all through a life

c, and p

2008-01-29T12:56:00.000-08:00

beer with drew

2008-01-28T12:56:00.000-08:00

climbing up trees

2008-01-27T12:55:00.000-08:00

walking on water

2008-01-26T12:54:00.000-08:00

tierra de milagros

2008-01-25T12:52:00.000-08:00

white folks map

2008-01-16T14:16:00.001-08:00

the bay, man

2008-01-13T14:15:00.000-08:00

chuko's justice center punks

2008-01-12T14:14:00.000-08:00

emory douglas

2008-01-11T14:11:00.000-08:00

ceremony

2008-01-05T12:38:00.000-08:00

hitched

2008-01-04T12:33:00.000-08:00

2008

2008-01-01T14:32:00.000-08:00

2007

2007-12-31T14:29:00.000-08:00

before the ball

2007-12-29T14:10:00.000-08:00

seoul garden

2007-12-27T14:09:00.000-08:00

wii

2007-12-25T13:27:00.000-08:00

live, not just survive

2007-12-20T18:45:00.000-08:00

Descendants of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse break away from US

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States, leaders said Wednesday.

"We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us," long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down neighborhood of Washington for a news conference.

A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old.

They also visited the Bolivian, Chilean, South African and Venezuelan embassies, and will continue on their diplomatic mission and take it overseas in the coming weeks and months, they told the news conference.

Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

The new country would issue its own passports and driving licences, and living there would be tax-free -- provided residents renounce their US citizenship, Means said.

The treaties signed with the United States are merely "worthless words on worthless paper," the Lakota freedom activists say on their website.

The treaties have been "repeatedly violated in order to steal our culture, our land and our ability to maintain our way of life," the reborn freedom movement says.

Withdrawing from the treaties was entirely legal, Means said.

"This is according to the laws of the United States, specifically article six of the constitution," which states that treaties are the supreme law of the land, he said.

"It is also within the laws on treaties passed at the Vienna Convention and put into effect by the US and the rest of the international community in 1980. We are legally within our rights to be free and independent," said Means.

The Lakota relaunched their journey to freedom in 1974, when they drafted a declaration of continuing independence -- an overt play on the title of the United States' Declaration of Independence from England.

Thirty-three years have elapsed since then because "it takes critical mass to combat colonialism and we wanted to make sure that all our ducks were in a row," Means said.

One duck moved into place in September, when the United Nations adopted a non-binding declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples -- despite opposition from the United States, which said it clashed with its own laws.

"We have 33 treaties with the United States that they have not lived by. They continue to take our land, our water, our children," Phyllis Young, who helped organize the first international conference on indigenous rights in Geneva in 1977, told the news conference.

The US "annexation" of native American land has resulted in once proud tribes such as the Lakota becoming mere "facsimiles of white people," said Means.

Oppression at the hands of the US government has taken its toll on the Lakota, whose men have one of the shortest life expectancies -- less than 44 years -- in the world.

Lakota teen suicides are 150 percent above the norm for the United States; infant mortality is five times higher than the US average; and unemployment is rife, according to the Lakota freedom movement's website.

"Our people want to live, not just survive or crawl and be mascots," said Young.

"We are not trying to embarrass the United States. We are here to continue the struggle for our children and grandchildren," she said, predicting that the battle would not be won in her lifetime.

surdna party

2007-12-14T14:37:00.000-08:00

leaving for korea

2007-12-08T11:52:00.000-08:00

light rain at tides

2007-12-06T11:50:00.000-08:00

ethiopian

2007-12-04T11:49:00.000-08:00

first snow

2007-12-02T11:49:00.000-08:00

by night

2007-12-01T11:47:00.000-08:00

pamily plus

2007-11-30T11:46:00.000-08:00

supercapitalism

2007-11-28T11:11:00.000-08:00

how bad is neoliberalism getting? it's even in the mainstream, from Robert Reich's (secretary of labor under Clinton) new book, Supercapitalism:

http://www.alternet.org/stories/68927/?page=1

"In most polls, when asked that same question, "Do you think that the democratic system is working in the interests of average Americans like you?" anywhere from 68 to 75 percent of Americans say, "No, it's working for the big guys."

AND...

"How are we going to ever get to that point and rescue democracy? The system is not going to reform itself from the inside. Stop trying to get corporations to be socially responsible. Stop trying to achieve any particular social objective like global warming or a national healthcare system ... Put all of our efforts into a citizen's movement for democracy."

before they go

2007-11-27T07:42:00.000-08:00

a couple weekends ago...

cadaques

2007-11-23T18:10:00.000-08:00

thankstaking with soups

2007-11-22T07:49:00.000-08:00

resistance is surrender

2007-11-21T07:39:00.000-08:00

by slavoj zizek
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n22/zize01_.html

One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible. Marx compared it to a vampire, and one of the salient points of comparison now appears to be that vampires always rise up again after being stabbed to death. Even Mao’s attempt, in the Cultural Revolution, to wipe out the traces of capitalism, ended up in its triumphant return.

Today’s Left reacts in a wide variety of ways to the hegemony of global capitalism and its political supplement, liberal democracy. It might, for example, accept the hegemony, but continue to fight for reform within its rules (this is Third Way social democracy).

Or, it accepts that the hegemony is here to stay, but should nonetheless be resisted from its ‘interstices’.

Or, it accepts the futility of all struggle, since the hegemony is so all-encompassing that nothing can really be done except wait for an outburst of ‘divine violence’ – a revolutionary version of Heidegger’s ‘only God can save us.’

Or, it recognises the temporary futility of the struggle. In today’s triumph of global capitalism, the argument goes, true resistance is not possible, so all we can do till the revolutionary spirit of the global working class is renewed is defend what remains of the welfare state, confronting those in power with demands we know they cannot fulfil, and otherwise withdraw into cultural studies, where one can quietly pursue the work of criticism.

Or, it emphasises the fact that the problem is a more fundamental one, that global capitalism is ultimately an effect of the underlying principles of technology or ‘instrumental reason’.

Or, it posits that one can undermine global capitalism and state power, not by directly attacking them, but by refocusing the field of struggle on everyday practices, where one can ‘build a new world’; in this way, the foundations of the power of capital and the state will be gradually undermined, and, at some point, the state will collapse (the exemplar of this approach is the Zapatista movement).

Or, it takes the ‘postmodern’ route, shifting the accent from anti-capitalist struggle to the multiple forms of politico-ideological struggle for hegemony, emphasising the importance of discursive re-articulation.

Or, it wagers that one can repeat at the postmodern level the classical Marxist gesture of enacting the ‘determinate negation’ of capitalism: with today’s rise of ‘cognitive work’, the contradiction between social production and capitalist relations has become starker than ever, rendering possible for the first time ‘absolute democracy’ (this would be Hardt and Negri’s position).

These positions are not presented as a way of avoiding some ‘true’ radical Left politics – what they are trying to get around is, indeed, the lack of such a position. This defeat of the Left is not the whole story of the last thirty years, however. There is another, no less surprising, lesson to be learned from the Chinese Communists’ presiding over arguably the most explosive development of capitalism in history, and from the growth of West European Third Way social democracy. It is, in short: we can do it better. In the UK, the Thatcher revolution was, at the time, chaotic and impulsive, marked by unpredictable contingencies. It was Tony Blair who was able to institutionalise it, or, in Hegel’s terms, to raise (what first appeared as) a contingency, a historical accident, into a necessity. Thatcher wasn’t a Thatcherite, she was merely herself; it was Blair (more than Major) who truly gave form to Thatcherism.

The response of some critics on the postmodern Left to this predicament is to call for a new politics of resistance. Those who still insist on fighting state power, let alone seizing it, are accused of remaining stuck within the ‘old paradigm’: the task today, their critics say, is to resist state power by withdrawing from its terrain and creating new spaces outside its control. This is, of course, the obverse of accepting the triumph of capitalism. The politics of resistance is nothing but the moralising supplement to a Third Way Left.

Simon Critchley’s recent book, Infinitely Demanding, is an almost perfect embodiment of this position.[*] For Critchley, the liberal-democratic state is here to stay. Attempts to abolish the state failed miserably; consequently, the new politics has to be located at a distance from it: anti-war movements, ecological organisations, groups protesting against racist or sexist abuses, and other forms of local self-organisation. It must be a politics of resistance to the state, of bombarding the state with impossible demands, of denouncing the limitations of state mechanisms. The main argument for conducting the politics of resistance at a distance from the state hinges on the ethical dimension of the ‘infinitely demanding’ call for justice: no state can heed this call, since its ultimate goal is the ‘real-political’ one of ensuring its own reproduction (its economic growth, public safety, etc). ‘Of course,’ Critchley writes,

history is habitually written by the people with the guns and sticks and one cannot expect to defeat them with mocking satire and feather dusters. Yet, as the history of ultra-leftist active nihilism eloquently shows, one is lost the moment one picks up the guns and sticks. Anarchic political resistance should not seek to mimic and mirror the archic violent sovereignty it opposes.

So what should, say, the US Democrats do? Stop competing for state power and withdraw to the interstices of the state, leaving state power to the Republicans and start a campaign of anarchic resistance to it? And what would Critchley do if he were facing an adversary like Hitler? Surely in such a case one should ‘mimic and mirror the archic violent sovereignty’ one opposes? Shouldn’t the Left draw a distinction between the circumstances in which one would resort to violence in confronting the state, and those in which all one can and should do is use ‘mocking satire and feather dusters’? The ambiguity of Critchley’s position resides in a strange non sequitur: if the state is here to stay, if it is impossible to abolish it (or capitalism), why retreat from it? Why not act with(in) the state? Why not accept the basic premise of the Third Way? Why limit oneself to a politics which, as Critchley puts it, ‘calls the state into question and calls the established order to account, not in order to do away with the state, desirable though that might well be in some utopian sense, but in order to better it or attenuate its malicious effect’?

These words simply demonstrate that today’s liberal-democratic state and the dream of an ‘infinitely demanding’ anarchic politics exist in a relationship of mutual parasitism: anarchic agents do the ethical thinking, and the state does the work of running and regulating society. Critchley’s anarchic ethico-political agent acts like a superego, comfortably bombarding the state with demands; and the more the state tries to satisfy these demands, the more guilty it is seen to be. In compliance with this logic, the anarchic agents focus their protest not on open dictatorships, but on the hypocrisy of liberal democracies, who are accused of betraying their own professed principles.

The big demonstrations in London and Washington against the US attack on Iraq a few years ago offer an exemplary case of this strange symbiotic relationship between power and resistance. Their paradoxical outcome was that both sides were satisfied. The protesters saved their beautiful souls: they made it clear that they don’t agree with the government’s policy on Iraq. Those in power calmly accepted it, even profited from it: not only did the protests in no way prevent the already-made decision to attack Iraq; they also served to legitimise it. Thus George Bush’s reaction to mass demonstrations protesting his visit to London, in effect: ‘You see, this is what we are fighting for, so that what people are doing here – protesting against their government policy – will be possible also in Iraq!’

It is striking that the course on which Hugo Chávez has embarked since 2006 is the exact opposite of the one chosen by the postmodern Left: far from resisting state power, he grabbed it (first by an attempted coup, then democratically), ruthlessly using the Venezuelan state apparatuses to promote his goals. Furthermore, he is militarising the barrios, and organising the training of armed units there. And, the ultimate scare: now that he is feeling the economic effects of capital’s ‘resistance’ to his rule (temporary shortages of some goods in the state-subsidised supermarkets), he has announced plans to consolidate the 24 parties that support him into a single party. Even some of his allies are sceptical about this move: will it come at the expense of the popular movements that have given the Venezuelan revolution its élan? However, this choice, though risky, should be fully endorsed: the task is to make the new party function not as a typical state socialist (or Peronist) party, but as a vehicle for the mobilisation of new forms of politics (like the grass roots slum committees). What should we say to someone like Chávez? ‘No, do not grab state power, just withdraw, leave the state and the current situation in place’? Chávez is often dismissed as a clown – but wouldn’t such a withdrawal just reduce him to a version of Subcomandante Marcos, whom many Mexican leftists now refer to as ‘Subcomediante Marcos’? Today, it is the great capitalists – Bill Gates, corporate polluters, fox hunters – who ‘resist’ the state.

The lesson here is that the truly subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfil. Since they know that we know it, such an ‘infinitely demanding’ attitude presents no problem for those in power: ‘So wonderful that, with your critical demands, you remind us what kind of world we would all like to live in. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where we have to make do with what is possible.’ The thing to do is, on the contrary, to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands, which can’t be met with the same excuse.

besalu

2007-11-20T18:08:00.000-08:00

patron saint

2007-11-18T09:44:00.000-08:00

see you on the other side, brother gabe.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2007/11/15/ST2007111501174.html?sid=ST2007111501174

tofu libre in barcelona

2007-11-16T09:40:00.000-08:00

jeemee and pete in barcelona, day one

2007-11-15T09:36:00.000-08:00

jee mee's birthday

2007-11-13T07:47:00.000-08:00

social club

2007-11-03T12:10:00.000-07:00

out of enchantment

2007-11-01T12:07:00.000-07:00

happy halloween

2007-10-31T14:55:00.000-07:00

these weekends

2007-10-28T14:58:00.000-07:00

in law

2007-10-27T14:59:00.000-07:00

family

2007-10-14T15:01:00.000-07:00

dip in the gulf

2007-10-07T13:12:00.000-07:00

real talk in dubai

2007-10-06T13:17:00.000-07:00

shadow of the burj

2007-10-04T13:18:00.000-07:00

in kabini

2007-09-30T13:21:00.000-07:00

water safari

2007-09-29T13:22:00.000-07:00

birthday brunch

2007-09-27T13:23:00.000-07:00

moms bday

2007-09-26T13:25:00.000-07:00

at the excellent bar

2007-09-23T13:32:00.000-07:00

cochin

2007-09-22T13:33:00.000-07:00

leaving munnar

2007-09-21T13:34:00.000-07:00

fields of tea

2007-09-20T13:35:00.000-07:00

up into the mountains

2007-09-19T13:37:00.000-07:00

houseboat in allepey

2007-09-18T13:39:00.000-07:00

varkala

2007-09-15T13:40:00.000-07:00

palm meadows

2007-09-13T13:41:00.000-07:00

in bangalore

2007-09-12T13:42:00.000-07:00

arverne

2007-09-09T08:22:00.000-07:00

with soups

2007-09-08T08:24:00.000-07:00

at holmsberg

2007-09-07T08:25:00.000-07:00

robert fisk on 9/11

2007-09-04T08:45:00.000-07:00

Questioning 9/11 ... With Caution

By Robert Fisk, Truthdig
Posted on September 4, 2007, Printed on September 4, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/61324/

Originally posted in The Independent.

Each time I lecture abroad on the Middle East, there is always someone in the audience -- just one -- whom I call the "raver." Apologies here to all the men and women who come to my talks with bright and pertinent questions -- often quite humbling ones for me as a journalist -- and which show that they understand the Middle East tragedy a lot better than the journalists who report it.

But the "raver" is real. He has turned up in corporeal form in Stockholm and in Oxford, in Sao Paulo and in Yerevan, in Cairo, in Los Angeles and, in female form, in Barcelona. No matter the country, there will always be a "raver."

His -- or her -- question goes like this. Why, if you believe you're a free journalist, don't you report what you really know about 9/11? Why don't you tell the truth -- that the Bush administration (or the CIA or Mossad, you name it) blew up the twin towers? Why don't you reveal the secrets behind 9/11?

The assumption in each case is that Fisk knows -- that Fisk has an absolute concrete, copper-bottomed fact-filled desk containing final proof of what "all the world knows" (that usually is the phrase) -- who destroyed the twin towers. Sometimes the "raver" is clearly distressed. One man in Cork screamed his question at me, and then -- the moment I suggested that his version of the plot was a bit odd -- left the hall, shouting abuse and kicking over chairs.

Usually, I have tried to tell the "truth"; that while there are unanswered questions about 9/11, I am the Middle East correspondent of The Independent, not the conspiracy correspondent; that I have quite enough real plots on my hands in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, the Gulf, etc, to worry about imaginary ones in Manhattan. My final argument -- a clincher, in my view -- is that the Bush administration has screwed up everything -- militarily, politically diplomatically -- it has tried to do in the Middle East; so how on earth could it successfully bring off the international crimes against humanity in the United States on 11 September 2001?

Well, I still hold to that view. Any military which can claim -- as the Americans did two days ago -- that al-Qaida is on the run is not capable of carrying out anything on the scale of 9/11. "We disrupted al-Qaida, causing them to run," Colonel David Sutherland said of the preposterously code-named "Operation Lightning Hammer" in Iraq's Diyala province. "Their fear of facing our forces proves the terrorists know there is no safe haven for them." And more of the same, all of it untrue.

Within hours, al-Qaida attacked Baquba in battalion strength and slaughtered all the local sheikhs who had thrown in their hand with the Americans. It reminds me of Vietnam, the war which George Bush watched from the skies over Texas -- which may account for why he this week mixed up the end of the Vietnam war with the genocide in a different country called Cambodia, whose population was eventually rescued by the same Vietnamese whom Mr Bush's more courageous colleagues had been fighting all along.

But -- here we go. I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11. It's not just the obvious non sequiturs: where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon? Why have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did flight 93's debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field? Again, I'm not talking about the crazed "research" of David Icke's Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster -- which should send any sane man back to reading the telephone directory.

I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers -- whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C -- would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.)

What about the third tower -- the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) -- which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7.

Two prominent American professors of mechanical engineering -- very definitely not in the "raver" bracket -- are now legally challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it could be "fraudulent or deceptive."

Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial reports of reporters that they heard "explosions" in the towers -- which could well have been the beams cracking -- are easy to dismiss. Less so the report that the body of a female air crew member was found in a Manhattan street with her hands bound.

OK, so let's claim that was just hearsay reporting at the time, just as the CIA's list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were -- and still are -- very much alive and living in the Middle East, was an initial intelligence error.

But what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose "Islamic" advice to his gruesome comrades -- released by the CIA -- mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East?

Atta mentioned his family -- which no Muslim, however ill-taught, would be likely to include in such a prayer. He reminds his comrades-in-murder to say the first Muslim prayer of the day and then goes on to quote from it. But no Muslim would need such a reminder -- let alone expect the text of the "Fajr" prayer to be included in Atta's letter.

Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious "war on terror" which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush's happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that "we're an empire now -- we create our own reality." True? At least tell us. It would stop people kicking over chairs.

domestic workers united

2007-09-03T10:19:00.000-07:00

September 3, 2007
For Immediate Release

Contact: Ai-jen Poo (646) 529-7000

Domestic Workers Launch National Alliance for Justice on Labor Day

New York, NY – Following the release of the Nanny Diaries, this Labor Day, immigrant nannies, housekeepers and elderly caregivers across the country are announcing the formation of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, representing thousands of workers and 4 cities across the country including New York City, Los Angeles, Washington DC and San Francisco. The alliance includes a number of groups from New York, and announced plans to come to New York in the spring to support the demands of New York domestic workers for recognition and labor standards.

Labor Day is a time of recognition of the contributions of working people to the culture and economy of the US. However, for hundreds of thousands of domestic workers who are excluded from most basic labor rights, it is a reminder that basic workers rights are still not a reality for so many. Domestic workers work long hours, for low wages, in isolation, without overtime pay, and are extremely vulnerable to abuse. In fact, most domestic workers will be working this Labor Day.

For these workers, Labor Day is a reminder of the importance of organizing, and uniting with other workers to achieve respect, recognition and rights.

Members of Domestic Workers United – an organization of New York nannies, housekeepers and elderly caregivers, predominantly from the Caribbean and Latin America, will be celebrating the formation of a national alliance on Labor Day with a renewed commitment to organizing for a New York Domestic Workers Bill of Rights including a living wage, health care and basic benefits, and reminding legislators of the necessity for labor standards for this critical workforce that makes all other work possible. Members will also be marching in the Caribbean Day Parade along Eastern Parkway to bring visibility to the struggles of domestic workers at the annual celebration of Caribbean immigrant heritage in New York. Caribbean immigrant women have represented a significant percentage of the domestic workforce in New York for over three decades.

The goals of the newly formed National Domestic Workers Alliance are to build the power of the domestic workforce, bring visibility to the struggles of domestic workers, and improve the workplace conditions.

Member organizations include: the Women's Collective of La Raza Centro Legal, Mujeres Unidas y Activas, and People Organized to Win Employment Rights in the San Francisco Bay Area; CHIRLA and the Pilipino Workers' Center organize in Southern California; CAAAV Women Workers' Project, Andolan Organizing South Asian Workers. Damayan Migrant Workers Association, Domestic Workers United, Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, Unity Housecleaners Cooperative of the Hempstead Workplace Project and Las Señoras de Santa Maria in New York; and CASA of Maryland. The Alliance will be planning actions in New York in the coming year, to bring national visibility and support for the New York Domestic Workers Bill of Rights [A628B, S5235].

http://www.domesticworkersunited.org/

on the second anniversary, locked up

2007-08-29T11:08:00.000-07:00

Locked Up in New Orleans

by ROBIN TEMPLETON

[from the September 10, 2007 issue of the Nation]

"I never got paid," Dewitt Solomon tells me. Nine months before the levees broke, Solomon had a minimum-wage job busing tables and washing dishes at Messina's, a popular New Orleans tourist restaurant. But instead of paying him directly, Messina's gave Solomon's paychecks to the Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff's Office. Solomon, who was serving time in the Orleans Parish Prison--the eighth largest penal institution in the country and the largest correctional facility in Louisiana before Hurricane Katrina--was enrolled in the sheriff's work-release program.

The prison was supposed to give him his wages, minus the $500 a month it deducted for room and board, the day it returned to Solomon his freedom. Solomon says that the sheriff still owes him $1,500.

Sitting at the kitchen table at his home in New Orleans's West Bank, Solomon and I are feeding bottles to his twin sons. The babies weighed less than two pounds at birth. Now, at 13 months, they're startlingly small but chugging away at the formula like they're in a race to catch up. Solomon's 5-year-old daughter is prancing around the room with a Dora the Explorer coloring book. She has proclaimed that the cartoon heroine is her twin sister. The resemblance is, actually, striking.

Solomon says he tried for months to recoup his lost earnings and never got a call back from the sheriff's office. He gave up after floodwater washed away his only proof, the pay stubs he'd saved from the restaurant.

Solomon sounds more resigned than bitter. "It's not that I couldn't still use the money," he says. "I'm just glad I got in and out before it got any worse." Solomon describes how his brother-in-law was arrested on trespassing charges when he went to check on storm damage to his father's home. His cousin was also arrested for a nonviolent crime weeks ago, and no one in the family has been able to make contact or even determine where he's being held.

New Orleans has the highest incarceration rate of any major US city--double the national rate. Louisiana also locks up more people in local jails than any state due in part to state laws, unheard of in other parts of the country, that paralyze due process.

District attorneys have sixty days from the time of arrest in a felony case and forty-five days in a misdemeanor case to decide whether to press charges and typically use the full statutory time limit. From there, it takes an average of three months for detainees to get a court date. It can take up to three years to get to trial. According to a recent study by the Vera Institute of Justice, 41 percent of those entering the Orleans Parish Prison would qualify to be released on their own recognizance. Instead, the city opts to lock people up if they can't post bail, which is true of three-quarters of the jail's detainees.

While it was bad before the storm, "now the system is only working to pick people up," says Loyola University law professor Bill Quigley. "It's a vacuum, sucking poor people in and keeping them in. Being arrested now equals being sent to prison."

Nearly a year after Katrina, the city's backlog of cases reached at least 6,000. Judge Arthur Hunter of the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court declared that "it is a pathetic and shameful state of affairs the criminal justice system finds itself in" and said that he would mark the one-year anniversary of the storm by beginning to release poor defendants.

But just as Hunter was declaring a constitutional state of emergency last summer, New Orleans was hit by a devastating crime wave. With half its former population, the city saw its crime rate escalate back to pre-Katrina levels. By the time it was gearing up for its second post-Katrina Mardi Gras celebration, national media were pronouncing New Orleans the murder capital of the United States.

Under the headline "Dysfunction Fuels Cycle of Killing in New Orleans," the New York Times reported in February that a "uniquely poisoned set of circumstances" was fueling the violence, including the destruction of the city's only crime lab, friction between police and prosecutors, community distrust and fear of the police, uncooperative or vanished witnesses and "murderers' brutalized childhoods." The majority of victims and suspects have been young African-American men--many teenagers--caught up in a drug trade that was reinvigorated, reorganized and made more lethal amid turf wars in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The crime crisis is part and parcel of a wider social crisis. Two years after the storm, only one-third of the childcare centers and 45 percent of the public schools in Orleans Parish have reopened. Mental health services for residents suffering from depression, drug addiction or post-traumatic stress disorder are practically nonexistent. The city's Housing Authority has slated thousands of units of public housing for demolition, the majority of which were not damaged by the storm.

Bill Quigley has represented hundreds of families fighting to reclaim their homes and possessions from the Housing Authority. "One of the reasons they say they don't want to reopen public housing is that they don't want to let crime back into the city," Quigley explains. "But crime is already back in. The truth is that there are a lot of young people here without their families. The families don't have housing. So kids are coming back on their own, without their aunts and their mothers and their grandparents. Neighborhoods are breaking down because we don't have the families back. We don't have a lot of the churches. We don't have the infrastructure in poor communities that we had before.

"Some of us in the city think it's a bigger crime to keep thousands of families out of their apartments than to sell drugs," he notes. "But law enforcement doesn't see it that way."

Indeed, city officials responded to the crime wave with a troop surge. The city's police department is nearly staffed back up to its pre-Katrina size and budgeted all the way back up. Local law enforcement has been joined by sixty state troopers and 300 National Guard troops in Humvees and military uniforms--they've christened themselves "Task Force Gator"--at a cost to the state of $35 million.

Police have been making a record number of arrests, now averaging over 1,300 a week. But as the crime problem persists, they don't seem to be getting the bad guys. According to recent exit interviews with detainees leaving the parish jail, conducted by the local criminal justice reform organization Safe Streets/Strong Communities, 80 percent were being held for nonviolent offenses, mostly on low-level drug or alcohol charges. "The city is plagued by violent crime, residents who will never be charged with a crime spend weeks in jail," the Vera Institute recently reported, "and some serious offenders are released with no charges."

Ursula Price, Safe Streets's outreach and investigations coordinator, describes the case of a woman in the jail "who had called 911 about a domestic violence incident. Instead of trying to help her, the police ran her name and ended up arresting her on an outstanding traffic violation."

Safe Streets provides first responders to the city's incarcerated. The group has racked up huge phone bills accepting collect calls from the Orleans Parish Prison and the diaspora of correctional facilities to which arrestees were scattered in the wake of the storm. Some callers just want to know why they're there--it can take days for police, whom one criminal defense lawyer described as "functionally illiterate," to complete a report. Others wonder how long they might be in, whether they have a court date, how they can get legal support or how they can contact their family or boss.

Callers from Orleans Parish Prison also report dungeonlike conditions: twenty-five people held in cells built for ten, so many people sleeping in one area that you can't even see the floor, no fresh or conditioned air, overflowing toilets, inconsistent electricity and iffy plumbing. The prison has yet to regain the accreditation it lost in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when hundreds of inmates were abandoned in fetid floodwaters in what local writer and criminal defense attorney Billy Sothern described as "the biggest prison crisis since Attica" [see "Left to Die," January 2, 2006].

This summer Glenn Thomas, the 29-year-old son of Rosetta James, a member of Safe Streets/Strong Communities, died in Orleans Parish Prison. James didn't learn of her son's death from the sheriff's office, she says, but by word of mouth: "One of the inmates was able to call his mother and tell her that Glenn had died, and she came and found me. I said, 'Nobody tell me nothing. I'm going to the jail.'" When she got there, the morning of July 4, James was told that her son, who had no known medical problems, had died the night before at 11 pm of "natural causes," and that she could call back in another month for the official report.

Thomas died waiting for his day in court. On May 19, 2004, he was arrested for simple drug possession. He was slated to appear in court about a year later, on August 31, 2005, when the city was uninhabitable. Nonetheless, a warrant was issued for his arrest for failing to appear. In October 2006, Thomas was arrested and detained in the Orleans Parish Prison. His new court date, the one he didn't live to see, was set for August 2007.

Criminal Sheriff Marlin Gusman's public information officer, Renee Lapeyrolerie, said they couldn't provide details about Thomas's death but said, "Well, in his criminal history he had a lot of drug arrests. Those things can be linked to health problems."

"This is the third death there's been in there this year," says Safe Streets co-director Norris Henderson. "It's all the same story. The jail says they don't know why any of these people died. Anything wrong that happens in his facilities the sheriff blames on the inmates or on not having enough money," Henderson says. "But you really can't blame Glenn for his own death, and you can't blame it on the money, because he's got that."

As mandated by a 35-year-old consent decree intended to remedy abusive conditions in the jail, the city pays the Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff's Office a per diem amount for each local inmate, plus $3.2 million annually to provide medical services. In his 2007 budget request to the City Council, Gusman asked for an additional $5 million for medical services, a request that was granted.

Henderson is solemn when asked what it will take to get public officials to pay attention to the crisis. "It's not like I want a Rodney King situation where people burn the city down, because we don't have much of a city left to burn. But we need to do something, a sit-down, a walkout, something. It's getting to the point where we need some drama."

Dana Kaplan of the Center for Constitutional Rights summarizes the essential problem facing reformers. "Right now Gusman's funding is tied to the number of the people in the jail. How are we going to get money for schools and services and jobs programs with so much money tied up in the jail?"

Gusman's recent budget requests make it clear that he is banking on crime. His 2007 "budget request for these payments is based on our expected City inmate population," the sheriff wrote to the City Council. "The inmate population is driven primarily by the number of arrests made by the Police Department. Since the storm, the arrest rate has consistently increased in an attempt to stem the rising crime rate." In his 2005 request, Gusman explained that the depopulation of the jail in the immediate wake of Katrina represented a "90 percent reduction in revenue, but our fixed costs remain high."

Gusman has never publicly said that his aim is to build Orleans Parish Prison, which can now accommodate 2,500 inmates, back up to its former size, which was 8,000 before Katrina. But in written testimony to the US House of Representatives in April 2007, he listed as chief among his critical needs "the restoration of our four largest jail facilities." This, Gusman wrote, "would increase our capacity (an additional 4,100 beds) to hold some of New Orleans [sic] most violent and repeat offenders."

In other words, "build them and fill them," says Henderson, "and we know who'll be filling them."

Henderson and other local advocates formed Safe Streets/ Strong Communities in the wake of Katrina, in the words of their founding statement, "to demand that elected officials address the root causes of our decades-long public safety crisis, cease blaming the victims, and stop investing time and money on tactics that have never worked.... Many of our children have been given nothing to reach for except guns and little to own and be proud of but their street corners."

While Safe Streets has scored some recent victories--helping win the appointment of a new Indigent Defender Board and funding to launch the Office of the Independent Monitor to oversee police policies and practices, for instance--the real challenge for activists is the fight to reallocate public resources, out of law and order and into community recovery.

But to Sheriff Gusman, these are one and the same; he has made sure that the city's path to recovery will be paved by his inmates--literally. Since Katrina, Gusman has used his Community Service Program and Neighborhood Response Team to deliver cheap labor for reconstruction projects. His office's website features photos of inmates in orange jumpers and sweatshirts emblazoned with Sheriff Gusman Community Service Program next to road signs announcing, Project Clean-Up. Inmates Working.

It's not so far from the way things were more than a century ago. Antebellum city records refer to what is now the Orleans Parish Prison as the Workhouse. In addition to those arrested for crime, the jail was a repository for slaves whose masters chose to lease them to the Workhouse. The same archives also reveal that African-Americans were committed to the Workhouse for "claiming to be free": In the space where the master's name was usually recorded, these inmates were referred to as "so-called free." After the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, African-Americans arrested in New Orleans for black-code crimes like vagrancy and unemployment were taken to the parish Workhouse. During Reconstruction, the incarcerated former slaves provided a critical pool of forced labor for railroad companies, agriculture and industry.

In its first regular session post-Katrina, the state legislature amended a law regulating parish jail labor in order to grant immunity to prison authorities "for injuries or damages caused or suffered by prisoners participating in any work program during incarceration at parish jail facilities." When I asked a legislative staffer about the origins of the post-Katrina amendment, she said, "I believe it was because there was a labor shortage."

Lieut. Eric Donnelly, director of the sheriff's work-release program, the one that Dewitt Solomon took part in before the storm, told a local business paper that the program played a vital role in restarting the city's economic engine. "As soon as the hurricane ended and we got a new phone, it was ringing off the hook from employers saying they needed their inmates," Donnelly said. "So as soon as we were getting them back in we had [employers] coming to pick them up themselves. That's how much they rely on this program."

But, as Solomon says, "you shouldn't have to go to jail to get a job."

on the second anniversary, a shrill call,

2007-08-29T08:57:00.000-07:00

A Message from an Organizer to the Left and Progressive Forces inside the USA

by Curtis Muhammad

With this second anniversary of Katrina upon us, there are a few words I wish to speak. This letter is written to the progressive, left movement for justice in the USA. In the last two years, every left organization has been in New Orleans, but despite that there is still no sign of a mass movement. There is still no sign that most activists are willing to put their knowledge and resources at the service of the grass roots and take their leadership from the bottom. I have found myself wondering, have poor black people been so vilified and criminalized that they are completely off the radar even of the so-called left? When Katrina happened, I hoped and expected that this would be the trigger to once again set off a true mass movement against racism and for justice in the US, led by those most affected: poor, black working people. When it became abundantly clear that this was not happening, I found myself at the crossroads of hope and hopelessness, and began to wonder how to spend the last years of my life in the service of my people.

The thing that I remind myself when I'm contemplating hopelessness is the beauty of humanity and the fact that people have always fought for what was right even when they knew they couldn't win. They tried because they loved each other; I think it's because it's built into
human beings for people to look out for each other. There is a drive in humanity to be just, to live in a society that is just, equal and respectful. I believe that ultimately people will achieve a just society; I believe humanity came out of a just society and will create it again.

I do believe that there was a time that the lovers of life, the lovers of humanity, the lovers of justice dominated the world. Some say this was so during the hunter-gatherer days, when though there were evil people they could never gain dominance. Their numbers were always
small, less than 1%; people ran their lives collectively, and therefore the greedy could not dominate. Well then, I say what happened, there is only that same 1% who dominates the world now.

This thinking, this logic has been the motivating factor in my life of movement work: the belief that there is a basic humanity that is inside the soul of most people. That this humanity can be harvested and organized into a movement for justice to free our people from slavery, bondage, oppression and exploitation. That the 80% of the world who live on an average of $2 a day can and will overcome the 1% and return us to a collective life organized around love, justice and
equality.

Most of you who know me also know I'm a storyteller and believe story to be a universal language that can be a vehicle for voice - the voice of all regardless of status, class, cast, race, gender. Story is an egalitarian language. So I wish to share with you my story, an abbreviated story of my organizing work from SNCC in Mississippi through the ghettoes of the US to the villages and jungles of Africa, to CLU, PHRF, NOSC, POC and finally the International School for Bottom-up Organizing. My story is meant to clarify why I now choose to live, work, teach and write outside the US and away from the grip of a drastically de-energized and often opportunistic and reactionary left in the USA.

* * *

I grew up in a community that, of necessity, had to take care of its own. In rural Mississippi in the 40s, 50s and 60s, mothers and fathers, grandparents, uncles and cousins protected the children from the hostile, racist world and collectively helped each other meet their needs. Nonetheless, when I was a child traveling to church on Sundays, I had to pass the tree from whose branches my cousin was lynched. The community of my birth gave me both my strength -- my faith in the people, my dedication to egalitarianism - and my undying hatred of racism and the oppressive few that control the world.

When SNCC came to town, I found my direction. It was both a community of love and a set of organizers devoted, at the risk of their lives, to the folk on the bottom: the poorest black folk in Mississippi, those who had nothing, not even the knowledge of how to read. SNCC introduced me to the struggles of my brothers and sisters around the world, and particularly in Africa. I became an internationalist and a revolutionary. The lessons of Ella Baker and SNCC have stayed with me throughout my life; I labored to make them a reality from Mississippi to the ghettoes of our major cities, from my time in the revolutionary movement in Africa to my work as a labor organizer, and I have done my utmost to apply them in post-Katrina New Orleans.

In 1998, I helped to organize Community Labor United (CLU), a coalition that was founded with a commitment to bottom-up organizing. (CLU principles included "ending the exploitation of oppressed peoples everywhere; educating, organizing and mobilizing the masses within our organizations and communities from the bottom up.") After eight years of organizing in some of the poorest areas of New Orleans, it became the "first responder" after Katrina, and led the formation of the People's Hurricane Relief Fund (PHRF).

As a founding member of PHRF and an organizer and New Orleans resident, I was back in the city within 8 days of the flood, struggling with overwhelming pain and anger. I felt that Katrina
represented an historic moment. Never before had all levels of government united to attempt genocide of 100,000 black people at the same time. Even in the 60s in Mississippi, they were murdering us in ones, twos and threes. I threw myself into the attempt to put the knowledge and resources of the left and nationalist organizations and "movement" people under the direction of the bottom: the poor and working class black folk who had been left to die in New Orleans. PHRF became a coalition that committed itself on paper to that goal.

What followed was a dramatic learning experience for me and for all those whose commitment is truly to the people and not to their own particular grouping. Within months, mainly as a result of a speaking tour I went on for PHRF, we had raised about a million dollars from folk across the country who were deeply moved by the attempted genocide of over a hundred thousand black folk. And by December, there was already conflict over who controlled that money and how it was to be used.

The New Orleans Survivor Council was organized by PHRF with the understanding that it was to become the leadership of the organization and the movement, and should control all resources. By April of 2006, when the NOSC began to sound like it wanted oversight of the funds, the interim leadership of PHRF took the money and ran, firing its own organizers for daring to tell the poor black residents in NOSC that they had the right to control the resources raised in their names. Undaunted, the young organizers continued working for the survivors
and formed a new group called People's Organizing Committee (POC).

This event was a turning point for me. I realized that the words of those who I had considered my comrades were empty, that their so-called commitment to bottom-up was a fiction; that their real commitments were to various organizations and their own egos. Our attempt to institutionalize bottom-up had led instead to a coalition of opportunists.

When I had spoken to mass audiences about Katrina in the fall of 2005, I had spoken of my discovery of the depth of the fear and hatred America has for poor, black people. The images on the media of those left to die could have been taken in sub-Saharan Africa or the Caribbean: those people were very poor and very black. With the desertion of PHRF, I was confronted by the knowledge that this hatred of poor black people extended into and throughout the progressive movement, even within exclusively black organizations. I felt very lonely in my continued commitment to lift up precisely that segment of oppressed Americans to lead the movement.

But POC plunged ahead, still dedicated to that vision. Thousands of volunteers came in the spring and summer, and many continue to come to this day. The hearts of so many people are in the right place. The New Orleans Survivor Council and its member group Residents of Public Housing continue to work to put bottom-up leadership on the map and fight for the right of our community to return and control its own destiny. But the past year has also revealed further weakness and lack of vision in our movement.

From the days immediately following the flood, we recognized that immigrants - brown people, some of the poorest and most desperate of our brothers and sisters from countries to the south - were being brought into our city. They were put to the dirtiest, most dangerous clean-up tasks, and later to replace the forcibly dispersed black labor force, for slave wages and in slave conditions. From the start, we called for organizing this new part of the New Orleans community in unity with and under the leadership of the black folk on the bottom.

This call was part of my message in the speeches I made in the fall of 2005, and several immigrant organizers heeded the call and came to work with us. However, despite many serious attempts to develop unity between black survivors and immigrants, it has become clear that those organizers refuse to unite with and take leadership from black folk. They have organized immigrant slaves into separate groupings with no contact with the NOSC, despite their initial commitment to unity. They are essentially, wittingly or unwittingly, following the government's agenda, which is to build a racist, assimilationist immigrant "movement" that will serve the needs of a war economy and patriotism.

And so we come to the second anniversary of Katrina. Bottom-up organizing is still embryonic, though hanging on to life and with a small, dedicated band of survivors, organizers and volunteers. But the rest of the movement is in shambles, or under direct or indirect influence of our enemies.

Through the experience of the last two years, I have also come to the conclusion that the infiltration of and direct attacks on the movement that started (in my lifetime as an activist) in the late 60s and early 70s with Cointelpro have never stopped. Our movement has been successfully divided into thousands of groupings, non-profits and NGOs, and the left has been rendered ineffectual. It is not an accident that, for forty years now, the movement has been so totally reformist, or that those who want to be revolutionaries are so isolated as to be irrelevant. The government and its agencies have a stranglehold on the people, the culture and even the left. I do not think it is possible in the U.S. at this time - for me - to develop and train organizers with a real understanding and commitment to the folk on the bottom.

And thus, I find myself at the crossroads of hope and hopelessness. I find myself possibly in the position of writing not mainly to the current readers of these words, but to those future revolutionaries who will learn from our impasse. I find myself deciding to work toward creating an international organizing school as a vehicle to discover, recruit and train radical organizers. I want to continue my investigation of the movements in Mexico and South America among very poor -- members of the informal economy, workers, campesinos and landless people -- learn more about how class and hue interact to shape oppression, take inspiration from the fact that the struggle continues, un-abandoned, worldwide, and share my own knowledge and experience with the rebels of today and tomorrow.

I have lived 64 years and have struggled intentionally for justice for about forty-six of those years. I am thankful and appreciative to all those who have traveled some of that distance with me: those who helped nurture my children, who stood with me when I was imprisoned and tortured, those who have always supported my work and stood by me when all seemed to stand against me. To these worthy friends, comrades and loved ones, I will always honor you, be there for you, and know you are there for me.

Still, I have arrived at a place in my life where I wish to share everything I have and know with the "sufferers." My principle continues to be the struggle to engage the poor, oppressed, voiceless, and those who have the least and suffer the most. The only struggle that matters to me now is finding justice for those who have never had it.

This is me, where I am, trying to figure out how to organize our folk in a way that we always look at need as the principle of justice. If you are looking for me, look among the youth, the poor, and the struggling masses trapped in slave-like conditions throughout the world, for I am no longer available to an opportunistic and racist left. I NOW SEEK REFUGE AMONG THE POOR.

This is my struggle.

Wish me well,
Curtis

migrant workers' resolution

2007-08-29T08:43:00.000-07:00

An International Conference on Defending and Promoting the Basic Rights of Migrant Workers was held here in Seoul from August 20 to 21st. The conference was sponsored by the KCTU and supported by the ILO, BWI and the Alliance for Migrants' Equality and Human Rights- a coalition of over 20 organizations in South Korea of which MTU is a part. Below is a joint statement issued by participants at the conference.

2007 International Conference on Defending and Promoting the Basic Rights of Migrant Workers Joint Resolution

The basic labor rights of migrant workers, who now suffer greatly from low wages, exploitation, and industrial accidents due to anti-human rights and anti-labor policies, must be protected!

On January 1, 2007 the South Korean government abolished the Industrial Trainee System, which had been called a “modern form of slavery,” and in place implemented the Employment Permit System (EPS). Currently, the government is carrying out a wide-scale publicity campaign stating that the new system would protect migrant workers' rights. However the EPS is in reality a short-term rotation system, which prohibits free transfer of workplace and requires yearly renewal of contracts. The EPS is in it self a severe repression of migrant workers' rights. In the interest of economic efficiency, the South Korean government along with other governments throughout the world demand tremendous sacrifices from migrant workers and expect them to remain silent while their rights are being denied. Furthermore, many governments are labeling migrant workers who have become irregular due to the failure of their policies “illegal residents” and conducting “human-hunting” crackdowns and deportations against migrant workers in a brutal violation of their human rights.

The attitude behind such government actions is one of complete disregard for the humanity and dignity of migrant workers. These governments view migrant workers merely as disposable goods that can be used and discarded at will, completely ignoring the economic, political, and social circumstances which forces workers to migrate. Migrant workers come from countries wrought by underdevelopment, war, and political, social, and economic devastation as a result of capitalist imperialism and neoliberal globalization. They migrate in search of gainful employment which they cannot find at home. We recognize the need to address these root causes of migration at the same time as we tackle the realities faced by migrant workers in receiving countries.

In the face of this grave situation we make the following demands: Each national government must change its overall attitude towards migrant workers and prepare legal and institutional apparatuses necessary to guarantee migrant workers a minimum wage that matches the standard of that country, equal pay for equal work and humane treatment on parity with that afforded native workers, thus removing the shackles of discrimination and oppression and creating the conditions where all workers, whether migrant or native, can live together harmoniously.

Since November 2003, the South Korean government has been treating irregular migrant workers as criminals, who disrupt social peace and undermine the standards of local working conditions. Thus, the government has been carrying out “witch-hunt” policy of crackdowns and deportations. Already 100,000 irregular migrant workers have been routed out and deported. Many have been hurt and killed in the course of these crackdowns. In the midst of this tremendous violation of human rights, the government has expressed pride over its brutal actions. This past February 2nd, 10 migrant workers tragically lost their lives when a fire broke out at Yeosu Foreigners' Detention Center. Fearing that those inside would escape, detention center officers refused to open cell doors, causing migrant workers to die behind locked iron bars.

This situation in which migrant workers are treated as criminals and forced to die behind prison bars for no other reason than having come to South Korea, a more developed nation, in order to earn money, is the true face of the South Korean government's policy on migrant workers. Since 2003, the government has been carrying out a massive crackdown against irregular migrant workers and at the beginning of this August the joint crackdowns intensified in severity. Once again migrant workers are being detained and forcibly deported in great numbers.

As such, the participants of this international conference on the rights of migrant workers demand that the South Korean government do the following:

1. Guarantee migrant workers the right to free transfer of workplace and decent working conditions! We condemn the EPS which is greatly deteriorating the lives of migrant workers.
2. Stop the crackdown and deportations immediately! Migrant workers are not criminals, and thus all policies that treat them as such must be immediately stopped.
3. Guarantee the right of residence and legalize all migrant workers.

Recognizing that the problem of migrant workers is not only of their concern, but rather an important issue for the entire labor movement and all labor-related organizations we resolve to focus on organizing and empowering migrant workers. Recognizing the significance of the High Court’s decision concerning the Migrants' Trade Union, in which the Court has recognized the right of irregular workers to join a trade union, we resolve to ensure the right of all migrant workers in South Korean and globally to organize and join a trade union regardless of their status. Utilizing the organizing experiences of each country, we commit to move forward and strengthen the network amongst us and work together to resolve the problems facing migrant workers.

As representatives to the International Conference on Defending and Promoting the Basic Rights of Migrant Workers held in South Korea, we will use the fruits of this gathering as a basis to establish regular and long-term solidarity and strategies for joint action. Whether we are representatives from sending or receiving countries, we adopt the position of 'unity of workers throughout the world' and 'workers are one' and vow to build close communication and alliances for the purpose of making a world in which workers can live dignified and humane lives.

21 August 2007
Participants to the 2007 International Conference on Defending and Protecting the Basic Labor Rights of Migrant Workers

remembering the vermont sky

2007-08-20T13:22:00.001-07:00

kopkind day nine

2007-08-19T13:14:00.000-07:00

kopkind night eight

2007-08-18T13:11:00.000-07:00

kopkind day seven

2007-08-17T13:19:00.000-07:00

kopkind day six

2007-08-16T13:18:00.000-07:00

kopkind day five

2007-08-15T13:18:00.000-07:00

kopkind day four

2007-08-14T13:16:00.000-07:00

kopkind day three

2007-08-13T13:09:00.000-07:00

kopkind day two

2007-08-13T13:06:00.000-07:00

kopkind day one

2007-08-12T13:03:00.000-07:00

and the reception

2007-08-11T13:02:00.000-07:00

the wedding

2007-08-11T13:00:00.000-07:00

lunch before

2007-08-11T12:57:00.000-07:00

getting ready

2007-08-10T12:51:00.000-07:00

public transit

2007-08-09T05:58:00.000-07:00

at palapa

2007-08-08T05:58:00.000-07:00

beauty requires

2007-08-07T12:39:00.000-07:00

goodbye to eldridge

2007-08-02T13:08:00.001-07:00

organizing 101

2007-08-01T13:07:00.000-07:00

with friends

2007-07-29T11:22:00.000-07:00

progress

2007-07-28T11:21:00.000-07:00

all together now

2007-07-22T07:50:00.000-07:00

to rockaway

2007-07-21T07:48:00.000-07:00

gild

2007-07-18T06:59:00.001-07:00

July 15, 2007, NY Times

The Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age

By LOUIS UCHITELLE

The tributes to Sanford I. Weill line the walls of the carpeted hallway that leads to his skyscraper office, with its panoramic view of Central Park. A dozen framed magazine covers, their colors as vivid as an Andy Warhol painting, are the most arresting. Each heralds Mr. Weill’s genius in assembling Citigroup into the most powerful financial institution since the House of Morgan a century ago.

His achievement required political clout, and that, too, is on display. Soon after he formed Citigroup, Congress repealed a Depression-era law that prohibited goliaths like the one Mr. Weill had just put together anyway, combining commercial and investment banking, insurance and stock brokerage operations. A trophy from the victory — a pen that President Bill Clinton used to sign the repeal — hangs, framed, near the magazine covers.

These days, Mr. Weill and many of the nation’s very wealthy chief executives, entrepreneurs and financiers echo an earlier era — the Gilded Age before World War I — when powerful enterprises, dominated by men who grew immensely rich, ushered in the industrialization of the United States. The new titans often see themselves as pillars of a similarly prosperous and expansive age, one in which their successes and their philanthropy have made government less important than it once was.

“People can look at the last 25 years and say this is an incredibly unique period of time,” Mr. Weill said. “We didn’t rely on somebody else to build what we built, and we shouldn’t rely on somebody else to provide all the services our society needs.”

Those earlier barons disappeared by the 1920s and, constrained by the Depression and by the greater government oversight and high income tax rates that followed, no one really took their place. Then, starting in the late 1970s, as the constraints receded, new tycoons gradually emerged, and now their concentrated wealth has made the early years of the 21st century truly another Gilded Age.

Only twice before over the last century has 5 percent of the national income gone to families in the upper one-one-hundredth of a percent of the income distribution — currently, the almost 15,000 families with incomes of $9.5 million or more a year, according to an analysis of tax returns by the economists Emmanuel Saez at the University of California, Berkeley and Thomas Piketty at the Paris School of Economics.

Such concentration at the very top occurred in 1915 and 1916, as the Gilded Age was ending, and again briefly in the late 1920s, before the stock market crash. Now it is back, and Mr. Weill is prominent among the new titans. His net worth exceeds $1 billion, not counting the $500 million he says he has already given away, in the open-handed style of Andrew Carnegie and the other great philanthropists of the earlier age.

At 74, just over a year into retirement as Citigroup chairman, Mr. Weill sees in Carnegie’s life aspects of his own. Andrew Carnegie, an impoverished Scottish immigrant, built a steel empire in Pittsburgh, taking risks that others shunned, just as the demand for steel was skyrocketing. He then gave away his fortune, reasoning that he was lucky to have been in the right spot at the right moment and he owed the community for his good luck — not in higher wages for his workers, but in philanthropic distribution of his wealth.

Mr. Weill’s beginnings were similarly inauspicious. A son of immigrants from Poland, raised in Brooklyn, a so-so college student, he landed on Wall Street in a low-level job in the 1950s. Harnessing entrepreneurial energy, deftness as a deal maker and an appetite for risk, with a rising stock market pulling him along, he built a financial empire that, in his view, successfully broke through the stultifying constraints that flowed from the New Deal. They were constraints not just on what business could or could not do, but on every high earner’s take-home pay.

“I once thought how lucky the Carnegies and the Rockefellers were because they made their money before there was an income tax,” Mr. Weill said, never believing in his younger days that deregulation and tax cuts, starting in the late 1970s, would bring back many of the easier conditions of the Gilded Age. “I felt that everything of any great consequence was really all made in the past,” he said. “That turned out not to be true and it is not true today.”

The Question of Talent

Other very wealthy men in the new Gilded Age talk of themselves as having a flair for business not unlike Derek Jeter’s “unique talent” for baseball, as Leo J. Hindery Jr. put it. “I think there are people, including myself at certain times in my career,” Mr. Hindery said, “who because of their uniqueness warrant whatever the market will bear.”

He counts himself as a talented entrepreneur, having assembled from scratch a cable television sports network, the YES Network, that he sold in 1999 for $200 million. “Jeter makes an unbelievable amount of money,” said Mr. Hindery, who now manages a private equity fund, “but you look at him and you say, ‘Wow, I cannot find another ballplayer with that same set of skills.’ ”

A handful of critics among the new elite, or close to it, are scornful of such self-appraisal. “I don’t see a relationship between the extremes of income now and the performance of the economy,” Paul A. Volcker, a former Federal Reserve Board chairman, said in an interview, challenging the contentions of the very rich that they are, more than others, the driving force of a robust economy.

The great fortunes today are largely a result of the long bull market in stocks, Mr. Volcker said. Without rising stock prices, stock options would not have become a major source of riches for financiers and chief executives. Stock prices rise for a lot of reasons, Mr. Volcker said, including ones that have nothing to do with the actions of these people.

“The market did not go up because businessmen got so much smarter,” he said, adding that the 1950s and 1960s, which the new tycoons denigrate as bureaucratic and uninspiring, “were very good economic times and no one was making what they are making now.”

James D. Sinegal, chief executive of Costco, the discount retailer, echoes that sentiment. “Obscene salaries send the wrong message through a company,” he said. “The message is that all brilliance emanates from the top; that the worker on the floor of the store or the factory is insignificant.”

A legendary chief executive from an earlier era is similarly critical. He is Robert L. Crandall, 71, who as president and then chairman and chief executive, led American Airlines through the early years of deregulation and pioneered the development of the hub-and-spoke system for managing airline routes. He retired in 1997, never having made more than $5 million a year, in the days before upper-end incomes really took off.

He is speaking out now, he said, because he no longer has to worry that his “radical views” might damage the reputation of American or that of the companies he served until recently as a director. The nation’s corporate chiefs would be living far less affluent lives, Mr. Crandall said, if fate had put them in, say, Uzbekistan instead of the United States, “where they are the beneficiaries of a market system that rewards a few people in extraordinary ways and leaves others behind.”

“The way our society equalizes incomes,” he argued, “is through much higher taxes than we have today. There is no other way.”

The New Tycoons

The new Gilded Age has created only one fortune as large as those of the Rockefellers, the Carnegies and the Vanderbilts — that of Bill Gates, according to various compilations. His net worth, measured as a share of the economy’s output, ranks him fifth among the 30 all-time wealthiest American families, just ahead of Carnegie. Only one other living billionaire makes the cut: Warren E. Buffett, in 16th place.

Individual fortunes nearly a century ago were so large that just 30 tycoons — Rockefeller was by far the wealthiest — had accumulated net worth equal to 5 percent of the national income. Their wealth flowed mainly from the empires they built in manufacturing, railroads, oil, coal, urban transit and mass retailing as the United States grew into the world’s largest industrial economy.

Today the fortunes of the very wealthiest are spread more widely. In addition to stock and stock options, low-interest credit has brought wealth to more families — by, for example, facilitating the sale of individual businesses for much greater sums than in the past. The fortunes amassed in hedge funds and in private equity often stem from deals involving huge amounts of easy credit and vast pools of capital available for investment.

The high-tech boom and the Internet unfolded against this backdrop. The rising stock market multiplied the wealth of Bill Gates as his software became the industry standard. It did the same for numerous others who financed start-ups on a shoestring and then went public at enormous gain.

Over a longer period, the market lifted the value of Mr. Buffett’s judicious investments and timely acquisitions, and he emerged as the extraordinarily wealthy Sage of Omaha, in effect, a baron of the new Gilded Age whose views are strikingly similar to those of Carnegie and Mr. Weill.

Like them, Mr. Buffett, 78, sees himself as lucky, having had the good fortune, as he put it, to have been born in America, white and male, and “wired for asset allocation” just when all four really paid off. He dwelt on his good fortune in a recent appearance at a fund-raiser for Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is vying for Mr. Buffett’s support of her presidential candidacy.

“This is a significantly richer country than 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago,” he declared, backing his assertion with a favorite statistic. The national income, divided by the population, is a very abundant $45,000 per capita, he said, a number that reflects an affluent nation but also obscures the lopsided income distribution intertwined with the prosperity.

“Society should place an initial emphasis on abundance,” Mr. Buffett argued, but “then should continuously strive” to redistribute the abundance more equitably.

No income tax existed in Carnegie’s day to do this, and neither Mr. Buffett nor Mr. Weill push for sharply higher income tax rates now, although Mr. Buffett criticizes the present tax code as unfairly skewed in his favor. Like Carnegie, philanthropy is their preference. “I want to give away my money rather than have somebody take it away,” Mr. Weill said.

Mr. Buffett is already well down that path. Most of his wealth is in the stock of his company, Berkshire Hathaway, and he is transferring the majority of that stock to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation so the Gateses can “materially expand” their giving.

“In my will,” he has written, echoing Carnegie’s last wishes, “I’ve stipulated that the proceeds from all Berkshire shares I still own at death are to be used for philanthropic purposes.”

Revisionist History

The new tycoons describe a history that gives them a heroic role. The American economy, they acknowledge, did grow more rapidly on average in the decades immediately after World War II than it is growing today. Incomes rose faster than inflation for most Americans and the spread between rich and poor was much less. But the United States was far and away the dominant economy, and government played a strong supporting role. In such a world, the new tycoons argue, business leaders needed only to be good managers.

Then, with globalization, with America competing once again for first place as strenuously as it had in the first Gilded Age, the need grew for a different type of business leader — one more entrepreneurial, more daring, more willing to take risks, more like the rough and tumble tycoons of the first Gilded Age. Lew Frankfort, chairman and chief executive of Coach, the manufacturer and retailer of trendy upscale handbags, who was among the nation’s highest paid chief executives last year, recaps the argument.

“The professional class that developed in business in the ’50s and ’60s,” he said, “was able as America grew at very steady rates to become industry leaders and move their organizations forward in most categories: steel, autos, housing, roads.”

That changed with the arrival of “the technological age,” in Mr. Frankfort’s view. Innovation became a requirement, in addition to good management skills — and innovation has played a role in Coach’s marketing success. “To be successful,” Mr. Frankfort said, “you now needed vision, lateral thinking, courage and an ability to see things, not the way they were but how they might be.”

Mr. Weill’s vision was to create a financial institution in the style of those that flourished in the last Gilded Age. Although insurance is gone, Citigroup still houses commercial and investment banking and stock brokerage.

The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 outlawed the mix, blaming conflicts of interest inherent in such a combination for helping to bring on the 1929 crash and the Depression. The pen displayed in Mr. Weill’s hallway is one of those Mr. Clinton used to revoke Glass-Steagall in 1999. He did so partly to accommodate the newly formed Citigroup, whose heft was necessary, Mr. Weill said, if the United States was to be a powerhouse in global financial markets.

“The whole world is moving to the American model of free enterprise and capital markets,” Mr. Weill said, arguing that Wall Street cannot be a big player in China or India without giants like Citigroup. “Not having American financial institutions that really are at the fulcrum of how these countries are converting to a free-enterprise system,” he said, “would really be a shame.”

Such talk alarms Arthur Levitt Jr., a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who started on Wall Street years ago as a partner with Mr. Weill in a stock brokerage firm. Mr. Levitt has publicly lamented the end of Glass-Steagall, but Mr. Weill argues that its repeal “created the opportunities to keep people still moving forward.”

Mr. Levitt is skeptical. “I view a gilded age as an age in which warning flags are flying and are seen by very few people,” he said, referring to the potential for a Wall Street firm to fail or markets to crash in a world of too much deregulation. “I think this is a time of great prosperity and a time of great danger.”

It’s Not the Money, or Is It?

Not that money is the only goal. Mr. Hindery, the cable television entrepreneur, said he would have worked just as hard for a much smaller payoff, and others among the very wealthy agreed. “I worked because I loved what I was doing,” Mr. Weill said, insisting that not until he retired did “I have a chance to sit back and count up what was on the table.” And Kenneth C. Griffin, who received more than $1 billion last year as chairman of a hedge fund, the Citadel Investment Group, declared: “The money is a byproduct of a passionate endeavor.”

Mr. Griffin, 38, argued that those who focus on the money — and there is always a get-rich crowd — “soon discover that wealth is not a particularly satisfying outcome.” His own team at Citadel, he said, “loves the problems they work on and the challenges inherent to their business.”

Mr. Griffin maintained that he has created wealth not just for himself but for many others. “We have helped to create real social value in the U.S. economy,” he said. “We have invested money in countless companies over the years and they have helped countless people.”

The new tycoons oppose raising taxes on their fortunes. Unlike Mr. Crandall, neither Mr. Weill nor Mr. Griffin nor most of the dozen others who were interviewed favor tax rates higher than they are today, although a few would go along with a return to the levels of the Clinton administration. The marginal tax on income then was 39.6 percent, and on capital gains, 20 percent. That was still far below the 70 percent and 39 percent in the late 1970s. Those top rates, in the Bush years, are now 35 percent and 15 percent, respectively.

“The income distribution has to stand,” Mr. Griffin said, adding that by trying to alter it with a more progressive income tax, “you end up in problematic circumstances. In the current world, there will be people who will move from one tax area to another. I am proud to be an American. But if the tax became too high, as a matter of principle I would not be working this hard.”

Creating Wealth

Some chief executives of publicly traded companies acknowledge that their fortunes are indeed large — but that it reflects only a small share of the corporate value created on their watch.

Mr. Frankfort, the 61-year-old Coach chief, took home $44.4 million last year. His net worth is in the high nine figures. Yet his pay and net worth, he notes, are small compared with the gain to shareholders since Coach went public six years ago, with Mr. Frankfort at the helm. The market capitalization, the value of all the shares, is nearly $18 billion, up from an initial $700 million.

“I don’t think it is unreasonable,” he said, “for the C.E.O. of a company to realize 3 to 5 percent of the wealth accumulation that shareholders realize.”

That strikes Robert C. Pozen as a reasonable standard. He made a name for himself — and a fortune — rejuvenating mutual funds, starting with Fidelity. In one case, he said, the fund he was running made a profit of $1 billion; his pay that year was $15 million.

“In every organization there are a relatively small number of really critical people,” Mr. Pozen said. “You have to start with that premise, and I made a big difference.”

Mr. Weill makes a similar point. Escorting a visitor down his hall of tributes, he lingers at framed charts with multicolored lines tracking Citigroup’s stock price. Two of the lines compare the price in the five years of Mr. Weill’s active management with that of Mr. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway during the same period. Citigroup went up at six times the pace of Berkshire.

“I think that the results our company had, which is where the great majority of my wealth came from, justified what I got,” Mr. Weill said.

New Technologies

Others among the very rich argue that their wealth helps them develop new technologies that benefit society. Steve Perlman, a Silicon Valley innovator, uses his fortune from breakthrough inventions to help finance his next attempt at a new technology so far out, he says, that even venture capitalists approach with caution. He and his partners, co-founders of WebTV Networks, which developed a way to surf the Web using a television set, sold that still profitable system to Microsoft in 1997 for $503 million.

Mr. Perlman’s share went into the next venture, he says, and the next. One of his goals with his latest enterprise, a private company called Rearden L.L.C., is to develop over several years a technology that will make film animation seem like real-life movies. “There was no one who would invest,” Mr. Perlman said. So he used his own money.

In an earlier era, big corporations and government were the major sources of money for cutting-edge research with an uncertain outcome. Bell Labs in New Jersey was one of those research centers, and Mr. Perlman, now a 46-year-old computer engineer with 71 patents to his name, said that, in an earlier era, he could easily have gone to Bell as a salaried inventor.

In the 1950s, for example, he might have been on the team that built the first transistor, a famous Bell Labs breakthrough. Instead, after graduating from Columbia University, he went to Apple in Silicon Valley, then to Microsoft and finally out on his own.

“I would have been happy as a clam to participate in the development of the transistor,” Mr. Perlman said. “The path I took was the path that was necessary to do what I was doing.”

Carnegie’s Philanthropy

In contrast to many of his peers in corporate America, Mr. Sinegal, 70, the Costco chief executive, argues that the nation’s business leaders would exercise their “unique skills” just as vigorously for “$10 million instead of $200 million, if that were the standard.”

As a co-founder of Costco, which now has 132,000 employees, Mr. Sinegal still holds $150 million in company stock. He is certainly wealthy. But he distinguishes between a founder’s wealth and the current practice of paying a chief executive’s salary in stock options that balloon into enormous amounts. His own salary as chief executive was $349,000 last year, incredibly modest by current standards.

“I think that most of the people running companies today are motivated and pay is a small portion of the motivation,” Mr. Sinegal said. So why so much pressure for ever higher pay?

“Because everyone else is getting it,” he said. “It is as simple as that. If somehow a proclamation were made that C.E.O.’s could only make a maximum of $300,000 a year, you would not have any shortage of very qualified men and women seeking the jobs.”

Looking back, none of the nation’s legendary tycoons was more aware of his good luck than Andrew Carnegie.

“Carnegie made it abundantly clear that the centerpiece of his gospel of wealth philosophy was that individuals do not create wealth by themselves,” said David Nasaw, a historian at City University of New York and the author of “Andrew Carnegie” (Penguin Press). “The creator of wealth in his view was the community, and individuals like himself were trustees of that wealth.”

Repaying the community did not mean for Carnegie raising the wages of his steelworkers. Quite the contrary, he sometimes cut wages and, in doing so, presided over violent antiunion actions.

Carnegie did not concern himself with income inequality. His whole focus was philanthropy. He favored a confiscatory estate tax for those who failed to arrange to return, before their deaths, the fortunes the community had made possible. And today dozens of libraries, cultural centers, museums and foundations bear Carnegie’s name.

“Confiscatory” does not appear in Mr. Weill’s public comments on the estate tax, or in those of Mr. Gates. They note that the estate tax, now being phased out at the urging of President Bush, will return in full in 2010, unless Congress acts otherwise.

They publicly favor retaining an estate tax but focus their attention on philanthropy.

Mr. Weill ticks off a list of gifts that he and his wife, Joan, have made. Some bear their names, and will for years to come. With each bequest, one or the other joins the board. Appropriately, Carnegie Hall has been a big beneficiary, and Mr. Weill as chairman was honored at a huge fund-raising party that Carnegie Hall gave on his 70th birthday.

The Weills — matching what everyone else pledged — gave $30 million to enhance the concert hall that Andrew Carnegie built in 1890 in pursuit of returning his fortune to the community, establishing a standard that today’s tycoons embrace.

“We have that in common,” Mr. Weill said.

Amanda Cox contributed reporting.

study

2007-07-15T08:11:00.000-07:00

science

2007-07-11T08:52:00.001-07:00

from the NY Times, July 11, 2007

Surgeon General Sees 4-Year Term as Compromised
By GARDINER HARRIS

WASHINGTON, July 10 — Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told a Congressional panel Tuesday that top Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to weaken or suppress important public health reports because of political considerations.

The administration, Dr. Carmona said, would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues. Top officials delayed for years and tried to “water down” a landmark report on secondhand smoke, he said. Released last year, the report concluded that even brief exposure to cigarette smoke could cause immediate harm.

Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches. He also said he was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings.

And administration officials even discouraged him from attending the Special Olympics because, he said, of that charitable organization’s longtime ties to a “prominent family” that he refused to name.

“I was specifically told by a senior person, ‘Why would you want to help those people?’ ” Dr. Carmona said.

The Special Olympics is one of the nation’s premier charitable organizations to benefit disabled people, and the Kennedys have long been deeply involved in it.

When asked after the hearing if that “prominent family” was the Kennedys, Dr. Carmona responded, “You said it. I didn’t.”

In response to lawmakers’ questions, Dr. Carmona refused to name specific people in the administration who had instructed him to put political considerations over scientific ones. He said, however, that they included assistant secretaries of health and human services as well as top political appointees outside the department of health.

Dr. Carmona did offer to provide the names to the committee in a private meeting.

Bill Hall, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said that the administration disagreed with Dr. Carmona’s statements. “It has always been this administration’s position that public health policy should be rooted in sound science,” Mr. Hall said.

Emily Lawrimore, a White House spokeswoman, said the surgeon general “is the leading voice for the health of all Americans.”

“It’s disappointing to us,” Ms. Lawrimore said, “if he failed to use this position to the fullest extent in advocating for policies he thought were in the best interests of the nation.”

Dr. Carmona is one of a growing list of present and former administration officials to charge that politics often trumped science within what had previously been largely nonpartisan government health and scientific agencies.

Dr. Carmona, 57, served as surgeon general for one four-year term, from 2002 to 2006, but was not asked to serve a second. Before being nominated, he was in the Army Special Forces, earned two purple hearts in the Vietnam War and was a trauma surgeon and leader of the Pima County, Ariz., SWAT team. He received a bachelor’s degree, in biology and chemistry, in 1976 and his M.D. in 1979, both from the University of California, San Francisco. He is now vice chairman of Canyon Ranch, a resort and residential development company.

His testimony comes two days before the Senate confirmation hearings of his designated successor, Dr. James W. Holsinger Jr. Two members of the Senate health committee have already declared their opposition to Dr. Holsinger’s nomination because of a 1991 report he wrote that concluded that homosexual sex was unnatural and unhealthy. Dr. Carmona’s testimony may further complicate Dr. Holsinger’s nomination.

In his testimony, Dr. Carmona said that at first he was so politically naïve that he had little idea how inappropriate the administration’s actions were. He eventually consulted six previous surgeons general, Republican and Democratic, and all agreed, he said, that he faced more political interference than they had.

On issue after issue, Dr. Carmona said, the administration made decisions about important public health issues based solely on political considerations, not scientific ones.

“I was told to stay away from those because we’ve already decided which way we want to go,” Dr. Carmona said.

He described attending a meeting of top officials in which the subject of global warming was discussed. The officials concluded that global warming was a liberal cause and dismissed it, he said.

“And I said to myself, ‘I realize why I’ve been invited. They want me to discuss the science because they obviously don’t understand the science,’ ” he said. “I was never invited back.”

Dr. Carmona testified under oath at a hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee headed by Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California. The topic was strengthening the office of the surgeon general. Dr. C. Everett Koop, surgeon general in the Reagan administration, and Dr. David Satcher, surgeon general during the Clinton administration and the first year of the administration of George W. Bush, also testified.

Each complained about political interference and the declining status of the office. Dr. Satcher said that the Clinton administration discouraged him from issuing a report showing that needle-exchange programs were effective in reducing disease. He released the report anyway.

Dr. Koop, said he had been discouraged by top officials in the Reagan administration from discussing the AIDS crisis. He did so anyway.

All three men urged major changes in the way the surgeon general is chosen and the way the office is financed.

Dr. Carmona described being invited to testify at the government’s nine-month racketeering trial of the tobacco industry that ended in 2005. He said top administration officials discouraged him from testifying while simultaneously telling the lead government lawyer in the case that he was not competent to testify. Dr. Carmona testified anyway.

Sharon Y. Eubanks, director of the Justice Department’s tobacco litigation team, was in the audience during Dr. Carmona’s testimony.

“What he said is all correct,” she said. “He was one of the most powerful witnesses. His testimony was very important.”

Dr. Carmona said that he felt that the duty of the surgeon general, often called the “nation’s doctor,” was to tackle many of the nation’s most controversial health topics and to issue balanced reports about the studies underlying them.

When stem cells became a focus of debate, Dr. Carmona said he proposed that his office offer guidance “so that we can have, if you will, informed consent.”

“I was told to stand down and not speak about it,” he said. “It was removed from my speeches.”

The Bush administration rejected the advice of many top scientists on this subject, including that of the director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Elias Zerhouni.

Similarly, Dr. Carmona wanted to address the controversial topic of sexual education, he said. Scientific studies suggest that the most effective approach includes a discussion of contraceptives.

“However there was already a policy in place that did not want to hear the science but wanted to preach abstinence only, but I felt that was scientifically incorrect,” he said.

Dr. Carmona said drafts of surgeon general reports on global health and prison health were still being debated by the administration. The global health report was never approved, Dr. Carmona said, because he refused to sprinkle the report with glowing references to the efforts of the Bush administration.

“The correctional health care report is pointing out the inadequacies of health care within our correctional health care system,” he said. “It would force the government on a course of action to improve that.”

Because the administration does not want to spend more money on prisoners’ health care, the report has been delayed, Dr. Carmona said.

“For us, the science was pretty easy,” he said. “These people go back into the community and take diseases with them.” He added, “This is not about the crime. It’s about protecting the public.”

right to the city, philippines

2007-07-10T12:29:00.001-07:00

from the nation

2007-07-09T13:58:00.000-07:00

worth reading, esp if you couldn't make it. an inspiring event.

An Even Newer Left

by DAN BERGER

[posted online on June 30, 2007]

Atlanta

At first sight, the only applicable description of the first US Social Forum would be chaos. Utterly overwhelming. Ten thousand people mill about the Atlanta Civic Center and its environs, trying to choose between dozens of workshops, issue-themed tents, merchandise and information tables, meetings, and plain old socializing.

It is a scene perhaps best captured in fragments rather than full sentences. Organizers. Housing. Immigrant workers. Vision. Prison abolition. Puppets. Speeches, newspapers, fliers, banners, flags, books, shirts. Laughter. Dance parties. Water. Media. Fundraisers. Collaboration. Resisting state and interpersonal violence. Imagining.

Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, ghetto, barrio, reservation. The city. Youth. Networking. Strategy.

It is people running into old friends from across the country as they roll into Atlanta in buses from the Southwest to the Northeast. It is the sweaty hugs and warm handshakes of new friends collaborating on old projects, of people meeting others doing the exact same work across the country or complimentary work across town. It is a place of impassioned and often impromptu speeches. Spirited marches, ad hoc press conferences, and clever street theater seem as ubiquitous as the 1,000 panels taking place. The social forum is a gathering of veterans--of wars and of movements.

The forum can easily feel like just another conference, only supersized. The schmoozing, the talking heads, the exchanging of cards and brochures--it's all here, just on a bigger scale. People trying to call attention to their cause or organization pass out flyers announcing the workshops they are organizing. There are many different workshop tracks to choose from, both from themes the forum organizers decided upon or the self-organized tracks groups have collaborated on to organize. It would be easy to pick a track and only see people interested in workers rights, urban community organizing, Palestine, transformative justice, or rebuilding the Gulf Coast. In that, the Social Forum is a conference of conferences for a movement of movements.

A bird's eye view of the social forum would reveal an energy and excitement for something more. That desire is not just for an alternative to the Bush regime's sinking ship. At its best, the desire stretches for a new way of conducting politics and social movement based on but not duplicative of what has come before. It is a call to build a left that is grassroots and democratic, visionary and strategic, a left that manages to have unity without sacrificing its political principles. If, as the World Social Forum slogan puts it, Another World Is Possible, the US Social Forum proclaims that Another US is Necessary.

There are surely problems: the pockets of people for whom politics consists of haranguing the public with conspiracy theories or tired ideas of Bolshevism. More pressing is the propensity for the forum's size and excitement to outpace its ability. While less so than forums in the resource-strapped Global South, the US Social Forum is not exempt from the confusion of facilitators without panels or panels without rooms. The Ida B. Wells Media Justice Center has provided an impressive model of collaborative journalism, but its community newsroom started out in what seemed like a bathroom closet. The competition for, or at least confusion over, space and attention is apparent--even if it takes place in an atmosphere of inspiring cooperation.

The necessity for another America, one that, in Langston Hughes' famous words, has never existed, permeates the forum. Indeed, the forum is in no short supply of proscriptions for a radical remaking of this country, and therefore the world. Panel after panel, table after table, conversation after conversation, meeting after meeting--each one makes apparent the need for another society, and what the ingredients of it must be. A sometimes too-quick-to-applaud audience cheers on as speakers denounce injustice and celebrate what Martin Luther King once described as a revolution in values.

The energy is kinetic and infective. Still, the real test is not what happens here but what emerges from it. And there are already reasons to hope: numerous urban community organizing groups from across the country sponsored a workshop track, parties, and meetings to solidify a Right to the City network. Under the auspices of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, the marginalized left voices within the immigrant rights movement had a chance to make their position known through workshops and a national press conference. A pre-forum gathering sponsored by Queers for Economic Justice and Southerners on New Ground took first steps toward building the infrastructure for a Queer Left, while another pre-forum gathering--strengthened throughout the week--brought together queer, feminist, and antiracist groups to envision solutions to state and interpersonal violence that don't involve the sprawling prison-industrial complex.

These examples show that a mass movement is slowly beginning to cohere. It is far too early to predict its success, failure, or specific forms. But the forum presents a picture of movements in motion, a chance to glimpse and above all participate in building the world we want to see. After years of patient organizing, the grassroots centers of social movements are beginning to burst through soil corroded by years of neo-liberalism and an impoverished dominant political culture. The consciousness, vision, and strategy emanating from the social forum is uneven and developing--and it may just be our best hope to have both democratic processes and liberating politics.

flamenco with family

2007-07-05T12:44:00.000-07:00

ussf day five

2007-07-01T12:59:00.000-07:00

ussf day four

2007-06-30T12:57:00.000-07:00

ussf day three

2007-06-29T12:55:00.000-07:00

ussf day two

2007-06-28T12:55:00.000-07:00

ussf day one

2007-06-27T12:22:00.000-07:00

global action project

2007-06-14T08:49:00.000-07:00

people's forum

2007-06-11T08:53:00.000-07:00