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LABOR’S RESPONSE TO KATRINA

WHAT HAS BEEN DONE?
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

MALCOLM SUBER
PEOPLES HURRICANE RELIEF FUND

REGISTERED NURSE RESPONSE NETWORK
CALIFORNIA NURSES ASSOCIATION

MEMBERS OF OTHER UNIONS

A Member of the
NEW ORLEANS COMMUNITY Residing in the Bay Area

MIKE BISHOP
UC-BERKELEY VOLUNTEER COORDINATOR

TUESDAY MAY 22nd - 7pm

$5-10 sliding scale donation –
no one turned away for lack of funds

CALIFORNIA NURSES ASSOCIATION
2200 FRANKLIN STREET, OAKLAND
(near 19th Street BART Station)

Sponsored By The Bay Area Labor
Committee For Peace & Justice/USLAW
For more info: 510-540-0845

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LAPD vs. Immigrants (Video)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/qws/ff/qr?term=lapd&Submit=S&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Search&st=s

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Dr. Julia Hare at the SOBA 2007
http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeo9ewi/proudtobeblack2/

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"There comes a times when silence is betrayal."
--Martin Luther King

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ARTICLES IN FULL:

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1) The Right to Paid Sick Days
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
May 15, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/opinion/15herbert.html?hp

2) In Divided New Orleans
Editorial
May 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/opinion/15tue1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

3) Che’s Fans in Iraq
By Mike Nizza
May 15, 2007, 9:28 am
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/ches-fans-in-iraq/

4) After Ordnance Scare, Beachgoers Told to Dig With Care
By JILL P. CAPUZZO
May 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/nyregion/15sand.html

5) Red Cross Report Says Israel Disregards Humanitarian Law
By STEVEN ERLANGER
May 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/world/middleeast/15jerusalem.html?ref=worl

6) Guantánamo Detainees’ Suit Challenges Fairness
of Military’s Repeat Hearings
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
May 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/washington/15gitmo.html?ref=us

7) In Deal, a Test for the U.A.W.
By MICHELINE MAYNARD
May 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/business/15Auto.html?ref=business

8) Satellites Show Harvest of Mud That Trawlers Leave Behind
By CORNELIA DEAN
May 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/science/15mud.html

9) LESSONS WE LEARNED FROM THE 6th
HEMISPHERIC MEETING IN HAVANA
Fidel Castro Ruz
May 14, 2007
5: 12 pm
www.marxmail.org

10) Somewhere over the Rainbow:
A report from a Kansas Mutual Aid
member from tornado devastated
Greensburg, Kansas
by Dave Strano
Kansas Mutual Aid member
Lawrence, Kansas
kansasmutualaid@hotmail.com

11) Court seeks Colombian lawmakers in growing scandal
Mon May 14, 2007 3:39PM EDT
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N14314528.htm

12) More than 500 citizens of ECUADOR were victims
of massacres in Colombia
By AFP 5/14/2007 07:46 hours
VIA Email from: Greg McDonald
sabocat59@mac.com

13) For blacks, the folly of the Iraq war hits home
Derrick Z. Jackson, THE BOSTON GLOBE
Monday, May 14, 2007
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/05/09/for_african_americans_folly_of_this_war_hits_home/

14) A Statement by William Singletary,
a witness in the case of Mumia
Abu-Jamal (1995 PCRA hearing), is what
follows below. This statement was sent to the
Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia
Abu-Jamal, in order that it be read at
rallies held in solidarity with death-
row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, on the
day of what likely is his last appeal
hearing--before a panel of the Third
Circuit federal court in Philadelphia,
PA, May 17th 2007.
LACFreeMumia@aol.com

15) Deal Is Reached in Senate on Immigration
By ROBERT PEAR and DAVID STOUT
May 17, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/17/washington/17cnd-immig.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

16) Clash of Hope and Fear as Venezuela Seizes Land
By SIMON ROMERO
May 17, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/17/world/americas/17venezuela.html

17) Venezuela Lets Councils Bloom;
Critics Say Chávez Backs Local Bodies to Boost Central Control
By Juan Forero
The Washington Post
May 17, 2007
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/16/AR2007051602547.html

18) Feds Crack Down on Immigrant Labor Organizers
A series of North Carolina immigration raids
weren't just about deporting undocumented workers
-- they were about busting unions.
By David Bacon
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=feds_crack_down_on_immigrant_labor_organizers

19) The Department of Defense -- Bringing Historical
Revisionism to a High School Near You
By Chris Rodda Sun May 13, 2007 at 11:25:30 AM EST
http://www.talk2action.org/printpage/2007/5/13/112530/361

20) Analysis Finds Large Antarctic Area Has Melted
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
May 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/16/science/earth/16melt.html?ref=science

21) Citing Racist Bias, Attorneys for Mumia Abu-Jamal
Urge a Federal Appeals Court to Grant the Former Black
Panther a New Trial
Friday, May 18th, 2007
VIA Email from: Mike Friedman
mikedf@amnh.org

22) "Sicko" Is Completed and We're Off to Cannes!
By Michael Moore
May 17, 2007
http://www.michaelmoore.com

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1) The Right to Paid Sick Days
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
May 15, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/opinion/15herbert.html?hp

It sounds reasonable: seven paid sick days a year. Why
should you have to lose a couple of days pay, or maybe
even your job, because you had the misfortune to catch
the flu?

And it certainly seems unreasonable to penalize an
employee in good standing who misses a day or two
of work to care for a child who is ill or has met
with a serious accident.

After all, this is the 21st century.

The reality, for a surprising percentage of the U.S.
population, is more like the 19th century. Nearly
half of all full-time private sector workers in the U.S.
get no paid sick days. None. If one of those workers
woke up with excruciating pains in his or her chest
and had to be rushed to a hospital — well, no pay
for that day. For many of these workers, the cost
of an illness could be the loss of their job.

The situation is ridiculous for those in the lowest
quarter of U.S. wage earners. Nearly 80 percent of
those workers — the very ones who can least afford
to lose a day’s pay — get no paid sick days at all.

I recently spoke with Bertha Brown, a home health
aide who lives in Philadelphia and has two young
daughters. She makes $7 an hour caring for people
who are ill or disabled. “I feed them and dress
them,” she said. “And if they have to be changed,
I do all that.”

She has worked for the better part of two decades
without ever being paid for a sick day. And her
wages are so low she can’t afford to lose even
a day’s pay. “If I get sick, I work sick,” she said.
“I cover my nose and my mouth with a mask to keep
my clients from getting sick.”

Food service workers are among those least likely
to get paid sick days. Eighty-six percent get no sick
days at all. They show up in the restaurants coughing
and sneezing and feverish, and they start preparing
and serving meals. You won’t see many of them wearing
masks.

There’s an effort under way to change this picture.
A growing number of organizations and activists are
lining up behind proposed federal legislation that would
give most workers the right to seven paid sick days
annually to take care of their medical needs or those
of their families. The legislation, sponsored by Senator
Edward Kennedy and Representative Rosa DeLauro, would
require employers with 15 or more workers to provide
the sick days.

Among the organizations pushing for paid sick days
is the Public Welfare Foundation in Washington, which
recently approved a $1 million “special initiative”
on the issue. Deborah Leff, the foundation’s president,
noted that it’s the poorest workers who most often are
forced to choose between going to work sick or losing
a day’s pay, and that a disproportionate number of
those workers are women — many of them with children.

“At least 145 countries have paid sick days,” said
Ms. Leff. “The United States is the only industrialized
country lacking such a policy. Our goal is to change that.”

An overwhelming majority of Americans favor paid sick
days for full-time workers. One poll showed that 95 percent
of workers find it “unacceptable” for employers to deny
sick days to workers. But the Kennedy-DeLauro legislation
is facing a tough road.

As one might imagine, the industries that would be affected
are ice-cold to the idea.

The response of Cracker Barrel Old Country Store to my
inquiries on this issue is illustrative. A spokeswoman
said in an e-mail message: “Because employees working
in the restaurants have flexible schedules, they can
schedule doctors’ appointments and other appointments
that sick leave and personal time are generally used
for at times when they are not working.

“If employees need to miss a shift due to illness,
there are generally many opportunities to make up that
lost shift later in the week, or the next week.”

That is the kind of workplace policy that prompts
Debra Ness, the president of the National Partnership
for Women and Families, to note that “for millions
of workers, getting sick can mean the beginning
of an economic disaster.”

Allowing a worker to recuperate from an illness,
or take care of a sick child, without suffering undue
economic hardship should be a matter of basic humanity
and fundamental decency. It should not be politically
controversial in a country that considers itself the
most advanced on the face of the earth, and that babbles
incessantly about the importance of family values.

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2) In Divided New Orleans
Editorial
May 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/opinion/15tue1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

When President Bush spoke to the nation soon after
Hurricane Katrina, he was resolute that the city would
be rebuilt. “We will do what it takes,” he said. We —
the federal, state and city governments; elected officials
and the citizens who hire them — have failed spectacularly.
Homes and schools remain empty or imaginary; evacuees and
survivors wait in cramped trailers, unable to return or
rebuild. A huge silence still hangs over the Lower Ninth
Ward, a place every American should see, to witness
firsthand how truckloads of promises have filled New
Orleans’s vast devastation with nothing.

That the Lower Ninth is overwhelmingly black is not
irrelevant. African-Americans were the predominant
and poorest members of this city before the storm,
they bore the worst of it and have the farthest
journey back to stability. A study issued last week
by the Kaiser Family Foundation, based on interviews
last fall with residents of Orleans, Jefferson,
Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes, maps the outlines
of a sharp racial divide.

In Orleans Parish, twice as many African-Americans
as whites said their lives were still “very” or “somewhat”
disrupted. Seventy-two percent of blacks said they had
problems getting health care, compared with 32 percent
of whites. Blacks were more likely to say that their
financial status, physical and mental health, and job
security had worsened since the storm. And they expressed
considerably more anxiety than whites about the sturdiness
of the rebuilt levees, the danger from future Katrinas
and the prospect of living without enough money or health
care, or a decent, affordable home.

There was a consensus about broad categories of the
recovery: solid majorities thought there had been at
least some progress in restoring basic services, reopening
schools and business and fixing levees. But in three
vital areas — rebuilding neighborhoods, controlling
crime and increasing the supply of affordable housing
— most agreed that there had been no progress or
“not too much.”

Even with the constant trickle of bad news, you can
find minimal improvements. Thousands of building permits
have been issued. A crisis was recently averted when
the Bush administration extended temporary housing
assistance for tens of thousands of displaced families.
Some government housing subsidies that were to expire
at the end of August will continue until March 2009.

It is also encouraging that administration of the
housing program will shift from the Federal Emergency
Management Agency to the Department of Housing and
Urban Development, which has always been the logical
choice, given its experience in housing needy families.
Other positive signs include the halting progress toward
a workable redevelopment plan, and a recent finding that
the city’s population had grown to above half of its
level before the storm.

The Kaiser survey even found signs of hope when it tested
for resilience in a proud city. Sixty-nine percent of
respondents said they were optimistic about New Orleans’s
future. And only 11 percent said they planned to leave.

Their faith must not be betrayed. Residents in the survey
were keenly aware that their city’s fitful recovery would
be devastated if the levees failed again. They put strong
levees above all other priorities, including fighting
crime and even basic services like electricity and water.
And yet National Geographic has reported that an engineer
has found signs that levees were poorly rebuilt and are
already eroding. There is no room for error here.

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3) Che’s Fans in Iraq
By Mike Nizza
May 15, 2007, 9:28 am
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/ches-fans-in-iraq/

Che Guevara may not live, as one of the latest installments
in his T-shirt line claims, but he still has fans leading
South American nations, and now, starting insurgent groups
in Iraq.

A previously-unknown group is using Che’s image in leaflets
announcing a “movement of Iraqi Communists and Marxists
experienced in armed struggle, leftist Iraqi nationalists,
and their supporters,” according to Iraq Slogger.

The Iraqi Armed Revolutionary Resistance, a hardly striking
name to add to an already crowded list, called out a long
list of enemies, including the “puppet government, the
so-called Council of Representatives, terrorist Salafis,
militias, the Interior Ministry, Iraqi traitors who came
on American tanks, the American and British mercenaries,
contractors, and their servants from the South Lebanese
Army.”

The group seems unlikely to inspire Iraqis who would
most strongly identify with their political beliefs.

Since 1934, the far left of the nation’s idealogical
spectrum has been claimed by the Iraqi Communist Party.

Last month, a spokesmen said that the party’s nonviolent
message was what attracted thousands of Iraqis to 73rd
anniversary celebrations.

“The Communist Party appeals to people because it is not
tainted with corruption and does not have blood on its
hands from sectarian killings. People are seeing the
party as hope, as a potential alternative, something
different,” Salam Ali told Political Affairs, which
specializes in Marxist news.

Also in stark contrast to today’s insurgent declaration,
party faithful spent May Day marching peacefully in Baghdad.
In these photographs, some were even smiling.

And if there’s one thing we’ve learned from insurgent
photos, it’s that they never, ever smile.

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4) After Ordnance Scare, Beachgoers Told to Dig With Care
By JILL P. CAPUZZO
May 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/nyregion/15sand.html

SURF CITY, N.J., May 14 — Sun worshipers coming to this
Jersey Shore town should be happy that the closed beaches
will soon be reopening. But they might want to rethink
what they bring.

Pail and small shovel: check. Sand spade and metal detector:
skip. Beach umbrella: proceed with caution.

After removing 1,111 pieces of potentially explosive
military ordnance from the sand and surf, the United
States Army Corps of Engineers is ready to declare the
beaches here and in neighboring Ship Bottom safe and
recommend that they be reopened in time for Memorial Day.

So, once the State Department of Environmental Protection
approves, the “Beach Closed” signs will come down. But in
their place will be new signs prohibiting beachgoers from
using metal detectors or digging deeper than a foot into
the sand. These “land-use controls” will be posted at every
entrance and on every lifeguard stand along the 1.4 miles
of affected beach on Long Beach Island.

“We really don’t expect anybody to find anything, but you
don’t know,” George Follett, an explosives safety specialist
for the Army Corps who has been overseeing the removal
of the devices, said on Monday. “If there’s a lot of wave
action, something might be uncovered.” Keith Watson, the
project manager, said he did not expect umbrellas to pose
a problem, but children digging too deep might be warned
to ease off.

The corps will be holding training sessions with all police,
fire and beach personnel, and any interested citizens,
about how to handle situations should they arise,
Mr. Watson said.

“We’ll be training badge checkers and lifeguards what
to look out for,” he said, “and when they see someone
digging too far, they’ll politely tell them not to.
It’s all part of the public relations.”

It is one public relations campaign that Joe Muzzillo,
who owns a Surf City beach shop, could live without.
Or maybe not. After hearing that sand castle building
and hole digging would be restricted, Mr. Muzzillo
decided to skip buying any sand toys and umbrellas
for his shop, Exit 63 WearHouse. Instead of the beach
paraphernalia, the store’s back wall is now lined with
T-shirts that carry slogans like “Save a Tourist — Find
a Bomb,” “Surf City’s Da Bomb” and “I Got Bombed
on L.B.I.,” for Long Beach Island.

Aside from a couple of complaints, reactions to the shirts
have been “98 percent positive,” Mr. Muzzillo said. Still,
he’s predicting a weak summer. “Even if the beach is open,
I think it’s going to suffer,” he said. “If kids can’t
dig and do the normal things kids do, it could be kind
of traumatic, especially when they hear the explanation
for why. Is a kid ever going to want to dig in the sand
again?”

Mary Madonna, the Surf City borough clerk, said the
borough has had an ordinance that prohibits digging more
than 12 inches at the beach since 2002, when a boy in
nearby Loveladies died after digging a deep tunnel that
collapsed on him. But she and others at Borough Hall
could not say how strictly the law has been enforced.

In Ship Bottom, where about 10 percent of the beaches
are affected by the new guidelines, a regulation against
digging deep holes also exists, but Mayor William
Huelsenbeck said that there was no set depth and that
enforcement was left to the discretion of lifeguards.

“We’ve always discouraged deep holes; nothing will
change,” Mayor Huelsenbeck said. “Kids can use their
shovels and pails. As for metal detectors, certainly
we would discourage people from trying to look for
these things.”

The explosives problem arose on March 5 when a resident
using a metal detector came upon a rusted military fuze,
an ignition device incorporating mechanical or electric
elements, buried in the sand. Believed to have been dumped
off the sides of ships sometime during World War I, the
discarded military munitions lay on the ocean floor for
90 years or more, according to Mr. Follett. Last fall,
the Army Corps dredged up 500,000 cubic yards of sand
from the bottom of the Atlantic as part of a $9 million
beach replenishment program for Surf City and part
of Ship Bottom.

The joy of getting new, wider beaches was quickly diminished
by the discovery of the ordnance, which corps officials said
could cause injury or death if detonated.

For the past six weeks, contractors hired by the corps
have been sweeping every inch of the replenished beach,
using equipment that Mr. Watson and Mr. Follett said could
detect devices as deep as three feet with 95 percent
accuracy.

At the start of the cleanup effort, Mr. Follett said, the
contractors were finding as many as 40 to 50 devices a day.
On Monday, doing a second sweep of the areas stirred up
by the recent northeaster, the crews found one device. The
cleanup has cost $2.3 million to date, according to
Mr. Watson, who added that the corps might have to undertake
a similar effort next winter.

“Beaches are a dynamic thing,” he said. “We’re not leaving.
We’ll follow it through to the end.”

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5) Red Cross Report Says Israel Disregards Humanitarian Law
By STEVEN ERLANGER
May 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/world/middleeast/15jerusalem.html?ref=worl

JERUSALEM, May 14 — The International Committee of the Red
Cross, in a confidential report about East Jerusalem and
its surrounding areas, accuses Israel of a “general disregard”
for “its obligations under international humanitarian law —
and the law of occupation in particular.”

The committee, which does not accept Israel’s annexation
of East Jerusalem, says Israel is using its rights as an
occupying power under international law “in order to further
its own interests or those of its own population to the
detriment of the population of the occupied territory.”

With the construction of the separation barrier, the
establishment of an outer ring of Jewish settlements beyond
the expanded municipal boundaries and the creation of
a dense road network linking the different Israeli
neighborhoods and settlements in and outside Jerusalem,
the report says, Israel is “reshaping the development
of the Jerusalem metropolitan area” with “far-reaching
humanitarian consequences.” Those include the increasing
isolation of Palestinians living in Jerusalem from the
rest of the West Bank and the increasing difficulty for
some Palestinians to easily reach Jerusalem’s schools
and hospitals.

The Red Cross committee, which is recognized as a guardian
of humanitarian law under the Geneva Conventions of 1949,
does not publish its reports but provides them in confidence
to the parties involved and to a small number of countries.
This report was provided to The New York Times by someone
outside the organization who wanted the report’s conclusions
publicized. The leak came just days before Israel’s celebration
of Jerusalem Day this Wednesday, observing the 40th anniversary
of the unification of the city.

The committee is better known for its role in visiting
prisoners all over the world to try to ensure humanitarian
conditions. It has been involved for decades with the Israeli-
Palestinian situation as part of its role in upholding the
Geneva Conventions, which cover the responsibilities
of occupying countries. But its reports rarely surface.

The report considers all land that Israel conquered in the
1967 war to be occupied territory. It was the result of
nine months of work by the committee and was delivered
in late February “to Israel and to a small number of
foreign governments we believe would be in the best
position to help support our efforts for the implementation
of humanitarian law,” said Bernard Barrett, a spokesman
for the committee in Jerusalem.

Israeli officials said that they respected the committee
and that they had cooperated with it gladly on issues
ranging from the release of captured Israeli soldiers
to asking its officials to give briefings on international
law to Israeli diplomats and commanders serving in the
occupied West Bank.

They confirmed having received the report, but disagreed
with its premises and conclusions.

“We reject the premise of the report, that East Jerusalem
is occupied territory,” said Mark Regev, spokesman for the
Israeli Foreign Ministry. “It is not. Israel annexed
Jerusalem in 1967 and offered full citizenship at the
time to all of Jerusalem’s residents. These are facts
that cannot be ignored.”

Israel, he said, “is committed to a diverse and pluralistic
Jerusalem, to improving the conditions of all the city’s
inhabitants and to protecting their interests as part
of our sovereign responsibility.” He added, “If any
population in Jerusalem is thriving and growing, it
is the Arab population.”

He also noted that Israel made great efforts to ensure
health care for Palestinians, pointing to 81,000 entry
permits in 2006 for Palestinians needing care inside
Israel.

Conditions have worsened for Palestinians in East
Jerusalem, which has long had inferior services.

Security restrictions and the barrier that runs around
and through parts of East Jerusalem were Israel’s response
to suicide bombings after 2000, but they made it much
more difficult for Palestinians to move into and out
of Jerusalem.

It is virtually impossible for Palestinians from the
West Bank or Gaza to move to Jerusalem if they were
not born in the city; even visiting requires a permit
that can be hard to get. Natural population growth
and building restrictions in Arab parts of the city
means that large families often share very small
apartments.

Palestinians argue that the building restrictions are
meant to suppress the growth of the their community;
the Israelis counter that zoning restrictions are
imposed throughout the city.

The Red Cross report notes that the separation barrier
“was undertaken with an undeniable security aim,” but
adds, “The route of the West Bank barrier is also
following a demographic logic, enclosing the settlement
blocs around the city while excluding built-up Palestinian
areas (thus creating isolated Palestinian enclaves).”

Mustafa Barghouti, spokesman for the Palestinian unity
government, welcomed the report, calling it consistent
with the rulings of the International Court of Justice,
which said in a nonbinding opinion in 2004 that Israel’s
security barrier was illegal where it crossed the 1967
lines into occupied territory. “Israel violates
international law with impunity, and couldn’t continue
this blunt violation for 40 years if it did not feel
impunity toward the international community,”
Mr. Barghouti said.

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6) Guantánamo Detainees’ Suit Challenges Fairness
of Military’s Repeat Hearings
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
May 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/washington/15gitmo.html?ref=us

WASHINGTON, May 14 — The military system of determining
whether detainees are properly held at Guantánamo Bay,
Cuba, includes an unusual practice: If Pentagon officials
disagree with the result of a hearing, they order a second
one, or even a third, until they approve of the finding.

These “do-overs,” as some critics call them, are among the
most controversial parts of the military’s system of
determining whether detainees are enemy combatants, and
the fairness of the repeat hearings is at the center of
a pivotal federal appeals court case.

On Tuesday, the United States Court of Appeals for the
District of Columbia Circuit begins consideration of the
first of what are expected to be scores of challenges
to the military panels’ decisions that detainees are
enemy combatants and are properly held.

The case, involving eight detainees, is the first under
a 2005 law that permits a limited review of the panels’
decisions. The repeat hearings have emerged as a major
flashpoint, with lawyers for the government and the
detainees offering the court sharply different
interpretations of their significance, legal filings
and interviews show.

For both sides, the dispute crystallizes the larger
questions now facing the courts over how much leeway
the appeals court judges have to review the decisions
of the hearing panels.

The 2005 law said the court was largely limited to
determining whether the military had followed its
own procedures in determining a detainee’s status. But
the lawyers for the detainees are pressing to get the
court to consider the basic fairness of the procedure
itself.

Detainees’ lawyers say the issue of the repeated hearings
offers the starkest proof that the Pentagon set up a system
of military tribunals not to find the truth about the
detainees but to ratify its own conclusion that the
military had seized the right people.

“When you have a proceeding that comes up with the ‘wrong
answer,’ ” said P. Sabin Willett, one of the detainees’
lawyers, “in this country we don’t keep sending it back
to a tribunal until they come up with the ‘right answer.’
And we don’t do it in secret, and that’s what happened here.”

Mr. Willett is to argue before the appeals court on Tuesday.

Government lawyers say critics are wrong to compare the
wartime system in Guantánamo, known as combatant status
review tribunals, or C.S.R.T.’s, to the civilian legal
system, which gives defendants extensive rights.

“This is just one of many areas,” a government brief said,
“where it is inappropriate to compare C.S.R.T. proceedings
with background principles that stem from domestic criminal
law.”

Another aspect to the case in the appeals court that has
caused public debate involves the government’s request
that the court tighten restrictions on lawyers for the
detainees. One proposal would have limited the number
of visits the lawyers could make to Guantánamo, a request
that the Justice Department withdrew Friday.

The practice of repeating some of the hearings is shrouded
in secrecy. It first came to public attention in November,
when a report by Seton Hall University Law School documented
that “at least three detainees were initially found not
to be enemy combatants” but were then reclassified as enemy
combatants after a new hearing.

Reviewing records of 102 hearings that were obtained from
the government through lawsuits, the report’s authors found
that “at least one detainee, after his first and second
tribunals unanimously determined him not to be an enemy
combatant, had yet a third tribunal” that then classified
him as an enemy combatant. About 380 men are now detained
at Guantánamo.

Military officials have not said in how many cases such
hearings were repeated.

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Chito Peppler of the Navy,
acknowledged that some decisions had reversed earlier
findings that detainees were not enemy combatants.

At the same time, Commander Peppler said, after
reconsideration in Washington, some detainees benefited
from tribunal hearings that were repeated and that
reclassified them from enemy combatant to “no longer
enemy combatant,” making them eligible for release.

Commander Peppler disputed the way the detainees’ lawyers
described the repeat hearings. He said multiple hearings
for a single detainee were part of the process. Under
Defense Department rules, he said, the hearing process
is not finished until a Pentagon official “completes
final review and approval of the decisions of the
tribunals.”

The combatant status review process was initiated in
a July 7, 2004, memorandum by Paul D. Wolfowitz, then
the deputy secretary of defense. He acted after a Supreme
Court decision that June suggested that detainees were
entitled to a “fair opportunity to rebut the government’s
factual assertions before a neutral decision maker.”

As set up by the Pentagon, the tribunals do not permit
detainees to have lawyers at the hearings or to see much
of the evidence against them.

When asked about the detainees’ lawyers’ assertion that
the tribunal process was not fair, a Justice Department
spokesman, Erik Ablin, said “more process has been afforded
to the detainees than ever provided to enemy combatants
in the history of armed conflict.”

Critics of the Bush administration’s detention policies
argue that the unusual and indefinite detentions at
Guantánamo raise new questions about the extent of the
government’s war powers.

Eric M. Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University
who has consulted with lawyers for several detainees,
said the repeated hearings were a symptom of the flaws
in the military hearings. “The system is designed,”
Mr. Freedman said, “to validate the holding of everyone
they are now holding.”

Because much of the evidence in the combatant status
hearings is classified and much of the process occurs
behind closed doors, little is known about the repeat
hearings.

One e-mail message from a Pentagon official, declassified
last month in a court case, shows that the official, whose
name remains classified, ordered a new hearing after
a detainee had been determined not to be an enemy combatant.
The e-mail message, apparently from early 2005, noted
that other detainees whose circumstances were similar
had been declared properly held.

The official wrote that “inconsistencies will not cast
a favorable light” on the hearing process or the Pentagon
office in charge of the combatant status review system,
the Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention
of Enemy Combatants. After a new hearing, according to
a court document, the detainee was reclassified as an
enemy combatant. He is still at Guantánamo.

Detainees’ lawyers say that in recent months they have
learned of other cases, beyond the three identified in
the Seton Hall report last year, that might have involved
repeated hearings.

This month, Susan Baker Manning, a lawyer for seven detainees
involved in the current appeals court case, received a package
of information from the government about the combatant status
hearing of one of the seven. At the bottom of a Pentagon
memorandum dated Jan. 14, 2005, there was a note that said her
client had first been determined not to be an enemy combatant.
But later, the notation continued, it was “ultimately determined
that the detainee is an enemy combatant.”

Ms. Manning’s client, Hammad Memet, now 29, has been at Guantánamo
for more than five years.

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7) In Deal, a Test for the U.A.W.
By MICHELINE MAYNARD
May 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/business/15Auto.html?ref=business

AUBURN HILLS, Mich., May 14 — Can private equity investors
fix Chrysler for good, and can they avoid a confrontation
with the United Automobile Workers union?

These are the most pressing questions to arise from the deal
announced Monday for Cerberus Capital Management, which
specializes in restructuring troubled companies, to pay
a total of $7.4 billion to take control of Chrysler, with
most of that money to be invested in the newly independent
company.

By unwinding a nine-year-old merger between Chrysler and
Daimler-Benz of Germany, Cerberus is also taking on
Chrysler’s $18 billion obligation for health care and
pensions for employees and retirees.

Any efforts to sharply reduce those perks — which Chrysler
can afford but says represent a cost burden of $1,500
a vehicle — will probably put it at odds with the U.A.W.

The issue will take on added importance in two months,
when the union and Detroit automakers open talks on a new
national contract. The union’s position on Chrysler may
influence talks with General Motors and the Ford Motor
Company, with the outcome representing the latest chapter
in the wholesale restructuring of the American auto industry.

For now, the U.A.W. is supporting the deal. Its stance
represents a reversal from only a month ago, when Ron
Gettelfinger, the union president, warned that an equity
player might “strip and flip” Chrysler, selling off its
most valuable parts for a quick profit.

But based on what the union was told of Cerberus’s plans,
Mr. Gettelfinger said Monday that the U.A.W. was “confident
enough to say that we support this transaction.”

That support may dwindle as the company and the union start
discussing specifics. The most obvious way for Cerberus
to make money off its investment is to cut costs — especially
by reducing the benefits that workers hold sacred, including
medical benefits for workers and their immediate families
for life, with only modest co-payments or deductibles.

“They’re going to want us to give something up,” Tim Preston,
50, a tradesman at Chrysler’s Jefferson Avenue North assembly
plant in Detroit, said Monday.

Chrysler, in fact, has already tried. Last year, the U.A.W.
refused to give Chrysler the same concessions on medical
costs that it granted G.M. and Ford, which it deemed
in far worse shape.

The union also refused to grant deep wage and benefit cuts
to the Delphi Corporation, G.M.’s former parts subsidiary,
which had reached agreement to sell itself to Cerberus
if a labor deal could be reached. Company and union leaders
say those talks are not dead, however.

Except for the early 1980s, when the union granted concessions
at all three car companies, labor talks have been fruitful
for the U.A.W. in recent decades, as it has continued to make
gains in wages and benefits even as tens of thousands of jobs
have been eliminated.

That trend was broken in the last couple of years when the
union agreed to buyouts and retirement incentives for workers
and agreed to concessions at G.M. and Ford.

By showing their support Monday for the Cerberus deal,
U.A.W. leaders may have been trying to set the tricky
groundwork of making the prospect of concessions palatable
to union members as a way to keep Chrysler competitive.

“It does promise some creative and maybe not-business-as-
usual solutions,” said John Paul MacDuffie, co-director of
the International Motor Vehicle Program at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.

No requests have been made of the union yet, but both
Mr. Gettelfinger and senior Chrysler executives say
there seems to be a meeting of minds.

“We have been led to believe that they are very concerned
about the American automobile industry,” said Mr. Gettelfinger,
who spent four hours with Chrysler executives this weekend
being briefed.

His reaction was clearly a relief to the Cerberus chairman,
John W. Snow, the former Treasury secretary, who joined
DaimlerChrysler officials in Stuttgart, Germany, at
a news conference on Monday.

“We’re going to work to make sure this company succeeds,
and as the company succeeds, it will maximize opportunities
for workers,” Mr. Snow said. “Our objective is a successful
Chrysler and a successful Chrysler creates opportunities.”

Some workers, however, were skeptical. “It makes me real
nervous,” said Anthony Watson, 36, a chassis assembly
worker at Chrysler’s truck plant in Warren, Mich.

Richard Burns, 39, an assembly line worker at the Warren
plant, just north of Detroit, said he and many of his
colleagues did not know much about Cerberus. “We’re
scared they’re going to break us up,” he said.

Cerberus officials insisted Monday that was not the case.
Under the complicated deal, Cerberus will take an
80.1 percent stake in the new company, to be known
as Chrysler Holding. Of the $7.4 billion, Cerberus
agreed to invest $5 billion in the new Chrysler and
$1.05 billion in Chrysler’s financial arm. The remaining
$1.35 billion will go to the former German parent company.

In turn, DaimlerChrysler has agreed to lend Chrysler
Holding $400 million and will absorb $1.6 billion in
costs related to a restructuring program under way at
Chrysler, which said in February that it would cut
13,000 jobs and close all or part of four factories.
Investors in DaimlerChrysler showed their support for
the deal Monday by bidding up the shares $2.12, to $84.12.
The Cerberus deal will have little impact on shareholders
of the German parent company, other than the financial
impact of shedding Chrysler.

All told, DaimlerChrysler will spend $677 million in cash
on the transaction. Daimler-Benz paid $36 billion for
Chrysler in 1998 in what was portrayed as a merger of
equals but ended up being a German takeover of the
American company.

In hindsight, the merger’s early days were its best. At
the time, Chrysler was rolling in profit, from the popularity
of its big Jeeps and minivans, while Mercedes-Benz was
enjoying a comeback for its cars, especially the E-class
sedan and the M-class, its first S.U.V.

The architects of that earlier merger, Jürgen E. Schrempp,
the former chief executive at Daimler-Benz, and Robert J.
Eaton, who ran Chrysler, envisioned a company that married
the mass-market success of Chrysler and the luxury appeal
of Mercedes. But Chrysler did not consistently deliver
on its promise.

Indeed, for the last 30 years, Chrysler has acted like
what might be described as a split-personality car company,
with wide and fast swings from highs to lows.

The same big vehicles, for example, that generated big
profits in the late 1990s put Chrysler out of step with
changing consumer tastes when gas prices soared.

Last summer, as many as 100,000 unsold Chryslers piled
up on storage lots, a big factor in Chrysler’s $1.5
billion loss for 2006. Last year, it fell to fourth
place in the American market, behind Toyota.

In February, Mr. Schrempp’s successor, Dieter Zetsche,
who ran Chrysler from 2000 to 2005, said the company
would eliminate 13,000 jobs, or 16 percent of the total
staff, and close all or part of four plants in its second
restructuring in seven years.

Mr. Zetsche also put Chrysler up for sale, attracting
a series of bidders, including Cerberus as well as two
other equity players, the Blackstone Group and Centerbridge
Partners.

The billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, who had often tangled
with Chrysler management, also put in a bid, as did Magna
International, the Canadian auto parts supplier.

The Cerberus deal represents a sea change in Detroit,
where there has not been a major privately held company
in over half a century (the Ford Motor Company, in which
the Ford family still has a controlling stake, went
public in 1956; G.M. has been public for nearly
a century.)

As a private company, Chrysler may be able to better
explore, with less public scrutiny, ways to lower health
care costs with its workers.

One idea may come from the Goodyear Tire and Rubber
Company, which is giving the United Steelworkers union
$1 billion to take over a health care plan covering
30,000 retired workers.

Executives from all of Detroit’s companies have studied
the plan, which would probably cost the auto industry
tens of billions of dollars to carry out in the United
States. But if the U.A.W. did agree, it would mean removing
the liability from the car companies.

Whatever the answer, many industry experts predict that
Chrysler will find some way to resurrect itself.

“This history of coming back from near death over and
over — the nine lives of Chrysler — does have a powerful
hold within the company, and with their suppliers and
with the union workers,” Professor MacDuffie said.

Nick Bunkley contributed reporting.

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8) Satellites Show Harvest of Mud That Trawlers Leave Behind
By CORNELIA DEAN
May 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/science/15mud.html

Scientists have known for years that when fishing trawlers
drag nets and gear across the ocean bottom they trap or kill
almost all the fish, mollusks and other creatures they
encounter. And the dragging destroys underwater features
like reefs, turning the bottom to mud.

Now, scientists have used satellite images to show fleets
of trawlers leaving plumes of mud behind them like contrails.
They hope the images will focus wider attention on trawling
damage, and on the possible uses of satellites to monitor
fishing.

One of the researchers, Kyle Van Houtan, who earned his
doctorate in environmental science in December at Duke,
began the work when he was studying the nesting success
of sea turtles and wanted to check the influence of
shrimpers, who trawl the bottom for their catch. He turned
for guidance to Daniel Pauly, director of the fisheries
center at the University of British Columbia, which maintains
an elaborate global database on fishing.

Looking at satellite photos of boats at work, "I kept
seeing lines on the images," Dr. Van Houtan said in
a telephone interview. "My first thought was they looked
like contrails from aircraft." Instead, he and Dr. Pauly
dubbed them "mudtrails."

Churning up mud does immense harm, Dr. Pauly said in a
telephone interview. Fish cannot see in water that is murky
with suspended sediment. The mud can also clog their gills
and set off algae blooms, which, in turn, lead to vast
increases in bacteria. Ultimately, the result is a dead
zone.

Even if that worst case does not materialize, trawling
can change a vibrant ocean bottom into, in effect,
a shrimp farm. The mud of repeatedly trawled areas is
congenial to shrimp, Dr. Van Houtan said, "but anything
else you might like to eat, like tuna, is gone."

"It was one of those eureka moments," he said of his
realization that mudtrails were visible from space.
When he looked at images of prime fishing areas, "we
saw an amazing density of boats," he said. "You can
see the birds following the boats to get the discarded
bycatch."

The good news, Dr. Pauly said, is that trawlers and their
mudtrails can be seen so clearly that it would in theory
be possible to monitor fishing by satellite. Even if
captains of individual boats do not want to cooperate
in such efforts, Dr. Pauly said, "we can see what they do."

Related:

Ocean Pollution: "OCEANS WITHOUT FISH"
By Roland Sheppard
http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret/iWeb/Site/Ocean%20Pollution%3A%20%27Oceans%20Without%20Fish%27.html


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9) LESSONS WE LEARNED FROM THE 6th
HEMISPHERIC MEETING IN HAVANA
Fidel Castro Ruz
May 14, 2007
5: 12 pm
www.marxmail.org

María Luisa Mendonça brought to the meeting in Havana, a powerful
documentary film on the subject of manual sugarcane cutting in Brazil.

As I did in my previous reflection, I have written a summary using
María Luisa's own paragraphs and phrases. It goes as follows:

We are aware that most of the wars in the last few decades have been
waged over control of energy sources. Both in central and peripheral
nations, energy consumption is guaranteed for the privileged sectors,
while the majority of the world's population does not have access to
basic services. The per capita consumption of energy in the United
States is 13,000 kilowatts, while the world average is 2,429 and in
Latin America the average is 1,601.

The private monopoly of energy sources is ensured by clauses in the
bilateral or multilateral Free Trade Agreements.

The role of the peripheral nations is to produce cheap energy for the
central wealthy nations, which represents a new phase in the
colonization process.

It's necessary to demystify all the propaganda about the alleged
benefits of agrifuels. In the case of ethanol, the growing and
processing of sugarcane pollutes the soil and the sources of drinking
water because it uses large amounts of chemical products.

Ethanol distillation produces a residue called vinasse. For every
liter of ethanol produced, 10 to 13 liters of vinasse are
generated. Part of this residue can be used as fertilizer, but most
of it pollutes rivers and the sources of underground water. If
Brazil were to produce 17 or 18 billion liters of ethanol per year,
this means that at least 170 billion liters of vinasse would be
deposited in the sugarcane field areas. Just imagine the environmental impact.

Burning sugarcane to facilitate the harvesting process, destroys many
of the microorganisms in the soil, contaminates the air and causes
many respiratory illnesses.

The Brazilian National Institute of Space Research issues a state of
emergency almost every year in Sao Paulo -where 60% of Brazil's
ethanol production takes place- because the burning-off has plunged
the humidity levels in the air to extreme lows, between 13% and 15%;
breathing is impossible during this period in the Sao Paulo area
where the sugarcane harvest takes place.

The expansion of agrienergy production, as we know, is of great
interest to the corporations dealing with genetically modified or
transgenetic organisms, such as Monsanto, Syngenta, Dupont, Bass and Bayer.

In the case of Brazil, the Votorantim Corporation has developed
technologies for the production of a non-edible transgenetic
sugarcane, and we know of many corporations that are developing this
same type of technology; since there are no measures in place to
avoid transgenetic contamination in the native crop fields, this
practice places food production at risk.

With regards to the denationalization of Brazilian territory, large
companies have bought up sugar mills in Brazil: Bunge, Novo Group,
ADM, Dreyfus as well as business magnates George Soros and Bill Gates.

As a result of all this, we are aware that the expansion of ethanol
production has led to the expulsion of peasants from their lands and
has created a situation of dependency on what we call the sugarcane
economy, not because the sugarcane industry generates jobs, on the
contrary, it generates unemployment because this industry controls
the territory. This means that there is no room for other productive sectors.

At the same time, we are faced with the propaganda about the
efficiency of this industry. We know that it is based on the
exploitation of cheap and slave labor. Workers are paid according to
the amount of sugar cane they cut, not according to number of hours
they have worked.

In Sao Paulo State where the industry is most modern -"modern" is
relative of course- and it is the country's biggest producer, the
goal for each worker is to cut between 10 to 15 tons of cane per day.

Pedro Ramos, a professor at Campinas University, made these
calculations: in the 1980's, the workers cut around 4 tons a day and
were paid the equivalent of more or less 5 dollars. Today, they need
to cut 15 tons of sugarcane to be paid 3 dollars a day.

Even the Ministry of Labor in Brazil made a study which shows that
before, 100 square meters of sugarcane yielded 10 tons; today, with
transgenetic cane one must cut 300 square meters to reach 10
tons. Thus, workers must work three times more to cut 10 tons. This
pattern of exploitation has resulted in serious health problems and
even death for the workers.

A researcher with the Ministry of Labor in Sao Paulo says that in
Brazil, sugar and ethanol are soaked in blood, sweat and death. In
2005, the Ministry of Labor in Sao Paulo reported the death of 450
worker for other causes such as murder and accidents -would this be
because transportation to the refineries is very unsafe?- and also as
a result of illnesses such as heart attack and cancer.

According to María Cristina Gonzaga, who carried out the survey, this
Ministry of Labor research shows that in the last five years, 1,383
sugarcane workers have died in Sao Paulo State alone.

Slave labor is also common in this sector. Workers are usually
migrants from the northeast or from Minas Gerais, lured in by
intermediaries. Normally the contract is not directly with the
company, but through intermediaries -in Brazil we call them "gatos"-
who chose the laborers for the sugar mills.

In 2006, the district attorney's office of the Public Ministry
inspected 74 sugar mills, only in Sao Paulo, and all of them were
taken to court.

In March 2007 alone, the district attorney's office of the Ministry
of Labor rescued 288 workers from slavery in Sao Paulo.

That same month, in Mato Grosso State, 409 workers were pulled out of
a sugar mill that produces ethanol; among them was a group of 150
indigenous people. In Mato Grosso, the central area of the country,
indigenous people are used as slave labor force in the sugar industry.

Every year, hundreds of workers suffer similar conditions in the
fields. What are these conditions? They work without being legally
reported, with no protective equipment, without adequate food or
water, without access to washrooms and with very precarious housing;
moreover, they have to pay for their housing and food, which is very
expensive, and they also have to buy their implements such as boots
and machetes and, of course, when work-related accidents occur, which
is often, they do not receive adequate care.

For us, the central issue is the elimination of the latifundia
because behind this modern façade we have a central issue, and that
is the latifundia in Brazil and, of course, in other Latin American
countries. Likewise, a serious food production policy is called for.

Having said this, I would like to present a documentary that we
filmed in Pernambuco State with sugarcane workers; this is one of the
biggest sugarcane producing regions, and so you will be able to see
what the conditions are really like.

This documentary was made with the Pastoral Land Commission of Brazil
(CPT) and with the unions of forestry workers in the state of Pernambuco.

With this, the outstanding and much admired Brazilian leader
concluded her speech.

And now I shall present the opinions of the sugarcane cutters as they
appeared in the film shown to us by María Luisa. In the documentary,
when the people are not identified by name, they are identified as
being a man, a woman or a young man. I am not including them all
because there were so many.

Severino Francisco de Silva.- When I was 8 years old, my father moved
to the Junco refinery. When I got there, I was about to turn 9; my
father began to work and I was tying up the cane with him. I worked
some 14 or 15 years in the Junco sugar mill.

A woman.- I've been living at the sugar mill for 36 years. Here I was
married and I gave birth to 11 children.

A man.- I've been cutting cane for many years, I don't even know how to count.

A man.- I started working when I was 7 and my life is that: cutting
cane and weeding.

A young man.- I was born here, I'm 23 years old, and I've been
cutting cane since I was 9.

A woman.- I worked for 13 years here in Salgado Plant. I planted
cane, spread fertilizer, cleaned sugarcane fields.

Severina Conceiçäo.- I know how to do all this field work: spread
fertilizer, plant sugar cane. I did it all with a belly this big
(she refers to her pregnancy) and with the basket beside me, and I
kept on working.

A man.- I work; every work is difficult, but sugarcane harvest is the
worst work we have here in Brazil.

Edleuza.- I get home and I wash the dishes, clean the house, do the
house chores, do everything. I used to cut cane and sometimes I'd
get home and I wasn't able to even wash the dishes, my hands were
hurting with blisters.

Adriano Silva.- The problem is that the foreman wants too much of us
at work. There are days when we cut cane and get paid, but there are
days when we don't get paid. Sometimes it's enough, and sometimes it isn't.

Misael.- We have a perverse situation here; the foreman wants to take
off from the weight of the cane. He says that what we cut here is all
that we have and that's that. We are working like slaves, do you
understand? You can't do it like this!

Marco.- Harvesting sugar cane is slave work, it's really hard
work. We start out at 3 in the morning; we get back at 8 at night.
It's only good for the boss, because he earns more every day that
goes by and the worker loses, production decreases and everything is
for the boss.

A man.- Sometimes we go to sleep without having washed, there's no
water, we wash up in a stream down there.

A young man.- Here we have no wood for cooking, each one of us, if we
want to eat, has to go out and find wood.

A man.- Lunch is whatever you can bring from home, we eat just like
that, in the hot sun, carrying on as well as you can in this life.

A young man.- People who work a lot need to have enough food. While
the boss of the sugar plantation has an easy life, with all the best
of everything, we suffer.

A woman.- I have gone hungry. I would often go to bed hungry,
sometimes I had nothing to eat, nothing to feed my daughter with;
sometimes I'd go looking for salt; that was the easiest thing to find.

Egidio Pereira.- You have two or three kids, and if you don't look
after yourself, you starve; there isn't enough to live on.

Ivete Cavalcante.- There is no such thing as a salary here; you have
to clean a ton of cane for eight reales; you earn according to
whatever you can cut: if you cut a ton, you earn eight reales, there
is no set wage.

A woman.- A salary? I've never heard of that.

Reginaldo Souza.- Sometimes they pay us in money. Nowadays they are
paying in money; in the winter they pay with a voucher.

A woman.- The voucher, well, you work and he writes everything down
on paper, he passes it on to another person who goes out to buy stuff
at the market. People don't see the money they earn.

José Luiz.- The foreman does whatever he wants with the
people. What's happening is that I called for him to "calculate the
cane", and he didn't want to. I mean: in this case he is forcing
someone to work. And so the person works for free for the company.

Clovis da Silva.- It's killing us! We cut cane for half a day, we
think we are going to get some money, and when he comes around to
calculate we are told that the work was worth nothing.

Natanael.- The cattle trucks bring the workers here, it's worse than
for the boss's horse; because when the boss puts his horse on the
truck, he gives him water, he puts sawdust down to protect his hoofs,
he gives him hay, and there is a person to go with him; as for the
workers, let them do what they can: get in, shut the door and that's
that. They treat the workers as if they were animals. The
"Pro-Alcohol" doesn't help the workers, it only helps the sugarcane
suppliers, it helps the bosses and they constantly get richer;
because if it would create jobs for the workers, that would be basic,
but it doesn't create jobs.

José Loureno.- They have all this power because in the House, state
or federal, they have a politician representing these sugarcane
mills. Some of the owners are deputies, ministers or relatives of
sugar mill owners, who facilitate this situation for the owners.
A man.- It seems that our work never ends. We don't have holidays,
or a Christmas bonus, everything is lost. Also, we don't even get a
fourth of our salary, which is compulsory; it's what we use to buy
clothes at the end of the year, or clothing for our children. They
don't supply us with any of that stuff, and we see how every day, it
gets much more difficult.

A woman.- I am a registered worker and I've never had a right to
anything, not even medical leaves. When we get pregnant, we have a
right to a medical leave, but I didn't have that right, family
guarantees; I also never got any Christmas bonus, I always got some
little thing, and then nothing more.

A man.- For 12 years he's never paid the bonuses or vacations.

A man.- You can't get sick, you work day and night on top of the
truck, cutting cane, at dawn. I became sick, and I was a strong man.

Reinaldo.- One day I went to work wearing sneakers; when I swung the
machete to cut cane, I cut my toe, I finished work and went home.

A young man.- There are no boots, we work like this, many of us work
barefoot, the conditions are bad. They said that the sugar mill was
going to donate boots. A week ago he cut his foot (he points) because
there are no boots.

A young man.- I was sick, I was sick for three days, I didn't get
paid, they didn't pay me a thing. I saw the doctor to ask for a
leave and they didn't give me one.

A young man.- There was a lad who came from "Macugi". He was at work
when he started to feel sick, and vomit. You need a lot of energy,
the sun is very hot and people aren't made of steel, the human body
just can't resist this.

Valdemar.- This poison we use (he refers to the herbicides) brings a
lot of illness. It causes different kinds of diseases: skin cancer,
bone cancer, it enters the blood and destroys our health. You feel
nauseous, you can even fall over.

A man.- In the period between harvests there is practically no work.

A man.- The work that the foreman tells you to do, must be done;
because as you know, if we don't do it∑ We aren't the bosses; it's
them that are the bosses. If they give you a job, you have to do it.

A man.- I'm here hoping someday to have a piece of land and end my
days in the country, so that I can fill my belly and the bellies of
my children and my grandchildren who live here with me.

Could it be that there is anything else?

End of the documentary.

There is nobody more grateful than I for this testimony and for María
Luisa's presentation which I have just summarized. They make me to
remember the first years of my life, an age when human beings tend to
be very active.

I was born on a privately owned sugarcane latifundium bordering on
the north, east and west on large tracts of land belonging to three
American transnational companies which, together, possessed more than
600 thousand acres. Cane cutting was done by hand in green sugarcane
fields; at that time we didn't use herbicides or even fertilizers. A
plantation could last more than 15 years. Labor was very cheap and
the transnationals earned a lot of money.

The owner of the sugarcane plantation where I was born was a Galician
immigrant, from a poor peasant family, practically an illiterate; at
first, he had been sent here as a soldier, taking the place of a rich
man who had paid to avoid military service and at the end of the war
he was shipped back to Galicia. He returned to Cuba on his own like
countless other Galicians who migrated to other countries of Latin America.

He worked as a hand for an important trans-national company, the
United Fruit Company. He had organizational skills and so he
recruited a large number of day-workers like himself, became a
contractor and ended up buying land with his accumulated profits in
an area neighboring the southern part of the big American company. In
the eastern end of the country, the traditionally independent-minded
Cuban population had increased notably and lacked land; but the main
burden of eastern agriculture, at the beginning of the last century,
rested on the backs of slaves who had been freed a few years earlier
or were the descendents of the old slaves and on the backs of Haitian
immigrants. The Haitians did not have any relatives. They lived
alone in their miserable huts made of palm trees, clustered in
hamlets, with only two or three women among all of them. During the
short harvesting season, cockfights would take place.

The Haitians would bet their pitiful earnings and the rest they used
to buy food which had gone through many intermediaries and was very expensive.

The Galician landowner lived there, on the sugarcane plantation. He
would go out just to tour the plantations and he would talk to anyone
who needed or wanted something from him. Often times he would help
them out, for reasons that were more humanitarian than economic. He
could make decisions.

The managers of the United Fruit Company plantations were Americans
who had been carefully chosen and they were very well paid. They
lived with their families in stately mansions, in selected
spots. They were like some distant gods, mentioned in a respectful
tone by the starving laborers. They were never seen at the sugarcane
fields where they sent their subordinates. The shareholders of the
big transnationals lived in the United States or other parts of the
world. The expenses of the plantations were budgeted and nobody
could increase one single cent.

I know very well the family that grew out of the second marriage of
that Galician immigrant with a young, very poor Cuban peasant girl,
who, like him, had not been able to go to school. She was very
self-sacrificing and absolutely devoted to her family and to the
plantation's financial activities.

Those of you abroad who are reading my reflections on the Internet
will be surprised to learn that that landowner was my father. I am
the third of that couple's seven children; we were all born in a room
in a country home, far away from any hospital, with the help of a
peasant midwife, dedicated heart and soul to her job and calling upon
years of practical experience. Those lands were all handed over to
the people by the Revolution.

I should just like to add that we totally support the decree for
nationalization of the patent from a transnational pharmaceutical
company to produce and sell in Brazil an AIDS medication, Efavirenz,
that is far too expensive, just like many others, as well as the
recent mutually satisfactory solution to the dispute with Bolivia
about the two oil refineries.

I would like to reiterate our deepest respect for the people of our
sister nation of Brazil.

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10) Somewhere over the Rainbow:
A report from a Kansas Mutual Aid
member from tornado devastated
Greensburg, Kansas
by Dave Strano
Kansas Mutual Aid member
Lawrence, Kansas
kansasmutualaid@hotmail.com

On Saturday May 12, four members of Kansas Mutual Aid, a Lawrence based
class struggle anarchist collective traveled to the small South Central
Kansas town of Greensburg. Our intention was to go as a fact-finding
delegation, to report back to the social justice movement in Lawrence on
what exactly was happening in the city.

On Friday May 4, 2007 Greensburg was almost completely destroyed by a F5
tornado. 97% of the buildings in the town of 1500 were destroyed or
damaged beyond repair. Nearly every single resident was left homeless,
jobless, and devastated. At least eleven people died in the storm, and
hundreds of companion animals, livestock, and wild animals were killed
as well.

According to the 2000 census, 97% of the population of Greensburg was
white, and the median income of the population was a meager $28,000. The
city was and still is comprised of overwhelmingly poor, white working
people.

Shortly after the tornado, the Federal Emergency Management Agency
(FEMA) took control of the recovery efforts in Greensburg. The United
Way became the coordinating organization for relief volunteers but,
after orders came from FEMA, halted the flow of volunteers into
Greensburg. FEMA demanded that Greensburg needed to be "secured" before
the area could be opened to real recovery efforts.

So, as hundreds of recovery volunteers were told to not come to
Greensburg by the United Way, hundreds of police from dozens of Kansas
jurisdictions were mobilized to enter the city and establish "control."

Reports coming from the recovery effort in Greensburg had been woefully
short of information. We made multiple phone calls to the United Way and
other aid agencies, and were told repeatedly not to come, that "We don't
need volunteers at this time." We were told that if we wanted to help,
we should just make a financial donation to the Salvation Army or United
Way.

With the experiences of Katrina and other major disasters fresh in our
collective conscious, we decided to go anyway, to assess the situation
and be able to present a better picture to those people in Lawrence that
were rightfully concerned about the effectiveness of the relief efforts.

On the night of Friday May 11, in the spirit of offering solidarity to
the working class population of Greensburg, members of KMA traveled two
hours to Wichita and spent the night there. A mandatory curfew had been
imposed on Greensburg, with no one being able to be in the city between
8pm and 8am. So after a nearly sleepless night, we piled into our
vegetable oil burning car and made the final two hour drive to
Greensburg, careful to not arrive before 8.

Multiple news agencies had reported that because of FEMA, all volunteers
were being denied entry at the checkpoints set up outside the city. As
we approached the checkpoint, we became really nervous, and tried to
make sure we had our story straight.

We were stopped by an armed contingent of Kansas Highway Patrol
Officers. We explained that we had come to help with the relief efforts,
and after a quick stare and glance into our car, the officer in charge
directed us to a red and white tent about half a mile into the town.

It turned out that on Friday the 11th, a week after the tornado
destroyed Greensburg, the Americorps organization was finally given
permission to establish and coordinate volunteer recovery efforts.
Americorps members from St. Louis had set up their base of operations in
a large red and white canopy tent that was also being used a meeting
place for the residents of the city.

Americorps volunteers proved to be pretty reliable for information, and
good contacts to have made while we were down there. Despite the
hierarchical and contradictory aims of the national organization, the
Americorps people on the ground were the only people really offering any
physical recovery aid to the residents of Greensburg.

The four of us from KMA, signed in to the volunteer tent and were given
red wristbands that were supposed to identify us as aid workers. We
decided not to wait to be assigned a location to work, and instead to
travel around the city on foot and meet as many local people as we could.

Our primary goals were numerous. We intended to analyze the situation
and assess how our organization could help from Lawrence. If long term
physical aid was needed from us, we had to make contacts within the
local populace that could offer a place to set up a base camp. We also
intended to find out what happened to the prisoners in the county jail
during and after the storm, and what the current procedure for those
being arrested was. In a highly militarized city, the police and
military were the biggest threat to personal safety.

As we traveled further into the ravaged town, it became clear that the
photographs I had seen had not done justice to what truly had happened
here. All that could be seen was endless devastation in every direction.
There wasn't a single building in this area of the town that had been
left standing. The devastation was near complete. Every single house we
came across in the first moments we entered the town had completely
collapsed. Every single tree was mangled and branchless. Memories of
watching post-nuclear warfare movies filled my head as we walked around
the city.

This was a post-apocalyptic world. The city was eerily empty for the
most part. National Guard troops patrolled in Hummers and trucks.
Occasionally, a Red Cross or Salvation Army truck would drive by. Very
few residents were there working on their homes.

After a short while, we met with several people evacuating belongings
from their home. They told us that FEMA had been there for a week, and
that all FEMA could offer them was a packet of information. The packet,
however, had to be mailed to the recipients, and they had no mailing
address! Their entire house had been destroyed. Their mailbox was
probably in the next county. All they were left to do was evacuate what
few belongings could be saved from their house, and then pull the
non-salvageable belongings and scraps of their house to the curb for the
National Guard trash crews to haul away.

No agency in the city besides Americorps was offering to help with the
removal of this debris, or the recovery of people's homes. FEMA's
mission was to safeguard the property of businesses in the area and
offer "low interest" loans to property owners affected. The National
Guard was on hand along with the local police, to act as the enforcement
mechanism for FEMA, while occasionally hauling debris and garbage out of
the city.

The only building in the city that FEMA and others were working in or
around was the County Courthouse. When we approached this area, we
quickly took notice of the giant air-conditioned FEMA tour buses, along
with dozens of trailers that were now housing the City Hall, police
dispatch centers, and emergency crews.

The media had reported that residents of the city would be receiving
FEMA trailers similar to the ones in New Orleans. The only FEMA trailer
I saw was being occupied by police.

At this location, we tried to formulate some answers as to what had
happened to any prisoners being housed in the county jail during the
storm, as well as the fate of the at least seven people that had been
arrested since the storm.

Not a single person could offer us a real answer. As of the writing of
this article, we are still working to find the answer to that question.
We have ascertained that any prisoners that were in Greensburg during
the storm were sent to Pratt County Jail immediately after the storm had
subsided. However, we still don't know how many people that accounts
for, nor do we know the fate of any arrestees in the week since.

Several of the arrestees after the storm were soldiers from Fort Riley
that were sent in to secure the town. They have been accused of
"looting" alcohol and cigarettes from a grocery store. The residents I
talked to said that they had been told that the soldiers had just
returned from Iraq. Is it a wonder that they would want to get drunk the
first chance they could? The social reality of this situation was
beginning to really set in. The city was in chaos, not because of the
storm, but because of FEMA and the police.

In the immediate recovery after the storm, FEMA and local police not
only worked to find survivors and the dead, but also any firearms in the
city. As you pass by houses in Greensburg, you notice that some are
spraypainted with how many weapons were recovered from the home. This is
central Kansas, a region with extremely high legal gun ownership. Of the
over 350 firearms confiscated by police immediately after the storm,
only a third have been returned to their owners. FEMA and the police
have systematically disarmed the local population, leaving the firepower
squarely in control of the state.

Later in the day we traveled with an Americorps volunteer that turned
out to be the sister of one of the members of the Lawrence
anti-capitalist movement. She gave us a small driving tour of the rest
of the devastation that we hadn't seen yet, and then deposited us in
front of a house of a family that was busy trying to clear out their
flooded basement.

Two days of rain had followed the tornado, and with most houses without
roofs, anything left inside the house that may have survived the initial
storm, was destroyed or at risk of being destroyed. The casualties of
the storm weren't just structures and cars. they were memories and loved
ones, in the forms of photographs, highschool yearbooks, family
memorabilia and momentos. People's entire lives had been swept away by
the storm.

We joined in the effort to help clear the basement, and listened to the
stories of the storm that the family told us. They explained that they
had just spent their life savings remodeling the basement, and now it
was gone. It had survived just long enough to save them and some
neighbors from the storm.

We removed whatever belongings were left in the basement, and sorted the
belongings into five piles. The smallest of the piles by far, as the
pile of things that were salvageable and worth keeping. The other piles
included one for wood debris, one for metal, one for hazardous waste,
and another pile for anything else that needed to be removed. From under
one of the piles, a scent of rotting flesh wafted through the air. The
family was afraid to look and see what may be hidden under the metal.

As we were preparing to leave the work site after clearing the entire
basement, we were thanked heartily by the family and their friends.
"Next time," one of them said, "bring fifty more with you."

Next time we will. It should be obvious to most by now, that the
federal, state, and local governments that deal with disasters of this
magnitude are not interested in helping the poor or working people that
are really impacted. Only through class solidarity from other working
people and working together with neighbors and community members will
the people of Greensburg be able to survive and rebuild.

Kansas Mutual Aid is in the midst of organizing a more permanent and
structured relief effort. We are continuing to make contacts to secure a
base camp for our work. We hope to have things organized and solidified
by Memorial Day Weekend when we plan to travel back with as many people,
tools, and supplies we can take.

Our goals are three fold:
1) To provide direct physical relief support to the residents of
Greensburg by being on hand to help salvage their homes, and provide any
other physical support they ask of us.

2) To offer solidarity and aid in any future organizing or agitating
efforts that will be needed to retain possession of their homes, or to
acquire any other physical aid they demand from the government or other
agencies.

3) To provide support and protection of human rights during the police
and military occupation of the city. We will work to document arrests
and ensure that human rights of arrestees are protected.

If you live in Eastern Kansas, or are willing to travel, we need your
help and experience. We also need a laundry list of supplies including:

Money for fuel for our vehicles
Respirators and filtered face masks
Headlamps and flashlights (none of the city has power, and there are a
lot of basements that will need to be worked in)
Shovels, pickaxes, prybars, crowbars, sledgehammers, and heavy duty rakes
Gloves, boots, goggles, construction helmets and other protective clothing
First Aid supplies
Water and Food (non-perishable) for volunteers heading down
Chainsaws and Gasoline
Portable generators
You and your experience

Please, if you have anything you can offer, or want to help in the
relief, e-mail us at kansasmutualaid@hotmail.com

We will be hosting a presentation on Monday May 21st at the Solidarity
Center in downtown Lawrence (1109 Mass Street) at 7pm on our experiences
in Greensburg, and on our plans to offer relief in the form of
solidarity and mutual aid, and not as charity. Please join us if you can.

There seems like there is much more to say, but with the experience
fresh in my mind, it's hard to keep typing. Action and organization is
needed more than a longer essay at this moment.

In love and solidarity,
Dave Strano
Kansas Mutual Aid member
Lawrence, Kansas

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11) Court seeks Colombian lawmakers in growing scandal
Mon May 14, 2007 3:39PM EDT
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N14314528.htm

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Colombia's Supreme Court on Monday ordered five
congressmen arrested on charges they colluded with paramilitary death
squads in a widening political scandal entangling allies of President
Alvaro Uribe.

Uribe is under fire from critics at home and Democrats in the U.S.
Congress who are skeptical about approving a free trade deal and a
military aid package for Colombia because of suspected ties between
pro-Uribe lawmakers and militia commanders.

Eight congressmen have already been jailed on charges they cooperated
with paramilitary bosses who carried out massacres, murders and
kidnappings in the name of combating guerrillas until they reached a
2003 peace deal with Uribe.

Authorities said the names of five lawmakers appeared on a document
signed with paramilitary leaders in 2001 at the Santa Fe de Ralito
militia stronghold when the commanders took over swathes of
countryside in a counter-insurgency campaign.

"The court's penal chamber has issued warrants for the five lawmakers
accused of signing the Ralito pact. The charge is conspiring to
commit an aggravated crime," Magistrate president Alfredo Gomez told
reporters.

Uribe's government has received millions in U.S. aid to help fight
rebels who are still battling a four-decade-old conflict fueled by
the cocaine trade. The rebels have been pushed back in the jungles
and Uribe has negotiated the disarming of 30,000 paramilitaries.

Rights groups have long denounced collusion among the paramilitaries,
political leaders and army officers, but the extent of the links is
becoming clearer as militia commanders give testimony about their
crimes as part of their peace deal.

Uribe says the arrests are proof that Colombia's institutions are
working better than ever and demanded authorities support the
investigation. But rights groups say the militia bosses have kept
their criminal networks and influence alive.

Top paramilitary commander Salvatore Mancuso has promised this week
to give evidence about politicians, army commanders, business leaders
and foreign companies who collaborated with the warlords before their
demobilization.

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12) More than 500 citizens of ECUADOR were victims
of massacres in Colombia
By AFP 5/14/2007 07:46 hours
VIA Email from: Greg McDonald
sabocat59@mac.com

Quito 5/13/2007 – More than 500 Ecuadorians were victims of massacres
by Colombian paramilitaries between 1998 and 2002; their relatives
kept quiet and did not make accusations because they were afraid of
reprisals, the press charged yesterday.

"Hundreds of Ecuadorians disappeared in Colombia," and "mass graves
give clues to relatives of those lost in the border region," headlined
the daily El Universal, in the port city Guayaquil, in southwestern
Ecuador.

The paper indicated that, between 1998 and 2002, "more than 500
Ecuadorian campesinos, doctors, professors, merchants working in La
Hormiga, La Dorada, El Tigre, El Placer, San Miguel and other
districts of (the department of) Putumayo in Colombia were victims of
massacres caused by paramilitary groups."

"Family members kept silent and did not make accusations, from fear;
human rights organizations and the Ecuadorian government ignored the
cases," the paper added.

The paper stressed that "hundreds of Ecuadorians (men, women, and
children) traveling or living temporarily in some ten villages in
southern Colombian Putumayo, disappeared as a result of armed action
by paramilitary groups from Colombia."

A week ago, the attorney general of Colombia, Mario Iguarán, revealed
that the remains of Ecuadorian citizens have been found among more
than 100 victims of the paramilitaries in mass graves in Putumayo.

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13) For blacks, the folly of the Iraq war hits home
Derrick Z. Jackson, THE BOSTON GLOBE
Monday, May 14, 2007
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/05/09/for_african_americans_folly_of_this_war_hits_home/

Military sociologist David R. Segal recently was asked
over the telephone what he hears in his surveys of
soldiers. He quoted an African American veteran of the
Iraq invasion and occupation: "This is not a black
people's war. This is not a poor people's war. This is
an oilman's war."

Gregory Black, a retired Navy diver who last year
started the Web site BlackMilitaryWorld.com, said that
quote sums up what he, too, hears from African
American veterans of Iraq.

"African Americans detest this war," Black said in a
recent phone interview. "Everybody kind of knows the
truth behind this war. It's a cash cow for the
military defense industry, when you look at the money
these contractors are making. African Americans saw
this at the beginning of the war and now the rest of
the country has figured it out. It's not benefiting us
in the least."

Asked about the reference to an "oilman's war," Black
said, "It's basically about oil, basically about
money. It's an economic war." He said veterans say
they are tired and burned out. "Guys are saying we're
halfway around the world fighting people of color
under the guise of democracy and we can't see how it's
benefited anyone," Black said. "It's hard to fight
halfway around the world for people's freedom when
you're not sure you have it at home."

This war, launched under false pretenses, has so
little merit that the enrollment of African Americans
in the military may be at its lowest point since the
creation of the all-volunteer military in 1973. In
2000, 23.5 percent of Army recruits were African
American. By 2005, the percentage dropped to 13.9
percent. National Public Radio quoted a Pentagon
statistic that said that African American propensity
to join the military had dropped to 9 percent.

Technically, 13.9 percent is about the proportion of
African Americans in the general population. But the
military's meritocracy has long been a
disproportionate option for African Americans because
of a lack of career opportunities and decent schools
to prepare them for college.

The drop in African American enrollment in the
military may be as powerful a collective political
statement about Iraq as when Muhammad Ali refused to
be drafted during the Vietnam War. Before the 2003
invasion, polls showed that African American support
for the invasion was as low as 19 percent, according
to the Joint Center for Political and Economic
Studies, while white support ran between 58 percent
and 73 percent in major polls.

Even today African Americans by far lead the way in
calling the war a mistake. According to Gallup, 85
percent of African Americans say it was a mistake,
compared to 53 percent of white Americans. According
to Pew, a plurality of white Americans, 49 percent,
still say it was the right decision to invade Iraq,
compared with 21 percent of African Americans.

"African Americans are always more sensitive to
anything that smacks of neocolonialism, which this war
did smack of," said Joint Center political analyst
David Bositis.

Segal and Black said that sensitivity has nothing to
do with patriotism. "What we're getting is not an
opposition to war, but considerable opposition to this
war," said Segal, director of the University of
Maryland's Center for Research on Military
Organization. He has done soldier attitude surveys for
the Army. "What we're seeing is a growing resentment
that it feels to them that the military has gone to
war, but not the nation. The military has gone to war,
the nation has gone to Wal-Mart."

Black said he still believes "without a shadow of a
doubt" that the military provides one of the best
opportunities for African Americans to advance in a
nation where civilian opportunities remain checkered.

But he also said the military may underestimate how
young people are absorbing the horrific images in
Iraq's chaos. Pentagon officials largely attribute the
drop in African American interest in the armed forces
to "influencers," parents, coaches, ministers, and
school counselors who urge youth not to enlist.

"I think some of that is true," Black said. "But I
taught ROTC in high school, and the kids themselves
are a lot smarter about this stuff. They see the news
and they can't justify going into a fight for
something they have no faith in."

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14) A Statement by William Singletary,
a witness in the case of Mumia
Abu-Jamal (1995 PCRA hearing), is what
follows below. This statement was sent to the
Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia
Abu-Jamal, in order that it be read at
rallies held in solidarity with death-
row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, on the
day of what likely is his last appeal
hearing--before a panel of the Third
Circuit federal court in Philadelphia,
PA, May 17th 2007.
LACFreeMumia@aol.com

Singletary says he is perhaps the
only true witness to the events of the
early morning hours of December 9th, 1981,
at 13th and Locust streets in
Philadelphia, at which radio journalist
and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal
was beaten, and fingered by police
for the murder of a police officer.
Singletary was never called to testify
at the rigged and racist charade, which is
sometimes referred to as Mumia's1982 trial.

Singletary insists that Mumia Abu-
Jamal did not even arrive on the scene
until after the officer was shot, and
did not in any way participate in the shooting.
Mumia himself was a victim, having
been shot and then viciously
attacked by white Philadelphia cops.

The hearing on May 17th may be
Mumia's last. It concerns only a few
issues out of a great many outstanding
questions in this case, most of which have
never been heard in court. The evidence
shows that Mumia is innocent, and the
statement below is just one of the many
proofs of that fact. Rallies in
solidarity with Mumia Abu-Jamal are
being held in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago,
San Francsco and San Jose California,
as well as London, Toronto, Amsterdam,
and others internationally.

(for a photocopy of the original
signed statement, send a request by
email to: LACFreeMumia@aol.com.)

Statement of William Singletary for
Solidarity Rallies May 17, 2007

Good-morning/Afternoon;

My name is William Singletary. I am an eye-witness to the murder or
assassination of Police Officer Daniel Faulkner on December 9, 1981, in
the early morning hours at 13th and Locust Street in Philadelphia, PA.
Mumia Abu-Jamal did not shoot Daniel Faulkner. I stood as close as 12 to
15 feet when Officer Faulkner was killed. When two bullets were viciously
pumped into Officer Faulkner, the shooter then looked into my direction.
We locked eyes for a few seconds. His stare was like a thousand ice picks
aiming for my heart. I slowly backed up; we never unlocked eyes until he
flung the 22 caliber pistol to the right rear wheel of the Volkswagen.
That's the type of weapon that killed the officer. I saw it and I told the
cops where to retrieve the weapon.

This story has had many twists and turns, according to the police, D.A.,
and prosecutor's office. None of what they stated is true. As I said, I
saw the whole thing as it happened and it was not the way they said. They
concocted a story, and put it on paper and the whole world believed what
they said. I was told to keep quiet by the police, by Mr. Jamal's
attorneys, and people on the street that I had always confided in. No one
wanted to lose their business or their jobs. So I was left alone, by
myself with this burden of "who will listen to me?" In the city of Philly
I was a loner or the "Crazy Nigger" that won't shut up. But when we would
be alone or with some brothers that truly believed that Mumia was
innocent, guided me through turbulent times.

I came through by moving time after time and taking low-paying jobs to
support my family. My family even turned their backs. I lost everything I
owned just for telling the truth.

I never knew people could be so mean; I am talking about professional
people. I watched those cops turn into pure animals when they did their
dance around Mr. Jamal. They beat him and kicked him, spit on him, called
him nigger and violated all of his civil rights. Every one of those cops
on the scene took part in the beating and the little dirty dance they did.
Mr. Jamal cried and begged them to stop because he had been shot, but they
continued to punch, kick, and beat him with their blackjacks until he was
unable to move on his own power. They then picked him up and tried to
split his body on a "No Parking" sign. At this point he was too weak to
say anything. The cops kept chanting, "Ramp, Ramp, Ramp" in reference to
an officer that was slain at an early Move confrontation. This was a
retribution for his reporting of that incident.

I don't know about all the ins and outs of this case. But what I do know
is that Mumia Abu-Jamal did not shoot Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. Mr.
Jamal was savagely beaten by the Philadelphia police. The whooping of Mr.
Jamal makes Rodney King's beating look like a picnic. I mean I have
traveled the world, been in a war zone, and come home to witness this
barbaric, savage, animal-like beating of another human being. These are
sworn officers of the law, all white, not one black. They know what I saw
and I've been threatened ever since. Not to the point of bodily harm, but
to the point of the loss of my businesses and all my friends.

When I speak of this I sometimes shiver to think of all the pain he
suffered at the hands of people who were sworn to serve and protect. I
would just like to say I am not crazy or fantasizing about anything. What
I said is the whole truth. I am glad to have you all listen and speak to
whomever to give this man a new trial. I was never called to the first
trial so maybe I will be called to the next one. I am a Vietnam Veteran; I
did receive a purple heart for wounds received in combat. I received an
honorable discharge. I successfully ran legit businesses in Philly before
I was "ran out of town."

Hopefully there is someone within the sound of my voice that can reach out
and help these twenty-five years of hell to be brought to some kind of
closure. As I said and keep saying, "Mumia Abu-Jamal is an innocent man."
I was there and I said what I saw. So please continue to support him
however you may.

Thank you. "Peace brothers and sisters"

Signed,

William Singletary

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15) Deal Is Reached in Senate on Immigration
By ROBERT PEAR and DAVID STOUT
May 17, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/17/washington/17cnd-immig.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

WASHINGTON, May 17 — Senators from both parties announced
an agreement this afternoon on immigration-reform legislation
that would bring illegal immigrants and their families “out
of the shadows and into the sunshine of American life,”
as Senator Edward M. Kennedy put it.

The bill would provide an opportunity “right away” for
millions of illegal aliens to correct their status, said
Mr. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts. It would emphasize
family ties as well as employment skills in weighing how
soon immigrants could become legal residents, he said.

But it would also emphasize improved border security and
would call for “very strong sanctions” against employers
who knowingly hire illegal immigrants, according to
Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania.

Both senators acknowledged that the bill, whose general
terms are agreeable to the White House, is likely to
come under fire both from the political right and the
political left — decried either as “amnesty” or as “not
humanitarian enough,” as Mr. Specter said.

Still, Mr. Kennedy said that the bill, however imperfect,
was the best chance in years to secure America’s borders,
help millions of people who have been living in fear and
help to eliminate a sad and sorded “underground economy”
in American life.

“Now it’s time for action,” Mr. Kennedy said. “I’ve been
around here long enough to know that opportunities like
this don’t come very often.” (The senator has been in
office 45 years.)

The announcement does not mean that a finished bill is
at hand, because differences between the Senate and House
on the issue must still be worked out. But the accord
in the Senate is nonetheless a giant step toward enactment
of “comprehensive immigration reform,” as Mr. Specter
described it. President Bush has used that term repeatedly
to describe the kind of bill he would like to see.

The senators said the system they envision would give weight
to immigrants’ education and to job skills deemed helpful
to the economy in deciding whom to admit, using a point
system to evaluate those qualifications. Family ties would
remain an important factor.

The point system is one element of a comprehensive bill
that calls for the biggest changes in immigration law
and policy in more than 20 years. The full Senate plans
to take up the legislation next week.

Although Democrats now control the Senate, the bill
incorporates many ideas advanced in some form by
President Bush. A draft of the legislation says that
Congress intends to “increase American competitiveness
through a merit-based evaluation system for immigrants.”

Moreover, it says, Congress will “reduce chain migration”
by limiting the number of visas issued exclusively on
account of kinship.

Democrats insisted, and Republicans agreed, that some points
be awarded to people who had close relatives in the United
States or could perform low-skill jobs for which there
was a high demand.

Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican
who has been one of the more optimistic negotiators,
said on Wednesday that the legislation “would free up
thous