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  • BAUAW NEWSLETTER
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    Saturday, May 27, 2006
     

    BAUAW NEWSLETTER-FRIDAY, JUNE 2, 2006

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    Urgent Call to Support U.S. Military Officer
    to Refuse Illegal IraqWar
    June 2, 2006: First U.S. military officer poised to publicly refuse
    orders in support of the illegal Iraq War requires immediate support
    and assistance. Join this unprecedented political and legal support
    campaign today! Information updated daily!
    Sign the petition!
    Thank you LT for standing up for international, US and military
    law by refusing to deploy to Iraq in support of the ongoing
    illegal war and occupation.
    http://www.thankyoult.org/

    ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*--------
    "It's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees."
    - Emilano Zapata
    ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*--------

    Protest the Minutemen In Fremont! Defend Immigrant Rights!
    When: Friday, June 2, 2006 at 4:30pm
    Where: Corner of Mowry and Fremont Blvd, Fremont CA
    Contact: Jessie Muldoon, 510-467-5579

    Protesta contral los Vigilantes en Fremont!
    Defienda los Derechos de los Inmigrantes!
    Cuando: Viernes 2 de Junio, 2006 a las 4:30pm
    Donde: La esquina de Mowry y Fremont Blvd, Fremont CA
    Contactar: Jessie Muldoon, 510-467-5579

    ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*--------
    LEASE RSVP ! 2nd SF Civil Rights Revival Cookout,
    Sunday 6-4-06 4 pm

    COALITION BUILDING
    Please Forward Far & Wide !

    2nd San Francisco
    Civil Rights RevivalCOOKOUT !

    Sponsored by:

    SF ANSWER
    Community First Coalition
    Idriss Stelley Foundation
    5 a n s w e r @ a c t i o
    When : SUNDAY, JUNE 4TH
    4PM - 7PM

    Where: In the Heart of Bayview:
    Idriss Stelley Foundation,
    4921 3RD ST, San Francisco
    Between Palou &Quesada

    Why : Join the SF Bayview Community to celebrate the past and present,
    the Struggle for Equality and Self-Determination of our Lands &
    Communities !

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

    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

    People United For a General and Unconditional Amnesty
    Rally Monday, June 19, 2006, 5:00 P.M.
    Palou Avenue and Third Street, S.F.

    No matter what the decisions the lawmakers make to "reform" the
    immigration laws, we know that they will make some immigrant
    workers "legal" and others "illegal."

    We will hold a rally June 19, 2006 at 5:00 p.m. at Palou Avenue
    and Third Street in San Francisco to demand General and
    Unconditional Amnesty for All Immigrants. We hold this rally
    in celebration of the date of June 19th, 141 years ago when
    it was declared the end of slavery by Black people in this country.

    Our Black brothers and sisters continue to be a slave of racism
    and injustice just as we immigrants. And the government
    continues to put on Death Row the great leaders of the Black
    movement such as Mumia Abu-Jamal.

    We make a call for unity at this rally in the Bayview so we can
    honor June 19th by making a commitment to sow the first
    seeds together in order to make a reality the emancipation
    of the Black people and the immigrants and to demand the
    immediate freedom of the great leader of the Black people,
    Mumia Abu-Jamal, innocent on Death Row.

    For More Information:

    People United For a General and Unconditional Amnesty
    Barrio Unido Por una Amnistia General e Incondicional
    474 Valencia Street
    San Francisco, CA 94110
    Contact Persons:
    Cristina Gutierrez: 415-431-9925
    Kati Sanchez: 415-368-2576

    Related:

    Senate Passes Comprehensive Immigration Bill
    By RACHEL L. SWARNS
    May 25, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/25/washington/25cnd-immig.html?hp&ex=1148616000&en=510a31f6777e6e54&ei=5094&partner=homepage

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

    ABOLISHING JROTC in SAN FRANCISCO SCHOOLS
    There will be a special meeting in July when
    the School Board will vote on this resolution.
    The meeting date is to be announced.
    School District Office
    555 Franklin St
    San Francisco
    415/241-6427

    Report and Open letter to the Board of Education regarding JROTC:

    At the first reading of the resolution to rid the schools
    of JROTC on the basis of the policy of "Don't ask, don't
    tell" that discriminates against gay's in the military, which
    was presented to the Board of Education meeting on May 23, the
    JROTC teachers (all retired military officers) mobilized students
    to speak on behalf of JROTC. Carole Seligman and I spoke to many
    students in the lobby before the meeting began. Repeatedly they
    expressed that they loved the program. It gives them confidence
    in themselves, provides a supportive environment, encourages good
    scholarship in school, and encourages comradeship among the members.

    So much so, that a young girl had a silver-colored chain with a tiny
    silver-colored and diamond studded bullet. I really couldn't believe
    it was a bullet so I asked her if it was. She said, "oh! this? Yes,
    it's a bullet. You know, it's between me and my friend, you know,
    like, 'I'll take a bullet for you!'"

    Need I say more about the virtues of JROTC?

    Unfortunately, the resolution that follows says nothing of this
    aspect of JROTC. Nothing about the war. Nothing about young people
    being taught to "take a bullet for each other". Nothing about the
    realities of war. Nothing about asking students, gay or not, to
    risk their lives and take the lives of Iraqis for this inhuman
    and illegal war brought about by an inhuman and illegal
    government.

    It was announced by gay supporters of JROTC at the meeting
    that they expected the military to lift the prohibition on gays
    in the military this year. If this is true this will make this
    resolution obsolete before it can ever take effect. Are we to cheer
    that our gay brothers and sisters will be able to fight in this war?
    What is our plan to convince young gay and straight students that they can't
    "be all they can be" if they are dead; or legless and armless; or with the
    blood of too many dead in their hearts and head; or permanently
    brain-damaged; burnt or blinded by exploding eyeballs and deafened by
    exploding eardrums? Who will tell them of depleted uranium illness?
    Who will tell them that although there is a very high survival rate for
    our injured soldiers there is also a very high rate of survival with such
    catastrophic injury and illness? Who will tell them that they are more
    likely to be homeless after serving than in college? Who will tell
    them about the logic of "following orders" and a "chain of command"
    Instead of thinking and reasoning and making decisions for themselves
    leads to disaster?

    If you haven't seen it, I suggest you watch the HBO special,
    "Baghdad ER". In fact it should be shown to all of our students
    in middle and high school. (It's far too explicit for very young children.)

    We and the majority of the voters in San Francisco want
    the military out of our schools immediately!

    Here are my comments for the meeting. I was cut off midway
    through my timed one-minute delivery. The resolution
    follows my comments. Please look at it again and see that a
    vital antiwar message is missing from it and correct and
    amend the resolution immediately to reflect opposition
    to the militarization of our schools and the offering up of our
    students as cannon fodder for this bloodthirsty and greedy
    government and it's military might.

    We want a world without war! How can we teach children
    that violence is not the answer when the most powerful
    and influential adults in the world--our government--
    uses it as their ultimate tool to gain wealth and power
    for themselves.

    You must take a stronger antiwar stand! I don't care how many
    antiwar resolutions you have passed. The proof of the pudding
    is in the military presence in our schools!

    Sincerely,
    Bonnie Weinstein

    Addressed to the President, Vice President and the
    Commissioners of the San Francisco Board of Education:

    I commend the board members who are bringing the motion
    to rid our schools of JROTC forward. This is in line with the
    wishes of the majority of the voters in San Francisco who
    voted to get the military out of our schools this past November.
    The military’s policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” is unacceptable.
    Our obligation is to educate our children against prejudice
    of all kinds—not turn a blind eye—and turn a bigoted military
    loose on them. But that is not the only reason we want the
    military and JROTC out.

    We want our children to engage in physical education, in fact,
    to find joy in it; and to study history—to learn how to avoid
    the mistakes of the past; to gain satisfaction and experience
    joy in learning so they can contribute to human knowledge
    themselves as well as help fashion a better world!

    We want our children to feel responsible to her or his
    community. We want students to gain a sense of
    responsibility and pride in a job well done by
    contributing to the life and well being of their school,
    their home and their community.

    We don’t want to teach our children to blindly obey
    a chain of command or to glorify war. In fact, it is our
    duty to teach our children that blind obedience, violence,
    greed, bigotry, prejudice, human inequality, torture, pre-
    emptive war, profiting off of war and injustice, inequality
    in the application of the law, and poverty in the face of
    fantastic wealth is wrong, inhuman and intolerable and
    we can do better!

    We must rid our schools of the military and JROTC, hire
    enough Physical Education teachers immediately, and
    re-dedicate our schools to education and human
    development—and reject the road to war and militarism.

    Just one more thing, I want to correct the notion that the
    new school policy regarding military recruiters has resulted
    in less military presence in our schools. In fact, it has resulted
    in more. Many schools did not invite the military on Career Day
    and now they must, and that is a shame, because we want the
    military out! We don’t want our children to study war or bigotry
    any more! Not for one more second!

    Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War,
    www.bauaw.org, 415-824-8730

    The resolution:

    Introduction of Replacement Program for JROTC
    --Commissioners Mark Sanchez and Dan Kelly

    WHEREAS: It is the official policy of the San Francisco Unified School
    District to oppose discrimination of any kind against any group
    of people; and

    WHEREAS: The District’s opposition to discrimination is articulated
    in Board Policy 5163, which provides that the San Francisco Unified
    School District shall not discriminate on the basis of race, religion,
    creed, national origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, or handicapping
    condition in the provision of educational programs, services, and
    activities, in the admission of students to school programs and
    activities; and in the recruitment and employment of personnel; and

    WHEREAS: The San Francisco Unified School District deplores the
    "Don’t Ask Don’t Tell" policy of the U.S. Department of Defense,
    which requires the discharge of any member of the armed forces
    if such service member has engaged in "homosexual acts," has
    revealed that s/he is a homosexual or bisexual, or the member
    has married or attempted to marry a person known to be of the
    same biological sex; and

    WHEREAS: The District believes that the "Don’t Ask Don’t Tell"
    policy is an unjust, indefensible, unintelligent, state-sanctioned
    act of homophobia; and

    WHEREAS: The San Francisco Unified School District cannot justify
    committing any funding to a JROTC program because its connection
    to the U.S. Department of Defense suggests that discrimination
    against some groups is tolerable.

    THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED: That the Board of Education of the
    San Francisco Unified School District calls for the phasing –out
    of the JROTC program of the United States Department of Defense
    on San Francisco Unified School District campuses; and

    BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED: That the Board of Education instructs
    District staff to provide all JROTC units at SFUSD campuses with
    one year notice that the programs will be terminated at all SFUSD
    campuses after the 2006-2007 school year; and

    BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED: That the Board of Education calls for the
    creation of a special task force to develop alternative, creative,
    career-driven programs which provide students with a greater
    sense of purpose and respect for self and humankind.

    Board has plan to oust ROTC from S.F. schools
    Members want to cut program over 'Don't ask, Don't tell'
    The students engage in physical training such as running, push-ups
    and jumping jacks; and discipline training such as marching,
    drill-practice and using a mock chain of command. They also
    study military history and perform community service.
    - Heather Knight, Chronicle Staff Writer
    Tuesday, May 23, 2006
    http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/05/23/MNGIOJ0G7P1.DTL

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

    More Abu Ghraib Photos Posted
    Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches
    May 21, 2006
    http://dahrjamailiraq.com
    We have posted a new collection of Abu Ghraib images
    from a variety of sources.
    Afterdowningstreet.org
    http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/
    supplied the images.
    We have decided to post these in our continuing effort
    to show the true face of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
    http://209.97.202.24/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=abu_ghraib_torture_pictures_images_iraq_war
    to view these images.

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

    SCROLL DOWN TO READ:
    EVENT ANNOUNCEMENTS
    GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS
    ARTICLES IN FULL
    LINKS ONLY

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

    "In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act."
    --George Orwell

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

    Great Counter-Recruitment Website
    http://notyoursoldier.org/article.php?list=type&type=14

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

    GREAT FLASH FILM BY PINK
    (I didn't know who she was. Now I do...BW)
    http://thinkwebworks.com/redraidernation/TAPES/dear-mr.html

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

    R A I L W A Y W O M E N
    Exploitation, Betrayal & Triumph in the Workplace
    by Helena Wojtczak
    http://www.railwaywomen.co.uk/book.html

    ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*--------
    EVENT ANNOUNCEMENTS
    ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*--------
    GENERAL AND UNCONDITIONAL AMNESTY FOR ALL!
    ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*--------

    LEASE RSVP ! 2nd SF Civil Rights Revival Cookout,
    Sunday 6-4-06 4 pm

    COALITION BUILDING
    Please Forward Far & Wide !

    2nd San Francisco
    Civil Rights RevivalCOOKOUT !

    Sponsored by:

    SF ANSWER
    Community First Coalition
    Idriss Stelley Foundation
    5 a n s w e r @ a c t i o
    When : SUNDAY, JUNE 4TH
    4PM - 7PM

    Where: In the Heart of Bayview:
    Idriss Stelley Foundation,
    4921 3RD ST, San Francisco
    Between Palou &Quesada

    Why : Join the SF Bayview Community to celebrate the past and present,
    the Struggle for Equality and Self-Determination of our Lands &
    Communities !

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

    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

    People United For a General and Unconditional Amnesty
    Rally Monday, June 19, 2006, 5:00 P.M.
    Palou Avenue and Third Street, S.F.

    No matter what the decisions the lawmakers make to "reform" the
    immigration laws, we know that they will make some immigrant
    workers "legal" and others "illegal."

    We will hold a rally June 19, 2006 at 5:00 p.m. at Palou Avenue
    and Third Street in San Francisco to demand General and
    Unconditional Amnesty for All Immigrants. We hold this rally
    in celebration of the date of June 19th, 141 years ago when
    it was declared the end of slavery by Black people in this country.

    Our Black brothers and sisters continue to be a slave of racism
    and injustice just as we immigrants. And the government
    continues to put on Death Row the great leaders of the Black
    movement such as Mumia Abu-Jamal.

    We make a call for unity at this rally in the Bayview so we can
    honor June 19th by making a commitment to sow the first
    seeds together in order to make a reality the emancipation
    of the Black people and the immigrants and to demand the
    immediate freedom of the great leader of the Black people,
    Mumia Abu-Jamal, innocent on Death Row.

    For More Information:

    People United For a General and Unconditional Amnesty
    Barrio Unido Por una Amnistia General e Incondicional
    474 Valencia Street
    San Francisco, CA 94110
    Contact Persons:
    Cristina Gutierrez: 415-431-9925
    Kati Sanchez: 415-368-2576

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

    Fourth Annual International Al-Awda Convention
    San Francisco - July 14-16, 2006
    To register: http://al-awda.org/sf-conv_reserve.html
    To flyer, the writing is on the wall: http://al-awda.org/pdf/flyer.pdf
    For all other info: http://al-awda.org

    ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*--------
    GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS
    ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*--------

    REMINDER TO ALL GROUPS: BE SURE AND POST ALL ACTIONS AND
    EVENTS TO WWW.INDYBAY.ORG TO REACH THE MOST PEOPLE
    AGAINST THE WAR IN THE BAY AREA!
    http://www.indybay.org

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

    FYI
    According to "Minimum Wage History" at
    http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/anth484/minwage.html "

    "Calculated in real 2005 dollars, the 1968 minimum wage was the
    highest at $9.12. "The 8 dollar per hour Whole Foods employees
    are being paid $1.12 less than the 1968 minimum wage.

    "A federal minimum wage was first set in 1938. The graph shows
    both nominal (red) and real (blue) minimum wage values. Nominal
    values range from 25 cents per hour in 1938 to the current $5.15/hr.
    The greatest percentage jump in the minimum wage was in 1950,
    when it nearly doubled. The graph adjusts these wages to 2005
    dollars (blue line) to show the real value of the minimum wage.
    Calculated in real 2005 dollars, the 1968 minimum wage was the
    highest at $9.12. Note how the real dollar minimum wage rises and
    falls. This is because it gets periodically adjusted by Congress.
    The period 1997-2006, is the longest period during which the
    minimum wage has not been adjusted. States have departed from
    the federal minimum wage. Washington has the highest minimum
    wage in the country at $7.63 as of January 1, 2006. Oregon is next
    at $7.50. Cities, too, have set minimum wages. Santa Fe, New
    Mexico has a minimum wage of $9.50, which is more than double
    the state minimum wage at $4.35."

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

    PRESERVE INTERNET NETWORK NEUTRALITY

    Hi,
    I can't imagine that you haven't seen this, but if you
    haven't, please sign the petition to keep our access.
    Everything we do online will be hurt if Congress
    passes a radical law next week that gives giant
    corporations more control over what we do and see on
    the Internet.

    Internet providers like AT&T are lobbying Congress
    hard to gut Network Neutrality--the Internet's First
    Amendment and the key to Internet freedom. Right now,
    Net Neutrality prevents AT&T from choosing which
    websites open most easily for you based on which site
    pays AT&T more. BarnesandNoble.com doesn't have to
    outbid Amazon for the right to work properly on your
    computer.

    If Net Neutrality is gutted, many sites--including
    Google, eBay, and iTunes--must either pay protection
    money to companies like AT&T or risk having their
    websites process slowly. That why these high-tech
    pioneers, plus diverse groups ranging from MoveOn to
    Gun Owners of America, are opposing Congress' effort
    to gut Internet freedom.

    So please! sign this petition telling your member of
    Congress to preserve Internet freedom? Click here:

    http://www.civic.moveon.org/save_the_internet?track_referer=706%7C1152463-5QFocRE05wmGUuh8yAMSzg

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

    Flash Film: Ides of March
    http://isahaqi.chris-floyd.com/

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

    NO BORDERS! NO WALLS! NO FENCES! GENERAL AMNESTY FOR ALL!
    OUR HOMELAND IS WHERE WE LIVE!

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

    REPEAL THE NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT IN 2007!
    Check out: 10 EXCELLENT REASONS NOT TO JOIN THE MILITARY
    http://www.10reasonsbook.com/
    Public Law print of PL 107-110, the No Child Left Behind
    Act of 2001 [1.8 MB]
    http://www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/index.html
    Also, the law is up before Congress again in 2007.
    See this article from USA Today:
    Bipartisan panel to study No Child Left Behind
    By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
    February 13, 2006
    http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-02-13-education-panel_x.htm

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

    WHY WE FIGHT
    A film by Eugene Jarecki
    [Check out the trailer about this new film.
    This looks like a very powerful film.]
    http://www.sonyclassics.com/whywefight/

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

    The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies
    http://www.law.indiana.edu/uslawdocs/declaration.html
    http://www.law.ou.edu/hist/decind.html
    http://www.usconstitution.net/declar.html
    http://www.indybay.org/news/2006/02/1805195.php

    Bill of Rights
    http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.billofrights.html
    http://www.indybay.org/news/2006/02/1805182.php

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

    1) Laid Off and Left Out
    By BOB HERBERT
    May 25, 2006
    http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/25/opinion/25herbert.html?hp

    2) An Immigration Victory [for the slave-holders, certainly
    not for immigrants....bw]
    New York Times Editorial
    May 27, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/27/opinion/27sat1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

    3) The Energy Challenge
    Coal May Be Fuel of the Future, but Industry Battles Over Path
    By SIMON ROMERO
    May 28, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/business/28coal.html?hp&ex=1148788800&en=fd524c32f2843a7b&ei=5094&partner=homepage

    4) In the war of the super-rich on the rest of us ...
    in San Francisco, as in New Orleans
    "In the war of the super-rich on the rest of us, whether in Iraq, New
    Orleans or San Francisco’s Hunters Point, the plan is to utterly
    destroy the land of the vulnerable and then further enrich the
    super-rich with contracts for reconstruction – or redevelopment:
    In Iraq, shock and awe; in New Orleans, devastation wrought by
    a hurricane and the hand of man; in the Hunters Point Shipyard,
    without notice to the neighborhood, the clearcutting by developer
    Lennar of all the trees covering 64.5 acres to make way
    for its Superfund condos."
    by Ann Garrison
    May 24, 2006
    http://www.sfbayview.com/051706/therestofus.shtml

    5) Are Enrons Bustin' Out All Over?
    By Gretchen Morgenson
    May 28, 2006
    http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/business/yourmoney/28gret.html

    6) Block the Vote
    New York Times Editorial
    May 30, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/opinion/30tue1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

    7) Justices Set Limits on Public Employees' Speech Rights
    By DAVID STOUT
    May 30, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/washington/30cnd-scotus.html?hp&ex=1149048000&en=57d52201086729ae&ei=5094&partner=homepage

    8) REPORT FROM CENTRO OBRERO
    [How the employer uses immigration papers, or lack thereof, as a
    tool to lower wages, increase hours and speed-up production
    in order to increase their rate of profit at the expense of the
    health and well being of workers...bw]

    9) Responsible Reform of Immigration Laws Must Protect Working
    Conditions for all Workers in the U.S.
    March 01, 2006
    San Diego, CA
    http://www.aflcio.org/aboutus/thisistheaflcio/ecouncil/ec02272006e.cfm

    10) Exxon Mobil Shareholders Reject Effort to Restrain Executive Pay
    DALLAS, May 31 (AP) — Shareholders of the Exxon Mobil
    Corporation, whose last chief executive took home $147
    million when he retired, overwhelmingly rejected resolutions
    to rein in compensation at the company's annual meeting on
    Wednesday...Mr. Raymond was paid $49 million in cash and
    restricted stock last year, then got a $98 million lump-sum
    pension payment.
    By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
    June 1, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/01/business/01exxon.html

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

    1) Laid Off and Left Out
    By BOB HERBERT
    May 25, 2006
    http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/25/opinion/25herbert.html?hp

    You don't hear much from the American worker anymore.
    Like battered soldiers at the end of a lost war, ordinary
    workers seem resigned to their diminished status.

    The grim terms imposed on them include wage stagnation,
    the widespread confiscation of benefits (including pensions
    they once believed were guaranteed), and a permanent state
    of employment insecurity.

    For an unnecessarily large number of Americans, the workplace
    has become a hub of anxiety and fear, an essential but
    capricious environment in which you might be shown the
    door at any moment.

    In his new book, "The Disposable American: Layoffs and
    Their Consequences," Louis Uchitelle tells us that since 1984,
    when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics started monitoring
    "worker displacement," at least 30 million full-time workers
    have been "permanently separated from their jobs and their
    paychecks against their wishes."

    Mr. Uchitelle writes on economic issues for The Times. In his
    book, he traces the evolution of that increasingly endangered
    species, the secure job, and the effect that the current culture
    of corporate layoffs is having on ordinary men and women.

    He said he was surprised, as he did the reporting for the book,
    by the extensive emotional fallout that accompanies layoffs.
    "There's a lot of mental health damage," he said. "The act of
    being laid off is such a blow to the self-esteem. Layoffs are
    a national phenomenon, a societal problem — but the laid-off
    workers blame themselves."

    In addition to being financially strapped, laid-off workers and
    their families are often emotionally strapped as well. Common
    problems include depression, domestic strife and divorce.

    Mr. Uchitelle's thesis is that corporate layoffs have been carried
    much too far, that they have gone beyond a legitimate and
    necessary response to a changing economy.

    "What started as a necessary response to the intrusion of foreign
    manufacturers into the American marketplace got out of hand,"
    he writes. "By the late 1990's, getting rid of workers had become
    normal practice, ingrained behavior, just as job security had
    been 25 years earlier."

    In many cases, a thousand workers were fired when 500 might
    have been sufficient, or 10,000 were let go when 5,000 would
    have been enough. We pay a price for these excesses. The losses
    that accrue to companies and communities when many years
    of improving skills and valuable experience are casually and
    unnecessarily tossed on a scrap heap are incalculable.

    "The majority of the people who are laid off," said Mr. Uchitelle,
    "end up in jobs that pay significantly less than they earned before,
    or they drop out altogether."

    At the heart of the layoff phenomenon is the myth, endlessly
    repeated by corporate leaders and politicians of both parties,
    that workers who are thrown out of their jobs can save themselves,
    can latch onto spiffy new jobs by becoming better educated
    and acquiring new skills.

    "Education and training create the jobs, according to this way
    of thinking," writes Mr. Uchitelle. "Or, put another way, a job
    materializes for every trained or educated worker, a job
    commensurate with his or her skills, for which he or she
    is appropriately paid."

    That is just not so, and the corporate and political elite need
    to stop feeding that bogus line to the public.

    There is no doubt that the better-educated and better-trained
    get better jobs. But the reality is that there are not enough
    good jobs currently available to meet the demand of college
    -educated and well-trained workers in the United States,
    which is why so many are working in jobs for which they
    are overqualified.

    A chapter in "The Disposable American" details the plight of
    exquisitely trained airline mechanics who found themselves
    laid off from jobs that had paid up to $31 an hour. Mr. Uchitelle
    writes: "Not enough jobs exist at $31 an hour — or at $16 an
    hour, for that matter — to meet the demand for them. Jobs
    just don't materialize at cost-conscious companies to absorb
    all the qualified people who want them."

    The most provocative question raised by Mr. Uchitelle is whether
    the private sector is capable of generating enough good jobs
    at good pay to meet the demand of everyone who is qualified
    wants to work.

    If it cannot (and so far it has not), then what? If education and
    training are not the building blocks to solid employment,
    what is? These are public policy questions of the highest
    importance, and so far they are being ignored

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

    2) An Immigration Victory [for the slave-holders, certainly
    not for immigrants....bw]
    New York Times Editorial
    May 27, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/27/opinion/27sat1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

    Americans should be proud of what the United States Senate did
    this week. It passed an ambitious bill that could lead to the most
    far-reaching overhaul of immigration laws in the nation's history.
    It did so after months of thoughtful debate and through a bipartisan
    compromise, a creature that many thought had vanished from
    Capitol Hill. The bill has many flaws, but its framework is realistic
    and humane. At various low points in the debate, this outcome
    could scarcely have been imagined, but the near-impossible
    happened on Thursday, by a vote of 62 to 36.

    The Senate has given the cause of immigration reform a lot of
    momentum, which it will need since it is now heading for a brick
    wall: the House of Representatives.

    The House Judiciary Committee chairman, James Sensenbrenner Jr.,
    in the role of head brick, called the Senate bill "a nonstarter" the
    morning after it passed. Discussing the odds of reconciling the
    House and Senate legislation into one bill, Mr. Sensenbrenner
    struck a tone of deathly pessimism. The chambers had once
    been miles apart, but now they were "moons apart or oceans
    apart," he said, grasping for words to convey the vastness of his
    gloom, and the ferocity of his bargaining stance.

    But why was he so down?

    The House's immigration bill is tough on security. But so is the
    Senate's. The House wants 700 miles of new fencing on the
    Mexican border; the Senate wants 370, with another 500 miles
    of vehicle barriers. That looks like mere miles apart to us.

    But when you add the real crux of the debate — the future flow
    of temporary workers and a path to citizenship for the nation's
    shadow population of 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants
    — things do get tricky.

    Many polls show that the American public has moved decisively
    toward favoring a comprehensive immigration solution: tightening
    security and giving illegal immigrants a chance to seek the burdens
    and benefits of citizenship. But those in the Sensenbrenner camp
    are clinging to a fantasy that only a clenched fist will set the nation's
    immigrant problems right. They have refused to treat illegal
    immigrants as anything but outlaws, and oppose the Senate
    bill's citizenship path. They speak with the sullen defeatism
    of those who have dug into their positions and can't climb out.

    It is hard to understand what — besides election-year pandering
    and xenophobic hostility — motivates their unwillingness to bend
    toward the flexible, sensible policy that immigrants, their families
    and their advocates, many business organizations and labor unions,
    and a majority of the Senate are seeking.

    Is it their fear that the United States as we know it is on the brink
    of disintegrating under a flood of poor people looking for work?
    That dread was expressed this month in a much-buzzed-about
    report from the Heritage Foundation. It warned that the Senate
    bill would increase the United States population by 103 million
    in 20 years. An uproar followed, and led to an amendment that
    shrank the bill's guest-worker quotas. The foundation then
    revised its estimate down to 66 million.

    But that is still a staggeringly ridiculous sum, considering that
    Mexico's entire work force is only 43 million. We suppose it is
    possible that every last worker south of the border could move
    here, bringing family members and pets, but Mexico and Central
    America would have to be depopulated to make the conservatives'
    nightmare come true. To the reality-based community, thankfully,
    the Senate bill is not a nightmare.

    It is a rough draft of what could end up as a profound achievement.
    There is a huge gap between the House and the Senate, but it can
    be bridged, and President Bush should bridge it. The coalition
    that passed the Senate bill has handed Mr. Bush an opportunity
    to lead the country to a better place. He should spend every last
    shred of his political capital and skill to take it.

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

    3) The Energy Challenge
    Coal May Be Fuel of the Future, but Industry Battles Over Path
    By SIMON ROMERO
    May 28, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/business/28coal.html?hp&ex=1148788800&en=fd524c32f2843a7b&ei=5094&partner=homepage

    WRIGHT, Wyo. — More than a century ago a blustery Wyoming
    politician named Fenimore Chatterton boasted that his state alone
    had enough coal to "weld every tie that binds, drive every wheel,
    change the North Pole into a tropical region, or smelt all hell!"

    His words seem prophetic.

    The future for American energy users is playing out in coal-rich
    areas like northeastern Wyoming, where dump trucks and bulldozers
    swarm around 80-foot-thick seams at a Peabody Energy strip mine
    here, one of the largest in the world.

    Coal, the nation's favorite fuel in much of the 19th century and early
    20th century, could become so again in the 21st. The United States
    has enough to last at least two centuries at current use rates —
    reserves far greater than those of oil or natural gas. And for all
    the public interest in alternatives like wind and solar power, or
    ethanol from the heartland, coal will play a far bigger role.

    But the conventional process for burning coal in power plants
    has one huge drawback: it is one of the largest manmade sources
    of the gases responsible for global warming.

    Many scientists say that sharply reducing emissions of these
    gases could make more difference in slowing climate change
    than any other move worldwide. And they point out that American
    companies are best positioned to set an example for other nations
    in adopting a new technique to limit the environmental impact
    of the more than 1,000 coal-fired power projects on drawing
    boards around the world.

    It is on this issue, however, that executives of some of the most
    important companies in the coal business diverge. Their
    disagreement is crucial in the debate over how to satisfy
    Americans' growing energy appetite without accelerating
    climate change.

    One of those executives, Michael G. Morris, runs American
    Electric Power, the nation's largest coal consumer and biggest
    producer of heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions from its
    existing plants. He is spearheading a small movement within
    the energy industry to embrace the new technology. His
    company plans to build at least two 600-megawatt plants,
    in Ohio and West Virginia.

    The company says these plants are not only better for the
    environment but also in the best interests of even its cost-
    conscious shareholders. While they would cost 15 to 20 percent
    more to build, Mr. Morris says they would be far less expensive
    to retrofit with the equipment needed to move carbon dioxide
    deep underground, instead of releasing it to the sky, if limits
    are placed on emissions of global warming gases.

    "Leave the science alone for a minute," Mr. Morris said in an
    interview at the Columbus, Ohio, headquarters of his company.
    "The politics around climate issues are very real. That's why
    we need to move on this now."

    But most in the industry are not making that bet. Among
    them is Gregory H. Boyce, chief executive of Peabody Energy,
    the largest private-sector coal producer in the world thanks
    in part to its growing operations here in Wyoming and with
    aspirations to operate coal-fired plants of its own. Mr. Boyce's
    company alone controls reserves with more energy potential
    than the oil and gas reserves of Exxon Mobil.

    "We're still not convinced that the technology or cost structure
    is there to justify going down a path where we're not
    comfortable," Mr. Boyce said.

    Mr. Boyce's view has prevailed. No more than a dozen of the
    140 new coal-fired power plants planned in the United States
    expect to use the new approach.

    The decisions being made right now in industry and government
    on how quickly to adopt any new but more costly technologies
    will be monumental.

    "Coal isn't going away, so you have to think ahead," said Gavin
    A. Schmidt, a climate modeler at the Goddard Institute for Space
    Studies, part of NASA. "Many of these power stations are built
    to last 50 years."

    Increased Gas Emissions

    Michael Morris and Gregory Boyce, both kingpins in their industries,
    have a lot in common. They do a lot of business together — Mr. Morris
    is one of Mr. Boyce's largest customers. They are solid Republicans.
    And they serve together on various industry initiatives.

    They agree that energy from coal — the nation's most important source
    of electricity — is cheaper than energy from oil and natural gas and
    is competitive with the uranium used in nuclear power plants. And
    coal could serve new uses: replacing petroleum in making chemicals,
    for example, or even fueling vehicles.

    But while sooty smokestacks are no longer a big problem in modern
    coal-burning power plants, the increase in global warming gases is.
    A typical 500-megawatt coal-fired electricity plant, supplying enough
    power to run roughly 500,000 homes, alone produces as much
    in emissions annually as about 750,000 cars, according to estimates
    from Royal Dutch Shell.

    Coal has perhaps no stronger evangelist than Mr. Boyce, who
    grew up on Long Island, the son of a mining executive, and studied
    engineering in Arizona. He argues that a way to reduce carbon
    dioxide emissions can be found without having to switch from
    the existing cheaper coal-burning technology.

    Much in the way that Exxon Mobil influences discussion of climate
    issues from the petroleum industry, Peabody is a backer of industry
    -supported organizations that seek to prevent mandatory reductions
    in global warming emissions and promote demand for coal.

    Peabody's executives are also by far the coal industry's largest
    political contributors to federal candidates and parties, giving
    $641,059 in the 2004 election cycle, with 93 percent of that amount
    going to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics,
    an independent research group in Washington that tracks money
    in politics. And while Peabody says it expects contributions to
    Democrats to increase, under Mr. Boyce the company has cultivated
    close contact with the Bush administration.

    Mr. Boyce was chairman of an advisory panel for the Energy Department,
    organized by the National Coal Council, that produced a controversial
    report in March calling for exemptions to the Clean Air Act to encourage
    greater consumption of coal through 2025. The thrust of the report,
    which Mr. Boyce outlined in an interview, is that improvements in
    technology to limit carbon dioxide emissions should be left to the
    market instead of government regulation.

    By contrast, the environmental advocacy group Natural Resources
    Defense Council, which has brought many lawsuits aimed at controlling
    pollution, described the report as an "energy fantasy" that would
    increase carbon dioxide emissions by more than 2 billion tons a year.

    But it is Peabody's economic argument, not the environmental
    opposition's, that is resonating throughout the electricity industry
    and among energy regulators.

    Led by Peabody, dozens of energy companies have embarked on
    the most ambitious construction of coal-fired electricity plants
    since the 1950's.

    Coal, as Mr. Boyce notes, is a bargain. Despite a doubling in
    domestic coal prices in the last two years, a surge in prices
    for natural gas, the preferred fuel for new power plants in the
    1990's, has made coal more attractive.

    With coal so favorably priced, Peabody saw an opportunity
    to enter the power-plant business itself, setting out to build two
    of the largest in the world, the 1,500-megawatt Prairie State
    Energy Campus in southern Illinois and the 1,500-megawatt
    Thoroughbred Energy Campus in western Kentucky. Both are
    in areas where the St. Louis-based company has substantial
    coal reserves.

    Despite growing concern among some large energy companies
    over the liabilities they face if global warming advances or legal
    limits on carbon dioxide emissions become a reality, Peabody
    remains loyal to its technology choice. Vic Svec, Peabody's senior
    vice president for investor relations, said the possibility of near-
    term caps on carbon emissions was not viewed as a "material threat."

    Cost of Clean Technology

    Mr. Morris, at American Electric Power, sees things differently.
    He cites cost concerns in arguing for its move to cleaner technology.
    At the request of environmental groups that hold shares in the
    company, A.E.P. agreed in 2004, shortly after Mr. Morris arrived,
    to report on the potential costs it would face if emissions rules
    were tightened. The company recognized that its growth beyond
    2010 could be limited if it stuck with old technology.

    The company has since won important allies in its push for cleaner
    coal, including General Electric, which is pinning much of its hopes
    for growth in the electricity industry on new technology and is
    working with A.E.P. on designing its plants.

    One vital element of A.E.P.'s ambitions, and by extension those
    of other energy companies with similar projects, fell into place
    in April when the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio allowed
    the company to bill customers for a portion of the higher pre-
    construction costs for the plant it is planning in the state.
    The company hopes to complete construction of its first such
    plant by 2010.

    Proponents of these plants, which turn coal into a gas that is
    burned to produce energy, say they would also emit much lower
    amounts of other pollutants that contribute to acid rain, smog
    and respiratory illness.

    But for every small advance of the new technology, there are
    bigger setbacks. Many within the industry argue that it would
    be a waste of time and money to build such plants in the United
    States unless China, which passed the United States several years
    ago as the largest coal-consuming nation, also moves to limit
    carbon dioxide emissions from its rapidly growing array of
    coal-fired plants.

    Divided Industry

    With widespread uncertainty in the state-regulated power industry,
    the debate has moved to the federal level, where testimony by
    senior energy executives before the Senate Energy Committee
    in April revealed a sharp fault line within the industry.

    On one side, A.E.P., lined up with Peabody and other heavy coal
    users against mandatory limits on global warming gases if
    industrializing countries like China and India are not included.
    Others that have less to lose from carbon caps — like Exelon and
    Duke Energy, which rely much more on nuclear power — spoke
    in favor of national limits that would include coal consumers.

    The Bush administration has rejected mandatory limits on carbon
    dioxide emissions. But there is some support in Washington for
    such legislation. The two senators from New Mexico, Jeff Bingaman,
    a Democrat, and Pete V. Domenici, a Republican, are working on
    a bill that could require limits on carbon dioxide emissions.

    Ahead of the 2008 presidential election, two senators often
    mentioned as candidates, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat
    of New York, and John McCain, Republican of Arizona, have
    endorsed mandatory cuts in emissions. Mr. Morris of A.E.P. said
    such support has persuaded him that limits might be imposed
    in coming years.

    While Peabody supports some coal gasification projects, it remains
    skeptical about departing from traditional coal-burning methods
    to produce electricity.

    The pulverized coal plants it wants to build, which grind coal into
    a dust before burning it to make electricity, currently cost about
    $2 billion each, or 15 percent to 20 percent less to build than the
    cleaner "integrated gasification combined cycle," or I.G.C.C., plants,
    which convert coal into a gas.

    The hope among scientists is that I.G.C.C. plants could be relatively
    quickly fitted with systems to sequester deep underground the
    carbon dioxide created from making electricity. Without such
    controls, the new coal plants under development worldwide
    could pump as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over
    their lifetimes as all the coal burned in the last 250 years, according
    to Jeff Goodell, who has written on coal for several publications,
    including The New York Times, and is author of a new book on
    the coal industry.

    But state and federal regulators have been hesitant to endorse
    the technology. Peabody and other companies remain skeptical
    that carbon-capture methods, whether for pulverized coal or
    combined cycle plants, will become commercially or technologically
    feasible until the next decade.

    Legal battles over this reluctance have already begun, with the
    Natural Resources Defense Council and the American Lung
    Association this year challenging the Environmental Protection
    Agency for allowing electric companies to move ahead with power
    plant projects without evaluating the new technology.

    In one key decision on the state level, the Wisconsin Public Service
    Commission rejected a proposal from WE Energies of Milwaukee
    in 2003 to build a plant with the new technology, saying it was
    too expensive and would result in higher electricity prices.

    Gas From Coal

    Engineers have known how to make gas from coal for more than
    a century, using this method in the gaslights that first illuminated
    many American cities. A handful of coal gasification plants are
    already in operation in the United States, Spain and the Netherlands,
    built with generous government assistance.

    Selling the captured carbon dioxide from coal gasification plants
    could make them more competitive with pulverized coal plants.
    One gasification plant in North Dakota, though different from an
    electric plant, already sends its carbon dioxide to Saskatchewan,
    where it is injected in aging oilfields to force more crude from the
    ground. And the oil giant BP announced a similar project in March
    for a refinery it owns near Los Angeles, using petroleum coke as
    a fuel there instead of coal.

    Scientists have developed numerous other plans to pump away
    carbon dioxide, like shipping it to offshore platforms to inject it
    below the ocean floor. These plans are not without risk, with some
    officials concerned that carbon dioxide sequestration could trigger
    earthquakes. Yet, time and again, the most limiting factor remains
    economics.

    As they proceed with plans to build pulverized coal plants, Peabody
    and other companies often point to their support of the alternative
    technology through their participation in Futuregen, a $1 billion
    project started three years ago by the Bush administration to build
    a showcase 275-megawatt power station that could sequester
    carbon dioxide and reduce other pollutants.

    Futuregen's 10 members include some of the world's largest coal
    mining companies, among them Peabody and BHP Billiton of Australia,
    as well as large coal-burning utilities like A.E.P. and the Southern
    Company.

    One Chinese company, the China Huaneng Group, is also a member
    of Futuregen, while India's government signed on in March. Washington
    is financing the bulk of the project, more than $600 million, with about
    $250 million coming from coal and electricity companies and the rest
    from foreign governments.

    But Futuregen is already behind schedule, with planners now hoping
    to choose a site for the plant by the end of the year, with an eye on
    starting operation by 2012. Environmental groups have criticized
    the project as too little, too late.

    "Futuregen is a smokescreen, since it's not intended to bring
    technology to the market at the pace required to deal with the
    problem," said Daniel Lashoff, science director at the climate center
    at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "We don't have that
    kind of time."


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

    4) In the war of the super-rich on the rest of us ...
    in San Francisco, as in New Orleans
    "In the war of the super-rich on the rest of us, whether in Iraq, New
    Orleans or San Francisco’s Hunters Point, the plan is to utterly
    destroy the land of the vulnerable and then further enrich the
    super-rich with contracts for reconstruction – or redevelopment:
    In Iraq, shock and awe; in New Orleans, devastation wrought by
    a hurricane and the hand of man; in the Hunters Point Shipyard,
    without notice to the neighborhood, the clearcutting by developer
    Lennar of all the trees covering 64.5 acres to make way
    for its Superfund condos."
    by Ann Garrison
    May 24, 2006
    http://www.sfbayview.com/051706/therestofus.shtml

    “It’s a war down here, and there’s a new battle to fight almostevery
    day.” – Lorie Arcenaux Seruntine, 21, geography student, ninth
    generation native of New Orleans

    I met 21-year-old Lorie Arsinaux Seruntine in New Orleans.
    She’d told her professors at the University of Memphis that she
    had to go home, had to be in New Orleans, doing independent
    study until she finished her degree.

    What better place for a geography student studying “hazards”
    – hazards both human and natural – to become an expert?
    Lorie understands levees, hurricanes, storm surges, geology,
    topography and the jet stream, most of which are still
    a mystery to me, and she knows as well as anyone that
    the flood that destroyed three quarters of New Orleans
    was no more natural than the bombs that destroyed Iraq.

    She knows that the levee system protecting the Black and
    poor parts of town had been de-funded and neglected for
    years and that, whether the alleged levee explosions occurred
    or not, the powerful had been eager to empty the city of its
    poor, mostly Black residents for a long time and that they
    had no care for preserving more than a tourist industry’s
    pale simulacrum of the unique and overwhelmingly Black
    New Orleans culture so loved all over the world.

    Lorie was among the first to occupy the rectory at historic,
    multi-racial St. Augustine’s Parish Church, when the archbishop
    of New Orleans threatened to replicate the New Orleans
    diaspora by dispersing its members into much larger
    neighboring parishes. This battle has been won – for now
    – but, like most, it will require continued organization,
    support and constant vigilance.

    She is now organizing local emergency response committees
    to face the next Caribbean hurricane season, beginning June 1,
    in New Orleans. Like those she is organizing with, natives left
    in the neighborhoods and the Common Ground Collective,
    she expects no help from FEMA or from the federal government
    in any form. More likely, she and others expect obstruction,
    federal authority preventing people from helping one another
    or from accepting the assistance last offered by Fidel Castro
    and his world famous hurricane doctors, or from Venezuelan
    President Hugo Chavez or even from the Black American medics
    who rushed to New Orleans from Atlanta, only to be turned
    back at the hurricane zone’s perimeter.

    Like many of the natives I met still in New Orleans, Lorie believes
    that their city was attacked and continues to be under siege by
    real estate developers, oil companies, energy and utility giant
    Entergy, and the usual suspects, Bechtel and Halliburton and
    the Shaw Group, corporations also awarded huge reconstruction
    contracts in response to the lobbying efforts of the very same
    lobbyists who pressed their interests in Iraq even before the
    bombs began to fall.

    Many more New Orleans natives still in the city confirmed the
    perception that they had been attacked. Grimly, quietly, often
    with resignation, most even seemed to believe that the barge
    that had catapulted through – or over, according to some
    – residential side of the Industrial Canal into the Lower Ninth
    Ward levee had been a Halliburton barge. It was not, but its
    owner is another story for another day.

    Many remaining residents told me horrifying stories but
    declined to be quoted. Even the editors of the New Orleans
    Times-Picayune, however, joined in an editorial lambasting
    the federal government, published on Sept. 4,
    http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050926/chronicle.
    I later learned that former FEMA chief and longtime Bush
    ally Joseph Allbuagh arrived on the Gulf Coast to represent
    his clients even before George Bush or then FEMA chief
    Michael Brown arrived.

    Having spent six weeks in New Orleans, having seen the
    deserted and devastated Sixth, Seventh, Eighth and Ninth
    Wards and having studied the web of federal “reconstruction
    contracts,” I agree: New Orleans is a new front in the war
    of the super-rich against the rest of us, a war waged most
    virulently against the poorest and most vulnerable.

    The highly capitalized and corporate organized now pick
    New Orleans’ bones much as vultures picked the bones
    of those whose bodies lay in the bayous for an entire week
    while FEMA reportedly haggled with Kenyon International,
    a subsidiary of Houston-based Service Corporation International
    (SCI), over the price of recovering the dead.

    SCI, Kenyon International’s owner, is the world’s largest chain
    of funeral retail outlets, about to become even larger by merging
    with Alderwood Funeral Homes. A little-known corporation,
    unlike Halliburton, Bechtel and Shaw, whose war profiteering,
    in both Iraq and New Orleans, are quite well known, SCI has
    earned most of its headlines by desecrating the dead, in Texas,
    Georgia and Florida. In response to a class action lawsuit in
    Florida and charges by the Florida State Attorney General,
    SCI agreed to pay $100 million dollars to the Jewish families
    who had trusted one of SCI’s many subsidiaries, Menorah
    Gardens, to bury their dead.

    SCI-owned Menorah Gardens books gravesites in advance,
    and it had way overbooked the gravesites at Menorah Gardens,
    as it often does. Having done so, it overpacked them with bodies,
    lost track of who was buried – if they were buried – where, then
    dug up and discarded corpses in nearby woods to make room
    for more. In one particularly grisly incident, it bashed into
    a crypt with a backhoe to remove corpses and discard them
    to make room for more.

    George Bush, however, is such a close family friend of SCI CEO
    Robert Waltrip that he did his best to save SCI from paying
    $450,000 in fines for using unlicensed embalmers, with grisly
    consequences, in Texas. And he has been so generous in the
    extension of reconstruction contracts to his corporate family
    friends that it’s quite difficult to believe that “haggling over
    the price” really postponed the recovery of New Orleans’
    mostly poor, mostly Black dead.

    As this “haggling over the price” went on, the number of “American”
    soldiers, including the first, a Central American, and the 1,000th,
    a Navajo, to die in Iraq was nearing the 2,000 mark, scheduled
    to trigger anti-war demonstrations all over the country. And the
    national mobilization in D.C. against the war was only days away.

    Recovery of more casualties within the bounds of the nation state
    that the war on Iraq was said to be defending might have given
    this country pause. Some might even have realized that, at that
    time, New Orleans had become the newest front in the war of
    the super-rich on the rest of us. The 500 tons of yellow cake
    uranium ore – that Saddam Hussein had allegedly imported from
    French-owned mines in Niger had long since been discounted.

    Little could be more audacious, disgusting and tasteless than
    hiring Kenyon International, a subsidiary of SCI, already repeatedly
    convicted not only of desecrating, but also of even losing track
    of and literally discarding the dead. But who would be better
    suited to keep New Orleans death count comfortably below the
    approaching 2,000 U.S. military casualty number in Iraq and
    below the 2,986 9/11 casualty count, reputed victims of Osama
    bin Laden? SCI had contracts to recover and bury the dead in
    New York and Pennsylvania after 9/11 as well and to counsel
    the bereaved in both states.

    Finally, embarrassed and disgusted by the so-called “haggling”
    between FEMA and SCI subsidiary Kenyon International, Louisiana
    Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco took charge and signed Kenyon
    International’s contract to begin the recovery of New Orleans dead.
    The contract is ongoing, though the official number still has not
    topped 2,000. But if anyone believes the official number, I’d like
    to sell you the Mississippi River Bridge.

    SCI International has not only settled repeated legal charges for
    its unceremonious disposal of the dead in the U.S.A. for corporate
    profit, but has also rushed to recover remains, count the dead and
    “return effects” in the Bali bombings, the truck bombing at the U.N.
    in Baghdad and nearly every suspicious plane crash in recent history.
    See SCI subsidiary Kenyon International’s list of Disaster Management
    contracts at http://www.kenyoninternational.com/kenyoninternatio.html.

    Now: Opening a new front on the war in Bayview Hunters Point

    The Redevelopment Agency is now fighting hard to open a new
    front in the war right here in San Francisco. If passed, their
    Redevelopment “Concept Plan” for Bayview Hunters Point will
    be an attack of the super-rich, the highly capitalized and corporate
    organized, on the rest of us, especially the poorest and most
    vulnerable, who are, of course, as a result of colonialism in Bayview
    Hunters Point, mostly Black and Brown – 48 percent Black and
    43 percent Brown, precisely. Some Supervisors seem to feel
    uncomfortable about voting against Sophie Maxwell, the only
    Black Supervisor on the Board, and seem confused by what they
    perceive as division within the Black community.

    There is division indeed in Bayview Hunters Point and division
    amongst those of us who will be stuck with the bill for some
    $300 million in reconstruction – property taxes that will be
    diverted from the City’s General Fund to stuff the pockets
    of big developers to “redevelop” Bayview Hunters Point.

    There is also division amongst those of us, throughout San
    Francisco, who will also be breathing the air stirred up when
    bulldozers, backhoes, cranes and the like begin digging into all
    the toxics, including radioactive waste, relentlessly dumped in
    Bayview Hunters Point for the past 60 years, in what is probably
    among the worst of many cases of environmental racism throughout
    this country. Even lying where they are, barely beneath the ground,
    all the toxics dumped in Bayview Hunters Point have already given
    it the highest breast cancer rate per capita in the entire U.S.A.,
    infant mortality rates 2.5 times those of the rest of the city and
    far higher birth defects rates as well. See:
    http://www.sfbayview.com/102704/toxicblight102704.shtml
    http://www.sfbayview.com/020905/healthistheissue020905.shtml
    http://www.sfbayview.com/120804/lennarbuyssupport120804.shtml
    http://www.asaging.org/diversity/EPA_Environment_and_Aging_Report.pdf
    http://www.greenaction.org/hunterspoint/documents/
    TheStateoftheEnvironment090204Final.pdf.

    As to the Supervisors’ fear of voting against Supervisor Sophie Maxwell,
    they should get over it. Fast. Of course Sophie Maxwell is voting with
    the Redevelopment Agency. Hamed Karsai is also the president of
    Afghanistan. Condoleezza Rice is secretary of state. Jalal Talabani
    seems to be the president of Iraq for the moment, and someone
    named Nuri al-Maliki seems to be Iraq’s prime minister-designate,
    also for the moment. All brown-skinned heads of brown-skinned
    countries, but so what?

    Not one of them is calling for a U.S. military or corporate pull-out
    from Afghanistan or Iraq. Black or Brown skin does not disadvantage
    those who side with the highly capitalized and corporate-organized
    super-rich, no more than white skin protects anyone who happens
    to be poor from aggressive military recruitment, toxic employment
    or a nuclear waste dump landing in their back yard.

    I myself grew up in Bremerton, Washington, a town built around the
    Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and, at that time, a far from wealthy,
    mostly white town, though it did have an unusually large Black
    population, which had migrated north, like those who migrated to
    Bayview Hunters Point, to work in the shipyard during World War II.
    Most students I went to high school with did not expect to attend
    college, and most residents seemed to feel that work in the shipyard
    was the best deal they would ever get.

    That meant that speaking out against U.S. wars, the U.S. military and
    U.S. military expenditures made me unpopular at an early age. However,
    after many of those I grew up with died young and two of my own
    brothers contracted cancers in their 40s, I dug in to do some research
    and learned something the Navy had never told us: that Bremerton
    is the final resting and recycling place for all the nuclear-powered
    vessels in the U.S. Navy.

    Some unfortunate U.S. Navy employees remove the spent nuclear fuel
    rods and send them off for disposal in Hanford, Washington, a largely
    white town with high cancer rates and a nuclear enrichment plant that
    was finally shut down due to irreparable contamination, though Hanford
    is still home to the largest nuclear power plant in the U.S.A. I also learned
    that Bremerton is on the path planned for nuclear waste returned to the
    U.S. for reprocessing, like that transported from a major nuclear
    accident in Japan.

    Bremerton, despite having a shipyard much like that in Hunters Point,
    was nevertheless no San Francisco. Not by any means. Though, at least
    to me, it seemed not particularly racist, it was, at that time at least,
    extremely homophobic. Same sex love was something people didn’t
    even talk about, except to whisper, “Oooh ... disgusting; how could
    they do that?” A couple of local college professors and our best high
    school English teacher were all suspect. Bremerton also voted for
    Ronald Reagan and celebrated his election because it was likely to
    mean larger military budgets and thus a bigger budget for the shipyard.

    No such behavior, obviously, would be allowed here. Everyone knows
    that no Republican nor open racist nor homophobe can be elected in
    San Francisco. Nor can anyone supporting a foreign war expect to be
    elected here. However, how many of us believe that these foreign wars
    are really wars between nation states? Capital has long since become
    global, so isn’t it high time that the nation state and its aggressive and
    defensive armies become global as well – as in a United Nations not
    dominated by the nuclear superpowers of the U.N. Security Council?

    Who among us believe that this war fought by American soldiers
    – including the Central American who was the first to die, the
    19-year-old Navajo Indian who was the 1,000th to die, and the
    34-year-old Black Texan who was the 2,000th to die – is really
    a war between nation states, between the United States and the
    nation state of Iraq, possessed by England at the conclusion of
    World War I and turned into a faux European nation state in 1932?

    Most of us, especially those in New Orleans and in Bayview Hunters
    Point, know that this is a war of the corporate super-rich on the rest
    of us, especially, and first, on the poorest and most vulnerable, who,
    by the way, always – always – lack nuclear weapons. Why is it that those
    so evil as to be subjected to the full force of the U.S. military never
    seem to have nuclear weapons?

    Nicaragua had none, nor did El Salvador, Panama, Afghanistan or Iraq.
    Mightn’t that be why Iran and Venezuela dream of having some, and
    the nuclear weapons empowered or nuclear-weapons-capable G-4
    now knock on the door of the U.N. Security Council demanding a seat?

    Now that the 500 yellow cakes of milled uranium ore from French-
    owned mines in Niger have long been discounted, not as French
    controlled yellow cakes mined and milled by miners now sick in Niger,
    but as Saddam Hussein’s imports to create the dreaded WMD, Donald
    Rumsfeld suddenly claims that newly found chemical weapons stores
    must have justified this war on Iraq. Some readers, particularly Gulf
    War vets, http://www.gulfweb.org/doc_show.cfm?ID=527, may have
    ideas about where the chemicals in these weapons came from, but,
    for now, let’s return to the basic question:

    How many of us believe that these foreign wars are really wars between
    nation states? How many of us believe that they are instead, wars of the
    super rich, the highly capitalized and corporate organized, on the rest
    of us, particularly the poorest and most vulnerable, who are, as a result
    of history and whatever else, most often Brown and Black?

    Those of us who believe that the war in Iraq is a war of the super-rich
    on the rest of us, and that the war my young friend Lorie Arsinaux
    Seruntine and many others describe in New Orleans is a front in the
    very same war, that of the super-rich on the rest of us, are also seeing
    that a new front in the very same war has long been opened here in San
    Francisco, by the Redevelopment Agency, which has always represented
    the super rich, the highly capitalized and corporate organized, like the
    Lennar Corp., its chosen “Master Developer” of the Hunters Point Shipyard
    Redevelopment Project, building $100,000 Superfund Condos next to
    a 46-acre nuclear waste dumpsite.

    Or the Catellus Corp., the “Master Developer” of Mission Bay, which
    Sen. Dianne Feinstein and her banker husband Richard Blum own significant
    interests in. Or the Treasure Island Redevelopment contract awarded
    to former Mayor Willie Brown’s two biggest campaign contributors, who
    were guaranteed a 25 percent return on their $40 million investment.
    We, the taxpayers of San Francisco, put up the other $350 million.

    Laurence Pelosi, stepson of House Whip Nancy Pelosi and former campaign
    treasurer for his first cousin, Mayor Gavin Newsome, is also a former vice
    president of a Lennar subsidiary redeveloping the Shipyard. Lennar, a
    corporation based in Florida, about as far from San Francisco as one
    could get, recently “acquired 37 communities in the Phoenix, San Diego
    and Orange County areas,
    http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/04-08-1998/0000628639&EDATE=.

    Does San Francisco want any more of its communities acquired,
    built and/or re-built by the Lennar Corp. or other huge corporate
    “Master Developers” represented by politicians with flagrant conflicts
    of interest that flagrantly break the law against such conflicts of interest
    in the state of California?

    Many of us see, within the Bayview Hunters Point district and without,
    strategic similarities in the wars being waged in Iraq, in New Orleans
    and here in our own home town. (We have been spared the bombs,
    thus far, though not the toxics, especially in Bayview, which may soon
    fill the skies above all of us as whoever is named the next Master
    Developer starts ramming into the Bay Area’s worst toxic dump with
    backhoes, bulldozers, cranes and wrecking balls.)

    Basic strategy in Iraq

    1) Plan to bomb every major city in the country to rubble.

    2) Get your lobbyists – Joseph Allbaugh in the lead – pushing for
    reconstruction contracts even before the first bombs drop. Never
    mind the U.N.

    3) Get the rest of us taxpayers to pay for the bombs and for the
    huge reconstruction contracts won by the corporate lobbyists and
    woefully fulfilled by the winners. Let the national debt – that owed
    by the rest of us, whose assets do not span the globe – soar beyond
    $8 trillion dollars to fill the pockets of the global super-rich, the highly
    capitalized and corporate-organized.

    4) Make sure not to significantly employ or train many Iraqis in the
    reconstruction of next to nothing so as to avoid leaving much money
    behind.

    5) Control local resources, in this case oil, so as to control its price
    on the international market.

    Basic strategy in New Orleans

    1) Let the levees crumble by defunding the Army Corps budget for
    repairing them until three quarters of the city floods.

    2) Stop as many volunteers as possible from getting in to help the
    victims, and stop people – people sharing food and water after the
    floodwaters subsided – from helping each other. Drive them out of
    their homes at gunpoint into the baking hot sun on the Mississippi
    River Bridge and then “evacuate” them, without even asking where
    they might have family or might want to go, and keep barely any
    records of where they have gone.

    3) Get lobbyists – again, with former FEMA Chief Allbaugh turned
    Halliburton, Bechtel, Shaw and SCI lobbyist in the lead – down to the
    Gulf Coast ahead of FEMA Chief Michael Brown or President George Bush.

    4) Get the rest of us to pay millions in sympathy and distraction taxes
    to the Red Cross and then use the rest of our taxes to pay for $2.5 billion
    in hurricane relief to Louisiana energy companies, including Entergy,
    a hugely capitalized new leader in nuclear energy, half a billion in tax
    credits to the gambling industry and similarly huge dollar figures to
    Bechtel, Halliburton, the Shaw Corp. and little-known Circle B Industries,
    a manufacturer of kitschy-coo Western trailer theme parks.

    5) Then, in May, kick most of the poor, mostly Black, mostly scattered
    evacuees off their FEMA vouchers, even though no one but a smattering
    of volunteers have rebuilt anything for them to go home to. They’ll be
    so isolated, damaged and discouraged that they won’t have a lot of
    fight left.

    6) Seize local resources, i.e., the property, which, like all inner city
    property, has highly appreciated with the rising oil prices, long
    commutes and the end of the safe suburban dream.

    Basic strategy in San Francisco and, right now, imminently,
    in Bayview Hunters Point

    1) Pay the Redevelopment Agency to spend 10 years writing
    a “Redevelopment Concept Plan” to destroy a neighborhood neglected
    and assaulted with toxics, 80 percent of the City’s solid waste and
    high level radiation from the National Radiological Defense Laboratory,
    plus a nuclear dumpsite, fallout from weapons tests hauled back
    from the Pacific for 60 years.

    2) Position corporate lobbyists while the “concept plan” is being
    conceptualized.

    3) Then give Mayor Gavin Newsom the right of eminent domain
    and the land grant authority of a king over “redevelopment” building
    contracts for 1,300 plus acres. Rebuild big and fast, making big fast
    profits for huge corporations. Shatter the community; then take the
    money and run.

    4) As in Iraq and New Orleans, make sure not to employ local people
    or contract with local business longer than necessary to satisfy token
    local employment and training requirements, so as to avoid leaving
    any money behind.

    5) As in New Orleans, seize the highly appreciated inner city property.

    6) Make sure San Francisco taxpayers pay companies like Florida-
    based Lennar, Redevelopment’s last big corporate prizewinner, to
    destroy a neighborhood, scatter a lot of our neighbors, and make
    a bundle building a gargantuan planned “community,” totally out
    of character with everything people love about San Francisco –
    unique houses, built one by one, by individuals, and neighborhoods
    that grew as they built those houses, one by one, over the past
    150 years.

    The City – that’s us, supposedly – and the Redevelopment Agency
    will wait to get theirs in increased property taxes, though some
    highly capitalized, corporate-organized members of city government
    aren’t likely to have to wait that long, being members and special
    friends of the super-rich, the highly capitalized and corporate
    organized.

    Will our Bayview Hunters Point Redevelopment Plan money stay
    in the Bayview? Will it develop skills and businesses there and build
    a mutually supportive commercial community that lives beyond the
    big building project?

    Of course not. The money will leave, become further concentrated
    in the hands of fewer corporations – and their local friends – and
    vanish into further mergers, disappear in search of new even larger
    projects – new wars, disasters, even epidemics, and more urban
    “blight” – not high level radiation, but unpainted houses and broken
    porches – all projects of a size large enough to guarantee the rate
    of return required by highly concentrated capital growing ever more
    so. Will the money and the great big plan create community? Of course
    not. Community can only be created by the day-to-day interactions
    of individuals.

    Yes, Black Bayview Supervisor Sophie Maxwell will vote for the plan;
    Sophie was elected the same year thousands of ballots were left
    untended across the street from City Hall and then found floating
    around in the Bay, unreadable. PG&E fought off public power in San
    Francisco that year too. If it passes, the Bayview Hunters Point
    Redevelopment Plan will take care of Sophie – and Gavin Newsome
    – for life. (As though Gavin were not taken care of.) With so much
    patronage, they will never have to raise another campaign dollar
    in their political lives.

    And I’m sure there are plenty of people in Bayview who understandably
    think that this is the best deal they can hope for. I understand that.
    I honestly do. I grew up in a town that felt the Puget Sound Naval
    Shipyard, last resting and recycling place to every nuclear-powered
    vessel in the Navy, was the best deal they were ever gonna get.

    But I myself am far from perfect, and I have to believe that not
    only I, but also Sophie and Gavin and everyone else supporting
    this toxic Redevelopment for the Rich Plan could do better, much
    better, and that we would all be better for it.

    Why not use the same $300 million budgeted for enriching the rich
    to make small 0 percent loans to individual Bayview homeowners
    who can’t get loans for home improvement, despite good credit
    and large amounts of equity in their homes, because banks have
    redlined their mostly Black and Brown neighborhoods?

    Why not use our money to make 0 percent loans to small, local
    developers, those who build a house or two or rehab one building
    at a time, then maybe another, those who have roots in the Bayview
    Hunters Point community, rather than Florida and the global
    corporotacracy?

    Don’t Bayview residents deserve this after being saturated with
    toxics, including high level radiation for all these years, the highest
    breast cancer rate in the entire country and 80 percent of this City’s
    solid waste, pushed out there for chemical dousing before being
    pushed out into the Bay?

    If we’re going to spend $300 million, why not spend it on soil
    remediation, solar installation, community gardening, a community
    food system, electric rail lines, and everything else that might make
    Bayview a stellar example of green reclamation and environmental
    recovery?

    Why not use some of this $300 million to fund scholarships for Bay
    View Hunters Point students to attend the Bay Area’s several excellent
    green colleges and universities to learn all the green skills now much
    in demand in the booming green industries. It takes less than 16 months
    to train a solar installer, and solar business means small business,
    distributed business. So do community gardening, community-based
    food systems and community waste disposal – unlike the Bay Area’s
    disgraceful disposal of all its toxics and most of its solid waste –
    in Bayview Hunters Point.

    Distributed energy means distributed power, energetic and political.
    So does distributed food production and food sales, and so distributed
    waste. If every community in America, including Sea Cliff, Pacific Heights,
    Russian Hill and Noe Valley, kept the nuclear waste – and the solid waste
    they generate – instead of storing or shipping it elsewhere, we’d soon see
    the end of nuclear waste and find a more environmentally friendly way of
    dealing with our own solid waste, in our own neighborhoods. Some aspects
    of life are simply too basic for the oblivious delegation we’ve all indulged
    in for so very long.

    Email Ann Garrison at
    katrinawithoutborders@thefloodnexttime.com.

    Related Article:
    The crashing barge and the deafening silence
    New Orleanians say that Halliburton owned the
    industrial barge that crashed through the levee
    into the Lower Ninth Ward, making way for the
    toxic floodwaters that destroyed neighborhoods
    and lives. A lost dog sits forlornly in front of the
    barge in this photo taken Sept. 22, 2005.
    [sorry I can't post the photo...bw]
    Photo: Jessica Rinaldi, Reuters
    by Ann Garrison
    May 24, 2006
    http://www.sfbayview.com/031506/crashingbarge031506.shtml

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

    5) Are Enrons Bustin' Out All Over?
    By Gretchen Morgenson
    May 28, 2006
    http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/business/yourmoney/28gret.html

    CHIEF executives everywhere probably breathed a sigh of relief last
    week when the Enron verdicts came in. With Kenneth L. Lay, the
    company's former chairman, and Jeffrey K. Skilling, its former
    chief executive, found guilty of fraud and other crimes, maybe
    now we can all move past this corporation-run-amok stuff.Enron,
    after all, was an anomaly, right?

    Sorry, pals. Other news from last week showed that the Enron
    verdicts were, at best, the end of the beginning of this dispiriting
    corporate crime wave. They were certainly not the beginning of its end.

    Last week, for example, investors learned that a throng of former
    executives at Fannie Mae, the mortgage-financing giant, had cooked
    the company's books to generate munificent bonuses for themselves.
    And while this was going on, Fannie's board was AWOL.

    While Fannie Mae has not been charged with criminal wrongdoing,
    the 350-page report issued by the Office of Federal Housing
    Enterprise Oversight, or Ofheo, was a gripping and definitive
    account of the company's $10.6 billion accounting debacle..
    The report confirmed that Fannie Mae is, as its spinmeisters
    say, in "the American Dream business"— for its executives, that is.

    Josh Rosner, an analyst at Graham Fisher & Company, an independent
    financial research firm in New York, has followed Fannie Mae for years.
    The report's revelations were disgraceful on several counts, he said.

    First was the disturbing breadth of Fannie Mae's dubious management
    and accounting practices. "At Enron, it was really three or four
    individuals who were intimately involved in the plan and the
    process and the intent to manipulate," he said. "The number
    of people who are identified as being problematic here is pretty
    staggering."

    More than a dozen executives appear in the report, and Fannie
    Mae's board also comes in for criticism. "Every bit of this report
    says the board was asleep at the switch," Mr. Rosner said.

    For example, the Ofheo report noted that the board was advised
    in 1999 that the company had adjusted its financial statements
    to burnish its 1998 results.

    Notes made by J. Timothy Howard, Fannie Mae's chief financial
    officer, for a January 1999 board meeting stated the following:
    "Taking these adjustments now will mean that we can report
    higher levels of net interest income and guaranty fees over
    the next year or two. That's one reason we made them."

    Ofheo found that the adjustments were meant to mislead
    investors. Perhaps the most shocking tidbit in the Ofheo
    report was its disclosure that Fannie Mae entered into insurance
    contracts to help the company keep its losses artificially low.
    The arrangements had no economic value and did not involve
    any transfer of risk, as insurance typically does. Instead, the
    contracts were designed so that they produced a greater
    benefit to the company if more of its mortgages went into
    foreclosure.

    "Fannie Mae was essentially betting against the American
    dream," Mr. Rosner said. "It is truly disgusting that you had
    a company entering into a sham transaction that had little
    economic benefit but that only paid off if more people had
    their homes foreclosed."

    One of the central players in the manipulation at Fannie
    Mae, according to the Ofheo report, was Franklin D. Raines,
    its chief executive from 1999 to 2004. The report said that
    he not only created an "unethical and arrogant culture" at
    the top of the company, but that more than half of the $90
    million in compensation he hauled in between 1998 and 2003
    was generated by accounting gimmicks that allowed him to
    meet bonus targets artificially.

    Robert Bennett, a lawyer representing Mr. Raines, said in
    a statement last week that the former chairman "never authorized,
    encouraged, or was aware of violations of Generally Accepted
    Accounting Principles (GAAP) at Fannie Mae for the purpose
    of smoothing earnings, reaching bonus targets, or for any other
    improper reason." He noted that Mr. Raines had promised that
    he would hold himself accountable "if it was determined that
    Fannie Mae misapplied accounting rules."

    According to Mr. Bennett's statement, Mr. Raines fulfilled that
    pledge by "retiring early" from Fannie Mae. Volunteering to give
    back portions of his jury-rigged bonuses was not mentioned
    as another way to keep his promise.

    Mr. Rosner said that he found the $400 million fine that Ofheo
    and the Securities and Exchange Commission leveled against
    Fannie Mae to settle the company's accounting shenanigans
    to be disturbingly low. He described the fine as a mere "toll."

    "For a $10.6 billion minimum restatement, for them to have
    to pay $400 million, you may as well tell people 'you can lie
    and here's the dollar figure per lie,' " Mr. Rosner said.

    After the report came out, Daniel H. Mudd, Fannie Mae's chief
    executive said: "We are glad to resolve these matters. We have
    all learned some powerful lessons here about getting things
    right and about hubris and humility. We are a much different
    company than before. But we also recognize that we have
    a long road ahead of us."

    TWO days later, the Enron verdicts were announced. That was
    also when Thomas J. Lehner, director of public policy for the
    Business Roundtable, was testifying on Capitol Hill in defense
    of current practices in executive compensation. Mr. Lehner
    reiterated the Business Roundtable's belief that executive pay
    at most American companies is justified and expressed opposition
    to legislation that would allow shareholders to approve
    compensation plans.

    Mr. Lehner's testimony brought back memories from
    November 2003, when the Business Roundtable announced
    what it called an important initiative on executive pay.
    Mr. Raines, who was chairman of the roundtable's Corporate
    Governance Task Force, said at that time: "Executive compensation
    should reward success and not reward failure."

    Do as I say, not as I do?

    Yes, the long and sorry story of Enron is nearing a close.
    Unfortunately, questionable corporate practices continue apace.
    There is obviously much work to be done — by prosecutors and
    shareholders — before we can be sure that other Enrons will
    not happen.

    Prosecutors know what trails to follow. Shareholders, less
    accustomed to taking such an active role, may not be as certain.

    They should begin by holding directors accountable for trouble
    that occurs on their watch. They should demand that executives
    forfeit compensation generated by fraudulent practices. And they
    must hold their mutual fund managers responsible for proxy
    voting practices that encourage excessive pay and cozy,
    somnambulant boards. If these managers don't vote against
    directors who hand out oversized pay for undersized performance,
    they are part of the problem and should be fired.

    As the Enron jury eloquently told us last week, silence in the face
    of these offenses gives consent.

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

    6) Block the Vote
    New York Times Editorial
    May 30, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/opinion/30tue1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

    In a country that spends so much time extolling the glories
    of democracy, it's amazing how many elected officials go out
    of their way to discourage voting. States are adopting rules that
    make it hard, and financially perilous, for nonpartisan groups
    to register new voters. They have adopted new rules for
    maintaining voter rolls that are likely to throw off many
    eligible voters, and they are imposing unnecessarily tough
    ID requirements.

    Florida recently reached a new low when it actually bullied
    the League of Women Voters into stopping its voter
    registration efforts in the state. The Legislature did this
    by adopting a law that seems intended to scare away
    anyone who wants to run a voter registration drive. Since
    registration drives are particularly important for bringing
    poor people, minority groups and less educated voters
    into the process, the law appears to be designed to keep
    such people from voting.

    It imposes fines of $250 for every voter registration form
    that a group files more than 10 days after it is collected,
    and $5,000 for every form that is not submitted — even if
    it is because of events beyond anyone's control, like a hurricane.
    The Florida League of Women Voters, which is suing to block
    the new rules, has decided it cannot afford to keep registering
    new voters in the state as it has done for 67 years. If a volunteer
    lost just 16 forms in a flood, or handed in a stack of forms
    a day late, the group's entire annual budget could be put at risk.

    In Washington, a new law prevents people from voting if the
    secretary of state fails to match the information on their
    registration form with government databases. There are
    many reasons that names, Social Security numbers and
    other data may not match, including typing mistakes.
    The state is supposed to contact people whose data does
    not match, but the process is too tilted against voters.

    Congress is considering a terrible voter ID requirement as
    part of the immigration reform bill. Senator Mitch McConnell,
    Republican of Kentucky, introduced an amendment to require
    all voters to present a federally mandated photo ID. Even people
    who have been voting for years would need to get a new
    ID to vote in 2008. Millions of people without drivers' licenses,
    including many elderly people and city residents, might fail
    to do so, and be ineligible to vote. The amendment has been
    blocked so far, but voting-rights advocates worry that
    it could reappear.

    These three techniques — discouraging registration drives,
    purging eligible voters and imposing unreasonable ID requirements
    — keep showing up. Colorado recently imposed criminal penalties
    on volunteers who slip up in registration drives. Georgia, one
    of several states to adopt harsh new voter ID laws, had its law
    struck down by a federal court.

    Protecting the integrity of voting is important, but many of these
    rules seem motivated by a partisan desire to suppress the vote,
    and particular kinds of voters, rather than to make sure that
    those who are entitled to vote — and only those who are entitled
    — do so. The right to vote is fundamental, and Congress and
    state legislatures should not pass laws that put an unnecessary
    burden on it. If they do, courts should strike them down.

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

    7) Justices Set Limits on Public Employees' Speech Rights
    By DAVID STOUT
    May 30, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/washington/30cnd-scotus.html?hp&ex=1149048000&en=57d52201086729ae&ei=5094&partner=homepage

    WASHINGTON, May 30 — The Supreme Court declared today,
    in a ruling affecting millions of government employees, that the
    Constitution does not always protect their free-speech rights
    for what they say on the job.

    In a 5-to-4 decision, the court held that public employees'
    free-speech rights are protected when they speak out as citizens
    on matters of public concern, but not when they speak out in the
    course of their official duties.

    Today's ruling, involving a deputy Los Angeles district attorney
    who contended that he had been denied a promotion for
    challenging the legitimacy of a search warrant, came in a case
    that has been closely watched not just by public workers but
    by those who have worried that it could discourage internal
    whistle-blowers from speaking up about government
    misconduct and inefficiency.

    "We hold that when public employees make statements pursuant
    to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens
    for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not
    insulate their communications from employer discipline," Justice
    Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court.

    The court's newest justice, Samuel A. Alito Jr., was in the majority
    as were Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., Justices Antonin Scalia
    and Clarence Thomas.

    The ruling noted the enormous variety of factual situations
    involving relationships between public employers and their
    employees, and it suggested that the particular facts of a case
    must be closely examined.

    In this case, the Los Angeles deputy prosecutor, Richard Ceballos,
    complained to his bosses in early 2000 that after being alerted
    by a defense lawyer, he had found "serious misrepresentations"
    in an affidavit used to obtain a search warrant.

    Discussions with his superiors were heated, and a trial court
    rejected challenges to the warrant. In the aftermath, Mr. Ceballos
    contended, he was reassigned and denied a promotion. He filed
    an employee grievance, which was denied based on a finding
    that he had not suffered any retaliation, despite his claim
    to the contrary.

    Mr. Ceballos took his case to federal district court, which threw
    it out after accepting his employer's argument that the actions
    Mr. Ceballos complained about were explainable by legitimate
    staffing needs. But the United States Court of Appeals for the
    Ninth Circuit reversed the lower court, concluding that
    Mr. Ceballos's free-speech rights had indeed been violated.

    The case, Garcetti v. Ceballos, No. 04-473, was one of a long
    line of cases addressing the rights of public employees and
    surely not the last. When it was argued before the justices
    on Oct. 12, the Bush administration sided with Los Angeles
    County in arguing that if the Ninth Circuit were upheld, public
    employees would in effect get constitutional protection for
    performing their duties "to the dissatisfaction of the employer."

    Employees who think they are unfairly treated should rely
    on Civil Service laws, Los Angeles County said.

    Mr. Ceballos's lawyer argued unsuccessfully that the result
    the government lawyers were seeking would cause an
    unacceptable chilling of the speech of potential whistle-
    blowers. Justice Kennedy was skeptical of that position
    at the time. "You're saying that the First Amendment has
    a function within the government office," he said. "The First
    Amendment isn't about policing the workplace."

    In writing the decision that reversed the Ninth Circuit today,
    Justice Kennedy noted that the Supreme Court has made it
    clear in previous rulings "that public employees do not
    surrender all their First Amendment rights by reason of
    their employment." On the other hand, he wrote, "When
    a citizen enters government service, the citizen by necessity
    must accept certain limitations on his or her freedom."

    The controlling factor in this case, Justice Kennedy wrote,
    was that Mr. Ceballos was acting purely in an official capacity
    when he complained internally about the search warrant.
    "Ceballos wrote his disposition memo because that is part
    of what he was employed to do," Justice Kennedy wrote.
    "He did not act as a citizen by writing it."

    To accept Mr. Ceballos's argument, the majority concluded,
    would be to commit state and federal courts to "a new,
    permanent and intrusive role" overseeing communications
    among government employees and their superiors.

    Dissenting in three separate opinions were Justices John
    Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and
    Stephen G. Breyer.

    "The notion that there is a categorical difference between
    speaking as a citizen and speaking in the course of one's
    employment is quite wrong," Justice Stevens wrote. He said
    the majority ruling could have the "perverse" effect of giving
    public employees an incentive to speak out publicly, as citizens,
    before talking frankly to their superiors.

    And Justice Souter asserted that "private and public interests
    in addressing official wrongdoing and threats to public health
    and safety can outweigh the government's stake in the
    efficient implementation of policy, and when they do public
    employees who speak on these matters in the course of their
    duties should be eligible to claim First Amendment protection."

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

    8) REPORT FROM CENTRO OBRERO
    [How the employer uses immigration papers, or lack thereof, as a
    tool to lower wages, increase hours and speed-up production
    in order to increase their rate of profit at the expense of the
    health and well being of workers...bw]

    The current struggles in our community involve a group of workers at an auto
    parts supplier called Hope International. The company is located in Redford
    and makes parts for Leer and the auto companies. Several workers were fired
    today after the owner was visited by members of the Interfaith Committee for
    Worker Justice, which had spoken to several of the workers. The workers
    originally visited Latinos Unidos, who asked the Interfaith Committee to
    intervene on behalf of the employees of HOPE international. Several of the
    workers expressed an interest in joining the Union, but the company claimed
    the workers had bad social security numbers and fired them after the visit
    from the religious committee.

    Issues in the plant are the same issues we are hearing from workers in many
    work places: higher production expectation of Mexican workers, overall
    discriminatory treatment of workers by managers, in this case who are also
    Mexican. Many of the workers have carpal tunnel syndrome and are working
    with injuries. Most are wearing braces on their wrists. Many have been fired
    for being unable to keep up production levels with injuries.

    The Committee visited the plant last Wednesday to ask that the issues raised
    by the workers be addressed by management. The management responded by
    firing one of its employees on the pretext of having a bad social security
    number. Five more were fired today after the Interfaith Committee visited
    the plant.

    A picket line is planned for Friday morning at the plant, which is located
    at 25215 Glendale, Redford, Michigan, 48239. See you there at 7:00 a.m. Be
    there or be square; the workers are worried about the company calling
    immigration, and if they do, the committees who support the workers will be
    meeting to plan the next move.

    The Lotus International workers have filed a lawsuit for their backwages and
    other unfair labor practices. Centro Obrero and LaSed worked with the group
    when they walked off the job after being told that their wages would be
    decreased and their work load would increase. As it was, they were getting
    paid for forty hours and working 55 per week, according to all the workers
    in this plant located in Canton, Michigan. Health and Safety violations are
    rampant and many of the workers have sustained injuries associated with
    working with chemicals and glass. This company makes plasma tv screens for
    SUVs.

    It seems that the auto part suppliers have Mexican workers and Mexican
    working conditions in the United States, right here in the Motor City. The
    struggle is never over; we are fighting the same fight our grandparents
    fought to bring decent working conditions and be treated as human beings.
    The UAW is working with the HOPE workers; stay tuned. The Interfaith
    Committee for Worker Justice and Centro Obrero will assist in their efforts
    and the entire community must remain vigilant to protect ourselves from
    exploitation and internal vendidos, who surely will have a special place in
    hell.

    Elena Herrada
    Rosendo Delgado por Latinos Unidos

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

    9) Responsible Reform of Immigration Laws Must Protect Working
    Conditions for all Workers in the U.S.
    March 01, 2006
    San Diego, CA
    http://www.aflcio.org/aboutus/thisistheaflcio/ecouncil/ec02272006e.cfm

    Overhaul of our nation’s immigration laws is long overdue. The
    current system is a blueprint for exploitation of workers, both
    foreign-born and native, and is feeding a multimillion dollar
    criminal enterprise at the U.S.-Mexico border.

    America deserves an immigration system that protects all
    workers within our borders—both native-born and foreign—
    and at same time guarantees the safety of our nation without
    compromising our fundamental civil rights and civil liberties.

    Any viable solution to this crisis must address the reasons why
    people are coming to the U.S. Most immigrants come from
    countries where the international development process has
    failed, and many are from countries where International
    Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and trade policies have
    weakened countries’ economies and labor protections, causing
    a devastating impact on all workers. In some developing countries,
    IMF policies have caused public-sector workers to lose their jobs
    and their union protections, forcing them into competition in the
    private sector, where few, if any, jobs are available, driving down
    wages and working conditions even further. Trade agreements
    such as the North American Free Trade Agreement undermine
    the agricultural economies of developing countries, leading
    workers to leave the fields and consider moving north. Without
    rising living standards abroad for workers and the poor,
    the pressure for illegal immigration will continue and escalate.

    At the same time that global forces are pushing workers to
    our borders, judicial and public policies toward immigrants
    have created new so-called pull factors for migration into the
    United States, namely, an incentive for employers to recruit
    undocumented immigrants for economic exploitation. Too
    many employers seek to avoid, evade, and ultimately negate
    U.S. labor and employment laws through the recruitment and
    importation of undocumented workers. The U.S. Supreme
    Court created a powerful new incentive for such exploitation
    by its decision in Hoffman Plastic Compounds v. National Labor
    Relations Board. In that case, the Court determined that an
    undocumented worker is not entitled to back pay – the only
    monetary remedy available to workers under the National
    Labor Relations Act – when he or she is fired illegally for
    trying to organize a union. This has made the cost of
    exploiting immigrants insignificant to unscrupulous employers.
    The end result is that industries that cannot export jobs –
    such as those in construction – are attempting to use flawed
    immigration policies to import the labor standards of
    developing nations into the United States.

    The broken immigration system has allowed employers
    to create an underclass of workers, which has effectively
    reduced working standards for all workers. Immigrant
    workers are over-represented in the highest risk, lowest
    paid jobs, but the exploited immigrants do not work in
    isolation. U.S.-born workers who work side by side with
    immigrants suffer the same exploitation. The U.S. Department
    of Labor, for example, determined the poultry industry – which
    is nearly half African American and half immigrant – was
    100 percent out of compliance with federal wage and hour
    laws. The Department of Labor also estimated more than
    half of the country’s garment factories violate wage and hour
    laws, and more than 75 percent violate health and safety laws.
    Of course, workplaces that are dangerous for immigrant
    workers are equally dangerous for their U.S.-born
    counterparts and co-workers.

    Our failed immigration policies also have encouraged
    employers to use guestworker programs to lower labor
    standards and working conditions for all workers within
    our borders. We’ve seen employers turn tens of thousands
    of permanent, well-paying jobs in the United States into
    temporary jobs through the use of various guestworker
    programs. The temporary guestworker jobs come with few
    or no benefits, lower wages and often are staffed through
    temporary agencies, whose fees come out of workers’ pockets.
    The foreign workers recruited to fill these jobs remain legally
    tied to the employers that recruited them and are thus naturally
    vulnerable to exploitation.

    Guestworker programs, such as the L and H-1B visa programs,
    operate with little employer accountability and to the detriment
    of all professional workers. None of these programs connect
    to the realities of current U.S. labor market conditions. In fact,
    employers are allowed to turn permanent jobs into temporary
    jobs and import workers, despite the unusually high current
    rate of unemployment among professional and technical workers.
    As a result, working conditions for all professional workers have
    suffered: pressures caused by employer exploitation of
    professional guestworkers coupled with the increases in
    outsourcing continue to have a chilling effect on any real
    wage increases for professionals, even those not directly or
    immediately impacted by these matters.

    Immigrant workers, like all workers, should be full social partners.
    We will continue to support effective, credible and enforceable
    rights for all workers, regardless of their country of origin
    or immigration status. At the same time, we will ensure that
    our member mobilization efforts include our immigrant brothers
    and sisters, and ultimately place immigration squarely within
    a progressive and sustainable economic agenda that benefits
    all working families in our nation.

    We hereby renew our call for comprehensive and responsible
    reform of our immigration laws, which must—at a minimum—
    comply with the following standards:

    ¨ Uniform enforcement of workplace standards must be
    a priority. History, economics and common sense dictate that
    exploitation of workers will continue as long, as it makes
    economic sense to do so, to the detriment of U.S.-born and
    foreign-born workers alike. Unfortunately, the lax enforcement
    of labor and employment laws has given too many unscrupulous
    employers the economic incentive to recruit undocumented
    workers, and has penalized those employers who abide by the
    law because it has put them at a competitive disadvantage.

    The only meaningful way to remove that perverse economic
    incentive and to equalize the competitive playing field is to
    ensure that all those who gain the benefit of a worker’s labor,
    whether that worker is an employee or an independent contractor,
    abide by all labor and employment laws. That means that the
    immigration reform law must provide real and enforceable
    remedies for labor and employment law violations that are
    available to all workers, regardless of their immigration status,
    and that there must be a mechanism by which all workers can
    vindicate their rights without having to face restrictive standing
    requirements or meaningless regulatory hurdles;

    ¨ Reforms must provide a path to permanent residency
    for the currently undocumented workers who have paid taxes
    and made positive contributions to their communities.
    Legalization is an important worker protection. History shows
    that legalizing this population benefits all workers: Wages
    and working standards of undocumented workers increased
    significantly after the legalization program of the 1986
    Immigration Reform and Control Act, thereby raising the floor
    for all workers. Without a legalization program, the economic
    incentive to hire and exploit the undocumented will remain,
    to the detriment of U.S. workers who labor in the same
    industries as the undocumented, because all workers will
    see their working conditions plummet.

    ¨ We must reverse the trend of allowing employers to
    turn permanent, full-time year-round jobs into temporary
    jobs through attempts to broaden the size and scope of
    guestworker programs. Longstanding U.S. guestworker
    policy requires that temporary workers can be used only to
    satisfy short-term or seasonal labor needs. The agricultural
    guestworker program, for example, the best known of these
    programs, is designed to satisfy the seasonal needs of
    employers who need to temporarily hire large numbers of
    workers during the growing season, which may be as short
    as six weeks. Similarly, the H2-B program allows non-
    agricultural employers in industries such as landscaping,
    hospitality and crabbing, to hire non-U.S. workers on
    a temporary basis to fill their seasonal needs.

    Guestworker programs are bad public policy and operate
    to the detriment of workers, in the both the public and private
    sector, and of working families in the U.S. The abuses suffered
    by workers in the first such program, the post World-War II
    Bracero program, are well documented. The negative effects
    of the modern versions of the “guestworker” construct—such
    as the H1-B and H2-B programs—are all too evident today.
    Workers around the country are witnessing the transformation
    of formerly well-paying, permanent jobs into temporary jobs
    with little or no benefits, which employers are staffing with
    vulnerable foreign workers who have no real enforceable rights
    through the guestworker programs. These modern programs
    have had a major and substantial detrimental effect on
    important sectors of our economy.

    The massive expansion of guestworker programs contemplated
    by current legislation before the Senate—which would more than
    quadruple the number of foreign workers admitted annually
    and would allow employers to import workers into the public
    and private sector--will not only harm U.S. workers, but also
    represents a radical and dark departure from our long-held
    vision of a democratic U.S. society. We are not a nation of “guests,”
    who, by definition, have only short-term and short-lived interests,
    but a nation of people who believe in investing in our communities,
    in our future, in the future of our children, and in our democracy.
    It defies everything that our nation stands for to legitimize
    a system that forces our communities to simply be “hosts”
    for “guests” who are only here to lend their labor, and who have
    no reason to become invested in that community, and who will
    never have a voice in their future within that community.
    We are not a nation of guests; we are a nation of citizens.

    In our view, there is no good reason why any immigrant who
    comes to this country prepared to work, to pay taxes, and to
    abide by our laws and rules should be denied what has been
    offered to immigrants throughout our country’s history, a path
    to legal citizenship. To embrace instead the creation of a permanent
    two-tier workforce, with non-U.S. workers relegated to second-class
    “guestworker” status, would be repugnant to our traditions and our
    ideals and disastrous for the living standards of working families.

    We fully support the right of all workers to bargain collectively,
    and we fully support and endorse the existing arrangement within
    the H2A program that the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC)
    negotiated with the North Carolina Growers Association, which
    provides the protections of a collective bargaining agreement
    to Mexican H2A workers at the Mt. Olive, N.C., facility.

    ¨ Long-Term Labor Shortages Should be Filled With Workers
    with Full Rights. We recognize that our economy may face real
    labor shortages in the coming years, as the baby boomer generation
    retires. Instead of relying on a construct that guarantees the
    deterioration of working conditions in the U.S., we should focus
    on a meaningful solution that guarantees full workplace rights
    for all workers, both foreign-born and native, and also permits
    employers to hire foreign workers to fill proven labor shortages.
    The solution is simple: Congress should revise the permanent
    employment-based visas system and devote more resources
    to removing processing delays.

    Employment-based admissions for permanent visas (commonly
    known as “green cards”) are subject to labor certification provisions:
    the employer must show that there are not sufficient workers in the
    U.S. who are able, willing, qualified and available at the time and
    at the place where the foreign worker is to perform the job.
    To demonstrate this adequately, the employer must offer the job
    at a prevailing wage, and must attest that the employment of the
    foreign worker will not adversely affect the wages and working
    conditions of similarly employed workers in the U.S. Congress
    has arbitrarily set the number of these visas at 140,000 annually.
    That approach should be changed so that the number of visas
    available responds to actual, demonstrated labor shortages,
    which will satisfy employers’ needs for workers, and will prevent
    the creation of a secondary class of workers and residents,
    because the new foreign workers will have full employment
    rights and the promise of a permanent future in our democracy.

    · Reform of immigration laws must consider the root causes
    of migration, and must take into account the global economic
    policies, as well as U.S. foreign policy that are pushing workers
    to migrate. Without rising living standards abroad for workers
    and the poor, the pressure for illegal immigration will continue.
    U.S. foreign policy, as well as trade and globalization policies,
    must be grounded upon a coherent national economic strategy,
    as described in An Economic Agenda for Working Families,
    adopted at the AFL-CIO’s 2005 Convention.

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

    10) Exxon Mobil Shareholders Reject Effort to Restrain Executive Pay
    DALLAS, May 31 (AP) — Shareholders of the Exxon Mobil
    Corporation, whose last chief executive took home $147
    million when he retired, overwhelmingly rejected resolutions
    to rein in compensation at the company's annual meeting on
    Wednesday...Mr. Raymond was paid $49 million in cash and
    restricted stock last year, then got a $98 million lump-sum
    pension payment.
    By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
    June 1, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/01/business/01exxon.html

    DALLAS, May 31 (AP) — Shareholders of the Exxon Mobil
    Corporation, whose last chief executive took home $147 million
    when he retired, overwhelmingly rejected resolutions to rein
    in compensation at the company's annual meeting on Wednesday.

    But the chairman and chief executive, Rex W. Tillerson, said
    some shareholders sent a signal by withholding votes for
    directors who approved the pay and pension packages
    of the former chief, Lee R. Raymond.

    Mr. Raymond was paid $49 million in cash and restricted
    stock last year, then got a $98 million lump-sum pension payment.

    In comments after the meeting, Mr. Tillerson, who took
    over in January after Mr. Raymond retired, said it was up
    to Exxon Mobil directors to determine his retirement
    package. He has not asked them to limit his compensation,
    but "they know how to reach me," he said.

    As in the past, Wednesday's meeting attracted environmental
    protesters who accuse the company of financing groups
    that question the link between global warming and the
    burning of hydrocarbons such as oil and coal.

    Most of the 13 shareholder resolutions — all opposed by the
    board — dealt with corporate governance issues, however,
    including three on executive and director compensation.
    None of the three got more than 12.9 percent support,
    according to the company.

    A firm that advises large shareholders recommended
    withholding votes for four directors on Exxon Mobil's
    compensation committee. The treasurer of North Carolina
    had indicated this week that his state's pension fund would
    withhold votes from five directors in protest over
    Mr. Raymond's compensation.

    The four compensation committee directors received 79
    to 82 percent of the votes cast, while the other eight directors
    were re-elected with percentages in the mid-90's, a spokesman said.

    A resolution to require that directors get a majority vote to be
    elected passed with 52 percent support. Mr. Tillerson said the
    board would consider the issue but made no promises about
    the outcome.

    ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*--------
    LINKS ONLY
    ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*--------

    Another Hunters Point Shipyard cover-up
    by Ebony Colbert
    http://www.sfbayview.com/053106/shipyardcoverup053106.shtml

    Danny Schechter | Media Crimes Sanitize War Crimes in Iraq
    Danny Schechter writes, "As events in Iraq continue to slip from bad
    to worse, the good news brigade is scrambling for new stories
    ('anything, give me anything') to shore up what's left of public
    support for a bloody war without end."
    http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/060206A.shtml

    Union: Scrapping pacts not needed
    By LARRY RINGLER Tribune Chronicle
    NEW YORK — Union attorneys spent Friday afternoon in Delphi
    Corp.’s bankruptcy hearing building a case that the company
    doesn’t need to scrap its labor pacts to cut labor costs because
    the unions have agreed to cut jobs.
    June 2, 2006
    http://www.tribune-chronicle.com/news/articles.asp?articleID=4353

    FOCUS | New "Iraq Massacre" Tape Emerges
    The BBC has uncovered new video evidence that US forces may
    have been responsible for the deliberate killing of 11 innocent
    Iraqi civilians. The video appears to challenge the US military's
    account of events that took place in the town of Ishaqi in March.
    The US said at the time four people died during a military
    operation, but Iraqi police claimed that US troops had deliberately
    shot the 11 people.
    http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/060206Z.shtml

    Dog Handler Convicted in Abu Ghraib Abuse
    By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
    June 2, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/02/us/02verdict.html

    Judging Whether a Killer Is Sane Enough to Die
    By RALPH BLUMENTHAL and ADAM LIPTAK
    June 2, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/02/us/02execute.html

    As Economy Slows, Mixed Data on Inflation
    By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
    June 2, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/02/business/02econ.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

    British Police Shoot Man in Counterterrorism Raid
    By ALAN COWELL
    June 2, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/02/world/europe/01cnd-london.html?hp&ex=1149307200&en=e5e1a6eb00a1e50e&ei=5094&partner=homepage

    Jobs Report Signals Cooling Economy
    By JEREMY W. PETERS
    June 2, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/02/business/02cnd-jobs.html?hp&ex=1149307200&en=e6846974a241a5f6&ei=5094&partner=homepage

    Afghans Call for Trial of U.S. Troops
    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0531-11.htm

    Chavez's 'citizen militias' on the march
    By Mike Ceaser
    In Caracas, Venezuela
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/americas/4635187.stm

    Highest Court in New York Confronts Gay Marriage
    By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
    June 1, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/01/nyregion/01marriage.html

    Black and Hispanic Home Buyers Pay Higher Interest
    on Mortgages, Study Finds
    By ERIK ECKHOLM
    June 1, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/01/us/01minorities.html

    Bush Urges Congress to Find Compromise on Immigration
    By JOHN O'NEIL
    June 1, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/01/washington/01cnd-bush.html?hp&ex=1149220800&en=8908c9b5448ad46c&ei=5094&partner=homepage

    The List: The World's Water Crises
    If oil was the resource of the 20th century, then the 21st century belongs
    to water. The lack of clean water and basic sanitation already curbs world
    economic growth by $556 billion a year, according the World Health
    Organization. FP looks at four countries struggling to quench their thirst.
    http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3473

    US probe finds Haditha victims were shot:NYT
    Wed May 31, 2006 09:34 AM ET
    http://go.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=12381467&src=eDialog/GetContent

    Well-Intentioned Food Police May Create Havoc With Children's Diets
    By HARRIET BROWN
    May 30, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/health/nutrition/30essa.html

    Chief Named for Troubled G.M. Unit
    By NICK BUNKLEY
    May 31, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/31/automobiles/31auto.html

    Is It Tableware or a Leading Indicator?
    By DAVID LEONHARDT
    May 31, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/31/business/31leonhardt.html

    Treasury Nominee Faces a Change in Pay and Control
    By ERIC DASH
    May 31, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/31/business/31pay.html?hp&ex=1149134400&en=10dc956562f947be&ei=5094&partner=homepage

    Files Contradict Account of Raid in Iraq
    By ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID S. CLOUD
    May 31, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/31/world/middleeast/31haditha.html?hp&ex=1149134400&en=ba9330564ff54260&ei=5094&partner=homepage

    FUTUREOFTHEUNION.COM LINKS:
    The Flies Will Lay Their Eggs
    http://futureoftheunion.com/?p=2729

    Basic Economics
    http://futureoftheunion.com/?p=2762

    Delphi Workers Prepare Their Delegates
    http://futureoftheunion.com/?p=2726

    Soldiers Of Solidarity Message Put To Music
    http://futureoftheunion.com/?p=2765

    The Legacy Of The Soldiers of Solidarity
    http://futureoftheunion.com/?p=2747

    Jobs Bank Update
    http://futureoftheunion.com/?p=2746

    A Dictator, Not A Visionary
    http://futureoftheunion.com/?p=2740

    Workers Will Rule When They Work To Rule
    http://futureoftheunion.com/?p=2709

    Men Are Born To Labor And The Bird To Fly
    http://futureoftheunion.com/?p=2687

    Keanu Reeves Slams Police State As Scanner Lights Up Cannes
    Media suggest films show world is in sorry state
    Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com | May 30 2006
    Keanu Reeves has slammed the modern day police state and surveillance
    society, a centerpiece of the upcoming film in which he stars, during
    promotion for A Scanner Darkly at the Cannes film festival.
    http://www.prisonplanet.com/index.html

    Books on Science
    Who Should Decide Land Use? U.S. Government Already Does
    By CORNELIA DEAN
    May 30, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/science/earth/30book.html

    U.S. Is Sending Reserve Troops to Iraq's West
    By DAVID S. CLOUD
    May 30, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/world/middleeast/30troops.html

    Asbestos - The Deadly Legacy
    By John Kelly   
    Tuesday, 30 May 2006
    http://www.marxist.com/asbestos-deadly-legacy300506.htm

    FOCUS | Dahr Jamail: Countless My Lai Massacres in Iraq
    Dahr Jamail argues that "just like Abu Ghraib, while the media
    spotlight shines squarely on the Haditha massacre, countless
    atrocities continue daily, conveniently out of the awareness
    of the general public. Torture did not stop simply because the
    media finally decided, albeit in horribly belated fashion,
    to cover the story, and the daily slaughter of Iraqi civilians
    by US forces and US-backed Iraqi "security" forces had not
    stopped either.
    http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/053006Z.shtml

    Where's the Petite Department? Going the Way of the Petticoat
    "But despite what executives say, overall sales of petite clothing
    sizes have grown in the past several years, reaching $10 billion.
    So petite women suspect another culprit: high-end department
    stores that they say view the petite consumer as older,
    unfashionable and undesirable."
    By MICHAEL BARBARO
    May 28, 2006

    The Price of Iraq
    New York Times Editorial
    May 28, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/opinion/28sun1.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

    Beware: Predators prowling Bayview streets!
    It has been brought to my attention by several relatives and family
    friends that the streets of Bayview Hunters Point have been invaded
    by PREDATORS! What is taking place is that many elderly homeowners,
    while out doing minor tasks in front of or near their homes, are being
    approached and told, “I’ll buy your house for $25,000! Just sign here.”
    http://www.sfbayview.com/052406/beware052406.shtml

    FOCUS | Fernando Suarez del Solar: Memorial Day -
    What Is this Special Day?
    Fernando Suarez del Solar wonders what has happened to Memorial Day:
    "In spite of all of the wars that have taken thousands of our soldiers
    and millions of innocents, especially children, the world is still at
    war, and people everywhere suffer under unjust political systems where
    there is no freedom."
    http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/052806Y.shtml

    DU: A Scientific Perspective/ An Interview With LEUREN MORET, Geoscientist
    By W. Leon Smith/Nathan Diebenow
    May 13, 2005, 07:20
    http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/printer_17578.shtml

    Investigation of Seminal Plasma Hypersensitivity Reactions
    Authors: Jonathan Bernstein; CINCINNATI UNIV OH
    http://www.stormingmedia.us/99/9904/A990473.html

    Title: Investigation of Seminal Plasma Hypersensitivity Reactions
    Synopsis: This study looked at Gulf War veterans and their sexual
    partners who experienced a burning sensation after contact with semen.
    http://deploymentlink.osd.mil/deploymed/projectDetail.jsp?projectId=391®ion=0&researchTopic=2&majorDeployment=0&researchSubTopic=5

    Is burning semen syndrome a variant form of seminal plasma
    hypersensitivity?
    Bernstein JA, Perez A, Floyd R, Bernstein IL.
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12517652&dopt=Abstract

    With Illegal Immigrants Fighting Wildfires, West Faces a Dilemma
    By KIRK JOHNSON
    May 28, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/us/28fire.html?hp&ex=1148788800&en=155ab953dd49f34a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

    Chavez One, Bush Zero
    by Audrey Sasson; May 22, 2006
    ZNet | Venezuela
    http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=45&ItemID=10308

    Military to Report Marines Killed Iraqi Civilians
    By THOM SHANKER, ERIC SCHMITT and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
    May 26, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/26/world/middleeast/26haditha.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

    Arundhati Roy on India, Iraq, U.S. Empire and Dissent
    Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006
    http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/23/1358250

    Gilded Paychecks | Ties That Bind
    With Links to Board, Chief Saw His Pay Soar
    By JULIE CRESWELL
    May 24, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/24/business/24board.html

    Iraq War Provoking Terror: Amnesty International
    "The war on terror and the way it has unfolded is actually premised on
    the principle that by eroding human rights you can reinforce security,"
    said Amnesty International's Secretary-General Irene Khan. "And that is
    why as part of the war on terror we see restrictions being placed on
    civil liberties around the world."
    http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/052306A.shtml

    Ford Layoffs Hit
    Black Auto Workers Hardest
    CHRIS NISAN / Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder
    http://www.mindfully.org/Industry/2006/Ford-Black-Layoffs1feb06.htm

    Rice's Appearance Draws Protests in Boston
    By KATIE ZEZIMA
    May 23, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/23/us/23boston.html

    Nigerian Monkeys Drop Hints on Language Origin
    By NICHOLAS WADE
    May 23, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/23/science/23lang.html

    Judge Steps In for Poor Inmates Without Justice
    By LESLIE EATON
    The public defenders' office, run not by City Hall but by a parish
    board, is basically broke. Louisiana, alone among the states, relies
    mainly on local court fees — mostly surcharges on traffic tickets —
    to finance its public defenders, according to the National Legal Aid
    and Defender Association.
    It is a financing system that Judge Hunter and Calvin Johnson,
    the chief judge of the criminal court in New Orleans, have recently
    found to be unconstitutional because it forces poor people to pay
    for the system. The Louisiana attorney general's office says it plans
    to appeal those decisions.
    May 23, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/23/us/23court.html

    Failed Amnesty Legislation of 1986 Haunts the
    Current Immigration Bills in Congress
    By RACHEL L. SWARNS
    May 23, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/23/washington/23amnesty.html

    Dahr Jamail | Easily Dispensable: Iraq's Children
    Dahr Jamail implores us to understand: "That women and children
    suffer the most during times of war is not a new phenomenon. It is
    a reality as old as war itself. What Rumsfeld, Rice and other war
    criminals of the Cheney administration prefer to call "collateral
    damage" translates in English as the inexcusable murder of and
    other irreparable harm done to women, children and the elderly
    during any military offensive."
    http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/052206A.shtml

    Breaking point: Inside Story of the Guantanamo Uprising
    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0521-01.htm

    Americans Don't Like President Bush Personally Much Anymore, Either
    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0521-04.htm

    The Dixie Chicks: America Catches Up With Them
    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0521-05.htm

    Iraq is Disintegrating as Ethnic Cleansing Takes Hold
    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0520-04.htm

    McCain Gets Cantankerous Reception at Commencement
    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0520-05.htm

    AMID WAR, TROOPS SEE SAFETY IN REENLISTING
    By Faye Fiore
    The military offers steady wages, housing and a health plan
    -- benefits that many service members find scarce in civilian life.
    Los Angeles Times
    May 21, 2006
    http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-enlist21may21,0,3677295.story?coll=la-home-headlines

    Gonzales Says Prosecutions of Journalists Are Possible
    By ADAM LIPTAK
    The government has the legal authority to prosecute journalists
    for publishing classified information, Attorney General Alberto
    R. Gonzales said yesterday.
    May 22, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/22/washington/22gonzales.html

    Rising Ocean Temperatures Threaten Florida's Coral Reef
    By RICK LYMAN
    May 22, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/22/us/22coral.html

    Poisoned Air Killed 3 Miners, Tests Suggest
    By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
    Filed at 1:19 p.m. ET
    May 22, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Mine-Explosion.html?hp&ex=1148356800&en=30604d9e34a2fe75&ei=5094&partner=homepage

    Supreme Court Backs Police in Emergencies
    By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
    Filed at 11:55 a.m. ET
    May 22, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Scotus-Police-Search.html

    Middle America: Welcome to the Center of the USA
    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0519-05.htm

    4 Guantanamo Prisoners Attempt Suicide in One Day
    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0519-01.htm

    ALERT - EXTREME DANGER TO FOOD MANUFACTURING WORKERS
    The Occupational Health Branch is trying to reach workers in the
    food flavoring manufacturing industry, their employers, and their
    health care providers, to alert them about two cases of a life-
    threatening lung disease, bronchiolitis obliterans, among workers
    (both English fluent Latinos) in companies located in southern
    California. Food flavoring companies that may have exposed
    workers are also located in northern California.  The disease
    is associated with inhalation exposure to diacetyl, a butter
    flavoring chemical. The lung disease is also known as "microwave
    popcorn lung disease" based on cases among workers
    in that industry.
    http://www.worksafe.org/news/3_14_06.cfm

    Lawsuit Is Filed to Force FEMA to Continue Housing Vouchers
    By SHAILA DEWAN
    May 20, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/20/us/20vouchers.html

    Explosion at Kentucky Mine Kills 5 Workers
    By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
    May 21, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/us/21mine.html?hp&ex=1148184000&en=adc4b3951c5f9259&ei=5094&partner=homepage

    Ecological Extortion in the National Forests
    http://www.counterpunch.org/juel05192006.html

    New Century Of Thirst For World's Mountains
    By the century's end, the Andes in South America will have less than
    half their current winter snowpack, mountain ranges in Europe and
    the U.S. West will have lost nearly half of their snow-bound water,
    and snow on New Zealand's picturesque snowcapped peaks will
    all but have vanished.
    Source: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
    May 19, 2006
    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060519102250.htm

    Dead soldiers flown home as British presence in Basra is questioned
    By Kim Sengupta
    Five military coffins, bearing the latest British dead from Iraq, arrived
    home yesterday. At the same time, 105 people died during two days
    of carnage in Afghanistan the next battleground for British forces.
    Published: 19 May 2006
    http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article548113.ece

    Detective Was 'Walking Camera' Among City Muslims, He Testifies
    By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
    May 19, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/19/nyregion/19herald.html

    Senate Votes to Set English as National Language
    By CARL HULSE
    May 19, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/19/washington/19immig.html

    Italy Calls Iraq War 'Grave Error'
    By IAN FISHER
    May 19, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/19/world/europe/19italy.html

    Monday, May 22, 2006
     

    BAUAW NEWSLETTER, FRIDAY, MAY 26, 2006

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

    People United For a General and Unconditional Amnesty

    Barrio Unido Por una Amnistia General e Incondicional

    474 Valencia Street

    San Francisco, CA 94110

    Contact Persons:

    Cristina Gutierrez: 415-431-9945

    Kati Sanchez: 415-368-2576

    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

    No matter what the decisions the lawmakers make to "reform" the
    immigration laws, we know that they will make some immigrant
    workers "legal" and others "illegal."

    We will hold a rally June 19, 2006 at 5:00 p.m. at Palou Avenue
    and Third Street in San Francisco to demand General and
    Unconditional Amnesty for All Immigrants. We hold this rally
    in celebration of the date of June 19th, 141 years ago when
    it was declared the end of slavery by Black people in this country.

    Our Black brothers and sisters continue to be a slave of racism
    and injustice just as we immigrants. And the government
    continues to put on Death Row the great leaders of the Black
    movement such as Mumia Abu-Jamal.

    We make a call for unity at this rally in the Bayview so we can
    honor June 19th by making a commitment to sow the first
    seeds together in order to make a reality the emancipation
    of the Black people and the immigrants and to demand the
    immediate freedom of the great leader of the Black people,
    Mumia Abu-Jamal, innocent on Death Row.

    Related:

    Senate Passes Comprehensive Immigration Bill
    By RACHEL L. SWARNS
    May 25, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/25/washington/25cnd-immig.html?hp&ex=1148616000&en=510a31f6777e6e54&ei=5094&partner=homepage

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    ABOLISHING JROTC in SAN FRANCISCO SCHOOLS
    There will be a special meeting in July when
    the School Board will vote on this resolution.
    The meeting date is to be announced.
    School District Office
    555 Franklin St
    San Francisco
    415/241-6427

    Report and Open letter to the Board of Education regarding JROTC:

    At the first reading of the resolution to rid the schools
    of JROTC on the basis of the policy of "Don't ask, don't
    tell" that discriminates against gay's in the military, which
    was presented to the Board of Education meeting on May 23, the
    JROTC teachers (all retired military officers) mobilized students
    to speak on behalf of JROTC. Carole Seligman and I spoke to many
    students in the lobby before the meeting began. Repeatedly they
    expressed that they loved the program. It gives them confidence
    in themselves, provides a supportive environment, encourages good
    scholarship in school, and encourages comradeship among the members.

    So much so, that a young girl had a silver-colored chain with a tiny
    silver-colored and diamond studded bullet. I really couldn't believe
    it was a bullet so I asked her if it was. She said, "oh! this? Yes,
    it's a bullet. You know, it's between me and my friend, you know,
    like, 'I'll take a bullet for you!'"

    Need I say more about the virtues of JROTC?

    Unfortunately, the resolution that follows says nothing of this
    aspect of JROTC. Nothing about the war. Nothing about young people
    being taught to "take a bullet for each other". Nothing about the
    realities of war. Nothing about asking students, gay or not, to
    risk their lives and take the lives of Iraqis for this inhuman
    and illegal war brought about by an inhuman and illegal
    government.

    It was announced by gay supporters of JROTC at the meeting
    that they expected the military to lift the prohibition on gays
    in the military this year. If this is true this will make this
    resolution obsolete before it can ever take effect. Are we to cheer
    that our gay brothers and sisters will be able to fight in this war?
    What is our plan to convince young gay and straight students that they can't
    "be all they can be" if they are dead; or legless and armless; or with the
    blood of too many dead in their hearts and head; or permanently
    brain-damaged; burnt or blinded by exploding eyeballs and deafened by
    exploding eardrums? Who will tell them of depleted uranium illness?
    Who will tell them that although there is a very high survival rate for
    our injured soldiers there is also a very high rate of survival with such
    catastrophic injury and illness? Who will tell them that they are more
    likely to be homeless after serving than in college? Who will tell
    them about the logic of "following orders" and a "chain of command"
    Instead of thinking and reasoning and making decisions for themselves
    leads to disaster?

    If you haven't seen it, I suggest you watch the HBO special,
    "Baghdad ER". In fact it should be shown to all of our students
    in middle and high school. (It's far too explicit for very young children.)

    We and the majority of the voters in San Francisco want
    the military out of our schools immediately!

    Here are my comments for the meeting. I was cut off midway
    through my timed one-minute delivery. The resolution
    follows my comments. Please look at it again and see that a
    vital antiwar message is missing from it and correct and
    amend the resolution immediately to reflect opposition
    to the militarization of our schools and the offering up of our
    students as cannon fodder for this bloodthirsty and greedy
    government and it's military might.

    We want a world without war! How can we teach children
    that violence is not the answer when the most powerful
    and influential adults in the world--our government--
    uses it as their ultimate tool to gain wealth and power
    for themselves.

    You must take a stronger antiwar stand! I don't care how many
    antiwar resolutions you have passed. The proof of the pudding
    is in the military presence in our schools!

    Sincerely,
    Bonnie Weinstein

    Addressed to the President, Vice President and the
    Commissioners of the San Francisco Board of Education:

    I commend the board members who are bringing the motion
    to rid our schools of JROTC forward. This is in line with the
    wishes of the majority of the voters in San Francisco who
    voted to get the military out of our schools this past November.
    The military’s policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” is unacceptable.
    Our obligation is to educate our children against prejudice
    of all kinds—not turn a blind eye—and turn a bigoted military
    loose on them. But that is not the only reason we want the
    military and JROTC out.

    We want our children to engage in physical education, in fact,
    to find joy in it; and to study history—to learn how to avoid
    the mistakes of the past; to gain satisfaction and experience
    joy in learning so they can contribute to human knowledge
    themselves as well as help fashion a better world!

    We want our children to feel responsible to her or his
    community. We want students to gain a sense of
    responsibility and pride in a job well done by
    contributing to the life and well being of their school,
    their home and their community.

    We don’t want to teach our children to blindly obey
    a chain of command or to glorify war. In fact, it is our
    duty to teach our children that blind obedience, violence,
    greed, bigotry, prejudice, human inequality, torture, pre-
    emptive war, profiting off of war and injustice, inequality
    in the application of the law, and poverty in the face of
    fantastic wealth is wrong, inhuman and intolerable and
    we can do better!

    We must rid our schools of the military and JROTC, hire
    enough Physical Education teachers immediately, and
    re-dedicate our schools to education and human
    development—and reject the road to war and militarism.

    Just one more thing, I want to correct the notion that the
    new school policy regarding military recruiters has resulted
    in less military presence in our schools. In fact, it has resulted
    in more. Many schools did not invite the military on Career Day
    and now they must, and that is a shame, because we want the
    military out! We don’t want our children to study war or bigotry
    any more! Not for one more second!

    Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War,
    www.bauaw.org, 415-824-8730

    The resolution:

    Introduction of Replacement Program for JROTC
    --Commissioners Mark Sanchez and Dan Kelly

    WHEREAS: It is the official policy of the San Francisco Unified School
    District to oppose discrimination of any kind against any group
    of people; and

    WHEREAS: The District’s opposition to discrimination is articulated
    in Board Policy 5163, which provides that the San Francisco Unified
    School District shall not discriminate on the basis of race, religion,
    creed, national origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, or handicapping
    condition in the provision of educational programs, services, and
    activities, in the admission of students to school programs and
    activities; and in the recruitment and employment of personnel; and

    WHEREAS: The San Francisco Unified School District deplores the
    "Don’t Ask Don’t Tell" policy of the U.S. Department of Defense,
    which requires the discharge of any member of the armed forces
    if such service member has engaged in "homosexual acts," has
    revealed that s/he is a homosexual or bisexual, or the member
    has married or attempted to marry a person known to be of the
    same biological sex; and

    WHEREAS: The District believes that the "Don’t Ask Don’t Tell"
    policy is an unjust, indefensible, unintelligent, state-sanctioned
    act of homophobia; and

    WHEREAS: The San Francisco Unified School District cannot justify
    committing any funding to a JROTC program because its connection
    to the U.S. Department of Defense suggests that discrimination
    against some groups is tolerable.

    THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED: That the Board of Education of the
    San Francisco Unified School District calls for the phasing –out
    of the JROTC program of the United States Department of Defense
    on San Francisco Unified School District campuses; and

    BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED: That the Board of Education instructs
    District staff to provide all JROTC units at SFUSD campuses with
    one year notice that the programs will be terminated at all SFUSD
    campuses after the 2006-2007 school year; and

    BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED: That the Board of Education calls for the
    creation of a special task force to develop alternative, creative,
    career-driven programs which provide students with a greater
    sense of purpose and respect for self and humankind.

    Board has plan to oust ROTC from S.F. schools
    Members want to cut program over 'Don't ask, Don't tell'
    The students engage in physical training such as running, push-ups
    and jumping jacks; and discipline training such as marching,
    drill-practice and using a mock chain of command. They also
    study military history and perform community service.
    - Heather Knight, Chronicle Staff Writer
    Tuesday, May 23, 2006
    http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/05/23/MNGIOJ0G7P1.DTL

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

    San Francisco Unified School District
    Office of Public Engagement and Information
    555 Franklin Street, Room 305 ● San Francisco, CA 94102
    Tel: 415.241.6565 ● Fax: 415.241.6036 ● www.sfusd.edu
    http://portal.sfusd.edu/data/news/pdf/ACF1D3.pdf

    Immigration Rally
    Afternoon Report

    May 1 Update

    - The support plan for schools today went smoothly due to the
    collaboration of central office departments and preparation over
    the last week.

    - Having analyzed the substitute requests before and during
    the weekend, the district was prepared to provide coverage for
    the roughly 750 teachers and staff who were absent today,
    Monday, May 1.

    - Over the course of the day, principals provided
    the central office “Command Center” with updated
    student enrollment, substitute and teacher absence
    information. Based on this information, central office
    staff and substitutes were re-deployed to sites that
    needed additional support. At impacted school sites,
    teachers and principals worked in collaboration with
    central office support staff to provide coverage for
    all students.

    - Bus transportation lines were covered for all
    schools with minimum disruption, though there were some
    delays in the city due to the re-routing of traffic.

    - 12,349 students were absent today from the school district
    (approximately 22%).

    - On a typical school day, 5% of students are absent in the district.

    - 5311 students were absent from elementary and K-8 schools (20%)

    - 2877 students were absent from middle schools (26%)

    - 4161 students were absent from high schools (21%)

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

    Guantanamo Poets
    May 21, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/weekinreview/21read1.html

    Prisons make poets of many, no less so the detainees
    of Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A few of their poems have been
    declassifed by the Pentagon and are published in this week's
    issue of Bookforum. Marc D. Falkoff, a lawyer who has worked
    with the prisoners, arranged for the translations from Arabic
    and Pashto. The first one reprinted here is by an ethnic Uighar,
    a Chinese Muslim. The second is an excerpt from a longer
    work by a Yemeni detainee.

    "Even if the Pain"
    By Saddiq Turkestani

    Even if the pain of the wound increases
    There must be a remedy to treat it.
    Even if the days in prison endure
    There must be a day when we will get out.

    From "The Truth"
    By Imad Abdullah Hassan

    O History, reflect. I will now
    Disclose the secret of secrets.
    My song will expose the damned oppression,
    And bring the system to collapse.
    The tyrants, full-equipped and numbered,
    Stand unmoved in the face of the Light.
    They proceed in the Dark, led by
    The Devil, in pride and arrogance.
    They have turned their land of peace
    Into a home for hypocrites.
    They have exchanged piety
    For cheap commodity.

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

    More Abu Ghraib Photos Posted
    Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches
    May 21, 2006
    http://dahrjamailiraq.com

    We have posted a new collection of Abu Ghraib images
    from a variety of sources.

    Afterdowningstreet.org
    http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/
    supplied the images.

    We have decided to post these in our continuing effort
    to show the true face of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

    Click here

    http://209.97.202.24/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=abu_ghraib_torture_pictures_images_iraq_war

    to view these images.

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

    SCROLL DOWN TO READ:
    EVENT ANNOUNCEMENTS
    GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS
    ARTICLES IN FULL
    LINKS ONLY

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

    "In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act."
    --George Orwell

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

    Great Counter-Recruitment Website
    http://notyoursoldier.org/article.php?list=type&type=14

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

    [Please read, respond and forward]
    Action Alert: Release Sameeh Hammoudeh!
    For Immediate Release
    May 9, 2006

    Talking Points:

    * On 6 December 2005 a jury found
    Sameeh Hammoudeh not guilty of all
    charges brought against him.
    Hence, there is no legal basis for
    keeping him imprisoned by the
    Immigration and Customs
    Enforcement Service. He should
    be released forthwith.

    * Sameeh Hammoudeh wishes to
    return to his home in Ramallah, Palestine. By
    holding him prisoner, the ICE is
    preventing him from exercising his
    inalienable, natural and legal right
    to return to his home.

    E-MAIL, CALL and WRITE:

    * Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales
    E-MAIL: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
    PHONE: 202-514-2001 and 202-353-1555
    MAIL: U.S. Department of Justice
    950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
    Washington, DC 20530-0001

    * Florida Governor Jeb Bush
    Email: jeb.bush@myflorida.com

    * Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist
    The Capitol PL-01
    Tallahassee, FL 32399-1050
    Main office telephone numbers
    Switchboard: 850-414-3300
    Citizens Services: 850-414-3990
    Florida Relay/TDD: 800-955-8771
    Florida Toll Free: 1-866-966-7226
    Fax: 850-410-1630

    To obtain contact information for media outlets, go to:
    http://newslink.org/

    Please cc your correspondence to alerts@al-awda.org

    Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition
    PO Box 131352
    Carlsbad, CA 92013, USA
    Tel: 760-685-3243
    Fax: 360-933-3568
    E-mail: info@al-awda.org
    WWW: http://al-awda.org

    Memo to: All those who have the power
    to free Sameeh Hammoudeh

    AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
    jeb.bush@myflorida.com

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

    GREAT FLASH FILM BY PINK
    (I didn't know who she was. Now I do...BW)
    http://thinkwebworks.com/redraidernation/TAPES/dear-mr.html

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

    R A I L W A Y W O M E N
    Exploitation, Betrayal & Triumph in the Workplace
    by Helena Wojtczak
    http://www.railwaywomen.co.uk/book.html

    ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*--------
    EVENT ANNOUNCEMENTS
    ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*--------
    GENERAL AND UNCONDITIONAL AMNESTY FOR ALL!
    ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*--------

    National Day of Out(r)age Against the Telcos!
    Heads Up! on an upcoming rally - Let me know if you or your
    organization would like to participate.
    Peace, Nancy/CODEPINK

    National Day of Out(r)age Against the Telcos!
    Wednesday May 24, 2006 4:00-6:00pm
    AT&T Building
    600 Folsom Street (Btwn 2nd & 3rd Sts.)
    San Francisco, CA

    Join Media Alliance, Access-SF Center, CODEPINK and others for a
    lively rally outside of the AT&T building where the National Security
    Agency (NSA) set up a secret spy room to collect phone calls.

    Recent news also has exposed the privacy violation of millions of
    telephone users by AT&T and Verizon who willingly handed over call
    records to the National Security Agency without proper legal
    warrants. AT&T has also been in the news about it's collusion with
    the NSA to install computers to track the internet traffic on their
    Worldnet backbone. Now these same corporation want even more access
    to homes throughout the country with their fiber networks. We demand
    accountability and
    better protections!

    If you'd like to participate in a fun & creative action outside of
    AT&T Ballpark on Weds. May 24th at 11:30am-12:30pm contact Jeff
    jeffp123@gmail.com

    For more info. contact Nancy codepinkbayarea at riseup.net

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

    Please circulate!

    Break the Silence Mural Project and Members of the JIP Culture
    Committee Invite you to attend:

    CLOSING PARTY for
    HOPE UNDER SIEGE
    a collaborative photo exhibition depicting the Israeli
    occupation of Palestinian land and people.
    Friday, MAY 26, 6-9 PM
    Michelle O'Connor Gallery
    2111 Mission Street @ 17th St. in San Francisco
    Admission is FREE (Donations welcome).

    Refreshments, Spoken Word, Music, Break the Silence Presentation
    Documentary photographers Aisha Mershani and Lisa Nessan capture
    resistance to Israeli occupation and current life in Palestine. The
    images in this diverse collection of photographs taken between 2002
    and 2006 go beyond the headlines of the mainstream media toward
    a deeper understanding of reality on-the-ground in West Bank,
    Palestine.

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

    Please join CODEPINK Women for Peace and Ti Couz Restaurant
    for A Celebration of Resistance
    Friday May 26, 2006 7:00-11:00pm
    Ti Couz Too
    3108 16th Street (@ Valencia Street)
    San Francisco, CA 94103

    Vive Le Resistance!

    Join us for an evening of food, drinks, music and dancing as we
    honor those Bay Area residents who have led the way of resistance
    on different fronts.

    with
    Medea Benjamin, Co-founder of Global Exchange and
    CODEPINK Women for Peace

    Music by Los Nadies along with traditional Mexican dancers.

    Evening Recognitions

    Hunger Strikers' for Immigrant Rights, a broad Bay Area Coalition
    launched a seven-day hunger strike at the U.S. Federal Building
    in San Francisco to protest the Anti-Immigrant Specter Bill
    pending in Congress. They are calling for fair and just
    immigration reform, and denouncing Senator Arlen Specter's
    bill that designates all undocumented immigrants as
    aggravated felons.

    San Francisco State University 10, Ten SFSU students protested
    military recruitment at the university's career fair. Campus
    police interrupted their protest and physically took the
    students from the school's gymnasium where they were
    protesting. The police then notified the students that they
    were banned from campus. They were protesting the military's
    recruiting of university students into careers that would foster
    death, destruction and injustice.

    Clarence Thomas, is a long-time labor activist who has worked
    consistently on a number of international issues. He travelled
    to Iraq with a delegation from U.S. Labor Against the War.
    He is the national co-chair of the Million Worker March
    Movement and a member of International Longshore and
    Warehouse Union, Local 10.

    Elizabeth "Betita" Martinez, A long-time activist, author and
    educator, Martinez has published six books and many articles
    on social justice movements in the Americas. Best known
    is her bilingual volume 500 Years of Chicano History in
    Pictures, which became the basis for a video she co-directed.
    In 1997 she co-founded and currently directs the Institute
    for MultiRacial Justice in San Francisco, and was one of
    a 1000 women nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005.

    Additional honorees TBA

    Space is limited so please RSVP now to Nancy Mancias at
    codepinkbayarea@riseup.net

    A request for donations of $10.00-100.00 sliding scale
    will be made to Esteklal! Independence for Iraq! ad campaign.

    With your help, we are sending a message of sorrow, friendship
    and peace directly to the women of Iraq and their families
    by challenging the free press in Iraq to print an advertisement
    calling on people of both nations to work together to end the
    occupation. www. esteklal.org

    Special thanks to Sylvie Le Mer and Ti Couz staff.

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

    PUSH FOR PEACE
    MEMORIAL DAY KICKOFF
    MONDAY, MAY 29, 2006
    GOLDEN GATE PARK, S.F.
    (Exact location to be announced.)

    Welcome to the Official Push for Peace Site!
    http://www.pushforpeace.us/civic/index.php?q

    The Push For Peace movement is geared to combine the efforts of
    able-bodied activists to those with special needs or challenges,
    so that all people can participate and be counted.

    The Push for Peace logo shows a Navy veteran in a wheelchair
    with a peace sign on the wheel, with people marching behind
    him. It can be seen at:

    http://www.pushforpeace.us/civic/index.php?q=node/71

    Just in case we don't get to modify the map before the weekend,
    I'll just name our proposed stops. We start, of course with Golden
    Gate Park, from there we head south to Los Angeles. Turning
    east we move to Phoenix, then on to Albuquerque. Now it's
    north to Denver, and east to St Louis. North again to Chicago,
    and east to Detroit. Continue east to Cleveland, and then NYC
    if all goes well Central Park (Imagine), culminating at the gates
    of the White House on July 4, 2006

    Push For Peace is a collective of veterans, progressive activists,
    and everyday citizens working together through education,
    motivation, and truth to bring America's troops home from the
    war in Iraq and to help bring healing and peace to our nation.
    The Push For Peace movement is geared to combine the efforts
    of able-bodied activists to those with special needs or challenges,
    so that all people can participate and be counted. The Push
    For Peace effort will include organized rallies and marches,
    as well as appearances and performances by high-profile
    speakers and entertainers, to rally the American people and
    show them we stand united with our fellow citizen and soldier.
    It is our goal to grow the base of participants each day resulting
    in a cross-country Push culminating at the gates of the White
    House on July 4, 2006. Events will be scheduled across the
    country leading up to the big Push in July. So keep checking
    the Push calendar for events near you. Mapping it all out...
    [Website shows map of stops in US en route to DC on July 4, 2006...bw]

    This is a tentative and unfinished P4P route and is only a work in progress.
    The Push is set to leave Golden Gate Park on Memorial Day 2006 (currently
    working on permits) and then we will Push our way across the country
    to arrive in DC across from the White House gathering at Lafayette Park
    (currently working on permits) on July 4th, 2006. Golden Gate Park,
    San Francisco, California Las Vegas Nevada Phoenix, Arizona Denver,
    Colorado Crawford, Texas New Orleans, Louisiana more states pending...
    Pushing real Democracy! http://www.pushforpeace.us/civic/index.php?q=

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

    Fourth Annual International Al-Awda Convention
    San Francisco - July 14-16, 2006
    To register: http://al-awda.org/sf-conv_reserve.html
    To flyer, the writing is on the wall: http://al-awda.org/pdf/flyer.pdf
    For all other info: http://al-awda.org

    ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*--------
    GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS
    ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*--------

    REMINDER TO ALL GROUPS: BE SURE AND POST ALL ACTIONS AND
    EVENTS TO WWW.INDYBAY.ORG TO REACH THE MOST PEOPLE
    AGAINST THE WAR IN THE BAY AREA!
    http://www.indybay.org

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

    FYI
    According to "Minimum Wage History" at
    http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/anth484/minwage.html "

    "Calculated in real 2005 dollars, the 1968 minimum wage was the
    highest at $9.12. "The 8 dollar per hour Whole Foods employees
    are being paid $1.12 less than the 1968 minimum wage.

    "A federal minimum wage was first set in 1938. The graph shows
    both nominal (red) and real (blue) minimum wage values. Nominal
    values range from 25 cents per hour in 1938 to the current $5.15/hr.
    The greatest percentage jump in the minimum wage was in 1950,
    when it nearly doubled. The graph adjusts these wages to 2005
    dollars (blue line) to show the real value of the minimum wage.
    Calculated in real 2005 dollars, the 1968 minimum wage was the
    highest at $9.12. Note how the real dollar minimum wage rises and
    falls. This is because it gets periodically adjusted by Congress.
    The period 1997-2006, is the longest period during which the
    minimum wage has not been adjusted. States have departed from
    the federal minimum wage. Washington has the highest minimum
    wage in the country at $7.63 as of January 1, 2006. Oregon is next
    at $7.50. Cities, too, have set minimum wages. Santa Fe, New
    Mexico has a minimum wage of $9.50, which is more than double
    the state minimum wage at $4.35."

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

    PRESERVE INTERNET NETWORK NEUTRALITY

    Hi,
    I can't imagine that you haven't seen this, but if you
    haven't, please sign the petition to keep our access.
    Everything we do online will be hurt if Congress
    passes a radical law next week that gives giant
    corporations more control over what we do and see on
    the Internet.

    Internet providers like AT&T are lobbying Congress
    hard to gut Network Neutrality--the Internet's First
    Amendment and the key to Internet freedom. Right now,
    Net Neutrality prevents AT&T from choosing which
    websites open most easily for you based on which site
    pays AT&T more. BarnesandNoble.com doesn't have to
    outbid Amazon for the right to work properly on your
    computer.

    If Net Neutrality is gutted, many sites--including
    Google, eBay, and iTunes--must either pay protection
    money to companies like AT&T or risk having their
    websites process slowly. That why these high-tech
    pioneers, plus diverse groups ranging from MoveOn to
    Gun Owners of America, are opposing Congress' effort
    to gut Internet freedom.

    So please! sign this petition telling your member of
    Congress to preserve Internet freedom? Click here:

    http://www.civic.moveon.org/save_the_internet?track_referer=706%7C1152463-5QFocRE05wmGUuh8yAMSzg

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

    Flash Film: Ides of March
    http://isahaqi.chris-floyd.com/

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

    NO BORDERS! NO WALLS! NO FENCES! GENERAL AMNESTY FOR ALL!
    OUR HOMELAND IS WHERE WE LIVE!

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

    REPEAL THE NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT IN 2007!
    Check out: 10 EXCELLENT REASONS NOT TO JOIN THE MILITARY
    http://www.10reasonsbook.com/
    Public Law print of PL 107-110, the No Child Left Behind
    Act of 2001 [1.8 MB]
    http://www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/index.html
    Also, the law is up before Congress again in 2007.
    See this article from USA Today:
    Bipartisan panel to study No Child Left Behind
    By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
    February 13, 2006
    http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-02-13-education-panel_x.htm

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

    TELL BUSH AND CONGRESS: STOP THE WAR
    ON IRAN BEFORE IT STARTS!
    Please join the online campaign to
    STOP THE WAR ON IRAN BEFORE IT STARTS!
    YOUR EMERGENCY ACTION IS NEEDED NOW!
    Send emails to President Bush, Vice President
    Cheney, Secretary of State Rice, U.N. Secretary-
    General Annan, Congressional leaders and
    the media demanding NO WAR ON IRAN!
    http://stopwaroniran.org/

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

    WHY WE FIGHT
    A film by Eugene Jarecki
    [Check out the trailer about this new film.
    This looks like a very powerful film.]
    http://www.sonyclassics.com/whywefight/

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

    The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies
    http://www.law.indiana.edu/uslawdocs/declaration.html
    http://www.law.ou.edu/hist/decind.html
    http://www.usconstitution.net/declar.html
    http://www.indybay.org/news/2006/02/1805195.php

    Bill of Rights
    http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.billofrights.html
    http://www.indybay.org/news/2006/02/1805182.php

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

    1) The Border War Comes Home
    Our Lives are on the Line
    By JUAN SANTOS
    May 18, 2006
    http://www.counterpunch.org/santos05182006.html

    2) On Immigration
    By Gregg Shotwell, Soldiers of Solidarity
    Date: Thurs, May 18 2006 1:10am
    From: GreggShotwell@aol.com
    mailto:GreggShotwell@aol.com

    3) Mexico to Protest U.S. Border Plan
    By REUTERS
    May 19, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/19/world/americas/19mexico.html

    4) Autopsy Finds That Soldier Under Army Medical Care Died
    From Painkiller Overdose (Fort Sill...bw)
    By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
    May 19, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/19/us/19training.html

    5) Gambling on a Weaker Dollar
    New York Times Editorial
    May 20, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/20/opinion/20sat1.html?hp

    6) At Unforgiving Arizona-Mexico Border,
    Tide of Desperation Is Overwhelming
    By GINGER THOMPSON
    May 21, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/us/21border.html?hp&ex=1148184000&en=a319e1a5cf6dae63&ei=5094&partner=homepage

    7) 100 Years in the Back Door, Out the Front
    By NINA BERNSTEIN
    May 21, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/weekinreview/21bernstein.html

    8) These Guns for Hire
    By TED KOPPEL
    Washington
    May 22, 2006
    http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/22/opinion/22koppel.html?hp

    9) An Immigration Bottom Line
    New York Times Editorial
    May 21, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/opinion/21sun1.html

    10) Message from Ricardo Alarcon,
    President of the National Assembly
    of People's Power of the Republic of Cuba

    11) Where is the Global Outcry at This Continuing Cruelty?
    Nearly 60 years after most Palestinians were first forced from our
    homes, the killings and blockades carry on with impunity
    by Ghada Karmi
    Published on Monday, May 15, 2006 by the Guardian/UK
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1774765,00.html

    12) His photo is an icon, his life a shambles
    At home and suffering from stress disorder,
    ex-Marine has turned against Iraq war
    BY DAVID ZUCCHINO
    Los Angeles Times
    Posted on Mon, May. 22, 2006
    http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/news/14636241.htm

    13) 'Swallowed by pain'
    Jeffrey Lucey joined the Reserves to help pay for college;
    he wasn't prepared for what happened next
    By Mehul Srivastava
    Dayton Daily News
    http://www.daytondailynews.com/project/content/project/suicide/daily/1011lucey.html

    14) 1 in 136 U.S. Residents Behind Bars
    U.S. Prisons, Jails Grew by 1,000 Inmates a Week From '04 to '05;
    1 in 136 Residents Behind Bars
    by Elizabeth White
    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0522-03.htm

    15) First Female Conscientious Objector Sentenced
    Wednesday, 24 May 2006, 11:02 am
    Press Release:
    23 MAY 2006 - for immediate release

    16) A Sudden Taste for the Law
    New York Times Editorial
    May 24, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/24/opinion/24weds1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

    17) Senate Advances Sweeping Immigration Bill
    By RACHEL L. SWARNS
    May 24, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/24/washington/24cnd-immig.html?hp&ex=1148529600&en=396eafcbc403e967&ei=5094&partner=homepage

    18) Senate Advances Sweeping Immigration Bill
    Under the provisions adopted on Tuesday, employers would be
    required to enter the Social Security numbers or immigrant
    identification numbers of all job applicants, including citizens,
    into the computerized system, which would be created by the
    Department of Homeland Security. The system would notify
    businesses within three days whether the applicant was
    authorized to work in the United States.
    By RACHEL L. SWARNS
    May 24, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/24/washington/24cnd-immig.html?hp&ex=1148529600&en=396eafcbc403e967&ei=5094&partner=homepage

    19) USA: the Statistics That Shock
    [The figures are even more shocking when you take into
    consideration inflation and the fact that the rich are now paying
    less taxes and the middle class, the working class, and the poor
    are now forced to pay more taxes.
    FYI: According to "The Inflation Calculator"
    www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi
    What cost $1.00 in 1973 would cost $4.42 in 2005 and more today!]
    By Michael Roberts   
    Wednesday, 24 May 2006
    http://www.marxist.com/usa-statistics-shock240506.htm

    20) Laid Off and Left Out
    By BOB HERBERT
    May 25, 2006
    http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/25/opinion/25herbert.html?hp

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    1) The Border War Comes Home
    Our Lives are on the Line
    By JUAN SANTOS
    May 18, 2006
    http://www.counterpunch.org/santos05182006.html

    He looked squarely into my eyes. "So, you see what's coming," he said.

    I was speaking with one of the core leaders of the movement for
    migrant's rights, and had laid before him a sketch of a plan of
    resistance for the nation's barrios, for the protection of people
    from the mass raids and mass deportations that will result from
    new anti-migrant legislation being birthed in Washington.

    "This is the calm before the storm; they're going to make it tough,"
    Professor Armando Navarro had told LA's La Opinion. "They're
    talking about raids, deportations. In every barrio we have to
    organize migrant defense committees, and get ready for civil
    disobedience."

    The meeting we had just attended unanimously called for the
    rejection of the so-called Hagel-Martinez "compromise" in the
    US Senate, under which as many as 7 million migrants could face
    deportation. Such a compromise would then have to be "reconciled"
    with House bill 4437, an even more extreme measure inspired
    by supporters of the ultra-Right and the racist shock troops
    called the Minutemen.

    The House bill calls for the universal deportation of every woman,
    child and man in the country without papers, for an utterly
    devastating depopulation -an ethnic cleansing - of the barrio,
    and the destruction of much of its cultural and economic life.

    The difference between the bills under consideration is the
    difference between partial and virtually complete ethnic cleansing,
    and any "compromise" between such measures will not change
    the racist and quasi-genocidal nature of the result. A "compromise"
    can only mean the deportation of millions and the legal
    stigmatization and terrorization of millions more.

    Under international law, ethnic cleansing means the expulsion
    from a territory of one ethnic group by another, and pertains
    to official policies aimed at the forcible removal of a targeted
    group. The crime is considered a form of forced emigration,
    deportation and genocide.

    International law recognizes ethnic cleansing as a crime against
    humanity when carried out in a time of literal warfare.
    The US war on migrants is the moral equivalent of ethnic
    cleansing. It is a crime against humanity.

    Fittingly, the Bush administration has flatly stated its intent
    to make "enforcement" the cutting edge of its new approach
    to migrants, and to prove the point it recently initiated the
    largest single mass arrest of migrants in US history, and put
    a severe new focus on penalizing employers, as well.

    Bush has already deported more people than any other
    president in U.S. history.

    Since he took office ICE has deported some 150,000 migrants
    a year and had deported 881,478 people through 2005, figures
    that do not include, for example, the 1.2 million people who
    were arrested at the U.S.-Mexican border itself last year.

    Now, in his Monday night speech, Bush has promised to fulfill
    one of the Minutemen's most draconian hopes ­ turning the
    border into a green zone, a quasi-military zone occupied
    by forces of the National Guard, backed by a super high
    tech "virtual" wall a wall more deadly, and more effective,
    than a mere fence.

    And, in apparent defiance of the Posse Comitatus Act ­
    which forbids the use of military troops within US borders -
    the House recently passed legislation that, according to the
    Pentagon, "gives authority to the Defense Department to
    assign military members to assist Homeland Security
    organizations in preventing the entry of terrorists, drug
    traffickers and illegal aliens into the United States"

    Migrant deaths at the border are expected to skyrocket,
    and the State is already building mass detention centers
    for migrants. Bush claims he's not "militarizing" the border.
    His claim will mean nothing to the dead and the incarcerated.

    Every version of the so-called "immigration reform laws"
    now under renewed consideration in Washington also
    authorizes and pays local police to act as immigration
    agents and to oversee the deportation of those they arrest,
    effectively adding a permanent quasi-military force of 650,000
    for "internal enforcement" of immigration laws.

    This is an example of the "middle ground" on migrants
    trumpeted by the US's white colonial ruling elite: the state
    will combine mass raids with the slow process of day by day
    racial profiling to eliminate the migrant population. According
    to an ICE plan called Operation Engame, they mean to deport
    every "deportable" migrant by the year 2012.

    In his Monday speech Bush said migrants are "beyond the
    reach and protection of American law." Indeed, he means
    to get them in his grasp, but their "protection" is nowhere
    on the agenda.

    The plan is to control and terrorize the migrants who will
    remain in the US, and to incarcerate and deport the rest.
    When that much is achieved, the ruling elites will find
    themselves in a comfortable position to continuously
    exploit the labor of a subjugated, highly controlled and
    vulnerable ethnic under-caste, and they will have
    provided themselves with the kind of ethnic scapegoat
    essential to the development of a new US-style fascism.

    False Hopes

    The hopes of millions of migrants have been ignited by
    the recent wave of protests, and by the hope that white
    America will find them with their white t-shirts and
    American flags -acceptable, tolerable, even welcome.

    The shock will be immense.

    Migrants will learn in a brutal fashion that the concern
    of America's elite has never had anything to do with
    surrender, white shirts, white dreams, or any other
    indication of who, as people, migrants might be or wish
    to be. The only concern of the ruling elites is their own
    need for migrants as exploitable workers like the slave
    master of the Old South they need their workers.

    There is another motive as well: today's elites also fear
    the very people they need - just like any slave master.
    The fear is compounded by the knowledge that today's
    master is not only an exploiter, he is also a usurper: the
    land he thrives on was stolen from the very people he
    degrades and dehumanizes with the epithet "illegal."

    And it's not just Republicans and open white racists who
    are afraid. It's many "liberals," too. Ed Schultz, the liberal
    talk show host, recently offered two factors as a bottom
    line on why migrants should stay: "the economy needs
    them" and "they can make trouble."

    The fear is so intense that, because of our mass protests,
    the worst elements of the Sensenbrenner bill HR4437 ­
    were momentarily derailed as different elements of the
    ruling class scrambled and bickered among themselves
    to determine who will have the final say - to determine
    who among them can assure the needs of their economy
    while averting the threat that migrants represent to them all.

    With every passing day, with every demonstration, with
    each child who prays each night that her parents can come
    out from the shadow of the stigma of being hunted and
    despised, with each heartbeat of rising hope, the noose
    around the neck of the ruling class gets just a little tighter;
    the options contract.

    With each day, each hour, the danger for the ruling elites
    of crushing the life and death expectations of migrants
    grows exponentially. Politically correct or not, every
    American flag carried in the recent mass demonstrations
    represents a rising, fluttering expectation, a sea of
    expectations whose depths promise shipwreck for the
    State, when, as it must, it betrays the promise of
    "freedom" and racial "equality."

    The crushing of those expectations could lead directly
    to rebellion in the streets, following the example of the
    recent rebellion of migrants in France, and of the African
    American rebellions of the 1960s. When Martin Luther
    King was overcome, when he lay dead of an assassin's
    bullet in Memphis, a hundred cities burned across the
    nation.

    They burned because it had become clear to the African
    American people that after more than a decade of struggle
    nothing fundamental in the structure of oppression had
    changed, that the changes that occurred had been mere
    surface changes, compromises, like the Hagel-Martinez
    bill today, aimed at silencing them, not at transforming
    the conditions of their lives or the oppression that afflicted
    them.

    The ruling elites have not forgotten for a moment the mass
    rebellion in Los Angeles of 1992. Migrant neighborhoods
    were a focal point of intense uprisings; the unity between
    Black and Brown was as palpably intense as the flames
    that engulfed the city and utterly terrifying to all of those
    whose daily task is to keep us down.

    As if to underscore the point, police were all but invisible
    in the recent pro-migrant marches in downtown LA ­
    although over a million of us were in the streets. But in
    Pico Union, where another million marched, riot squads
    were visible everywhere, even until past midnight. Pico
    Union was a storm center of the LA rebellion. Half of those
    arrested in that period were Brown.

    Is it any wonder, then, that the rulers have taken pause
    for thought about just how far they dare to go in the war
    on immigrants? Sensenbrenner went too far with HR4437
    he awakened the threat. Now they must gauge a thing all
    but impossible to gauge: just how far is too far?

    No one on either side of the equation knows the answer
    to that question.

    One thing at least is clear no one in the white mainstream
    is going to come to the support of migrants unless migrants
    themselves stop wrapping themselves in the flag of the
    oppressor, and dare to stand up to oppression and unless
    they are willing to polarize the nation against their persecutors
    and defiantly challenge their racism.

    At the same time our demands must be made clear and
    millions must be challenged to re-think their prejudices.
    That's exactly how the Black movement for freedom did it,
    and nothing less will do. The "problem," as one writer
    recently put it, isn't at the border; the problem isn't with
    immigration it's that migrants are being persecuted.

    And voting won't change that, no matter what the "We
    Are America" coalition claims. A vote in November and
    face it, most migrants simply aren't eligible to vote will
    change nothing for the child whose mother or father
    is deported today. Even if the Democrats win in November,
    there is absolutely no guarantee that they will take
    up the question of immigration anew.

    No. The harsh reality is that the Democrats have supported
    extremely draconian anti-migrant measures in their
    willingness to "compromise" with the overtly fascistic
    elements of the Republican Party.

    The "compromise" already accepted by the Democrats
    includes mass deportations of up to several million people,
    the indefinite detention of migrants without due process,
    the treatment of minor offenses as "aggravated felonies"
    which would trigger harsh mandatory detention and
    deportation, and of course, unleashing the police as
    migrant hunters in a program of daily terror against
    our communities.

    When the matter goes to the House/ Senate reconciliation
    committee, it can only get worse. The Democrats are no
    more likely to repeal the war on migrants than they have
    been willing to reverse their criminal support for the unjust
    colonial war of occupation against Iraq.

    They will not relent unless we leave them no choice, unless,
    like the forces of resistance in other places and other times,
    we make the political price of continuing the war on migrants
    too high.

    The Ultimate Showdown

    The National Immigrant Solidarity Network says it clearly.
    "This is a critical moment for the immigrant struggle."

    "We should brace ourselves," they say, "for the ultimate
    showdown of the immigrant struggle soon, and we should
    mobilize ourselves quickly to respond to the racist anti-
    immigrant xenophobia that will go down."

    The group is calling for emergency community meetings
    to strategize rapid response to a possible nationwide
    crackdown or attack on immigrants.

    No matter what the rulers do, short of a general legalization,
    they will present our people with unbearable choices, with
    an unimaginable grief of separation; with the mass
    destruction of what is most sacred to us; our families
    and communities.

    Will we allow the rulers of America to deport our children,
    2/3 of whom are citizens of their nation? Will we allow
    them to force us to leave our children behind? Will we let
    our children live in fear that their parents may not come
    home from work? That they will disappear? At what point
    will the grief, fear and rage become unbearable, and
    uncontainable? At what point must we say "¡Ya Basta!" ?

    Flying the American flag has disarmed us. It is not our
    willingness to live by the rules that impresses the slave
    master his entire regime is designed to ensure our
    compliance. What impresses him is our potential to
    awaken, to shatter the framework, to throw away the "rules".

    Flying the US flag means we don't understand the
    ruthless nature of our enemies; it means a basic and
    unconscious allegiance to the idea of getting ahead and
    doing so on the backs of others, an unconscious allegiance
    to and imitation of the very foundations of the oppressor's
    outlook and his control of us, and an implicit acceptance
    of his colonial rule over stolen land and subjugated peoples.

    Our enemies want to split our allegiances, they want us
    to grasp at individual chances for "acceptance" and
    "freedom," and to ignore the well being of our people
    as a whole. That, after all, is the real "American Dream"
    ­ private wealth and well being on the backs of other,
    subjugated peoples.

    But we can no longer leave the fate of our children
    in their hands. We cannot allow our families to be
    shattered and our dreams to be crushed. We must
    refuse to live any longer in the shadows, refuse to live
    under slavery in any form. It is time to take matters
    into our own hands, to do once more what every
    migrant has already done just by crossing the border
    make the decision to live, to survive together, no matter
    what they throw at us.

    Let them deal with the ramifications of attempting mass
    repression against a people in resistance here, while
    they face a similar problem overseas. Let them worry
    about alienating Latin America and their European
    partners in war and conquest. Let them worry about
    permanently alienating the millions Black and White -
    who already support us, and who understand that the
    powers that be are taking the nation toward fascism.
    Let them worry what will happen when they invade our
    barrios and workplaces in mass raids.

    Let them worry while we organize; while we create mass
    networks of direct action and resistance. Let us truly
    follow the example of the Black Civil Rights Movement
    and of the Black Power Movement that followed it. The
    Black movement of the 1950s and 60s was a resistance
    movement, one that both obeyed the law, and which,
    through civil disobedience and other strategies, broke
    the law, as necessary, in obedience to a Higher Law.

    Black people of that era laid their lives on the line for
    their freedom. We can do no less.

    Let us put the slogan to the test: ¡Un Pueblo Unido
    Jamás Será Vencido!

    Si, se puede.

    Juan Santos is an editor and writer in Los Angeles.
    He can be reached at JuanSantos@Mexica.net

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

    2) On Immigration
    By Gregg Shotwell, Soldiers of Solidarity
    Date: Thurs, May 18 2006 1:10am
    From: GreggShotwell@aol.com
    mailto:GreggShotwell@aol.com

    What distrubs me about this immigrant
    issue is that it is not fundamentally
    about immigration. It is cloaked in
    nationalism and racism but it is really
    anti worker. If we allow one set of
    workers to be treated like criminals, where
    will it end? First they came for (fill
    in the blank) and I didn't say anything
    because I wasn't one.

    Well, the way I see it, I am one. First,
    foremost, and always, I am a worker.

    The bossing class wants me to make
    other workers my enemies but workers don't
    cut wages, steal pensions, deprive
    us of health care, monoplize natural
    resources, and destroy our communities,
    the bosses do. The real criminals are the
    bastards that gave us NAFTA, which
    exploited Mexican workers and US workers.
    NAFTA displaced Mexican farmers by
    dumping US corn grown by Corporate farms onto
    the Mexican market. Even the small
    tortilla makers lost jobs because of
    NAFTA.

    How is that capital can cross borders
    at will to exploit workers but we can't
    cross borders to buy drugs in Canada,
    and workers who have been deprived of
    jobs through no fault of their own are
    treated like criminals because they want
    to work for a living? NO WORKER IS MY ENEMY.

    I volunteered for many years at a half
    way house for federal prisoners. They
    all told me about the Prison Industrial
    Complex. Well, PIC wants more prison
    labor. Who benefits when workers are
    turned into criminals? It won't stop them
    from crossing the borders. Criminalization
    will just make it easier for bosses
    to exploit them. Encouraging workers
    to hate the latest set of immigrants is
    a traditonal tool of bosses in America.
    Sure, they were legal when they came
    through Ellis Island, but then the bosses
    found out that legal workers could
    get organized, so they encouraged
    illegal immigration.

    It's the rich bastards that are depriving
    us of national health care, and
    stealing our pensions, and profiting
    from war, and driving our wages down while
    they rake in the profits. I will not
    be tricked into believing poor underpaid
    workers are my enemies. I know
    who the enemy is. There's no dirt under his
    fingernails, no sorrow in his eyes,
    and he wouldn't risk his life and sacrifice
    his own comfort in order to send
    money home to his family.

    Let us not lose our focus. Workers
    are our allies. The bosses are trying to
    whipsaw us against immigrant workers.
    Criminalization plays into the bosses
    hands. They want illegal workers.
    They want all workers to be treated like
    outlaws. They aren't going to stop
    with Mexicans. Ask anybody who's ever been on a
    picket line. Workers are outlaws in
    America. It's no wonder they don't want us
    to own guns.

    sos, Gregg Shotwell

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

    3) Mexico to Protest U.S. Border Plan
    By REUTERS
    May 19, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/19/world/americas/19mexico.html

    MEXICO CITY, May 18 — Mexico will formally complain to the United
    States about plans to build security fences and deploy National Guard
    troops on the border to curb illegal immigration, Mexico's foreign
    minister, Luis Ernesto Derbez, said Thursday.

    "There are 12 million Mexicans on the other side, 12 million people
    who live every day in anguish about the need for a reform to let them
    live peacefully," Mr. Derbez said. He said Mexico would send
    a diplomatic note to the United States about American plans
    for the border.

    Such notes are often sent as a form of protest when nations are
    at odds with each other.

    Mexico wants the United States to make it easier for immigrants to
    attain legal status, and supports a guest-worker program rather
    than a tightening of the border.

    The status of illegal immigrants in the United States is a major
    political issue in Mexico. Opponents have criticized President
    Vicente Fox as not protesting strenuously enough against
    American efforts to tighten the porous frontier. Andrés Manuel
    López Obrador, the leftist candidate in the presidential election,
    which will be held in July, accused Mr. Fox on Wednesday
    of being "a plaything, a puppet of foreign governments."

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

    4) Autopsy Finds That Soldier Under Army Medical Care Died
    From Painkiller Overdose
    By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
    May 19, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/19/us/19training.html

    HOUSTON, May 18 — An injured Army recruit who died while under
    medical treatment at Fort Sill, in Lawton, Okla., succumbed to an
    accidental overdose of the powerful narcotic painkiller fentanyl,
    according to a military autopsy report released to the family on
    Thursday. But a fellow soldier said he had warned the Army that
    the recruit had been abusing the drug.

    The death was the second drug fatality in two years in the Physical
    Training and Rehabilitation Program, which is intended to treat new
    recruits who are injured in basic training. Last week, The New York
    Times reported that the Army had shaken up the therapy program
    after repeated complaints from soldiers and their parents that
    injured recruits were punished with physical abuse and medical
    neglect.

    The autopsy report, by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology,
    found that the soldier, Pfc. Mathew Scarano, 21, of Eureka, Calif.,
    died the night of March 18-19 from a blood concentration of
    fentanyl of 0.09 milligrams per liter, at least three times the fatal
    dosage cited in medical studies, the report said. "The manner
    of death is accident," it concluded.

    Col. William L. Greer, Fort Sill's chief of staff, said in a telephone
    interview on Thursday that Private Scarano appeared to have abused
    the medication by removing a three-day skin patch he had been
    given and eating the fentanyl. While the investigation has not yet
    been formally closed, Colonel Greer said, "the death will be ruled
    an accident based on oral ingestion of the patch." He defended
    the medical procedures as proper. "I'm not sure how we could
    have prevented that," he said.

    But a fellow soldier who was also in the therapy unit, and has since
    been medically discharged from the Army, said he knew that Private
    Scarano had been ingesting fentanyl from the skin patch, and had
    told Army doctors about it.

    "I told doctors he was not using the medication the way he should
    have," said the former soldier, Clayton Howell. "But I don't know
    why they didn't do anything."

    Private Scarano's mother, Christen Scarano-Bailey, said the
    findings left crucial questions unanswered. "It was negligence
    or improperly prescribed," she said in a telephone interview.
    "I think the Army was at fault."

    Jon Long, the Army spokesman at Fort Sill, said the Criminal
    Investigation Division Command at the post was completing its
    inquiry into the death. Though the Army declined to release the
    autopsy report, a copy was provided by Ms. Scarano-Bailey.

    In the Army shake-up of the program, one drill sergeant was
    disciplined and reassigned after soldiers said he had kicked
    an injured recruit, and another was reassigned after soldiers
    said he had ordered medicated soldiers repeatedly awakened
    during the night.

    Among the changes in the programs nationwide, commanders
    said, was closer control of medications. A six-month limit on
    stays in the recuperation program would also be enforced,
    they said.

    On Monday, the under secretary of the Army, Pete Geren, was
    at Fort Sill on what the Army called a previously planned visit
    to discuss base realignments. Mr. Geren visited the therapy
    unit and talked to soldiers, and "recommended that the lessons
    learned at Fort Sill be shared with the Army's other P.T.R.P. sites,"
    said a Pentagon spokeswoman, Betsy J. Weiner.

    Private Scarano had been in and out of the unit for more than
    a year, after he injured his groin and then hurt his shoulder falling
    off a rappelling tower, his family said. He was adamantly against
    having Army surgeons operate on his shoulder, he wrote in letters
    home. But he was dedicated to the Army, friends said, and planned
    to re-enlist if he could get out long enough to have his shoulder
    repaired at a civilian hospital.

    Ms. Scarano-Bailey said that when she last saw her son, on
    a Christmas furlough, he showed no signs of drug dependency
    and, though in pain from his shoulder, took nothing stronger
    than Tylenol.

    Other soldiers in the therapy program said in recent interviews
    that they thought Private Scarano showed signs of overmedication.

    "I can't remember ever seeing him conscious after 6:30 p.m.," said
    Pvt. Justin Nugent, 21, of Candor, N.Y. He said that Private Scarano
    had to be awakened earlier than the others because it took him longer
    to shake off sleep and that he might have taken unauthorized extra
    medications, not realizing that doctors had already increased his dosage.

    Pvt. Richard Thurman, now out of the unit, said Private Scarano had
    often been so "doped up" that "somebody would have to hold him
    up when he walked to final formation," and that his medication
    schedule was adjusted so that he would get his dosage only after
    the evening formation.

    Private Thurman said that the night before Private Scarano died,
    he was lying in his bunk on his back and that soldiers who knew
    it was an uncomfortable position for him rolled him onto his stomach.
    He was found dead the next morning.

    "What we felt is that the P.T.R.P. did this to him," Private Thurman
    said, "and that the system itself was flawed."

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

    5) Gambling on a Weaker Dollar
    New York Times Editorial
    May 20, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/20/opinion/20sat1.html?hp

    For some time now, shortsighted lawmakers in Congress have been
    threatening China with tariffs for what they call its unfair currency
    practices. The Bush administration, to its credit, has generally resisted
    the protectionist rant, most notably by refusing to brand China
    a "currency manipulator" in an official report to Congress last week.

    China responded to the administration's responsible policy and
    diplomatic courtesy this week when it loosened, a bit, the tether
    that binds the Chinese currency, the yuan, to the dollar. A stronger
    yuan implies a weaker dollar, as does the general strengthening
    so far this year of the euro and the yen. By making foreign goods
    sold here more expensive and American goods sold abroad cheaper,
    a weaker dollar would, in theory, eventually help reduce the United
    States' huge trade gap.

    The problem is this: unless a falling dollar is paired with reductions
    in the federal budget deficit, it could do more harm than good
    by driving up interest rates, perhaps sharply. That's because the
    foreign investors who finance the administration's "borrow as you
    go" budget are likely to demand higher returns to invest in
    a depreciating dollar.

    But if budget deficits declined over the long run, the government's
    reduced need to borrow would help keep interest rates low as the
    dollar depreciated. Then, after a lag, the falling dollar would shrink
    the trade deficit without risking big increases in interest rates
    in the process.

    Unfortunately, the incessant tax cutting of the past five years
    precludes any serious attempt to reduce the budget deficit. So
    to keep interest rates in check as the dollar falls, the administration
    would have to persuade investors not to believe what they see:
    a dollar that is declining even as the United States does nothing
    to curb its borrowing.

    That would be a difficult trick even for a Treasury Department that
    commanded respect. It will be especially difficult for Mr. Bush's
    Treasury team, which has suffered a diminution of esteem and
    credibility.

    The Bush tax cuts also make it harder for Americans as a nation
    to bail themselves out of the trade deficit by saving more. Higher
    personal savings would allow the government to finance its budget
    deficit without outsized foreign borrowing — another safe route
    to a cheaper dollar and a smaller trade gap. But the Republicans
    who control Congress let a tax credit for low-income savers expire
    this year to free up room in the budget for nearly $70 billion
    in additional tax cuts for high-income Americans over the near
    term.

    That tax cut bill, signed into law this week by President Bush,
    also commits an estimated $53 billion through the middle of
    the century to help those same high earners shift their existing
    savings into tax shelters. This adds not one cent of new savings
    and presages big deficits far into the future.

    A weakening dollar, on top of intractable budget deficits and
    a chronic savings shortfall, is a recipe for recession. The
    question now is whether the country will change direction
    in time. The portents are not good.

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

    6) At Unforgiving Arizona-Mexico Border,
    Tide of Desperation Is Overwhelming
    By GINGER THOMPSON
    May 21, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/us/21border.html?hp&ex=1148184000&en=a319e1a5cf6dae63&ei=5094&partner=homepage

    ARIVACA, Ariz., May 18 — All the talk in Washington about putting
    walls and soldiers along the border with Mexico did not stop
    Miguel Espindola from trying to cross the most inhospitable part
    of it this week with his wife and two small children.

    Their 6-year-old daughter, Karla, clutched her mother's back
    pocket with one hand and a bottle of Gatorade with the other
    as the family set out across the Sonora Desert on Thursday.
    Miguelito, 7, lugged a backpack that seemed to weigh almost
    as much as he did.

    "Yes, there is risk, but there is also need," said Mr. Espindola,
    explaining why he had brought his children on a journey that
    killed 464 immigrants last year, and a 3-year-old boy this week.

    Looking out at the vast parched landscape ahead, Mr. Espindola,
    a coffee farmer, talked about the poverty he had left behind,
    and said: "Our damned government forces us to leave our
    country because it does not give us good salaries. The
    United States forces us to go this way."

    Here at ground zero for the world's largest and longest wave
    of illegal migration, about the only thing that is clear is that
    easy answers do not apply. During a drive along a narrow
    highway that runs parallel to the line, it is hard to see how
    increased law enforcement and advanced technologies will
    stop an exodus made up predominantly of Mexicans willing
    to risk everything.

    Meanwhile, it becomes easier to understand the conflicting
    attitudes about migrants that have not only strained relations
    between the United States and its neighbors to the south,
    but also tested America's identity as a melting pot.

    In the last five years, Arizona has become the principal,
    and deadliest, gateway for illegal migrants. It accounts
    for nearly one-third of the 1.5 million people captured
    for illegally crossing the border last year, and nearly half
    the migrants who died, according to the United States
    Border Patrol.

    Those figures have inspired competing responses.

    After the 3-year-old boy was found dead this week in the
    desert, some local law enforcement authorities called for
    charging his mother, Edith Rodriguez Reyes, with reckless
    endangerment. The authorities at the Mexican consulate
    here said Ms. Rodriguez was a victim of smugglers and
    demanded that she be released.

    The mesquite-covered landscape here was a base for the
    Minuteman militias, who have threatened to take the law
    into their own hands in defense of America's southern border.

    It is also home to so-called border Samaritans, who scour
    the desert in search of migrants in distress to deliver water,
    medical attention and, sometimes, advice on how to avoid
    detention.

    "This is a token deployment of unarmed and grossly
    inadequate numbers of National Guardsmen," a Minuteman
    spokeswoman, Connie Hair, told The Arizona Daily Star.
    Ms. Hair said the troops would be placed in the "same
    demoralizing position as the Border Patrol, outmanned
    and outgunned against international crime cartels."

    Jim Walsh, a volunteer with the Samaritans, was not
    optimistic either, but for different reasons. "With this
    president and this Congress," he said, "it's not going
    to be too humane."

    Worried about the enormous drain on taxpayers, voters
    here passed a ballot initiative intended to limit immigrants'
    access to public services. Meanwhile, economists like
    Marshall Vest at the University of Arizona said the illegal
    immigrants were an important source of labor for the
    booming construction and tourism industries that had
    helped make Arizona the second-fastest growing state,
    after Nevada.

    When Mr. Bush deploys an estimated 6,000 National
    Guard troops to the border, it is expected that most
    will be sent here in an effort to seal off the desert.
    So this is likely to be the place where the successes
    and failures of the policy will unfold.

    Arizona has been hurt by "bad immigration policies,"
    said Laura Briggs, an associate professor of women's
    studies at the University of Arizona, and a member of
    the border Samaritans. "There is a long tradition of
    hospitality in the borderlands, and this rising death
    toll is stressing everybody out."

    Those conflicting interests, and growing frustrations,
    come to life on Arivaca Road, which runs about 14 miles
    west of Interstate 19, on the way to Sasabe, Mexico.

    Once a bucolic settlement of horse and cattle ranchers,
    the area around the highway has been overrun, according
    to residents, by illegal immigrants who move in groups
    of up 80 at a time, and up to a thousand a day in the
    peak winter season. Residents must also contend with
    the buzz of Border Patrol agents in trucks and helicopters.

    Frank Ormsby, a rancher, and his brother, Lloyd, said
    that after living for more than a decade in the middle
    of the buildup of the Border Patrol and the growing waves
    of immigrants, they are just plain sick of all of it. There
    are more backpacks littering the desert than rocks, they
    said, and enough money is being spent on equipment
    for the Border Patrol to rebuild New Orleans.

    To them, illegal immigration is a huge business managed
    by powerful interests to make money and political careers.
    Among the beneficiaries, Frank Ormsby said, were immigrant
    smugglers, whose fortunes increased every time a new law
    enforcement effort was announced, and the Border Patrol,
    whose budget has increased fivefold in 10 years.

    "There are so many agents they could stand hand-in-hand
    across the border and stop illegal immigrants if they really
    wanted to," said Mr. Ormsby from beneath a wide black
    cowboy hat. "The money we are spending on the Border
    Patrol, in gas, in equipment, in technology, what do we
    have to show for it?"

    "I see so much waste," he added. "Ray Charles could see it."

    A couple miles down the road, two sunburned men, their
    clothes tattered and their lips severely chapped, look the
    image of needy. Raúl Calderón, 60, and his 22-year-old
    son Samuel, had been walking in the desert heat for four days.

    Natives of the western Mexican state of Michoacán, they
    said they had been abandoned by the smuggler — known
    among immigrants here as "coyotes" — they had hired
    on the second day of their journey.

    On the third night, the men said, they lost track of the
    10 other people traveling with them in the darkness. And by
    the fourth morning, they had run out of food and water.

    "Our government has forgotten about us," the father said.
    Then nodding toward his son, he added, "Each generation
    stays as poor as the last."

    Mr. Calderón said his native town of Churintzio had been
    nearly emptied by migration to the United States. He himself
    had gone back and forth across the border for much of the
    last two decades. But he said he had spent the last five years
    in Mexico, trying to start his own restaurant.

    His son, on the other hand, had made enough money working
    in restaurants between San Antonio and Corpus Christi to
    return to Michoacán and build a home. Now the two of them
    were off to the United States again to seek more work,
    this time in California.

    Mr. Calderón said he had heard that President Bush "is going
    to give work permits, and so I have come to get one."

    He would not, however, get one this day. Border Patrol
    helicopters buzzed overhead. A few minutes later came
    the trucks. And without much of an exchange, Mr. Calderón
    and his son were taken away.

    "It's like saying we're going to stop crime," said a Border
    Patrol spokesman, Gustavo Soto, when asked whether the
    presence of the National Guard would stop undocumented
    immigrants from coming. "It's hard to say that we will be
    able to stop all people from coming across the border.
    But we can achieve better control."

    On the Mexican side of the border, where remittances have
    become the second-largest source of income after oil,
    Mexican immigration agents said they felt helpless in
    stopping the immigrants, even though the law prohibits
    citizens from leaving through unofficial ports.

    Hundreds of people, carrying backpacks and gallon jugs
    of water, filed into the desert on Thursday. Among them,
    were Karla and Miguelito, neither one of them more than
    four-feet tall.

    In a speech cut short so that the migrants could be on
    their way before sundown, Mario López, an agent in Grupo
    Beta, a Mexican government agency that seeks to protect
    the migrants, advised the men, women and children about
    the dangers of their illegal journey and advised them of
    their rights in case they were apprehended by the Border Patrol.

    "This is a sad reality," he said. "We hate to see our people
    leaving this way. But what can we do, except wish them luck."

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

    7) 100 Years in the Back Door, Out the Front
    By NINA BERNSTEIN
    May 21, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/weekinreview/21bernstein.html

    THE Texas cotton lobbyist tried to reassure Congress that the tens
    of thousands of Mexicans who labored in the fields of the Southwest
    were not a threat to national security. There "never was a more docile
    animal in the world than the Mexican," he told the Senate committee.

    Then he offered a way around the political problem the congressmen
    faced in extending the program that had let the workers in.

    "If you gentlemen have any objections to admitting the Mexicans
    by law," he said, "take the river guard away and let us alone, and
    we will get them all right."

    They did — and that was in 1920. Almost a century later, the
    debate over illegal immigration from Mexico often makes it
    sound like a recent development that breaks with the tradition
    of legal passage to America.

    Quite the contrary, say immigration scholars like Aristide R. Zolberg,
    who relates the anecdote about the Texas cotton grower in his new
    book, "A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning
    of America." A pattern of deliberately leaving the country's "back
    door" open to Mexican workers, then moving to expel them and
    their families years later, has been a recurrent feature of immigration
    policy since the 1890's.

    "Things are not the same today, but the basic dynamics do not
    change," said Mr. Zolberg, a professor of political science at the
    New School. "Wanting immigrants because they're a good source
    of cheap labor and human capital on the one hand, and then
    posing the identity question: But will they become Americans?
    Where is the boundary of American identity going to be?"

    Nearly every immigrant group has been caught at that crossroads
    for a time, wanted for work but unwelcome as citizens, especially
    when the economy slumps. But Mexicans have been summoned
    and sent back in cycles for four generations, repeatedly losing
    the ground they had gained.

    During the Depression, as many as a million Mexicans, and even
    Mexican-Americans, were ousted, along with their American-born
    children, to spare relief costs or discourage efforts to unionize.
    They were welcome again during World War II and cast as heroic
    "braceros." But in the 1950's, Mexicans were re-branded
    as dangerous, welfare-seeking "wetbacks."

    In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent Gen. Joseph Swing
    to "secure the border" with farm raids and summary deportations
    that drove out at least a million people. At the same time, growers
    were assured of a new supply of temporary workers through the
    "braceros" program, which soon doubled to 400,000 a year.

    The pattern grew during the years between the 1882 Chinese
    Exclusion Act and the quotas of 1929, as rising legal barriers
    drastically narrowed the nation's front door. The goal was to preserve
    the country's "Nordic character" against Italians and Eastern European
    Jews who had begun arriving in large numbers.

    Yet Congress refused to close the back entrance to a growing flow
    of Mexicans, even though by the lawmakers' own racial standards,
    Mexicans were even more objectionable than the "degraded races"
    of Asians and Southern Europeans whom they were increasingly
    replacing in fields, factories and railroad work.

    A convenient way was found to reconcile the contradiction, said
    Camille Guérin-Gonzales, a professor of history at the University
    of Wisconsin and the author of "Mexican Workers and American
    Dreams." No quotas were necessary to keep Mexicans out because
    they were not going to stay. "Not wanting to 'mongrelize the race,'
    but needing cheap labor, Americans constructed Mexicans as
    'birds of passage,' " she said, using the phrase coined to describe
    Italian immigrants. "The proximity of the border made that even
    more believable."

    The cotton pickers cited by the Texas lobbyist had arrived by way
    of a program intended to address World War I labor shortages.
    But as commercial agriculture created "factories in the field,"
    undocumented entry became the norm. Growers pointed out
    that no willing field hand could afford the "head tax" that went
    with legal entry. And employers regularly cited informal entry
    as a feature that made Mexicans more desirable than cheap
    foreign laborers like Filipinos, because they were easier to deport.
    As one rancher quoted in Mr. Zolberg's book remarked to a Mexican
    hand: "When we want you, we'll call you; when we don't — git."

    The full, brutal weight of that formula hit in the Depression.
    Roundups of Mexican families in public places, summary deportations
    — and well-publicized threats of more to come — sent panic through
    Mexican-American communities in 1931. The tactic was called "scare-
    heading" by its architect, Charles P. Visel, the director of the Los Angeles
    Citizens Committee on the Coordination of Unemployment Relief.
    It worked. Even many legal immigrants were panicked into selling
    their property cheap and leaving "voluntarily."

    It was a time when crops went unharvested for lack of buyers and
    white families like those in "The Grapes of Wrath" poured West,
    desperate for work. "They gave you a choice: starve or go back to
    Mexico," a resident of Indiana Harbor, Ind., recalled later, as Roger
    Daniels relates in his book "Guarding the Golden Door." A Santa
    Barbara woman said she would never forget seeing trains organized
    by the railroad transporting families to the border in boxcars.
    The same rail lines had long been maintained by Mexicans who
    had settled not only in the Southwest, but in Indiana, Illinois
    and eastward.

    "I have left the best of my life and strength here, sprinkling with
    the sweat of my brow the fields and factories of these gringos,
    who only know how to make one sweat and don't even pay attention
    to one when they see one is old," said one worker, Juan Berzunzolo,
    interviewed in California in the 1920's by a Mexican anthropologist
    and quoted by Devra Weber in "Dark Sweat, White Gold: California
    Farm Workers, Cotton and the New Deal."

    At the other side of the border, Ms. Guérin-Gonzales said, an
    11-year-old American-born girl who had been "repatriated" from
    California told an interviewer in the 1930's, "I would be in the fifth
    grade there, but here, no, because I didn't know how to read and
    write Spanish." A boy recounted how a Mexican policeman upbraided
    him for speaking English. But by 1943, with the economy ascendant
    and employers crying of wartime labor shortages, the cycle began
    anew.

    Today, the nature of the deal can no longer be disguised, said
    Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, co-director of Immigration Studies at
    New York University. "It's a bad-faith pact," he said. "We can't have
    it both ways — an economy that's addicted to immigrant labor, but
    that's not ready to pay the cost."

    And Mr. Zolberg said the old resort to mass expulsion is less likely,
    since the naturalization of millions of Latinos, including those from
    the 1986 amnesty, changed the rules of the game. "Mexicans, and
    Latinos generally are more in the situation today that Italians and
    Jews were in the 20's and 30's," he said. "They began to have some
    electoral clout, because there were more people of that national
    origin who could stand up."

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

    8) These Guns for Hire
    By TED KOPPEL
    Washington
    May 22, 2006
    http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/22/opinion/22koppel.html?hp

    THERE is something terribly seductive about the notion of
    a mercenary army. Perhaps it is the inevitable response of
    a market economy to a host of seemingly intractable public
    policy and security problems.

    Consider only a partial list of factors that would make a force
    of latter-day Hessians seem attractive. Among them are these:

    • Growing public disenchantment with the war in Iraq;

    • The prospect of an endless campaign against global terrorism;

    • An over-extended military backed by an exhausted, even
    depleted force of reservists and National Guardsmen;

    • The unwillingness or inability of the United Nations or other
    multinational organizations to dispatch adequate forces
    to deal quickly with hideous, large-scale atrocities (see
    Darfur and Congo);

    • The expansion of American corporations into more remote,
    fractious and potentially hostile settings.

    Just as the all-volunteer military relieved the government
    of much of the political pressure that had accompanied
    the draft, so a rent-a-force, harnessing the privilege of
    every putative warrior to hire himself out for more than
    he could ever make in the direct service of Uncle Sam,
    might relieve us of an array of current political pressures.

    In the areas of logistics and support, this proposition is
    already more than theoretical. In addition to the roughly
    130,000 American troops now serving in Iraq, private
    contractors have their own army of approximately 50,000
    employees performing functions that used to be the
    province of the military. The army used to cook its own
    meals, do its own laundry, drive its own trucks. But after
    the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Pentagon reduced
    American armed forces by some 36 percent, anticipating
    a peace dividend that was never fully realized.

    So, if there are personnel shortages in the military (and
    with units in their second and third rotations into Iraq
    and Afghanistan, there are), then what's wrong with having
    civilian contractors? Expense is a possible issue; but
    a resumption of the draft would be significantly
    more controversial.

    Moreover, contractors provide the bodyguards (most
    of them veterans of the American, British, Australian,
    Nepalese or South African military) and, in some cases,
    the armored vehicles and even helicopters that have
    become so necessary for the conduct of business by
    foreign civilians in Iraq. Such protective services are
    employed by practically every American news agency
    and, indeed, are responsible for the security of the
    American ambassador himself.

    So, what about the inevitable next step — a defensive
    military force paid for directly by the corporations that
    would most benefit from its protection? If, for example,
    an insurrection in Nigeria threatens that nation's ability
    to export oil (and it does), why not have Chevron or
    Exxon Mobil underwrite the dispatch of a battalion
    or two of mercenaries?

    Chris Taylor, the vice president for strategic initiatives
    and corporate strategy for Blackwater USA, wanted to be
    sure I understood that such a thing could only happen with
    the approval of the Nigerian government and at least the
    tacit understanding of Washington. But could Blackwater
    provide a couple of battalions under those circumstances?
    "600 people in a battalion," he answered. "I could source
    1,200 people, yes. There are people all over the world who
    have honorably served in their military or police organizations.
    I can go find honorable, vetted people, recruit them, train
    them to the standard we require."

    It could have the merit of stabilizing oil prices, thereby
    serving the American national interest, without even tapping
    into the federal budget. Meanwhile, oil companies could protect
    some of their more vulnerable overseas interests without the
    need to embroil Congress in the tiresome question of whether
    Americans should be militarily engaged in a sovereign third
    world nation.

    There are limits, of course. None of these security companies
    is likely to undertake the full-scale military burden presented
    by an Iran or a North Korea. But their horizons are expanding.
    Cofer Black, formerly a high-ranking C.I.A. officer and now
    a senior executive with Blackwater USA, has publicly said that
    his company would be prepared to take on the Darfur account.

    At whose expense and to what ultimate end is not altogether
    clear. But Blackwater and other leading security companies are
    seriously proposing to officials at very high levels of the
    government that their private forces could relieve a number
    of the burdens now being shouldered (or not) by American
    troops. The underlying theory seems to be that where a host
    government is unable to protect American business interests
    overseas and where the American government may be
    reluctant or unable to intervene, there is another option
    conveniently available.

    The Pentagon, which is anything but enamored of the prospect
    of private armies operating outside its chain of command,
    is nonetheless struggling to come to terms with what it now
    calls "the long war." There is every expectation that the fight
    against global terrorism and the most extreme forms of Islamic
    fundamentalism will last for many years. This is a war that will
    not necessarily require aircraft carriers, strategic bombers,
    fighter jets or heavily armored tanks. It will certainly not
    enable the United States to exploit its advantages in
    nuclear weapons.

    It is a war, indeed, that favors the highly mobile and adaptive
    fighting skills of the former Special Forces soldiers and other
    ex-commandos who have already taken early retirement
    from the military in order to serve their country less directly,
    if more profitably.

    The United States may not be about to subcontract out the
    actual fighting in the war on terrorism, but the growing
    role of security companies on behalf of a wide range of
    corporate interests is a harbinger of things to come. Is
    what's good for companies like Exxon Mobil, Freeport-
    McMoRan (the mining company that has paid the Indonesian
    military to maintain security) or even General Motors
    necessarily good for the United States?

    The other morning on NBC's "Today" program, Rex Tillerson,
    chairman and chief executive of Exxon, was asked by Matt
    Lauer if his company would consider lowering profits
    to help consumers this summer. Mr. Tillerson had the
    good manners not to laugh. "We work for the shareholder,"
    he said, adding, "Our job is to go out and make the most
    money for ... those people."

    What then if the commercial interests of a company or
    foreign government hiring one of these security contractors
    comes into conflict with the interests of the United States
    government? Mr. Taylor of Blackwater doesn't even concede
    the possibility. "At the end of the day," he said, "we consider
    ourselves responsible to be strategic partners of the U.S.
    government." To which he then added, perhaps a little more
    convincingly: "If we went against U.S. government interests
    we would never get another contract."

    It is, however, an evolving relationship that requires far greater
    scrutiny. There is, in the final analysis, no direct chain of
    command from the government to units of Blackwater or
    other security companies that have been hired by private
    corporations or foreign governments. Chris Taylor insists:
    "We are accountable. We are transparent." That's debatable.
    But, he adds: "Given the global war on terror, this is a way that
    a lot of these retirees (from the military) can contribute. We want
    to have a discussion into how we fit into the total solution set."

    By all means. Let the discussion begin.

    Ted Koppel is a contributing columnist for The Times and
    managing editor of the Discovery Channel.

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

    9) An Immigration Bottom Line
    New York Times Editorial
    May 21, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/opinion/21sun1.html

    This week starts the endgame for immigration reform in the Senate.
    Months of debate have come down to this: whether the
    comprehensive solution at the core of the Senate bill will survive
    the hostile attentions of those who do not want real reform at all.
    A brace of amendments has already warped and weakened the bill
    — though not fatally, thanks to a bipartisan coalition that has fended
    off repeated attempts at sabotage. But there is still a danger that
    any legislation will be further compromised or even gutted
    to conform with the House's deplorable bill.

    A good immigration bill must honor the nation's values and be
    sensible enough to work. It must not violate the hopes of deserving
    people who want to work toward citizenship. It must not create
    a servant class of "guest workers" shackled to their employers
    and forbidden to aspire to permanent legal status. It must give
    newcomers equal treatment under the law and respect their rights
    of due process. It must impose rigorous enforcement of labor
    laws, so unscrupulous employers cannot exploit illegal workers.
    And it must clear the existing backlogs of millions seeking to
    enter the country legally, so that illegal immigrants do not
    win an unfair place in line.

    'Amnesty' and the Mythical Middle Ground. The Senate is the
    only hope for real reform this year because the House has
    already chosen its plan. It wants to wall off Mexico, turn 11
    million or so illegal immigrants into an Ohio-size nation of
    felons, and then pick them off through arrests, deportation
    and an atmosphere of focused hostility until they all go home,
    abandoning their families and jobs.

    That spirit of wishful hunkering has infected the Senate, where
    Democrats and moderate Republicans have had to struggle
    against the obstinacy of those who join their counterparts
    in the House in seeing immigration entirely as a pest-control
    problem. President Bush has aligned himself with the thoughtful
    reformers, but in a slippery way. "There's some people in our
    party who think, you know, deportation will work," Mr. Bush
    said on Thursday. "There are people in the other party that
    want to have automatic amnesty. As I said in my speech,
    I've found a good middle ground."

    But nobody favoring the Senate bill wants automatic amnesty.
    It imposes a long and difficult path to citizenship. Illegal
    immigrants must have a clean record and a job, speak English
    and pay a big fine. That is what the president wants, though
    he tries not to say it. His mildness has only validated the
    efforts of those who cling to the enforcement-only delusion,
    and who have tried so hard to strip the Senate bill of any
    meaningful paths to citizenship.

    Mr. Bush should have joined the debate far earlier and more
    assertively, insisting that the "middle ground" lies nowhere
    near those who refuse any accommodation and favor mass
    deportations.

    The Border Fixation. An immigration solution cannot be focused
    only on the border. We've tried that. Border enforcement has
    swelled in the last 20 years, with no visible effect. Mr. Bush's plan
    to send National Guard troops was seen on both sides, rightly,
    as a ploy to placate the xenophobes. It would be good to expand
    the Border Patrol. But the best help we can give it is to enforce
    workplace rules, ease the pressure for visas and restore law
    and order in a comprehensive way.

    The Enforcement Gap. The value of illegal immigrants to many
    employers is their fearful willingness to work for low pay in bad
    conditions. People who are secure in their status will stand up
    against abuses, leading to better treatment for all. Workplace
    enforcement is one tactic. Employers who risk real punishment
    will be less likely to flout the rules. But guest worker programs
    without the citizenship option are also an invitation to worker
    abuse, and a shameful abdication of America's values. Mr. Bush
    has taken this path. Congress must not.

    Fairness and Workability. The current bill divides the 11 million
    to 12 million illegal immigrants into three groups. Those who
    arrived less than two years ago would have to go home. Those
    who have been here for two to five years would be treated
    as guest workers, and would have to leave and re-enter the
    country to keep that status. The rest would be able to seek
    citizenship.

    Will this cumbersome bureaucratic solution work? It depends
    on the willingness of the two-to-five-year group to step forward.
    For immigration reform to succeed it must lure people out of the
    shadows — a goal that may be fatally compromised by the punitive
    hoops the bill erects.

    Another profound shortcoming of the bill is its harsh criminal-
    justice provisions. It greatly expands the types of immigration-
    related offenses that constitute "aggravated felonies" and thus
    grounds for detention and deportation. People who use false
    passports to flee persecution, for example, might be ensnared.
    The bill increases penalties and the risk of deportation for minor
    infractions, like failing to file a change of address form. It removes
    judges' and immigration officers' discretion to weigh individual
    circumstances, adding toughness at the cost of fairness and decency.

    The Xenophobia Problem. The Senate's debate has laid bare
    a hostility to immigrants that is depressing in its spitefulness
    and vigor. From Senator James Inhofe's amendment declaring
    English the national language to one from Jon Kyl that would have
    barred low-skilled guest workers from seeking permanent status
    to another from John Ensign that would have denied Social Security
    credit for work done before an immigrant is legalized, the debate
    has been littered with attempts to stifle, stymie or blow up the
    process.

    The bipartisan coalition pursuing thoughtfulness over such
    simplistic hostility has proved sturdy so far. The senators who
    have fashioned the consensus for comprehensive reform must
    stick together, or the possibility of a solution this year will die,
    along with the hopes of millions.

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

    10) Message from Ricardo Alarcon,
    President of the National Assembly
    of People's Power of the Republic of Cuba

    Dear sisters and brothers:

    On behalf of the revolutionary Government of Cuba and the Cuban
    people I salute the organizers and all participants at the May 20
    Hands off Venezuela and Cuba rally.

    We appreciate your solidarity in our struggle for independence and
    justice in the face or the imperialist aggression that our people
    have been resisting, heroically and successfully for over 47 year. In
    spite of the economic blockade our people has advanced dramatically
    in building a new and better society and cooperating closely with our
    brothers and sisters in Venezuela we are helping many others in Latin
    America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia to improve their lives. We
    strongly believe that free and universal health care and education, a
    decent job and housing are inalienable rights that belong to
    everybody including the millions deprived from those rights in the
    United States.

    We urge all of you to join us in demanding an end to the criminal and
    hypocritical policy of the Bush administration that continue to
    promote terrorism against the Cuban people as illustrated by their
    protection of such cold blood killers like Orlando Bosch and Luis
    Posada Carriles and maintain unjustly incarcerated Five Cuban heroes
    that were detained almost 8 years ago precisely for their efforts
    against those very same terrorist groups that operate with impunity
    and with the official protection of the US authorities.

    We call upon all of you to join in the international campaign against
    US sponsored terrorism from September 12 when the Cuban Five will
    have been deprived of their freedom for 8 years to October the 6th
    that will mark the 30th anniversary of the destruction of a Cubana
    civilian airplane and the assassination of all 73 persons on board.
    We should also commemorate next September 21 the 30th anniversary of
    the killing in Washington D.C. of Orlando Letelier and Ronnie Moffit.

    Orlando Bosch was involved in the plot to murder Letelier and Moffit
    as is clearly reflected in recently declassified U.S. official
    documents but Bosch has never been questioned by FBI, and is living
    in Miami still actively pursuing his criminal endeavors.

    Luis Posada Carriles is a fugitive of the Venezuelan justice from
    which he escaped with the help of the Reagan-Bush White House twenty
    years ago. The U.S. Governmnet knows very well that he and Bosch
    masterminded the destruction of our airplane in 1976. The U.S. has an
    obligation to extradite Posada to Venezuela to continue his trial on
    that heinous crime or has the obligation to prosecute him in the U.S.
    for the same crime. There is no legal alternative according to
    international conventions against terrorism that were signed and
    ratified by the U.S. But Mr. Posada has been for more than a year
    under U.S. official protection and so far he has not been estradited
    or accused.

    The detention of Gerardo, Ramon, Antonio, Fernando and Rene was
    determined to be arbitrary and illegal by a unanimous decision of a
    five member panel of U.N. human rights experts. Their convictions
    were reversed also by a unanimous decision of three judges of the
    Atlanta Court of Appeals. Those decisions were announced in May 2005
    and August 2005, but the Five Cubans are still in prison subjected to
    cruel and unusual treatment with severe violations of their human
    rights including the denial of visas to the wives of Gerardo and Rene
    that have not been permitted to enter the U.S. to visit them.

    The Five Cubans must be liberated immediately. Posada Carriles and
    Bosch must be prosecuted and punished as confessed and very well
    documented terrorists.

    The cynical "war on terrorism" of Bush has to be unmasked, denounced
    and defeated.

    The aggression against the Iraqi people has to be stopped forthwith.
    The exploitation and discrimination against immigrant workers, the
    war on poor people, must end.

    The threats against Venezuela and the interventionist attempts
    against other peoples in latin America have to be condemned and
    rejected.

    Let's fight together to build bridges of friendship, peace and
    cooperation between the peoples of the United States and Latin
    America and the Caribbean. Let's struggle untied, shoulder to
    shoulder, towards a new and better world, a world of justice and
    freedom for all.

    Long live the American people. Long live the peoples of Latin America
    and the Caribbean. In solidarity let's fight together until victory
    forever.

    Ricardo Alarcon

    La Habana

    May 20, 2006

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

    11) Where is the Global Outcry at This Continuing Cruelty?
    Nearly 60 years after most Palestinians were first forced from our
    homes, the killings and blockades carry on with impunity
    by Ghada Karmi
    Published on Monday, May 15, 2006 by the Guardian/UK
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1774765,00.html
     
    Israel is 58 years old today. Israelis have already celebrated with
    barbecues and parties. And so they should, for they've pulled off
    an amazing stunt: the creation of a state for one people on the
    land of another - and at their massive expense - without incurring
    effective sanction. Some of those not celebrating, the Arab citizens
    of Israel, were also there, demonstrating to remind the world that
    Israel displaced 750,000 to take their land without compensation.
    Millions more Palestinians will demonstrate today in the refugee
    camps of Gaza, the West Bank and neighbouring Arab states
    against their expulsion by Israel. The world, however, is not
    listening, any more than it did in 1948, when most of Palestine's
    inhabitants were expelled to make way for Jewish immigrants.
     
    My family was among those displaced and, though a child,
    I vividly remember the panic and misery of that flight from our
    home in Jerusalem on an April morning in 1948, with the scent
    of spring in the air. Palestine by then had become a raging
    battleground as Jews fought to seize our land in the wake of
    the 1947 UN partition resolution. My parents decided to evacuate
    us temporarily. "We will return," they insisted, "the world will
    not let such injustice happen!" They were wrong: the world let
    it happen and we never returned. Little comfort in knowing that
    we were among many others, that we did not end up in tents,
    that conflicts do such things. Our lives, our history and our
    future had been traduced. In those early days, I would wonder
    with anguish how the Jewish incomers who took over our house
    could sleep at night, seeing our belongings, family photos,
    children's toys. Subsequently, Israelis made much of the danger
    they faced from five Arab armies in the 1948-49 war, but in
    reality their forces were greater than all their opponents'
    combined, and the latter ill equipped and poorly trained.
     
    Growing up in Britain, I got no sympathy but rather kept being
    told about the need to give Jews a state they could feel safe in.
    But at whose expense was this generosity? We Palestinians had
    no hand in the Holocaust, nor in persecuting Jews. But we were
    transformed from a peaceable agrarian people into a nation
    of beggars under occupation, refugees, exiles and second-class
    citizens of Israel. Worse still, we are now labelled terrorists,
    suicide bombers or Islamic extremists. Our crime? We were
    in the wrong place at the wrong time. And for that we have
    been repeatedly punished, most recently for electing the
    "wrong" government, headed by a party the west, not
    Palestinians, labels as terrorist.
     
    I went to "Palestine" last month to see what 58 years of Israel
    had done. It was also springtime, but this was a shadow of the
    land I had known. I found a pathetically fragmented society,
    clinging to a fading dream of statehood against the odds.
    Israel's policies have broken up the Palestinian territories
    into ghettoes behind barriers and checkpoints. Gaza, supposedly
    liberated, is a big prison where, according to the World Bank,
    75% are under the poverty line and a quarter of children are
    malnourished. Since January, Israel has kept the cargo crossings
    into Gaza closed most of the time. Flour ran out last month,
    and now medicines. The UN has warned of a humanitarian
    disaster. Now Israel is threatening to cut off fuel because of
    outstanding Palestinian debts, normally paid from Palestinian
    tax receipts, which Israel has illegally held back since January.
    The barrier wall, sealing off whole towns and villages, makes
    normal life impossible.
     
    The new, democratically elected Palestinian government is
    paralysed because of Israeli and western sanctions. International
    aid to the Palestinians, $1bn annually, has been stopped; $70m
    donated by Arab states is blocked because banks, fearing
    international sanctions, refuse to transfer the funds. Money
    has run out for 150,000 public workers and their approximately
    1 million dependants. I found deserted supermarkets and
    shopkeepers in despair. Armed men roam the streets full
    of anger at their loss of livelihood. Meanwhile, Israel's assault
    on the Palestinians continues. Last week the army killed nine
    and wounded 24. It mounted 38 incursions into Palestinian
    towns and arrested 61 people, including 11 children.
     
    The Quartet powers have agreed a three-month emergency
    aid package. Because of the freeze on relations with Hamas,
    the aid will bypass the government, though how essential
    services can be run without a central administration is hard
    to imagine. Arab foreign ministers have warned of a breakdown
    in law and order if the Palestinian Authority collapses, but to
    no avail. The world's silence in the face of this cruelty is
    astonishing. There is no international outcry against a policy
    whose transparent objective is to goad the Palestinians into
    overthrowing the government they elected in favour of one
    more pliant to Israel's designs. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's
    plan is to draw Israel's border "unilaterally", annexing the large
    West Bank settlement blocs and keeping Jerusalem and the
    Jordan Valley. The roads connecting it to Israel will bisect
    Palestinian territory.
     
    What remains, 14% at most, together with the Gaza prison,
    will form the "Palestinian state". Olmert will be in Washington
    soon, no doubt seeking a rubber stamp. The idea is presumably
    that the Palestinians - dispersed and powerless - will then
    no longer be in Israel's way. Anyone who believes this, as the
    west's unthinking support for Israel seems to suggest, knows
    nothing about history or the will of peoples to resist injustice.
    The Palestinians are no exception.
     
    Dr. Ghada Karmi is a research fellow at the Institute of Arab
    and Islamic Studies, Exeter University, and a former consultant
    to the Palestinian Authority. Email to: g.karmi@exeter.ac.uk
     
    Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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

    12) His photo is an icon, his life a shambles
    At home and suffering from stress disorder,
    ex-Marine has turned against Iraq war
    BY DAVID ZUCCHINO
    Los Angeles Times
    Posted on Mon, May. 22, 2006
    http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/news/14636241.htm

    JONANCY, Ky. — Growing up in Jonancy Bottom, where coal trucks
    grind their gears as they rumble down from the ragged green hills,
    Blake Miller always believed there were only two paths for him: the
    coal mines or the Marine Corps. He chose the Marines, enlisting
    right out of high school.

    The Marines sent him to Iraq, and then to Fallujah, where his life
    was forever altered. He survived a harrowing all-night firefight in
    November 2004, pinned down on a rooftop by insurgents firing
    from a nearby house. Filthy and exhausted, he had just lighted
    a Marlboro at dawn when an embedded photographer captured
    an image that transformed Blake into an icon of the Iraq war.

    His detached expression in the photo seemed to signify different
    things to different people — valor, despair, hope, futility, fear,
    courage, disillusionment. For Blake, the photograph represents
    a pivotal moment in his life: an instant when he feared he would
    never see another sunrise, and when his psychological foundation
    began to fracture.

    Blake, whose only brush with celebrity was as a star quarterback
    in high school, became known as the Marlboro Man, a label he
    detests. That same notoriety has carried over into his post-Iraq
    life, where he is an icon of sorts for another consequence of the
    war — post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

    On Nov. 10, precisely one year after the photograph was flashed
    around the world, Lance Cpl. James Blake Miller was medically
    discharged from the Marine Corps, diagnosed with full-blown
    PTSD. Three years after leaving the Kentucky hills for a career
    in the Corps, he was back home. He feels adrift and tormented,
    dependent on his new bride, his family and his military psychiatrist
    to help him make sense of all that has happened to him.

    CAN'T SLEEP

    He barely sleeps. On most mornings, Blake says, he has no good
    reason to get out of bed. Often, his stomach is so upset that he
    can't eat. He has nightmares and flashbacks. He admits he's often
    grouchy and temperamental. He knows he drinks and smokes
    too much.

    "He's not the same as before," said Blake's wife, Jessica, who has
    known him since grade school. "I'd never seen the anger, the
    irritability, the anxiety."

    Blake says he feels guilty about taking money — $2,528 in monthly
    military disability checks — for doing nothing. Yet he's also frustrated
    that two careers made possible by his military training, police officer
    or U.S. marshal, are out of reach because law enforcement is reluctant
    to hire candidates with PTSD.

    So he broods, feeling restless and out of options: "I'm only 21. I'm
    able-bodied as hell, yet I'm considered a liability. It's like I had all
    these doorways open to me, and suddenly they all closed on me.
    It's like my life is over."

    At a local restaurant one night last month, Blake became enraged
    when he thought a man was staring at Jessica's rear end.

    "I just wanted to grab his hair and smash his head against the table,"
    he said later. "I was ready to kill him." But he restrained himself, he said.

    Jessica, who graduates this spring from Pikeville College with
    a psychology degree, has persuaded her husband to undergo
    visualization techniques in which she helps him confront his
    demons.

    "It's understandable that Blake has PTSD, after all he's been through,"
    she said. "Ordinary people can't comprehend what it's like to be
    constantly shot at and have to kill other human beings. They need
    to know what it means to send people like Blake out to fight wars.
    You're going to have a lot of people breaking."

    Five other members of his platoon of about three dozen have
    been diagnosed with PTSD, Blake said. A dozen men from his
    unit were killed in action. A Journal of the American Medical
    Association study published in March found that more than
    one-third of troops who served in Iraq sought help for mental
    health problems within a year of returning home.

    Sitting in the couple's spacious apartment above a furniture
    store outside Pikeville, Ky., Jessica squeezed Blake's hand and
    told him: "You've gone through so much, baby, that you just broke."

    THE FAMOUS PHOTO

    Blake was staring at the sunrise. He was on a rooftop in Fallujah,
    sucking on a Marlboro and wondering whether he would live
    to see Jessica and his father and brothers again.

    Luis Sinco, a Los Angeles Times photographer, was crouched
    next to the corporal, taking cover behind a rooftop wall. There
    was a break in the all-night firefight after an Abrams tank,
    radioed in by Blake, destroyed a house filled with insurgents.

    Sinco pressed the shutter.

    He did not consider the image particularly special. It was the
    last shot he filed that day.

    The photo appeared Nov. 10, 2004, and was distributed
    worldwide. More than 100 newspapers published it. TV and cable
    networks aired feature stories about the Marine's lost, distant look.
    Some noted the trickle of blood on his nose — caused not by
    enemy fire, but by Blake's rifle sight when it bumped his face.

    Blake was unaware that Sinco had photographed him. Two days
    later, he recalled, his gunnery sergeant told him: "Miller, your ugly
    mug is on the front page of all the newspapers back home,
    Marlboro Man."

    The effect of the photo didn't fully register until a three-star
    general showed up in Fallujah. Blake said the general suggested
    moving him out of combat for fear that morale would plummet
    if anything happened to the Marines' new media star, but he
    refused to leave. Later, President Bush sent him a letter and
    a cigar.

    When Jessica saw the photo on the front page of the local paper,
    she had not heard from Blake in a week.

    "I was glad to know he was alive, but I couldn't stop crying," she
    said. "The scared look on his face, his eyes — it tore me up."

    In early January 2005, as Blake's unit prepared to leave Iraq, what
    Marines call a "wizard" — a psychiatrist — gave a required "warrior
    transitioning" talk about PTSD and adjusting to home life. Blake
    didn't think much about it until he returned to Jonancy in late
    January and his nightmares began.

    He dreamed about the 40 enemy corpses that he counted after
    the tank demolished the house, he said, and that he had been shot.

    "He'd jump out of bed and fall to the floor," Jessica said. "I'd have
    to hold him to get him to wake up, and then he'd hug me for the
    longest time."

    'I TEND TO DRINK A LOT'

    Sometimes, Blake mutters Arabic phrases he learned in Iraq or
    grimaces in his sleep, and Jessica will keep whispering his name
    until he wakes up. Some nights, he doesn't sleep at all.

    "I tend to drink a lot just to be able to sleep," Blake said. "Nothing
    else puts me to sleep."

    He decided last summer to see a military psychiatrist at Camp
    Lejeune, N.C., where he was based. In August, he was diagnosed
    with PTSD. But before he could be put on "non-deployable status,"
    his unit was sent to New Orleans to assist with Hurricane Katrina
    recovery.

    While aboard a ship off the Louisiana coast, Blake was taking
    a cigarette break when a petty officer made a whistling sound
    like an incoming rocket-propelled grenade. Blake says he
    remembers nothing about the incident, but was later told that
    he slammed the officer against a bulkhead and attacked him.

    By November, Blake was forced to take a medical disability
    discharge. "They said they couldn't take the risk of me being
    a danger to myself and others," he said.

    He fears that he may have another blackout. "It's terrifying
    that at any moment I could lose control and not know what
    I'm doing," he said. "What if next time it's Jessica?"

    In February, while smoking a cigarette and staring out Jessica's
    dorm room window, Blake said, he thought he saw a dead Iraqi
    man on the grass. Later, he had visions of an Iraqi father and
    son fishing — a scene he'd witnessed in Iraq just before
    a grenade exploded nearby.

    "I can't tell anymore what really happened and what I dreamed,"
    he said. "Sometimes I feel like I'm dying."

    Blake visits a Veterans Administration psychiatrist in nearby
    West Virginia and speaks with him by phone several times
    a week. He said his psychiatrist told him that his PTSD has
    to be managed; his disability will be re-evaluated next March.

    Meanwhile, he has slowly turned against the war. "We've done
    some humanitarian aid," Blake said, "but what good have we
    actually done, and what has America gained except a lot of
    deaths? It burns me up."

    Jessica, who sports an "I Love My Marine" sticker on her car,
    says she and Blake are behind the troops though they no
    longer support the war.

    Blake's military service is literally written on his body; his unit's
    motto, "Angels of Death," is tattooed on his right forearm.
    He had a life-sized cigarette tattooed on his left forearm
    last year.

    For Hillbilly Days, an annual street festival late last month in
    Pikeville (population 6,304), Blake shaved his scruffy beard
    and got a military "high and tight" haircut. He agreed to help
    at a Marine Corps recruiting booth at the festival. Just putting
    on his Marine fatigue pants and boots for the first time since
    his discharge brought back more memories that he had
    to tamp down.

    'I CAN'T STAND TO LOOK AT IT'

    He was so worried that the Marlboro Man photo would
    dominate the recruiting booth that he begged the recruiters
    not to display it. He also persuaded them to remove a large
    version of the photo that had hung in the recruiting station
    in downtown Pikeville.

    "I can't stand to look at it anymore," he said. Even so, he says
    the photo has provided him a platform to try to educate others
    about PTSD.

    Although he has turned against the war, he said, he often wishes
    that he was back in the Corps and with his buddies. He still
    recommends the Corps to potential recruits, but advises them
    that it's a job, not a way of life. He recommends noncombat
    positions.

    "In order to do your job in combat, you have to lock up your
    emotions," he said. "Basically, you're turning people into killers."

    On Nov. 10, precisely one year after the photograph was flashed
    around the world, Lance Cpl. James Blake Miller was medically
    discharged from the Marine Corps, diagnosed with full-blown
    post-traumatic stress disorder.

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

    13) 'Swallowed by pain'
    Jeffrey Lucey joined the Reserves to help pay for college;
    he wasn't prepared for what happened next
    By Mehul Srivastava
    Dayton Daily News
    http://www.daytondailynews.com/project/content/project/suicide/daily/1011lucey.html

    BELCHERTOWN, Mass. | This is the paraphernalia of Jeffrey Lucey's life.
    On one wall of his bedroom: a large, framed photograph of him and
    his Marine Reserves unit.

    On the opposite wall, a much smaller group photo of his Chestnut
    Hill Community Class of 1995 hangs just a little askew.
    On his bookshelf, at the top of two neat stacks, are the books Twelve
    Steps and Twelve Traditions and Living Sober. Bottles of cologne are
    arranged in a small semi-circle on top of his dresser — Abercrombie
    and Fitch, Baryshnikov, Nautica, Acqua di Gio, Obsession.

    On his bed, his mother has placed a DVD of one of his favorite movies,
    The Passion of the Christ, and near his dresser, there are six empty
    bottles: two Heinekens, one Mr. Boston Blackberry Flavored Brandy
    and the rest are of a beer called EKU-28 with the label, "EKU-28 is
    the one whenever something good and strong is needed."

    And here, in front of the dust-covered TV, the faint light from the
    shuttered windows reveals more of the paraphernalia of Jeffrey
    Lucey's life. Brown spots stain the unwashed carpet.
    It is the color of dried blood.

    "It is our 53rd day of activation and we've been incountry four
    weeks to the day." — Jeffrey Lucey's journal

    Going to Iraq was never in Lucey's plans. He wanted to be a cop.
    He wanted to marry his high-school girlfriend. He wanted what
    most want in this town of 2,300 people.

    He went to Holyoke Community College, trying to rack up enough
    credits for a degree. Too small for football, too slow for track,
    Lucey spent most of his time with friends, driving 4-wheelers
    on the paths near his house. He got into some trouble, his
    mother remembers, but no more than most kids his age.
    He wasn't sure he wanted to join the Marine Reserves. But
    some of his friends were joining, and there was a chance he
    could get some money to pay for college. He talked about
    it with his parents. Back then, before Sept. 11, 2001, there
    wasn't a war to worry about, so he signed up.

    In the next two years, everything changed. The country was
    at war, and young men like Lucey were being sent to fight an
    enemy halfway across the world. His unit was activated on
    Jan. 11, 2003.

    Many in America's armed forces are like Lucey: young,
    impressionable with a slight wild streak. Inexperienced in
    the world and unsure of themselves at home. He was a good
    soldier. But something else was going on inside Lucey and
    the war would only make it worse.

    "I should have realized all our lives were about to change,"
    Lucey wrote in his journal.

    Lucey's unit was sent to Camp Pendleton, south of Los Angeles,
    where they spent the days moving equipment from the motor
    pool, getting weapons training and taking hand-to-hand
    combat courses — all preparations for their deployment in Iraq.
    At night, they partied.

    "When each day came to an end, it was like our barracks were
    suddenly changed into a college dorm," Lucey wrote. "Alcohol
    and drinks flooded the area. You could smell steaks, hot dogs
    and burgers cooking outside on our makeshift barbecues.
    Everyone enjoying what we knew would be our last hurrah."

    In the relatively safe confines of the camp, Lucey saw the first
    of his buddies die. He wrote about seeing a Marine killed in
    a car crash. Three others were injured. The day after this accident,
    some of the Marines from his battalion went down to Tijuana.
    "On their way back, their vehicle somehow flipped, paralyzing
    one of the Marines from the neck down," Lucey wrote.

    After a month in California, Lucey's unit left on a 22-hour flight
    to Kuwait, stopping once in Maine and again in Germany.

    "Our first stop was in Bangor, which was difficult, knowing my
    home, my family and my girl Julie, who I love and cherish more
    than anything in the world, was only a couple of hours drive
    away," he wrote.

    In Kuwait, Lucey was stationed at Camp Shuiba, where he helped
    maintain the trucks, humvees and trailers that would be used
    in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

    It was tough in the desert. The heat. The toilets with water filled
    all the way to the top. The boredom. The food that was never
    hot enough, the water that was never cool enough. The sandstorms.
    The nights spent awake.

    "Three days would go by," Lucey wrote, "and your total sleep
    would be under 6 hours. This made the days seem like weeks."
    On March 18, Marine Reservist Lucey celebrated his 21st birthday.
    He was 5,000 miles from Belchertown, his family, his girlfriend
    —and although he may not have known it, the war was about
    to begin.

    The day after his birthday, American forces launched a "decapitation
    strike" in hopes of taking out Saddam Hussein. Two days later, the
    famous "shock and awe" campaign began with three Tomahawk
    cruise missiles from the USS Donald Cooke. In the next two days,
    more than 800 missiles were launched on targets across Iraq,
    softening up the Iraqi defense for the ground assault.

    At Camp Shuiba, Lucey felt the ground shake.
    "At 10:30 p.m. a scud landed in our vicinity," Lucey wrote. "We
    were just falling asleep when a shock wave rattled through our tent.
    The noise was just short of blowing out your ear drums. Everyone's
    heart truly skipped a beat and the reality of where we are and what's
    truly happening hit home.

    "It's now 11:30 and we still have no word of casualties, but from
    the power encompassed in that blast the fear of the worst for
    many is very real. We are now trying to go to sleep for at least
    a couple of hours but anxiety is high and sleep seems close to
    impossible."

    And then, Lucey added three more lines: "We now just had a gas
    alert and it is past midnight. We will not sleep. Nerves are on edge."

    "Hazel, who is in the rack beside me, was looking at his 3 month
    old baby boy when the scud hit... he picked up the picture off
    the floor and gave me a look that seem to say that I hope I will
    hold him again."

    Sometime around March 21, Lucey's company, the 2nd Platoon,
    Section A, 6th Motor Transportation Battallion rolled into Iraq,
    slowly inching north toward Nasiriyah.

    He wrote infrequently during his six months away from home.
    His family took to watching CNN in hopes of catching a glimpse
    of him.

    Later, sitting on his back porch in Belchertown, Lucey told his
    mother and his sister stories about his time in Iraq.

    There was the story about the flag.

    On a short assignment in Nasiriyah, when he volunteered to go
    along with a convoy of Humvees, Lucey saw a dead child on the
    side of the road. The boy clutched to his chest an American flag
    stained with his blood. Lucey helped drag the body off the street
    into an alleyway, and as he left to join his convoy, he kept the
    flag for himself.

    And then there's the story about the old couple.

    Lucey told his mother about his nightmares where faceless old
    people would run toward him asking for help, like the old couple
    in Nasiriyah he says he watched get shot in the back as they ran
    toward the shelter of their home. The nightmare came often,
    keeping Lucey up until three or four in the morning, until the
    last bottle of EKU-28 beer had run out, and he would finally
    fall asleep.

    And then there is the story. The story Lucey kept bottled up
    inside him until last Christmas, when he finally let it out.
    "Don't you understand?" he shouted at his sister, Debra. "Your
    brother is a murderer."

    That's when Debra Lucey first saw the dog tags. The ones Lucey
    said he took off the necks of the two Iraqi soldiers he was forced
    to shoot, one in the eye, the other in the back of the neck. The
    dog tags were simple, with faint letters scratched into their
    cheap metal, Debra remembers thinking. Lucey never took
    the dog tags out, and this was the first time he had shown
    them to the family.

    The Marines have disputed some of these stories. They intially
    told local papers in Massachusetts that as a Reservist in the 6th
    Motor Transport Battalion, Lucey would most likely never have
    come close to Iraqi prisoners. Later, the Marine Corps admitted
    that in the confusion of Iraq, it was not only possible, but likely
    that Lucey volunteered to help in transporting the prisoners.
    A photograph that his parents developed from Lucey's camera
    shows a bare-backed Iraqi sitting on the ground in front of
    a truck with a black bag over his head. Two soldiers are standing
    guard over the Iraqi.

    "Uncertainty can drive any man crazy, the uncertainty about what's
    going to change in your life upon your arrival home. Will all your
    loved ones still be there. Was your significant other loving only
    you while you were 8,000 miles away? Will your friends and loved
    ones be the same people or will they have evolved into people
    you know longer know. Most importantly, will we be the same
    when we get back or will we have changed ourselves."

    It takes about five minutes to walk from Lucey's house to a maple
    tree he used to sit by for hours. The tree has a rope — a long,
    ragged one with seven knots on it. As a child, Lucey would swing
    out on the rope and jump into the brook that runs past the house.
    Earlier this year, as he walked with his mother to the brook, he
    took the headphones from his CD player off his head and made
    her listen to a song about a soldier returning from war.

    "Whatever happened to the young man's heart. Swallowed by pain,
    as he slowly fell apart," the song's chorus goes. "And I am staring
    down the barrel of a .45. Swimming through the ashes of another
    life. No real reason to accept the way things have changed. Staring
    down the barrel of a .45."

    "I am listening to the words, and I am thinking, 'This is my son,
    and he wants me to listen to this,' " Joyce Lucey recalled as she
    walked down the path to the tree. "And he goes, 'No no no, I am
    not going to do anything. Looking down the barrel of a .45 to
    me represents looking down a long dark tunnel.' "

    After he returned from Iraq, Lucey's drinking got worse. His private
    therapist recommended he seek professional help from the VA.
    His nightmares were more frequent, and Lucey had started
    hallucinating. He would go to bed with a flashlight because
    he felt spiders were crawling all over him.

    The Luceys did what they could. They hid the knives in the house.
    They secreted away his Marine Corps-issued knives to his sister's
    house. They took turns sleeping so they could keep an eye on him.
    Drunk, confused and abusive, Lucey was brought by his father and
    sister to the VA medical center in Northampton, Mass., on May 28, 2004.
    The same night that Lucey was involuntarily admitted, medical
    records show that a doctor decided that he was "a clear and
    present danger to self and others from PTSD (post-traumatic
    stress disorder), depression with psychotic features and suicidal
    ideation, acute alcohol intoxication."

    For the next four days, Lucey was kept under observation, and
    the medical records that his father now pores over night after
    night show that the medical center had a pretty good idea of
    what he was going through.

    "When we left him at the VA, I think it gave us a sense of false
    security," said his father, Kevin Lucey. "I felt as if the professionals
    had things under control — things were out of my hands now."

    On two separate occasions, different health care professionals
    answered "yes" to questions about Lucey's suicidal tendencies.
    In one chilling note, after checking yes to whether the patient
    planned to kill himself, a further note described how Lucey "plan
    ed (sic) to OD, hang himself or suffod=cate (sic) himself."

    On June 1, the VA medical center discharged Lucey. They
    diagnosed him with alcohol intoxication, alcohol dependence
    and mood disorder secondary to alcohol intoxication.

    "Jeff knew that he was drinking too much," said Dr. Mark Nickerson,
    a private therapist that Lucey had been seeing at the same time.
    "But it was the trauma that was really eating into him. As
    inappropriate a crutch as it (the alcohol) was, it's about all
    he really had. To me, it would make sense to try and treat
    both the problems together, instead of focusing on the drinking."
    Less than four days later, Lucey was back at the VA medical center.
    His sister had come home after her college graduation ceremonies
    to find him drinking at the house and talking about hanging himself.
    She called the VA.

    VA medical center rules say that for an involuntary admission
    to take place, the patient must be on the premises, or be committed
    by his family. Lucey refused to walk into the building, and VA staff
    spoke to him outside. There wasn't much the staff could do: Records
    state that the patient "showed no grounds to seek a commitment or
    placement under protective custody by the VA police." The Luceys
    had to bring him home.

    Off and on, Lucey would ask for help when he was sober. Twice,
    he asked his father if he could curl up in his lap. Even though he
    thought his son's request odd, Kevin Lucey thought of those times
    as progress. Just one week before Father's Day, he sat for a half-
    hour in the family room, his 23-year-old son in his lap, and told
    himself "we were crossing some kind of hurdle."

    "It's funny how alcohol affects people and makes things more
    interesting in a way."

    Jeffrey Lucey's father came home from work June 22 to find the
    TV on, his son's Iraqi dog tags on the bed and the cellar door open.
    He walked the 10 steps down to the cellar, and saw a small semi-
    circle of picture frames on the ground — photographs of Lucey
    and his Marine unit flanked by pictures of his girlfriend and his
    family. The glass in one of the frames was broken, and his mother
    later found the shards on the floor of her son's room next to the
    blood stains.

    Kevin Lucey took another step and saw his son's feet hanging
    two inches above the ground. He doesn't remember if he screamed
    — he wanted to act quickly. He lifted his 165-pound son, took
    the noose off his neck, and made a small pillow out of the rug
    on the floor.

    "He was in my lap again," said Kevin. "He looked so peaceful,
    and I just held him, and tried to warm him up."

    Lucey probably stood on a crumpled white cardboard box to get
    his neck inside the noose. Had he wanted to save himself, all he
    had to do was stretch his toes the two inches to the ground, take
    the noose off his neck, go back up the cellar stairs into his room
    and wait for his father to come home.
    Instead, he left a note.
    "Dear Dad, Don't look. Just call the cops."
    Contact Mehul Srivastava at 225-2432.

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    14) 1 in 136 U.S. Residents Behind Bars
    U.S. Prisons, Jails Grew by 1,000 Inmates a Week From '04 to '05;
    1 in 136 Residents Behind Bars
    by Elizabeth White
    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0522-03.htm

    WASHINGTON - Prisons and jails added more than 1,000 inmates
    each week for a year, putting almost 2.2 million people, or one
    in every 136 U.S. residents, behind bars by last summer.

    The total on June 30, 2005, was 56,428 more than at the same
    time in 2004, the government reported Sunday. That 2.6 percent
    increase from mid-2004 to mid-2005 translates into a weekly
    rise of 1,085 inmates.

    Of particular note was the gain of 33,539 inmates in jails, the
    largest increase since 1997, researcher Allen J. Beck said. That
    was a 4.7 percent growth rate, compared with a 1.6 percent
    increase in people held in state and federal prisons.

    Prisons accounted for about two-thirds of all inmates, or
    1.4 million, while the other third, nearly 750,000, were in
    local jails, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

    Beck, the bureau's chief of corrections statistics, said the
    increase in the number of people in the 3,365 local jails is
    due partly to their changing role. Jails often hold inmates
    for state or federal systems, as well as people who have
    yet to begin serving a sentence.

    "The jail population is increasingly unconvicted," Beck said.
    "Judges are perhaps more reluctant to release people pretrial."

    The report by the Justice Department agency found that
    62 percent of people in jails have not been convicted,
    meaning many of them are awaiting trial.

    Overall, 738 people were locked up for every 100,000
    residents, compared with a rate of 725 at mid-2004. The
    states with the highest rates were Louisiana and Georgia,
    with more than 1 percent of their populations in prison
    or jail. Rounding out the top five were Texas, Mississippi
    and Oklahoma.

    The states with the lowest rates were Maine, Minnesota,
    Rhode Island, Vermont and New Hampshire.

    Men were 10 times to 11 times more likely than women
    to be in prison or jail, but the number of women behind
    bars was growing at a faster rate, said Paige M. Harrison,
    the report's other author.

    The racial makeup of inmates changed little in recent years,
    Beck said. In the 25-29 age group, an estimated 11.9 percent
    of black men were in prison or jails, compared with 3.9 percent
    of Hispanic males and 1.7 percent of white males.

    Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project,
    which supports alternatives to prison, said the incarceration
    rates for blacks were troubling.

    "It's not a sign of a healthy community when we've come to
    use incarceration at such rates," he said.

    Mauer also criticized sentencing guidelines, which he said
    remove judges' discretion, and said arrests for drug and parole
    violations swell prisons.

    "If we want to see the prison population reduced, we need
    a much more comprehensive approach to sentencing
    and drug policy," he said.

    Copyright 2006 The Associated Press

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    15) First Female Conscientious Objector Sentenced
    Wednesday, 24 May 2006, 11:02 am
    Press Release:
    23 MAY 2006 - for immediate release

    First Female Conscientious Objector Sentenced for Refusing Deployment
    to Afghanistan

    FT. BENNING, GA – Army National Guard Specialist Katherine Jashinski
    received a bad conduct discharge today and was sentenced to 120 days
    confinement after pleading guilty to the charge of "refusal to obey a
    legal order." She was acquitted of the more serious charge of "missing
    movement by design." With 53 days already served (on Fort Benning),
    and 20 days off for good behavior, Ms. Jashinski has 47 days of
    confinement remaining.

    On November 17, 2005, Jashinski made a public statement of
    conscientious objection on the eve of her scheduled deployment to
    Afghanistan. Eighteen months after filing, the Army denied her
    application for a discharge. She was then court-martialed for refusing
    to train with weapons.

    Jashinski's superiors testified that they believed in the sincerity of
    her CO claim, and the Judge noted that he was convinced of the same.

    Aidan Delgado and Camilo Mejía, members of Iraq Veterans Against the
    War, attended Ms. Jashinski's trial today to support her. They
    described
    the atmosphere of the courtroom as initially tense, but said that
    Jashinski's powerful heartfelt testimony changed the tone of the room.

    "Iraq Veterans Against the War supports the right of every soldier to
    follow their conscience," said Delgado. "As the first woman GI to
    publicly take a stand against this war and to declare herself a CO,
    Katherine's actions are very significant. She is a fine example of a
    young person standing up for her beliefs."

    Ms. Jashinski is feeling triumphant and happy to have resolution.
    After completing her sentence she will return to school at the
    University of Texas at Austin and continue her work with the newly
    founded Austin GI Rights Hotline.

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    16) A Sudden Taste for the Law
    New York Times Editorial
    May 24, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/24/opinion/24weds1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

    It's hard to say which was more bizarre about Attorney General
    Alberto Gonzales's threat to prosecute The Times for revealing
    President Bush's domestic spying program: his claim that
    a century-old espionage law could be used to muzzle the press
    or his assertion that the administration cares about enforcing
    laws the way Congress intended.

    Mr. Gonzales said on Sunday that a careful reading of some
    statutes "would seem to indicate" that it was possible to
    prosecute journalists for publishing classified material. He
    called it "a policy judgment by Congress in passing that kind
    of legislation," which the executive is obliged to obey.

    Mr. Gonzales seemed to be talking about a law that dates
    to World War I and bans, in some circumstances, the
    unauthorized possession and publication of information
    related to national defense. It has long been understood
    that this overly broad and little used law applies to
    government officials who swear to protect such secrets,
    and not to journalists.

    But in any case, Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Bush have not
    shown the slightest interest in upholding constitutional
    principles or following legislative guidelines that they
    do not find ideologically or politically expedient.

    Mr. Gonzales served as White House counsel and as
    attorney general during the period Mr. Bush concocted
    more than 750 statements indicating that the president
    would not obey laws he didn't like, or honor the recorded
    intent of those who passed them. Among the most
    outrageous was Mr. Bush's statement that he did not
    consider himself bound by a ban on torturing prisoners.
    Mr. Gonzales was part of the team that came up with
    the rationalization for torture, as well as for the
    warrantless eavesdropping on Americans' e-mail
    and phone calls.

    If Mr. Gonzales has developed a respect for legislative
    intent or a commitment to law enforcement, he could
    start by using his department's power to enforce the
    Voting Rights Act to protect Americans, rather than
    challenging minority voting rights and endorsing such
    obviously discriminatory practices as the gerrymandering
    in Texas or the Georgia voter ID program. He could
    enforce workplace safety laws, like those so tragically
    uninforced at the nation's coal mines, instead
    of protecting polluters and gun traffickers.

    He could uphold the Geneva Conventions and the U.N.
    Convention Against Torture, instead of coming up with
    cynical justifications for violating them. He could repudiate
    the disgraceful fiction known as "unlawful enemy combatant,"
    which the administration cooked up after 9/11 to deny legal
    rights to certain prisoners.

    And he could suggest that the administration follow Congress's
    clear and specific intent for the 1978 Foreign Intelligence
    Surveillance Act: outlawing wiretaps of Americans without warrants.

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    18) Senate Advances Sweeping Immigration Bill
    Under the provisions adopted on Tuesday, employers would be
    required to enter the Social Security numbers or immigrant
    identification numbers of all job applicants, including citizens,
    into the computerized system, which would be created by the
    Department of Homeland Security. The system would notify
    businesses within three days whether the applicant was
    authorized to work in the United States.Those job applicants
    determined to be illegal would have to be fired.
    By RACHEL L. SWARNS
    May 24, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/24/washington/24cnd-immig.html?hp&ex=1148529600&en=396eafcbc403e967&ei=5094&partner=homepage

    WASHINGTON, May 24 — The Senate voted on Tuesday to require
    employers to use a vast new employment verification system that
    would allow businesses to distinguish between legal and illegal
    workers.

    The chances of the bill's passage increased sharply today, as
    the Senate voted 73 to 25 to limit debate and the number of
    amendments that can be offered. The cloture vote makes
    it likely that final action on the bill, which would provide
    at path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who have been
    in the country for over five years, will take place.

    However, the Senate's approach would have to be reconciled
    with a bill passed last December by the House of Representatives
    that focuses strictly on enforcement and would consider illegal
    immigrants to be felons. Many conservative members of both
    houses have said any provision allowing illegal immigrants
    to gain citizenship is an amnesty that will only encourage
    more undocumented immigration.

    Under the provisions adopted on Tuesday, employers would be
    required to enter the Social Security numbers or immigrant
    identification numbers of all job applicants, including citizens,
    into the computerized system, which would be created by the
    Department of Homeland Security. The system would notify
    businesses within three days whether the applicant was
    authorized to work in the United States.

    Those job applicants determined to be illegal would have
    to be fired. The measure, approved 58 to 40, is included
    in a bill that would legalize the vast majority of the nation's
    illegal immigrants, which is expected to pass the Senate
    later this week.

    The new requirements would result in a broad operational
    shift for employers who have relied almost entirely on
    a paper system — the collection of identity documents
    — to determine the legal status of their workers. The
    measure is considered a linchpin of the current immigration
    legislation because it is designed to deter illegal immigration
    by making it extremely difficult for undocumented
    immigrants to find work.

    Without such a provision, senators say, American businesses
    would remain a powerful magnet for millions of illegal immigrants.
    The legislation calls for creating documents that would be
    resistant to counterfeiting for legal immigrants and stiff fines
    for violations by employers. It requires the verification system
    to be operational and in use by all businesses within
    18 months once Congress appropriates the money for it.

    "This is probably the single most important thing we can
    do in terms of reducing the inflow of undocumented workers,"
    Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, said of the measure,
    which was pushed ahead by Senator Charles E. Grassley,
    Republican of Iowa.

    Mr. Grassley hailed the measure as an effort "to balance the
    needs of workers, employers and immigration enforcement."

    But some administration officials, employers and other
    lawmakers raised sharp questions about the amendment,
    which was developed in consultation with the American
    Civil Liberties Union.

    Officials at the United States Chamber of Commerce applauded
    the plan, but expressed doubts that homeland security officials
    could speedily create such a system.

    "This is a massive undertaking on the part of the federal
    government," said Randy Johnson, vice president at the
    chamber. "Our conversations with the administration have
    indicated that 18 months is too short."

    Officials at the Department of Homeland Security sent
    e-mail messages to senators saying they had concerns
    about the system's "workability and implementation."

    White House officials declined to comment, but
    participants in negotiations on the amendment said
    officials were concerned with a provision that would
    require the federal government to reimburse workers
    who were fired because of a mistake involving the system.

    Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said homeland
    security officials feared the system would allow many illegal
    workers to continue working when a definitive finding
    of legal status could not be made.

    The vote in favor of employment verification came as the
    Senate rejected several amendments intended to help
    refugees and illegal immigrants affected by the legislation.

    Lawmakers defeated a measure, sponsored by Senator
    Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, that would have
    legalized all illegal immigrants, regardless of how long they
    have lived here. They also voted down an amendment to
    toughen workplace and safety standards and another to
    help refugees whose resettlement here has been delayed
    because their indirect support for armed rebels opposed
    to their repressive governments has put them in technical
    violation of American antiterrorism laws.

    Critics say the legislation would increase the burdens on
    asylum seekers, eliminate federal review of deportation
    orders and leave millions of illegal immigrants in the
    shadows. Human rights groups are particularly concerned
    about a measure that would allow asylum seekers to be
    deported even while their claims were under review by
    federal courts.

    "The impact on asylum seekers would be devastating
    and potentially irreversible," said Eleanor Acer, director
    of the asylum program at Human Rights First, an advocacy
    group. "You would essentially be deporting refugees back
    to their countries of persecution."

    Difficult negotiations lie ahead between the Senate and House,
    where many Republicans strongly oppose legalization
    of illegal immigrants.

    Hoping to narrow the gap between Senate and House
    Republicans on this issue, the leader of the House conservative
    caucus announced a bill that would allow the illegal immigrants
    to participate in a guest worker plan, but would not grant them
    permanent residency or citizenship.

    The measure, sponsored by Representative Mike Pence, Republican
    of Indiana, would require the nation's estimated 11 million illegal
    immigrants to leave the country to apply for a slot in the program,
    which would be administered by private employment agencies
    licensed by the American government.

    House Republicans expressed lukewarm support for the bill, which
    was promptly attacked by conservative critics of guest worker
    programs. But the bill was praised by White House officials.

    Under the employment verification provision, job applicants
    deemed illegal would have 10 days to challenge that determination
    with the Department of Homeland Security. If homeland security
    officials failed to confirm that determination within 30 days,
    the applicant would be considered legal to work.

    John Holusha contributed reporting from New York for this article.

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

    19) USA: the Statistics That Shock
    [The figures are even more shocking when you take into
    consideration inflation and the fact that the rich are now paying
    less taxes and the middle class, the working class, and the poor
    are now forced to pay more taxes.
    FYI: According to "The Inflation Calculator"
    www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi
    What cost $1.00 in 1973 would cost $4.42 in 2005 and more today!]
    By Michael Roberts   
    Wednesday, 24 May 2006
    http://www.marxist.com/usa-statistics-shock240506.htm

    I was so shocked by the statistics and studies that have been recently
    released on the incomes and wealth of the ordinary Americans that
    I had to tell you about them.

    I'm not talking about the slave labour wages that new immigrants
    in America get for working "illegally' to clean, tidy and maintain the
    homes of the super-rich in their 'gated communities' across the
    nicest parts of the real estate; or the below poverty wages that
    the likes of the mega supermarket chain of Wal-Mart pays its
    checkout and warehouse staff. Have you seen the recent film
    documentary, Wal-Mart, the high cost of low price? There isn't
    one aspect that this film doesn't show Wal-Mart as vicious and
    oppressive in: employee welfare, customer welfare, the
    environment, even racism and sexism.

    No, I'm not talking about the poorest sections of the community
    but the average household where there are one or two 'good'
    jobs and apparently good lifestyle. I'm talking about middle
    America, the so-called middle class in white-collar professional
    and service sector jobs.

    The median wage is that wage or salary which is the most
    common. It is not the average salary. That is the wage that
    divided all the incomes of the super rich by those of the poor.
    That average is not what most people in the US earn. The
    median income is. And according to the latest statistical
    survey of Americans, in a period since 1998 when the US
    economy has expanded by 25%, the median wage, that
    earned by middle fifth of Americans, has fallen by 3.8%
    and in fact, since 1973 has stagnated.

    At the beginning of May, the US economy was in its fifth
    year of economic growth, stock markets were nearly back
    to the levels last seen in the great hi-tech boom of 2000
    and profit margins were at record levels after five consecutive
    quarters of double-digit growth.

    But the 'prosperity' has not 'trickled down to the ranks of
    middle America, let alone the industrial working-class and
    poor and dispossessed. At the same time, stagnating incomes
    for middle America have been accompanied by soaring inequality.
    Again, according to the new study, since 1973 annual income
    growth for the top 1% of Americans was 3.4% and for the
    top 0.1% it was 5.2% each year. But for the 90% below them,
    it grew just 0.3% a year since 1973! So much for the American
    dream!

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

    20) Laid Off and Left Out
    By BOB HERBERT
    May 25, 2006
    http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/25/opinion/25herbert.html?hp

    You don't hear much from the American worker anymore.
    Like battered soldiers at the end of a lost war, ordinary
    workers seem resigned to their diminished status.

    The grim terms imposed on them include wage stagnation,
    the widespread confiscation of benefits (including pensions
    they once believed were guaranteed), and a permanent state
    of employment insecurity.

    For an unnecessarily large number of Americans, the workplace
    has become a hub of anxiety and fear, an essential but
    capricious environment in which you might be shown the
    door at any moment.

    In his new book, "The Disposable American: Layoffs and
    Their Consequences," Louis Uchitelle tells us that since 1984,
    when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics started monitoring
    "worker displacement," at least 30 million full-time workers
    have been "permanently separated from their jobs and their
    paychecks against their wishes."

    Mr. Uchitelle writes on economic issues for The Times. In his
    book, he traces the evolution of that increasingly endangered
    species, the secure job, and the effect that the current culture
    of corporate layoffs is having on ordinary men and women.

    He said he was surprised, as he did the reporting for the book,
    by the extensive emotional fallout that accompanies layoffs.
    "There's a lot of mental health damage," he said. "The act of
    being laid off is such a blow to the self-esteem. Layoffs are
    a national phenomenon, a societal problem — but the laid-off
    workers blame themselves."

    In addition to being financially strapped, laid-off workers and
    their families are often emotionally strapped as well. Common
    problems include depression, domestic strife and divorce.

    Mr. Uchitelle's thesis is that corporate layoffs have been carried
    much too far, that they have gone beyond a legitimate and
    necessary response to a changing economy.

    "What started as a necessary response to the intrusion of foreign
    manufacturers into the American marketplace got out of hand,"
    he writes. "By the late 1990's, getting rid of workers had become
    normal practice, ingrained behavior, just as job security had
    been 25 years earlier."

    In many cases, a thousand workers were fired when 500 might
    have been sufficient, or 10,000 were let go when 5,000 would
    have been enough. We pay a price for these excesses. The losses
    that accrue to companies and communities when many years
    of improving skills and valuable experience are casually and
    unnecessarily tossed on a scrap heap are incalculable.

    "The majority of the people who are laid off," said Mr. Uchitelle,
    "end up in jobs that pay significantly less than they earned before,
    or they drop out altogether."

    At the heart of the layoff phenomenon is the myth, endlessly
    repeated by corporate leaders and politicians of both parties,
    that workers who are thrown out of their jobs can save themselves,
    can latch onto spiffy new jobs by becoming better educated
    and acquiring new skills.

    "Education and training create the jobs, according to this way
    of thinking," writes Mr. Uchitelle. "Or, put another way, a job
    materializes for every trained or educated worker, a job
    commensurate with his or her skills, for which he or she
    is appropriately paid."

    That is just not so, and the corporate and political elite need
    to stop feeding that bogus line to the public.

    There is no doubt that the better-educated and better-trained
    get better jobs. But the reality is that there are not enough
    good jobs currently available to meet the demand of college
    -educated and well-trained workers in the United States,
    which is why so many are working in jobs for which they
    are overqualified.

    A chapter in "The Disposable American" details the plight of
    exquisitely trained airline mechanics who found themselves
    laid off from jobs that had paid up to $31 an hour. Mr. Uchitelle
    writes: "Not enough jobs exist at $31 an hour — or at $16 an
    hour, for that matter — to meet the demand for them. Jobs
    just don't materialize at cost-conscious companies to absorb
    all the qualified people who want them."

    The most provocative question raised by Mr. Uchitelle is whether
    the private sector is capable of generating enough good jobs
    at good pay to meet the demand of everyone who is qualified
    wants to work.

    If it cannot (and so far it has not), then what? If education and
    training are not the building blocks to solid employment,
    what is? These are public policy questions of the highest
    importance, and so far they are being ignored

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    LINKS ONLY
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    Chavez One, Bush Zero
    by Audrey Sasson; May 22, 2006
    ZNet | Venezuela
    http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=45&ItemID=10308

    Military to Report Marines Killed Iraqi Civilians
    By THOM SHANKER, ERIC SCHMITT and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
    May 26, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/26/world/middleeast/26haditha.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

    Arundhati Roy on India, Iraq, U.S. Empire and Dissent
    Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006
    http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/23/1358250

    Gilded Paychecks | Ties That Bind
    With Links to Board, Chief Saw His Pay Soar
    By JULIE CRESWELL
    May 24, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/24/business/24board.html

    Iraq War Provoking Terror: Amnesty International
    "The war on terror and the way it has unfolded is actually premised on
    the principle that by eroding human rights you can reinforce security,"
    said Amnesty International's Secretary-General Irene Khan. "And that is
    why as part of the war on terror we see restrictions being placed on
    civil liberties around the world."
    http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/052306A.shtml

    Ford Layoffs Hit
    Black Auto Workers Hardest
    CHRIS NISAN / Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder
    http://www.mindfully.org/Industry/2006/Ford-Black-Layoffs1feb06.htm

    Rice's Appearance Draws Protests in Boston
    By KATIE ZEZIMA
    May 23, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/23/us/23boston.html

    Nigerian Monkeys Drop Hints on Language Origin
    By NICHOLAS WADE
    May 23, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/23/science/23lang.html

    Judge Steps In for Poor Inmates Without Justice
    By LESLIE EATON
    The public defenders' office, run not by City Hall but by a parish
    board, is basically broke. Louisiana, alone among the states, relies
    mainly on local court fees — mostly surcharges on traffic tickets —
    to finance its public defenders, according to the National Legal Aid
    and Defender Association.
    It is a financing system that Judge Hunter and Calvin Johnson,
    the chief judge of the criminal court in New Orleans, have recently
    found to be unconstitutional because it forces poor people to pay
    for the system. The Louisiana attorney general's office says it plans
    to appeal those decisions.
    May 23, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/23/us/23court.html

    Failed Amnesty Legislation of 1986 Haunts the
    Current Immigration Bills in Congress
    By RACHEL L. SWARNS
    May 23, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/23/washington/23amnesty.html

    Dahr Jamail | Easily Dispensable: Iraq's Children
    Dahr Jamail implores us to understand: "That women and children
    suffer the most during times of war is not a new phenomenon. It is
    a reality as old as war itself. What Rumsfeld, Rice and other war
    criminals of the Cheney administration prefer to call "collateral
    damage" translates in English as the inexcusable murder of and
    other irreparable harm done to women, children and the elderly
    during any military offensive."
    http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/052206A.shtml

    Breaking point: Inside Story of the Guantanamo Uprising
    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0521-01.htm

    Americans Don't Like President Bush Personally Much Anymore, Either
    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0521-04.htm

    The Dixie Chicks: America Catches Up With Them
    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0521-05.htm

    Iraq is Disintegrating as Ethnic Cleansing Takes Hold
    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0520-04.htm

    McCain Gets Cantankerous Reception at Commencement
    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0520-05.htm

    AMID WAR, TROOPS SEE SAFETY IN REENLISTING
    By Faye Fiore
    The military offers steady wages, housing and a health plan
    -- benefits that many service members find scarce in civilian life.
    Los Angeles Times
    May 21, 2006
    http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-enlist21may21,0,3677295.story?coll=la-home-headlines

    Gonzales Says Prosecutions of Journalists Are Possible
    By ADAM LIPTAK
    The government has the legal authority to prosecute journalists
    for publishing classified information, Attorney General Alberto
    R. Gonzales said yesterday.
    May 22, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/22/washington/22gonzales.html

    Rising Ocean Temperatures Threaten Florida's Coral Reef
    By RICK LYMAN
    May 22, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/22/us/22coral.html

    Poisoned Air Killed 3 Miners, Tests Suggest
    By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
    Filed at 1:19 p.m. ET
    May 22, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Mine-Explosion.html?hp&ex=1148356800&en=30604d9e34a2fe75&ei=5094&partner=homepage

    Supreme Court Backs Police in Emergencies
    By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
    Filed at 11:55 a.m. ET
    May 22, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Scotus-Police-Search.html

    Middle America: Welcome to the Center of the USA
    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0519-05.htm

    4 Guantanamo Prisoners Attempt Suicide in One Day
    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0519-01.htm

    ALERT - EXTREME DANGER TO FOOD MANUFACTURING WORKERS
    The Occupational Health Branch is trying to reach workers in the
    food flavoring manufacturing industry, their employers, and their
    health care providers, to alert them about two cases of a life-
    threatening lung disease, bronchiolitis obliterans, among workers
    (both English fluent Latinos) in companies located in southern
    California. Food flavoring companies that may have exposed
    workers are also located in northern California.  The disease
    is associated with inhalation exposure to diacetyl, a butter
    flavoring chemical. The lung disease is also known as "microwave
    popcorn lung disease" based on cases among workers
    in that industry.
    http://www.worksafe.org/news/3_14_06.cfm

    Lawsuit Is Filed to Force FEMA to Continue Housing Vouchers
    By SHAILA DEWAN
    May 20, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/20/us/20vouchers.html

    Explosion at Kentucky Mine Kills 5 Workers
    By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
    May 21, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/us/21mine.html?hp&ex=1148184000&en=adc4b3951c5f9259&ei=5094&partner=homepage

    Ecological Extortion in the National Forests
    http://www.counterpunch.org/juel05192006.html

    New Century Of Thirst For World's Mountains
    By the century's end, the Andes in South America will have less than
    half their current winter snowpack, mountain ranges in Europe and
    the U.S. West will have lost nearly half of their snow-bound water,
    and snow on New Zealand's picturesque snowcapped peaks will
    all but have vanished.
    Source: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
    May 19, 2006
    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060519102250.htm

    Dead soldiers flown home as British presence in Basra is questioned
    By Kim Sengupta
    Five military coffins, bearing the latest British dead from Iraq, arrived
    home yesterday. At the same time, 105 people died during two days
    of carnage in Afghanistan the next battleground for British forces.
    Published: 19 May 2006
    http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article548113.ece

    Detective Was 'Walking Camera' Among City Muslims, He Testifies
    By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
    May 19, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/19/nyregion/19herald.html

    Senate Votes to Set English as National Language
    By CARL HULSE
    May 19, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/19/washington/19immig.html

    Italy Calls Iraq War 'Grave Error'
    By IAN FISHER
    May 19, 2006
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/19/world/europe/19italy.html

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