experts, officials
for S.F.'s disparity with other cities
- Susan Sward, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, December 17, 2006
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/12/17/MNGF8N04MD1.DTL

San Francisco police arrest African Americans for serious crime at a
much higher rate than officers in California's other biggest cities.

Black people in San Francisco are arrested for felonies at nearly twice
the rate they are in Sacramento. They are arrested at twice the rate
of black people in Fresno, three times the rate in San Jose, Los
Angeles, Long Beach and San Diego, and four times the rate
in Oakland.

The disparity between San Francisco's black felony arrest rates
and the seven other largest cities' -- measured by the number
of African Americans arrested per 1,000 black residents -- is so
large that many experts and civic leaders who reviewed the
numbers said they are "disturbing" and require an investigation.

The numbers prompt several questions, all of which basically boil
down to this: Is the high arrest rate of African Americans because
of the way the San Francisco Police Department does its policing,
or because of criminal activity within the community?

Mayor Gavin Newsom and Police Chief Heather Fong said they
do not think the department is going after African Americans
in an unfair manner. They also said they were consulting experts
to try to learn why the arrest numbers look the way they do.

Newsom said he found the numbers "outrageous'' but was not
shocked by them because of the time he has spent attempting
to tackle the root causes of poverty.

"There is no question in my mind that this deserves immediate
attention and investigation, and I will be doing that,'' Newsom
said. He said the investigation would be conducted by a University
of South Florida criminologist, Lorie Fridell, who will "do
aggressive data analysis'' of the arrest numbers and report
back to him and Fong in about two months.

While Fong said the arrest numbers merit review, she suggested
that the disparity exists in part because the perception that
sometimes San Francisco is "soft on crime'' may draw criminals
from out of the city who feel they can come here and "not be
held accountable.''

Fong's staff said they hand-counted arrests made by the
Tenderloin Task Force last year and found that more than
60 percent of the African Americans arrested were listed on
booking cards as "no local" -- a term often applied to transients
-- or gave addresses outside San Francisco. The department
does not have similar data for other districts besides the
Tenderloin, which police looked at because they believe
many nonresidents are involved in drug dealing and other
crimes there.

San Francisco officers arrest criminal suspects as they find
them, not based on the color of their skin, Fong said.

"I don't think just by looking at the numbers, you can prove
or disprove that there is any targeting,'' she said, adding that
factors such as repeat offenders and out-of-town criminals
influence the numbers.

Others who reviewed the numbers for The Chronicle found
them startling.

"What is significant about these numbers is that they beg serious
attention,'' said San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris.
"These numbers are clearly based on a legitimate collection
of data and are not based on emotional cries.''

Merrick Bobb, a nationally recognized expert in police practices,
said the city must look harder to explain the numbers.

"The strongly disparate impact of San Francisco policing on
African Americans begs for a convincing set of reasons based
solidly on empirical fact,'' said Bobb, who heads a nonprofit
organization in Los Angeles that advises departments nationwide.

"The SFPD, to date, has not persuasively explained what legitimate
factors cause San Francisco to have felony arrest patterns so
different'' from the state's other biggest cities, Bobb said.

Sheriff Michael Hennessey, who runs the city's jails and has
tracked their racial composition for years, said his lockup
population reflects the black arrest rate. "The disparity is just
incredibly dramatic,'' he said. "If you are an adult white male,
your chances of being in my jail are 1 in 365, and if you are
an adult black male, your chances are 1 in 23.''

The Chronicle began examining the city's black felony arrest
rate after its investigation of the department's use of force,
published in February, found officers were arresting African
Americans and reporting use of force on them at rates about
five times greater than their presence in the city's population.

San Francisco police cited several factors they say contribute
to African Americans accounting for about half of all felony
arrests in the city, where they are less than 8 percent of the
population. In 2005, 1 out of 3 arrests of black people
involved narcotics.

Officers interviewed by The Chronicle said most of the dealers
coming from out of town by BART or car to sell drugs --
primarily crack cocaine and sometimes methamphetamine --
are African Americans. Moreover, said Capt. Timothy Hettrich,
head of the narcotics division, black drug dealers often sell
out in the open on street corners, thus increasing their
chances for arrest.

Fong also has said that some of the offenders are arrested
time and again, thereby increasing the black arrest numbers.

Also, she said, the department has had to devote a lot of
resources to combatting gangs of youths responsible for many
of the city's black-on-black homicides. William Whitfield,
an African American officer who has worked in the department
for more than a decade, said factors such as out-of-town
criminals do affect arrests.

"I've seen that with my own eyes -- I got a guy once with an
automatic weapon around his neck on a shoestring coming off
of BART,'' Whitfield said. "He had the weapon under his jacket,
and I was buying dope undercover. I saw him walk up from BART,
and when they moved in and arrested him and the crew he was
working with, they found the weapon. He was an Oakland guy.''

Whitfield said many black criminals today quickly resort to violence
and this occurs at a younger and younger age. People are "selling
dope in the Sunset, don't get me wrong, but they aren't shooting
each other over it, and they are out in the Bayview and the Fillmore.
It's not all about dope and gangs, either, because you've got that
everywhere. Sometimes a shooting is a personal beef, sometimes
it's jealousy, sometimes it's as simple as, 'You were looking
at my girlfriend.' ''

'Disturbing' numbers

Many experts acknowledge that the factors Fong and her officers
cite may contribute to the city's black arrest rate. They also note
that in cities throughout America, African Americans are arrested
in numbers that exceed their presence in the population.

But they say the black arrest rate in San Francisco is so much
higher than other California cities that the disparity cannot be
explained completely by the factors cited by police.

"America's criminal justice system disproportionately affects
African Americans, and San Francisco is no exception,'' said
Bobb, the police practices expert. "What stands out in this
city is the degree of disproportion, which is higher than what I've
seen elsewhere on the West Coast.''

Joseph Marshall, a member of the San Francisco Police Commission
and co-founder of the Omega Boys Club who has worked with
at-risk youth for decades, said he knows the Police Department
has made a concerted effort to combat black gang violence
"to reduce the homicides, and those numbers are down.''

But he added: "These numbers on arrest rates are disturbing
and scream for an explanation. Is there something going
on within the SFPD that makes the numbers so different?''

James Bell, executive director of the San Francisco-based
W. Haywood Burns Institute for Juvenile Justice Fairness and
Equity, has been wrestling for years with Marshall's question.
About 60 percent of juveniles detained in the city are black.

"If you are an intelligent, caring person in San Francisco, you
should be disquieted that in a supposedly liberal city, black
youths are so much in the overwhelming majority among the
detainees,'' Bell said. "The numbers are just too disparate
for anyone to credibly advance the 'you-do-the-crime,
you-do-the-time' syndrome as an explanation. To believe
these numbers, you'd have to believe that white kids in places
like the Haight and the Sunset are basically doing no crime.''

Hettrich, who heads the narcotics division, says numbers
don't convey what police confront.

"The real story is we go after the drugs, and we go where we
have had complaints,'' Hettrich said in a ride-along interview
where he pointed out drug dealing hot spots around the city
and the high numbers of African Americans and Latinos making
sales. "Those arrest numbers may indicate we are doing a good
job in areas where we have had complaints.

"Color means nothing to us,'' Hettrich said. "We are prejudiced
against dealers."

David Dockery, an African American officer who walks a beat
in the predominantly black Hunters Point housing projects, said
most citizens "want more of us out there. If I could stand
in front of their houses all day long, that's what they'd like.''

Dockery and his African American partner, Officer Mike Robinson,
said the department's crime chasing is "color blind.'' They also said
what many officers believe -- that criminals are drawn to San
Francisco because they feel that if caught, their punishment
in the courts will be lighter than it would be in surrounding
counties. "We know a guy with four cases pending,'' Robinson said.
"Where does this stop?''

Answers, not speculation

San Francisco's high black arrest rate is not of recent origin:
20 years ago, San Francisco was making black felony arrests
at a rate much higher than California's seven other largest cities,
state Justice Department reports show. In 1986, for example,
San Francisco's black felony arrest rate was almost 45 percent
greater than Los Angeles' and almost 51 percent higher than
Oakland's.

In the decades since then, San Francisco's black felony arrest
rate has climbed by more than 35 percent while the other seven
major California cities' rates have dropped -- often by a considerable
amount. During those 20 years, Los Angeles' black felony arrest
rate dropped by more than 36 percent and Oakland's declined
by more than 52 percent.

When evaluating why San Francisco's black arrest numbers are
so different from the other cities', Bobb said speculation
is not productive.

"It is not helpful, in the absence of thorough research and hard
evidence, for the SFPD merely to speculate as to possible
reasons, just as it is unproductive for others to speculate that
there must be police antipathy to African Americans," Bobb said.

A second review was conducted at The Chronicle's request by
Samuel Walker, a criminal justice professor emeritus from the
University of Nebraska, Omaha, who has consulted with the
U.S. Justice Department on matters ranging from police use
of force to questions of race-based civil rights violations
by police agencies.

Walker concluded that San Francisco police are targeting black
people in their law enforcement efforts. To him, the numbers
indicate that "many law-abiding citizens" are confronted by
officers "solely because of their skin color."

"No other factor than race could possibly explain the San Francisco
arrest data given the fact that they are so far out of line compared
with other departments,'' Walker said.

Two figures in San Francisco's criminal justice system expressed
similar conclusions.

Public Defender Jeff Adachi said that he does not believe the
department has a go-after-black-suspects plan, but he added
that by focusing on heavily black neighborhoods plagued by
crime and violence, police inevitably drive black arrest numbers
up and often use those high numbers as proof they are in the
right spots to catch the criminals.

"I believe that the San Francisco Police Department has focused
its efforts, in terms of 'crime crackdowns,' in those neighborhoods
where there is a high concentration of blacks -- the Western
Addition, Tenderloin, Visitacion Valley, Potrero Hill, Ingleside
Terrace and Bayview-Hunters Point,'' he said. "This has long been
the trend since the crack cocaine epidemic, when task forces
were formed to focus buy-bust operations in those neighborhoods.''

Sheriff Hennessey said the problem does not just lie with the police.

"I think this is a reflection of institutionalized racism: You are
more likely to get arrested for the same act if you're black, you
are more likely to be retained in jail for the same crime if you
are black, and society is more likely to care less about your
incarceration if you are black," Hennessey said.

Officers in the department said they go where the crime and
violence is happening.

Mikail Ali and Toney Chaplin, African American inspectors in the
gang task force, said police concentrate their efforts on areas
where violence is occurring.

"African American youth are shooting each other at a rate far
greater than other groups, so we try to get those kids on some
charge if we can't get them on a homicide,'' Chaplin said. Ali added:
"Social neglect by the community, government and business have
caused environments populated predominantly by black people
to be conducive to crime and violence, and law enforcement ends
up having to deal with the bottom line -- young black kids killing
one another at a disproportionate rate.''

The community perception

Chief Fong says officers are taught to treat all citizens equally.
Police Academy recruits are given 52 hours of training -- more
than twice the state requirement -- on discrimination and cultural
diversity as it relates to African Americans, and other races and
segments of society, including gays and lesbians, seniors and
the homeless.

But in San Francisco's black neighborhoods, many believe
police give them special attention.

At the Ella Hill Hutch Community Center -- a hub of activity for
African American youths living in the Western Addition --
Executive Director George Smith says he is blunt with young
people about what he believes they face.

"I tell young kids that you shouldn't break the law because this
is a system so poised to arrest young African American males,''
Smith said.

Guy Hudson, who works two jobs as a city athletics coach and
as a security guard, knows many of the kids in black
neighborhoods all over town, and he said that many black
people believe they often can "talk things over'' with police
in San Francisco when that wouldn't work in Oakland, Santa
Clara or Daly City.

Even so, Hudson says, it's a reality that police focus on black
people in San Francisco. He recalls the time three officers stopped
him in Hunters Point after he "drove down a hill a little fast''
and they emerged from their car "pointing guns at my head.''

Hudson, 42, said he asked them, "Out in the avenues, would
you be jumping out of your car with an automatic machinegun?''

The police eventually let him go. Before they drove off, Hudson
said, one of them told him that someone recently had fired
shots at an officer on Harbor Road. Hudson said he responded:
"That gives you the right to pull pistols on everyone in the
community?''

Police Commissioner Marshall, who is African American, wrote
a book, "Street Soldier," in which he described the deep-seated
antipathy black people hold for police. "There's not a black
person I know who doesn't see the police as an occupying force
in the community. At the same time, though, I'm convinced that
if black folks stopped blowing each other's brains out, they'd
be in a much better position to deal with police issues.''

However, there are African Americans who approve of the way
officers conduct themselves in their neighborhoods.

Al Harris, who lives in the Ingleside and works as an organizer
for the Safety Network group, which is funded by the Mayor's
Office of Criminal Justice, says police often have to confront a
"pretty rough world -- you go into neighborhoods and you're
hated. In some neighborhoods, it's instilled from when kids
are little that the police are the enemy.''

"I think the police are doing a pretty good job,'' Harris added.
"I know officers who do all kinds of good stuff for the kids,
participating in community events, giving toys at Christmas,
hundreds of turkeys at Thanksgiving.''

Asked about whether it appears that police are targeting black
people for arrest, Harris said: "Definitely not. There's no need
to target the African American kids. They're the ones out
on the streets selling the drugs.''

Earlier study

The numbers revealing the high arrest rate of black people
in the city are not the first statistical indication that African
Americans get special police attention.

In 2002 the American Civil Liberties Union issued a report,
"A Department in Denial: The San Francisco Police Department's
Failure To Address Racial Profiling,'' which found black motorists
were more than three times as likely to be searched as whites
after a traffic stop.

That year San Francisco police arrested black people for felonies
at the department's highest rate in the years reviewed by The
Chronicle -- 171 for every 1,000 African Americans in the city's
population.

The next year, the department adopted a new general order
establishing its commitment to "unbiased policing'' and stating
officers "must be able to articulate specific facts and circumstances
that support reasonable suspicion or probable cause'' for detaining,
stopping, arresting and searching citizens or seizing their property.

The black arrest rate began to drop. In 2003 it was 150 per 1,000,
in 2004 it was 146, and in 2005 it was 145. Even in that last year,
though, the rate was three times higher than Los Angeles, San Jose,
Long Beach and San Diego and four times higher than Oakland.

Search for explanation

Looking at the 2000 U.S. census to try to find possible reasons
for the arrest rate, The Chronicle found some similarities and
some differences between San Francisco and the seven other cities.

Like black residents of those other cities, San Francisco African
Americans' median household income lags considerably behind
that of the city's total population, and their level of education
is also typically years behind that of the total population.

Police Commissioner Marshall says answers that might seem at
least part of the explanation -- such as poverty, lack of education
and the flight of large numbers of middle-class black residents
from the city in recent decades -- end up providing no real
guidance, because those patterns are found in other cities
where the arrest rates are far lower.

In two ways, though, San Francisco does stand out: During the
1990s, the city's African American population declined faster
than in any other major U.S. city, dropping by 23 percent,
according to 2000 census figures.

The black percentage of population also dropped in Oakland,
San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego. In Fresno, Long Beach
and Sacramento, it rose somewhat. Today San Francisco, which
is 7.8 percent African American, has the second smallest
proportion of black people among the state's eight biggest
cities. San Jose, with 3.5 percent, has the smallest, and Oakland,
with almost 36 percent, has the largest.

A second difference involved unemployment numbers. While
African Americans in all the cities had high unemployment
numbers, only in San Francisco was their unemployment rate --
6.2 percent -- more than double that of the rest of the population.

Need for investigation

Walker, the Nebraska criminal justice professor, said San Francisco's
high black arrest rate should be investigated by the U.S. Justice
Department and the state attorney general's office.

Fong said she did not feel the need for a state or U.S. Justice
Department investigation of San Francisco's black felony arrest
rate. Instead, she said she was consulting with outside experts
and plans a review of department policies to see if changes
are warranted.

She added that the department's efforts to analyze its arrest
record are made difficult by the fact its record keeping system
is being overhauled and she can't "go to a computer right now
and pull up arrest data with all this information you have spoken
about.''

Newsom said while he is convinced there is no "significant racial
profiling in our department,'' he cannot "in good conscience
defend the disparity'' between San Francisco and other cities'
black arrest rates. Referring to the arrest numbers, he said,
"On face value, they are outrageous.''

The mayor added that as he has worked to push programs tackling
concentrated poverty in the city, such as a tax credit for working
families, he has concluded "the issues of crime for me are
overwhelmingly correlated with issues of poverty.''

Newsom added that Fridell, the University of South Florida associate
professor of criminology selected by the city to review its arrest
data, was picked in part because she has special expertise
in the area of racial profiling.

One way or another, San Francisco has to discover why it is
arresting black citizens at a higher rate than the other California
cities, said Bobb, the Los Angeles police practices expert.

What is at stake is the concept of equal treatment under
the law, he said.

"The Supreme Court has held that the Constitution prohibits
selective enforcement of the law based on considerations such
as race,'' Bobb said. "Courts across the country have ruled
that using impermissible racial classifications in determining
whom to stop, detain and search violates the equal protection
clause.''

Walker, the law enforcement expert who has consulted for the
Justice Department, says the San Francisco Police Department
"should be looking at its own operation to see if there's anything
it could be doing differently.''

The equal protection under law guarantee of the 14th Amendment
is "the bedrock of all civil rights laws in the United States and
a fundamental principle upon which our country is based,'' he said.

Jack Jacqua, who founded the Omega Boys Club with Marshall,
said the policing of black people in San Francisco is a problem
for the city and its leaders.

While he acknowledged that police have "the most dangerous,
difficult job in America,'' he said they "most times treat poor kids
from the hood differently than they do more affluent kids.''

Jacqua, who has devoted his life to working with at-risk youths,
added that many black youths come from "a population where
there is virtually no middle class because the middle class people
can't afford to live here, and many of these youngsters end
up in the criminal justice system.''

It works this way, Jacqua said: If a kid shoplifts in the Sunset
District, police are probably going to call Mom and Dad and
have them take their child home. "But if you shoplift downtown
and your address is in the Bayview, then they will take you to jail.''

As for the black community, he said much of it "is a mess -- it's
destroying itself. Not enough people are involved in standing
up and challenging these youngsters to take responsibility
for their lives. Where is the leadership?''

And what of the city's liberal political establishment that has
reigned for many years?

"The bottom line," said Jacqua, "is that poor blacks are in the
way of what this city wants to be, though the city won't admit
it because 'we're liberal and believe in diversity.' But the city
really doesn't want poor folks and especially poor black folks.''

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

5) About Face: Soldiers Call for Iraq Withdrawal
by MARC COOPER
[posted online on December 16, 2006]
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070101/cooperweb

For the first time since Vietnam, an organized, robust movement
of active-duty US military personnel has publicly surfaced to oppose
a war in which they are serving. Those involved plan to petition
Congress to withdraw American troops from Iraq. (Note: A complete
version of this report will appear next week in the print and online
editions of The Nation.)

After appearing only seven weeks ago on the Internet, the Appeal
for Redress, brainchild of 29-year-old Navy seaman Jonathan Hutto,
has already been signed by nearly 1,000 US soldiers, sailors, Marines
and airmen, including dozens of officers--most of whom are
on active duty. Not since 1969, when some 1,300 active-duty
military personnel signed an open letter in the New York Times
opposing the war in Vietnam, has there been such a dramatic
barometer of rising military dissent.

Interviews with two dozen signers of the Appeal reveal a mix
of motives for opposing the war: ideological, practical, strategic
and moral. But all those interviewed agree that it is time to start
withdrawing the troops. Coming from an all-volunteer military,
the Appeal was called "unprecedented" by Eugene Fidell,
president of the National Institute of Military Justice.

The Nation spoke with rank-and-file personnel as well as high-
ranking officers--some on the Iraqi front lines, others at domestic
and offshore US military bases--who have signed the Appeal.
All of their names will be made available to Congress when the
Appeal is presented in mid-January. Signers have been assured
they are sending a communication to Congress protected under
the Military Whistleblower Protection Act. The Pentagon
is powerless to take official reprisals and has said that as long
as active-duty personnel are not in uniform or on duty, they
are free to express their views to Congress.

There are of course other, subtler risks involved. The military
command exercises enormous power through individual reviews,
promotions and assignments. But that hasn't kept a number
of signers from going public with their dissent.

Navy Lieut. Cmdr. Mark Dearden of San Diego, for example,
enlisted in 1997 and is still pondering the possibility of a lifetime
career. "So this was a very difficult decision for me to come to.
I don't take this decision lightly," he says. But after two "tough"
deployments in Iraq, Dearden says signing the Appeal was
not only the right thing to do but also gave him personal
"closure."

"I'm expressing a right of people in the military to contact
their elected representatives, and I have done nothing illegal
or disrespectful," Dearden adds.

Other interviews with active-duty soldiers, sailors, Marines
and airmen who have signed the Appeal for Redress reveal
an array of motivations. Here are excerpts:

"Lisa"--20 years old, E-4, USAF, Stationed at Hickam Air
Force Base, Hawaii:

I joined up two weeks after I turned 17 because I wanted
to save American lives. I wanted to be a hero like any
American child.

I supported the war when I joined because I thought it was
justified. Only after my own research and the truth coming
out did I learn how wrong I was, how--for lack of a better
word--how brainwashed I was.

Now I know the war is illegal, unjustified and that our troops
have no reason for being there.

When I saw an article about the Appeal in the Air Force Times
I went online right away and signed it and have encouraged
others to do the same.

"Sgt. Gary"--21 years old. US Army. Deployed with 20th
Infantry Regiment, near Mosul, Iraq:

I joined up in 2001, still a junior in high school. I felt very
patriotic at the end of my US History class. My idea of the
Army was that you signed up, they gave you a rifle and you
ran off into battle like in some 1950s war movie. The whole
idea of boot camp never really entered my head.

I supported the war in the beginning. I bought everything Bush
said about how Saddam had WMDs, how he was working with
Al Qaeda, how he was a threat to America. Of course, this all
turned out to be false.

This is my second tour, and as of a few days ago it's half-over.
Before I deployed with my unit for the second time I already had
feelings of not wanting to go. When in late September a buddy
in my platoon died from a bullet in the head, I really took a long
hard look at this war, this Administration, and the reasons why.

After months of research on the Internet, I came to the conclusion
that this war was based on lies and deception. I started to break
free of all the propaganda that the Bush Administration and the
Army puts out on a daily basis.

So far in three years we have succeeded in toppling a dictator
and replacing him with puppets. Outlawing the old government
and its standing army and replacing them with an unreliable and
poorly trained crew of paycheck collectors. The well is so poisoned
by what we have done here that nothing can fix it.

"Lt. Smith"--24 years old, 1st Lieutenant, US Army. Deployed
near Baghdad:

I cannot, from Iraq, attend an antiwar protest. Nor could I attend
one in the States and represent myself as a soldier. What I can do
is send a protest communication to my Congressional delegate
outlining grievances I feel I have suffered. Appeal for Redress
gives me that outlet.

I am encouraged by the November elections, but still wary. We
rushed into the war on false assumptions, and now we might
rush out just as falsely. What troops need now is a light at the
end of the tunnel, not just for this deployment but for all
deployments. Bringing everyone out this summer is too fast
to be supported by our Army's infrastructure. We would
hemorrhage lives if we do so. But so would we if we stay
the course.

I am encouraged by politicians who call for a withdrawal
by the conclusion of President Bush's term in office. That seems
a realistic timetable for me.

Mark Mackoviak--24 years old. US Army. Recently returned
from Iraq. Stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina:

I joined the Army on September 23, 2001. I had been out
of school for a year when September 11 came around, and
I was supportive of our action in Afghanistan. I wound up
there a year later, and it was pretty eye-opening to see
how people live.

I was also in Iraq for about a year, deployed near the
International Airport, west of Baghdad. I was never that
supportive of the invasion. I thought the media coverage
of it was horrendous, really disgusting.

Just about everything I saw in Iraq reinforced my views that
it was wrong. The point that really hit me was when the Asmara
Mosque got blown up. I said, Wow, this is really a civil war.

I really enjoy being in the Army, enjoy the experience. I just
happen to not support this war. I'm very open about that.
My buddies either disagree with me or just pay no attention.
But I get absolutely no hostility. None.

"Rebecca"--26 years old. 101st Airborne, US Army. Just
returned from Iraq. Stationed at Fort Hood, Texas:

I joined in 2004. I was trying to go into the human rights field,
but it was very competitive. I was in need of health insurance,
and the Army seemed feasible. Now it looks like I will be
stop-lossed until 2010.

I had strong feelings about the war, against it, but I'm the type
of person that wants to fully understand both sides of the
argument.

My experience in Iraq confirmed my views, but it also gave
me a more multifaceted view of things. I did see some of the
good things being done, but it seemed like a Band-Aid on
a gushing wound. Mostly I saw the frivolity of the missions,
the lack of direction, the absurdity of the mission. You go out
in your Humvee, you drive around, and you wait to be blown
up and get killed by an IED.

About 40 percent of my unit were stop-lossed. Their first
mission was to take down Saddam and his regime, and they
seemed to understand that and agree with the mission to take
down a ruthless dictator. Now they can't seem to understand
why they are there, caught in the cross hairs of a civil war.

I think it is safe to say that the majority of soldiers are
wondering what this grand scheme is that we keep hearing
about from those above us but that is never translating
down to the ground level.

Some politicians are starting to see that not only a majority
of Americans oppose to this war. Now they see this very
powerful statement of soldiers who have already been
on the front line and who are still in uniform and are also
opposed. None of them have been where we have been,
none of them have seen what we have seen. It's time they do

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

6) Powell Says U.S. Forces Are Overstretched in Iraq
By BRIAN KNOWLTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/world/middleeast/17cnd-powell.html?hp&ex=1166418000&en=a0cfd8c18d0fe1a6&ei=5094&partner=homepage

WASHINGTON, Dec. 17 — Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said
today that badly overstretched American forces in Iraq were losing the
war there, and that a temporary increase in troop levels probably
would not help.

But, he quickly added, “we haven’t lost.”

The situation could be reversed, General Powell said in one of his most
extensive commentaries on the Iraq war since leaving office. He urged
an intense effort to train and support Iraqi security forces and
strengthen the government in Baghdad.

General Powell was deeply skeptical about proposals to increase troop
levels in Iraq, an idea that appears to have gained ground as President
Bush reconsiders the United States’ strategy there.

“There really are no additional troops” to send, General Powell said,
adding that he agreed with those who say that the United States
Army is “about broken.”

General Powell said he was unsure that new troops could successfully
suppress sectarian violence or secure Baghdad.

He urged the United States to do everything possible to prepare
Iraqis to take over lead responsibility; the “baton pass,” he said,
should begin by mid-2007.

“We are losing — we haven’t lost — and this is the time, now, to start
to put in place the kinds of strategies that will turn this situation
around,” General Powell said on the CBS News program
“Face the Nation.”

Military planners and White House budget analysts have been
asked to provide Mr. Bush with options for increasing American
forces in Baghdad by 20,000 or more, and there are signs that
the president is leaning in that direction.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the incoming Democratic majority
leader, said today that he would “go along with” an increase
in troops in Iraq if it were clearly intended to lead to an ultimate
troop withdrawal by early 2008.

Mr. Reid supported the proposal of the bipartisan Iraq Study
Group to undertake a broad regional effort to gain diplomatic
support for a peaceful Iraq.

General Powell endorsed a related study group idea: opening
talks with Syria and Iran.

The general has kept a low public profile since leaving office
in January 2005, but he has emerged at crucial points in the
growing debate over Iraq to weigh in, as when he said that
Iraq was now embroiled in civil war.

An increase in troop strength, he said today, “cannot be
sustained.” The thousands of additional American troops sent
into Baghdad since summer had been unable to stabilize the
city and more probably could not tip the balance, General
Powell said. The deployment of further troops would, moreover,
impose long-term costs on a badly stretched military.

While Mr. Reid suggested that he would support a troop
increase for only two or three months, Gen. Jack Keane, one
of five Iraq experts who met with Bush last Monday, called
that schedule “impossible.”

General Keane, a retired Army vice chief of staff, asserted
that Iraq could not be secured before mid-2008. “It will take
a couple of months just to get forces in,” he said on the
ABC News program “This Week.”

The president’s request to military planners and White House
budget officials to provide details of what a troop increase would
mean indicates that the option is gaining ground, senior
administration officials said.

Political, training and recruiting obstacles mean that an increase
larger than 20,000 to 30,000 troops would be prohibitive, the officials
said. The increase would probably be accomplished largely by
accelerating scheduled deployments while keeping some units
in Iraq longer than had been planned.

General Powell said this meant it would be “a surge that you’d
have to pay for later,” as replacement troops became even harder
to find.

The current strategy stresses stepping up the training of Iraqi
forces and handing off to them as soon as possible.

Senator Reid made clear that his support for a troop increase
depended on its being linked to an overall withdrawal plan.
“We have to change course in Iraq,” he said on the ABC News
program “This Week.” But in the meantime, Mr. Reid said,
Democrats would “give the military anything they want.”

General Powell, who as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff
helped lead an earlier American-led coalition that forced Iraqi
troops out of Kuwait in 1991, said that he was unsure this time
whether victory could be achieved.

“If victory means you have got rid of every insurgent, that you
have peace throughout the country, I don’t see that in the cards
right now,” he said. But it was possible to install a certain level
of order and security.

General Powell said the Iraq war had left Americans “a little
less safe” by curtailing the forces available should another major
crisis arise. But, he added, “I think that’s all recoverable.”

He supported the call for talks with Syria and Iran, although the
latter, he said, would be more difficult.

“I have no illusion that either Syria or Iran want to help us in Iraq,”
General Powell said. But there were times, he said, when difficult
contacts can be productive.

Before he visited Damascus as secretary of state, General Powell
said, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel asked him not to go.
But Mr. Sharon then added that it would be helpful if General
Powell should ask Syrian leaders to stop Hezbollah militants
in Lebanon from firing rockets into Israel.

“The rockets stopped,” General Powell said.

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

7) Brainstorming on Iraq
The Capital Awaits a Masterstroke on Iraq
By HELENE COOPER
WASHINGTON
December 17, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/weekinreview/17cooper.html?hp&ex=1166418000&en=d2978f837abd747c&ei=5094&partner=homepage

SOMEONE in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office has gotten everybody
on this city’s holiday party circuit talking, simply by floating an unlikely
Iraq proposal that is worthy of a certain mid-19th century British
naturalist with a fascination for natural selection.

We shall call it the Darwin Principle.

The Darwin Principle, Beltway version, basically says that Washington
should stop trying to get Sunnis and Shiites to get along and instead
just back the Shiites, since there are more of them anyway and
they’re likely to win in a fight to the death. After all, the proposal
goes, Iraq is 65 percent Shiite and only 20 percent Sunni.

Sorry, Sunnis.

The Darwin Principle is radical, decisive and most likely not going
anywhere. But the fact that it has even been under discussion,
no matter how briefly, says a lot about the dearth of good options
facing the Bush administration and the yearning in this city for
some masterstroke to restore optimism about the war.

As President Bush and his deputies chew over whether there’s
a Hail Mary pass to salvage Iraq, it has become increasingly clear
that the president will probably throw the ball toward his
secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.

Make no mistake, the Rice way is a long shot as well. It’s a catchall
of a plan that has something for everyone. Its goal — if peace
and victory can’t be had — is at least to give a moderate Shiite
government the backbone necessary to stand up to radicals
like Moktada al-Sadr through new alliances with moderate
Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.

In this plan, America’s Sunni Arab allies would press centrist
Iraqi Sunnis to support a moderate Shiite government. Outside
Baghdad, Sunni leaders would be left alone to run Sunni towns.
Radical Shiites, no longer needed for the coalition that keeps
the national government afloat, would be marginalized. So would
Iran and Syria. To buy off the Sunni Arab countries, the United
States would push forward on a comprehensive peace plan
in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

The Rice plan seems diplomatic and reasoned. But it breaks no
molds. Which is why examining the Darwin Principle better
helps explain the mood of the capital right now.

“Deciding to side with the Shia is probably the most inflammatory
thing we could do right now,” says Wayne White, a member
of the Iraq Study Group who is now at the Middle East Institute,
a research center here. “It would be a multi-headed catastrophe.”

At first glance, the idea of siding with the Shiites doesn’t seem
that crazy. America has, after all, had more spectacular trouble
of late from Sunni extremists like Al Qaeda and the Taliban
than from Shiites, whose best-remembered attacks
on Americans were two decades ago, by hostage-takers
in Iran and truck bombers in Lebanon.

But Middle East experts can provide a long list of reasons why
a survival-of-the-fittest theory might not necessarily be the
best way to conduct American foreign policy in Iraq. First,
they say, it’s always dangerous to take sides in a civil war.
Second, siding with the Shiites in a Shiite-Sunni war is
particularly dangerous since most of the Arab world is Sunni
and America’s major Arab allies are Sunni. Besides Iraq, Shiites
form a large majority only in Iran, and, well, enough said there.

If America has problems now with Muslim extremists around
the world, those would likely worsen if the United States was
believed to have aided the uprooting or extermination
of Iraq’s Sunni population.

On Monday, a group of prominent Saudi clerics called on
Sunni Muslims everywhere to mobilize against Shiites in Iraq,
complaining that Sunnis were being murdered and
marginalized by Shiites.

So, where is the Darwin Principle coming from?

Well, there’s no proof Mr. Cheney really even backs it. Unnamed
government officials with knowledge in the matter say the
proposal comes from his office, but they stop short of saying
it comes from Mr. Cheney himself.

Other top officials say it is highly unlikely that the administration
would pursue such a radical course. (Of course, the radical nature
of the Darwin Principle is all the more reason to assume it comes
from Mr. Cheney himself.) But it is difficult to imagine the
administration actually publicly announcing such a course
even if it decided on it.

Can you just hear President Bush’s speech to the nation? “My Fellow
Americans, the United States has decided that there are more Shiites
than Sunnis in Iraq, so we are therefore going to side with the people
most likely to win a fight to the death. We’ll figure out how to deal
with the rest of the Arab world, where there are more Sunnis than
Shiites, later.”

Still, somewhere deep inside the Beltway, someone has laid out
the intellectual basis for the Shiite option. So some people with
knowledge of the thinking behind the proposal were asked to
explain it. None agreed to be identified, citing an administration
edict against talking about President Bush’s change-of-strategy
in Iraq before the president articulates exactly what that change
will be. But here’s what they said:

America abandoned the Shiites in 1991 and look where that
got us. Mr. Cheney has argued that America can’t repeat what
it did after the Persian Gulf war, when it called on the Shiites
to rise up against Saddam Hussein, then left them to be
slaughtered when they did. The result was 12 more years
of the Iraqi dictator’s iron-fisted rule, which ended up leading
to war anyway.

Reconciliation hasn’t worked. The logic of the past couple
of years has been that Iraq’s Constitution and election process
would bring together the Sunnis and the Shiites. Prime Minister
Nuri Kamal al-Maliki was eventually able to formulate
a so-called National Unity Government in which Sunnis,
Shiites and Kurds all hold key positions.

That government has proved itself to be “disappointing,” one
senior administration official acknowledged delicately.
And violence has continued to surge.

Maybe America can scare the Sunnis into behaving. That’s the
“stare into the abyss” strategy, another senior administration
official said. He said that for the past three years, Sunni
insurgent groups, and many Sunni politicians, have refused
to recognize that the demographics of Iraq are not in their
favor. Sunni insurgents can share the responsibility with Shiite
death squads for the violence in Iraq, but the Sunnis have the
most to lose in an all-out civil war, since they are outnumbered
three to one. So perhaps Darwin Principle proponents — whoever
they are — just want to scare Sunnis, including those in Saudi
Arabia, Jordan and other American allies, into trying harder
for reconciliation.

Ms. Rice “does not believe we should plainly take one side
over another,” said a State Department official, who said
he doesn’t support the Shiite option but sees the convoluted
logic of it. “But the demography of Iraq is a fact.”

The longer America tries to woo the Sunnis, the more it risks
alienating the Shiites and Kurds, and they’re the ones with
the oil. A handful of administration officials have argued
that Iraq is not going to hold to together and will splinter
along sectarian lines. If so, they say, American interests
dictate backing the groups who control the oil-rich areas.

Darwin? Try Machiavelli. An even more far-fetched offshoot
of the Darwin Principle is floating around, which some hawks
have tossed out in meetings, although not seriously, one
administration official said. It holds that America could
actually hurt Iran by backing Iraq’s Shiites; that could deepen
the Shiite-Sunni split and eventually lead to a regional Shiite-
Sunni war. And in that, the Shiites — and Iran — lose because,
while there are more Shiites than Sunnis in Iraq and Iran, there
are more Sunnis than Shiites almost everywhere else.

Wow.

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

8) Mexico’s Federal Forces Pull Out of Oaxaca
By REUTERS
December 17, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/world/americas/17mexico.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

OAXACA, Mexico, Dec. 16 (Reuters) — The federal riot police ended
their weeks-long occupation of the Mexican tourist city Oaxaca’s
center on Saturday, having weakened a protest movement trying
to oust a state governor.

Violent clashes between the masked activists and the riot police,
and a string of shootings of protesters, made Oaxaca one of
President Felipe Calderón’s top problems as he began his
term in office.

But the arrest of several protest leaders has weakened the
movement, and the frequency and size of demonstrations
has fallen.

The federal police boarded trucks and rolled out of the city
before dawn, handing security to the state police. The federal
agents were headed for a nearby air base where they would
remain until further notice, a state spokeswoman said.

The federal force stormed Oaxaca in October, fighting
leftist activists who had built barricades and closed
government buildings in a bid to topple Gov. Ulises Ruiz.

The police have snatched hundreds of protesters from the streets
in recent weeks, leading to accusations by rights groups
of illegal arrests and torture.

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

9) Abuse Claims Are Settled in Washington
"The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington has agreed to pay
$1.3 million to 16 men who said they were sexually abused by eight
priests from 1962 to 1982."
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 17, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/us/17priests.html

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington
has agreed to pay $1.3 million to 16 men who said they were sexually
abused by eight priests from 1962 to 1982.

Although the men began pursuing the claims three years ago, in many
instances the statutes of limitation had expired in the jurisdictions
where they said the abuse had occurred, said Peter M. Gillon, a lawyer
for the group. In addition, two of the men had already lost legal claims
against the archdiocese.

“Our clients were in severe distress, emotionally, psychologically,
financially and spiritually, and felt that a settlement was appropriate
at this time,” Mr. Gillon said as the agreement was announced Friday.

All eight priests accused by the men have been removed from ministry;
seven were prosecuted and one was acquitted.

The settlement, first reported in Saturday’s editions of The Washington
Post, provides cash payments of $10,000 to $190,000 to each of the men.

The archdiocese includes more than 560,000 Roman Catholics
in 140 parishes in the District of Columbia and five Southern
Maryland counties.

The settlements will be covered by insurance reserves and not by other
church assets, operating funds or collections, said Susan Gibbs,
a spokeswoman for the archdiocese.

Also on Friday, lawyers representing 45 people who sued the
Archdiocese of Los Angeles, accusing clergy members of sexual
abuse, announced that a $60 million settlement had been finalized
and paid, a lawyer for the plaintiffs said.

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, leader of the archdiocese, had announced
the settlement Dec. 1 and said that $40 million of the payment would
come from the archdiocese’s operations fund and that the rest would
come from religious orders and insurance coverage.

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

10) Protesters Denounce Police Killing
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
December 17, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/nyregion/17protest.html?ref=nyregion

A protest march cut a solemn swath through crowds of Christmas
shoppers and the joyous mood of the holiday season in Midtown
Manhattan yesterday in a rebuke to the police for the fatal shooting
of an unarmed black man in Queens on his wedding day last month.

Three weeks after Sean Bell was killed and two friends were wounded
in a hail of 50 police bullets, a coalition of civil rights groups, elected
officials, community leaders, clergymen and others marched down
Fifth Avenue and across 34th Street in a “silent” protest that sputtered
scattered chants, but was largely devoid of shrieks, speeches
and most of the usual sound-and-fury tactics of demonstrations.

Billed as a “Shopping for Justice” march and led by the Rev. Al Sharpton,
the army of protesters, many carrying placards, moved grim-faced
between hordes of holiday shoppers and tourists clogging
the sidewalks of two of the city’s busiest commercial arteries.

The police had set up metal barricades to confine the marchers
to a single traffic lane, but the throng quickly swelled beyond
expectations and the barricades were shifted to widen the line
of march to four of the five lanes on Fifth Avenue and five
of the six on 34th Street. Traffic on side streets leading
to the march was halted as the protesters swept on.

Here and there, marchers shouted “No shopping, no justice,”
or “Shot” and numbers from 1 to 50. Others carried signs
proclaiming: “Stop NYPD Racist Terror,” and “Justice for Sean
Bell.” But most stared straight ahead, ignoring those on the
other side of the barricades.

The size of the protest, strung out for 10 blocks, was anybody’s
guess. The organizers said thousands marched. The police,
as is customary, gave no estimate. In any case, there were no
confrontations, arrests or untoward incidents during the
march, the police said.

“We’re not coming to buy toys, we’re not coming to buy
trinkets — we’re coming to shop for justice,” Mr. Sharpton,
a man never at a loss for words, said at a morning rally in
Harlem, explaining what could not be said in a nonverbal
march. “Our presence is a bigger statement than anything
we could ever say with our mouths.”

In Midtown, shoppers gawked. Tourists snapped pictures
and wondered what it was all about. Salvation Army carolers
sang on, and the protesters, who had been admonished
repeatedly by organizers to remain silent, kept discipline
only in the front ranks, where members of Congress, the
Legislature, the City Council and other V.I.P.s marched
alongside a stone-faced Mr. Sharpton.

“It’s New York, you always see crazy things,” Margaret
Rajnik, a nurse from Atlantic City, said at Rockefeller Center,
where mobs of shoppers jammed the plaza in front of the
skating rink, the giant Christmas tree and the golden
Prometheus.

A sampling of shoppers found many against the protest.
“We just came here to go shopping at the American Girl
store and go see the Rockettes,” said Cherrie Ostigui, 38,
of Odenton, Md. “Now we can’t even cross the street to
get our lunch.”

Steve Diomopoulos, 22, a student from Livonia, Mich., called
it “a weird time to be doing this,” and added: “It’s an
inconvenience to people like myself who came from out
of town and want to get some Christmas shopping done.
It’s almost like a hostile atmosphere. I don’t think that’s
what people came here to see.”

But Seleah Bussey, 22, a Brooklyn College student, said,
“I think it’s good because it’s a tourist area and tourists
need to know what’s really happening.”

Mr. Sharpton, who called the Queens shooting a case of
excessive force, said the march was a moral appeal to the
city to change police policies.

Hours before he was to be married on Nov. 25, Mr. Bell
was killed and his friends, Joseph Guzman and Trent
Benefield, were wounded in a barrage of police bullets
as they left a bachelor party at a strip club. The police,
conducting an undercover operation at the club, said they
believed the victims were going to get a gun, and opened
fire when the men’s car hit an officer and an unmarked
police minivan.

Mr. Bell and his friends were black; the officers were white,
Hispanic and black. No guns were found among the victims,
and while the police say they are examining reports that
a fourth man who ran away may have had a gun, the case
has generated vigils and protests that culminated
in yesterday’s march.

Besides the complaints of annoyed shoppers, the march
generated two negative responses that were aimed
at Mr. Sharpton.

Before the march, Steven A. Pagones, a former assistant
prosecutor in Dutchess County who won a defamation suit
against Mr. Sharpton and two others in 1998, showed up near
the marchers’ rendezvous point to remind reporters that he
had been falsely accused of being one of a group of white men
who abducted and raped a black teenager, Tawana Brawley,
in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., in 1987. The case stirred racial
tensions nationally, but was investigated by a grand jury
and found to be a hoax.

“I want people to understand that for years he’s made reckless
allegations in furtherance of his own agenda,” Mr. Pagones
said of Mr. Sharpton.

Michael J. Palladino, president of the Detectives’ Endowment
Association, also cited Mr. Sharpton’s role in that matter.
“I think it’s all about credibility, something the Rev. Al had
forsaken a long time ago in the Tawana Brawley case,”
Mr. Palladino said. “He’s trying to deny our police officers their
civil rights and due process. But in the end, a grand jury will
hear the evidence and they’ll come to a decision.”

The protesters, many of whom arrived in buses from Queens,
Brooklyn and elsewhere, were joined by Representative Charles
B. Rangel, City Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr., and other
politicians; by the singer Harry Belafonte; by leaders and
members of the N.A.A.C.P.; the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s
Rainbow/PUSH Coalition; Mr. Sharpton’s National Action
Network; and relatives and friends of Mr. Bell, Mr. Guzman
and Mr. Benefield.

The group included Mr. Bell’s fiancée, Nicole Paultre, who has
taken the surname Bell, and one of their two children, Jada, 4,
and Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant sodomized with
a broomstick by a police officer in a station house nine years
ago. Mr. Benefield rode in a wheelchair, but Mr. Guzman,
shot numerous times, remained at a rehabilitation center.

There were chants and speeches from Mr. Sharpton and
others as the crowd assembled at 59th Street and Fifth
Avenue, but the exhortations ended as the protesters
stepped off in early afternoon, heading down a Fifth
Avenue decked out for the season.

The line of march led down a parade of elegant stores,
past St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Rockefeller Center, where
a Salvation Army vocalist sang sweet carols. Giant illuminated
snowflakes graced the facade of Saks.

Lower down the avenue, the marchers encountered sparser
crowds shopping for sneakers and sweatshirts.

The march ended at 34th Street and Seventh Avenue,
outside Macy’s. There, Sonia Fatimah, 50, one of the
marchers, yelled at a black officer. “I hope they’re not
profiling your son right now, Sergeant,” she said.

Mr. Sharpton and members of the Bell family ducked into
the lobby of the Hotel Pennsylvania nearby and waited for
the crowd to disperse. Many other protesters, perhaps
unaware the proceedings were over, tried to join them inside.
There was some pushing and a brief scuffle broke out between
some followers and news photographers, but it quickly subsided.

Later, about 150 followers of the radical New Black Panther
Party burned an American flag at 34th Street and Seventh
Avenue and heaped verbal abuse on a contingent of police
officers. But there were no clashes or arrests.

Reporting was contributed by Nicholas Confessore,
Cassi Feldman, Daryl Khan, Rachel Metz and Anthony Ramirez.

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

11) Goldman’s Season to Reward and Shock
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
December 17, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/business/yourmoney/17deal.html?ref=business

IF you happened to see Page Six of The New York Post on Thursday,
you would have noticed a provocative cartoon: eight shady-looking
executives, wearing black eye masks and smoking cigarettes, were
holding a board meeting.

Their company? Goldman Sachs. The caption read: “What’s next on
our agenda? Oh yes, our end-of-the-year bonuses.”

You probably know by now that Goldman Sachs, Wall Street’s golden
child, is paying its employees what seems like a king’s ransom:
a total of $16.5 billion in compensation. That equates to $623,418
for every employee. Several top traders are said to have made
as much as $100 million.

To some, it seems almost criminal.

ABC News tallied up all the things that $100 million could buy.
“You could feed about 800,000 children for a year ($60 million),
recreate the Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes and Brad Pitt-Jennifer
Aniston weddings four times over ($16 million), buy one
of Mel Gibson’s private islands ($15 million), and still remain
a millionaire nine times over,” ABC News reported.

In London, Goldman’s office cleaners threatened to strike.
“Whilst bankers at Goldman Sachs will be splashing out on
second homes, cars and polo ponies with their multimillion-
pound bonuses, cleaners at Goldman Sachs are being squeezed
by staff cutbacks,” Tony Woodley, general secretary of the
Transport & General Workers’ Union, which represents the
cleaners, told BBC News.

Driss Ben-Brahim, a top Goldman trader who according to
press reports collected $98 million, was stalked by paparazzi
outside his home in London. One of Goldman’s holiday parties
was mocked for its lavishness when it was reported that some
of its managing directors anted up $10,000 each to pay for it.

As the cleaners and others have vented their outrage, one
group has stayed largely silent on Goldman’s largess:
its shareholders.

And they ought to be up in arms.

What’s that, you say? What does a shareholder of Goldman
Sachs have to complain about? After all, its stock is
up 61 percent so far this year with dividends reinvested.
Goldman made a profit of $9.4 billion in its 2006 fiscal
year ended Nov. 24, nearly as much as it did in the last
two years combined.

And Goldman Sachs has taken great pains to tell investors
that as a percentage of revenue, the compensation costs for
its 26,467 full-time employees are actually lower than those
of many of its counterparts. This year, the firm spent 43.7
percent of its revenue on compensation and benefits,
compared with 46.6 percent last year. That’s lower than
Lehman Brothers, for example, which spent 50.1 percent
of its revenue this year on compensation. Last year, Merrill
Lynch spent about 49 percent of its revenue on compensation;
Morgan Stanley, on the other hand, devoted 41.8 percent
of its revenue to paying employees.

Using a different yardstick, however, Goldman’s pay seems
completely out of whack with its peers’.

Goldman’s compensation per employee, as mentioned earlier,
is about $623,418. That’s nearly double what the average
employee at rival firms earns. Lehman spent the equivalent
of about $314,000 for every employee, and Bear Stearns
spent about $320,000.

You could argue that Goldman Sachs makes its money more
efficiently, and it does. You could argue that Goldman Sachs
is in a different business than its rivals, and in some sense,
it is: its biggest profits come from trading, not from
investment banking.

But are its employees so much more talented than the rest
of Wall Street that they deserve a “Goldman premium”
of such huge proportions? That’s a tough case to make.

Yes, there is a competitive marketplace for talent, and the
proliferation of hedge funds has only intensified the fight
for top people. Some of Goldman’s superstars could quit,
either for a hedge fund or to start their own fund, and make
far more money.

But a vast majority — especially those who are being paid
at the mid- to top end — could not.

And for those Goldman employees who appear to be stars
within the firm, their stellar performances do not always travel
with them when they leave 85 Broad Street. Consider the example
of Eric Mindich, a star Goldman trader, who left in 2004 to found
Eton Park Capital Management. The firm raised an enormous
amount of money based on his track record, and now has
$5.5 billion, but its returns have proved to be a fraction
of the regular double-digit returns he made at Goldman.

If Goldman shaved its compensation costs just 6 percent, profits
would have been nearly $1 billion higher. The firm could then
have issued a special dividend, which would have benefited
all shareholders. Many of those shareholders are, of course,
Goldman employees.

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

12) Report on the Thursday, December 7, 2006 BAUAW meeting and
BAUAW Open Letter to the Board of Education
December 17, 2006
www.bauaw.org

Hi folks,

We held a BAUAW meeting Thursday, Dec. 7th where we discussed
possible alternatives to JROTC and celebrated our victory. We got
a report from Pat Gerber about other proposals that are being
discussed by Mark Sanchez and others that can take the place
of JROTC.

We felt that what was missing was the involvement of parents,
students, teachers, administrators and the whole school community
in making these decisions about alternatives.

We decided to send an open letter to the board asking them
to form committees in each school consisting of parents, students,
teachers, administrators and community representatives who will
come together over a period of six months (time frame is just
a suggestion) to discuss, research, decide on and make
recommendations to the Board regarding alternatives to JROTC
and the needs of the schools and our children.

We also decided to meet again to follow up on our letter
and prepare for the next School Board meeting, Tuesday,
January 23, 2007.

The Next BAUAW 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!

Peace,

Bonnie

OPEN LETTER TO THE SAN FRANCISCO
BOARD OF EDUCATION MEMBERS:

Dear Board Members:

We congratulate you for your historic decision to phase-out
the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) program
by 2008 as per the wishes of the majority of voters in San
Francisco. But now we must fill the void of not enough
Physical Education classes and teachers for our students
and deteriorating conditions in our schools—an intolerable
situation.

At our BAUAW meeting on December 7, 2006 we discussed
many possible alternatives to JROTC. We discussed creating
a partnership with San Francisco State University and other
Universities and Colleges to allow college students working
toward a teaching credential, say, to get internship credit
to lead various classes that could fulfill the P.E. requirement
and even provide a variety of after-school programs that
could be available to all the children. (Art majors could
teach art classes; science majors could lead after- school
science programs; etc. we could set up tutoring centers
as well. High school students could provide similar services
for school credit to elementary schools in their community.
Students could volunteer at hospitals and senior centers
under the mentorship of a professional, etc.)

Community involvement essential

While this was just a few of many interesting and possible
alternatives that we discussed, it occurred to us that we were
neglecting the most important thing—getting the parents,
students and community involved in coming up with the
alternatives to JROTC that they feel they need.

We would like to suggest that a committee be set up consisting
of a delegation of parents, teachers, students, administrators
and community members from each school to come together
to research, discuss, and vote on recommendations
for alternative programs to JROTC.

We feel that proceeding in this manner will insure that whatever
alternative we finally choose will best fit the needs of the
community that the school district is trying to serve.
It could turn out that different schools have different needs.

What we do know, is that parent and community involvement
is desperately needed if we are to help are ailing schools and
our children. A strong school-community alliance will be
beneficial to all concerned. Any improvement to our schools
is an improvement in teaching conditions and a boost to morale.

Creative alternatives needed

Our children are faced with overwhelming challenges and
obstacles in today’s world. Almost half come from single-
parent households. Many of these parents must work more
than one job to make ends meet. This leaves little time left
for child and parent relationships—let alone getting homework
completed or household chores done. And, in this economy,
pressures will be even greater to keep up with the demands
of everyday life.

In order to meet these challenges we must get the community
and parents involved in the school-lives of the children. This is
a golden opportunity to begin the process. We believe there are
many low-cost alternatives to JROTC and low-cost, creative after-
school programs—programs that can really serve and benefit the
whole school community not just the students who might have
been in JROTC. The more who are involved in support of the
school community, the stronger our position will be to fulfill
the needs of our schools.

We have lobbied and begged and pleaded for money for our
schools—so that there are enough classes and teachers to go
around. These P.E. classes are required classes. Of course they
should be funded and provided to students, but so far, none
of the politicians have been able to do anything about it.

We now must take the next step and organize parents, teachers,
students, administrators and community members to fight for
these things that our children need to be successful in this world
and, hopefully, make our world a better place.

In short, we request that you set up a District-wide School-Needs
Committee with representative from each school community
(parents, students, teachers, administrators and community
members) and schedule meetings over the next six months
(this time frame is just a suggestion and should be decided
upon by the committees) to come up with recommendations
to the Board. That body could set up sub-committees to do
research on various proposals, etc., and report back to the
group as a whole.

Such a process will strengthen connections between the School
District and the community and can only be a positive step toward
solving the overwhelming and complex problems we will face
in the future as the budget cuts mount. We have no other choice
but to organize and fight back for the needs of our children—
our future depends on it.

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

13) Swift Raids
New York Times Editorial
December 18, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/opinion/18mon1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

When federal immigration officials raided six plants owned by Swift
& Company, the world’s second largest beef and pork processor, last
Tuesday, they brought Spanish translators. They knew exactly what
kind of worker is found in low-paying, strenuous jobs in this country:
recent Latino arrivals with limited skills and, in many cases, no legal
papers. Nearly 1,300 people — almost 10 percent of Swift’s work force —
were taken away in what the government said was the largest but
not the last assault on the underground immigrant economy.

The raids have led some people to heap scorn on Swift and, of
course, on the illegal immigrants, particularly the dozens
of detainees who have been charged with identity theft and
other crimes. But doing so misses the bigger picture. Swift and
its workers are merely Exhibit A in an immigration system that
is failing in all of its parts.

It is a system that rewards illegality and pays lip service to
lawfulness and order.

Swift insists that it is a model corporate citizen. It obeyed the
rules, which require it to check workers’ identity papers and
file so-called I-9 forms attesting to that. And it went further,
participating in the federal Basic Pilot program, a system of
checking Social Security numbers that President Bush has touted
as a way to crack down on immigration fraud. The company
says that prying any more aggressively into workers’ legal
status would leave it open to civil rights lawsuits.

The Swift raids are powerful evidence that I-9’s and Basic
Pilot are ineffective and disingenuous, a nod to by-the-books
technical lawfulness that allows a far vaster world of illegality
to flourish. Swift and other large-scale employers of immigrants,
like farms and hotels, may insist that they never knowingly hire
people illegally. But as long as the jobs they offer are the kinds
whose pay and conditions consistently fail to attract native-born
Americans, their protests will ring hollow. This system is brilliantly
efficient at bringing lots of cheap products and services to market,
which is great unless you mind its essential lawlessness, anonymity
and reliance on an enormous work force of silent, compliant,
frightened people whose bitter choice is to stay here illegally
or go home and be desperately poor.

Swift, by its lights, was doing the right thing. The federal government
was doing the right thing, waking up, belatedly, to workplace
enforcement. And yet it’s impossible to see how this will work
over the long term. Immigration reform built on piecemeal
enforcement — factory raids and border walls — won’t solve
the problem of the 12 million illegal immigrants already here.
The American economy wouldn’t stand the shock if the Swift
raids were multiplied to levels beyond the merely symbolic.

The system needs what Mr. Bush and Congress have refused to
give it: a way to end the sham. Comprehensive immigration reform
is good for the economy, giving companies access to a secure and
stable work force. It is good for national security, allowing law
enforcement to go after real criminals and leave honest working
people alone. And it is good for the immigrant workers across
the country, terrorized by Tuesday’s raids, who just want to keep
doing their jobs, no matter how hard and distasteful.

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

14) Castro to Recover but Not Return, Cubans Say
By JULIA PRESTON
December 18, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/world/americas/18cuba.html?ref=world

Cuban officials told lawmakers from the United States House of
Representatives visiting Havana yesterday that President Fidel Castro
did not have cancer or any terminal illness and that he would be
making a public appearance shortly, according to Rep. William
Delahunt, one of the legislators.

But Mr. Delahunt, Democrat of Massachusetts, said he concluded
from the delegation’s discussions with senior Cuban officials and
diplomats that Mr. Castro would not return to running Cuba
on a day-to-day basis.

Mr. Delahunt said he understood that government administration
had been definitively passed to Mr. Castro’s brother, Raúl. “The Cubans
were emphatic, and I believe them, that Fidel does not have cancer,
and that the illness he does have is not terminal,” Mr. Delahunt said
in a telephone interview last night after he returned to Washington.

He said Cuban officials assured the delegation that Mr. Castro was
planning to re-emerge shortly. Mr. Castro, 80, who has controlled
Cuba since he took power after a revolution in 1959, has not been
seen in public since July 26, and Cuba has guarded the details
of his medical condition as a state secret. Cuban officials announced
that he underwent intestinal surgery in late July. He did not appear
at celebrations of his 80th birthday earlier this month, prompting
a new rush of rumors that he had died.

If Mr. Castro re-appears, “this will not be Fidel sitting at his desk,”
Mr. Delahunt said. “This will be Fidel Castro is alive and recovering.”
He said he anticipated that if Mr. Castro did resume a political role,
it would be setting broad policy. “The functioning of the government,
that transition has already occurred,” he said.

The bipartisan delegation of 10 representatives, which Mr. Delahunt
described as the largest Congressional delegation to visit Cuba
during Mr. Castro’s rule, arrived Friday and spent 48 hours in
Havana. It was led by Mr. Delahunt and Rep. Jeff Flake, Republican
of Arizona, the leaders of the Cuba Working Group in the House.

The lawmakers met with the foreign minister, Felipe Pérez Roque,
the National Assembly president, Ricardo Alarcón, and Yadira García,
an economic minister, among others.

They did not have any contact with Mr. Castro or meet with Raúl
Castro. The Communist Party newspaper reported Saturday that Fidel
Castro had telephoned several Cuban lawmakers on Friday. He has
also spoken recently to President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela,
Mr. Chávez has said.

The Cuban officials did not disclose what illness Mr. Castro had,
but they insisted he was recovering, and said he had avoided
public appearances to hasten his recuperation, Mr. Delahunt
said. Mr. Castro passed his political authority to his brother
before his surgery.

“It seems that the Cuban government may not be ready to say
that a new era has begun,” Mr. Flake said when asked why Raúl
Castro had not met with the lawmakers, The Associated Press
reported from Havana.

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

15) Engels Would Gasp, and Locals Gripe, at a Golden Mile
By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY
December 18, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/world/europe/18moscow.html?ref=world

MOSCOW, Dec. 17 — The statue of Friedrich Engels that graces one
of central Moscow’s most prestigious neighborhoods has not been
of much use to any but pigeons in recent years. But Engels, the co-
author of “The Communist Manifesto,” was a handy rallying point
not long ago for some residents of that neighborhood, Ostozhenka,
who were protesting its transformation into a hotbed of luxury housing
thanks to the Russian capital’s oil-fueled real estate boom.

“Leave Us Alone,” read banners unfurled by the protesters in
September. That is the name of their movement, spurred by the
latest luxury housing project, slated for the site of an apartment
building in which some of them still live, at Khilkov Pereulok 3.
The gold domes of Christ the Savior Cathedral, a 19th-century
church destroyed by Stalin and rebuilt in the 1990s, just as the
district began to take off, overlook the area.

Ostozhenka (pronounced ahs-TO-zhen-ka), once home to many
artists and intellectuals, is now known in the parlance of real estate
agents and their wealthy clients as the Golden Mile. In the last five
years it has become a Kremlin-view Beverly Hills on the Moscow
River. Its winding lanes are now home to modern multimillion-dollar
penthouses, Ferraris, gourmet restaurants and bizarre crimes: last
year a celebrity plastic surgeon was stabbed by roller skaters, and
later died, in what appeared to be a roll-by contract killing.

The neighborhood’s rise is only one of many morality tales of money,
power and real estate now playing out across post-Soviet Russia.

In recent months, dramas included an elderly Moscow couple who
had been evicted from their home and were camping in the yard
of their old apartment building, which was slated for demolition
to make way for new construction, and villagers being pushed from
their homes on the edge of Moscow to make way for high rises.
In both cases, residents were infuriated by orders to move
to apartments in Yuzhnoye Butovo, a district that is near
a former Stalinist killing field and an hour from central Moscow
by subway. They are still fighting the orders.

The fight continues in Ostozhenka as well. “The Golden Mile
is the most brilliant business project in post-Soviet Russia,”
Denis Litoshik said in November at one of the neighborhood’s
Starbucks-like coffee shops.

Mr. Litoshik, 27, has a personal stake in its transformation:
he lived, until recently, at Khilkov Pereulok 3, and is a leader
of Leave Us Alone. As a journalist for the business newspaper
Vedomosti, he is awed by what he says is a reported $33,000
per square meter price tag on apartments going up next door
to his former home. “They’re not selling drugs, but they’re
making much more money,” he said of developers who have
converged on Ostozhenka.

But a few buildings, some ramshackle, some solidly middle
class, hinder a complete makeover.

One of those is Khilkov Pereulok 3. Mr. Litoshik lived there with
his wife and their baby until city authorities issued a decree in May
declaring the building subject to demolition to make way for
new construction even though the 19th-century building was
overhauled in the 1960s and renovated again in the past few years.
He and other residents were pressured by officials and developers
to leave. Fearing that the building could be burned down, as
sometimes happens across Russia when new construction has
been slated, he moved away and began to fight.

This month, the business daily Kommersant reported that the
federal antimonopoly watchdog had deemed the plans for Khilkov
Pereulok 3 illegal. But that ruling could yet be challenged and
may not halt the development. Sergei Tsoi, press secretary for
Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, was quoted by Kommersant earlier this
year as calling the Ostozhenka protesters’ actions “egoism.”

Ostozhenka stood virtually untouched until the late 1990s,
frozen in time by a Soviet decree that called for the construction
of a vast Lenin-topped Palace of Soviets in place of the razed
Christ the Savior Cathedral. It was never built, but the plan was
never revoked; a swimming pool was instead built on the site.
And Ostozhenka figured in Mikhail Bulgakov’s surrealist novel,
“The Master and Margarita,” which gave the Russian language
its ultimate real estate catch phrase: “The housing problem has
corrupted them.”

Bulgakov depicted the early Soviet years, when aristocratic abodes
were forcibly transformed into communal apartments for the masses,
with shared bathrooms, kitchens and secrets. Now new money
is squeezing out the remaining “kommunalki,” as the communal
apartments were called.

Aleksandr Khosenkov, 56, lives in a friend’s communal flat.
“I live here, but all the streets have been renamed — I can’t find
the houses,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if a person has a Mercedes.
Their soul should matter, not their car.”

Georgy Dzagurov, the general director of Penny Lane Realty, which
offers properties in Ostozhenka, said, “Practically anyone who
is powerful has bought there.”

“One million dollars or $2 million is nothing for them,” he said
of his clients. In October, Morgan Stanley announced its purchase
of a stake in RGI International, owned by Boris Kuzinez,
a developer whose ultramodern buildings are credited with
transforming Ostozhenka into billionaires’ row. RGI’s Web
site, posted in time for its London Stock Exchange initial public
offering earlier this month, lists Khilkov 3 among its projects.

While describing his clients only as “mostly businessmen, bankers,
in oil and metals,” Mr. Kuzinez acknowledged an oligarch’s need f
or the right milieu. “It’s hard for oligarchs to live in a regular
building,” he said.

Maksim, a banker, though not an oligarch, declined to give his
last name but agreed to show his sleek two-bedroom apartment
in an a Kuzinez development. “There are guards everywh