The Presidential Candidates & the Enviroment - 3 Great Articles

The Real Problem With Foreign Oil? Climate Change
WorldChanging Team
October 16, 2008 10:12 AM

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/008877.html

Memo to Senators Obama and McCain:

Last night in your debates, you missed an opportunity. You faced the question,


Would each of you give us a number, a specific number of how much you believe we can reduce our foreign oil imports during your first term?

You led your responses, very similarly, with the following statements (excerpts taken from this transcript):

McCain:


I think we can, for all intents and purposes, eliminate our dependence on Middle Eastern oil and Venezuelan oil. Canadian oil is fine.

Obama:


I think that in ten years, we can reduce our dependence so that we no longer have to import oil from the Middle East or Venezuela. I think that's about a realistic timeframe.


Senators, we think that you missed the point to address the real problem, which is not which nation the oil comes from, but rather the very fact that it is oil. Your statements do not acknowledge that fossil fuels are a finite natural resource that we will eventually run out of, and which, when burned, poison the planet.

By addressing the larger issue -- climate change -- and pushing for a United States that no longer needs fossil fuels to do its daily business, you will inherently solve the problem of sending U.S. dollars to hostile oil-producing nations. But the reverse scenario does not work. America could remove all the foreign oil from its energy supply and still be economically disadvantaged and ecologically imperiled. And weaning America off select supplies of foreign oil does little to help the rest of the world transition to a post-carbon economy.

True, both of you mentioned alternative energy later on in your answers:

Obama:


But understand, we only have three to four percent of the world's oil reserves and we use 25 percent of the world's oil, which means that we can't drill our way out of the problem.

That's why I've focused on putting resources into solar, wind, biodiesel, geothermal. These have been priorities of mine since I got to the Senate, and it is absolutely critical that we develop a high fuel efficient car that's built not in Japan and not in South Korea, but built here in the United States of America.
McCain:


So the point is with nuclear power, with wind, tide, solar, natural gas, with development of flex fuel, hybrid, clean coal technology, clean coal technology is key in the heartland of America that's hurting rather badly.

And, to be fair, moderator Bob Schieffer could have done a better job with this question. He took the topic – originally identified as "energy and climate control" – straight to the issue of "foreign oil."

By consistently addressing the problem of oil as if it is first and foremost an issue of national security, we believe that the entire discussion is misleading the public. Dependence on oil is an issue of planetary security, because continuing to yoke the systems that define our lives to a resource that has no future is the very antithesis of sustainability.

While we realize that foreign oil and its implications for security and the economy are at the forefront of American minds, we still believe that there is a crucial subject here that is being avoided by the two men competing to lead the world's most fuel-dependent, most polluting (per capita) nation on earth.

We worry that this persistent air of surreality won't clear up nearly soon enough.



Job One, Day One: Bright Green Economic Recovery
Alex Steffen
October 14, 2008 9:43 AM
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/008866.html

"We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late."
--Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

With the U.S. presidential race in its final few weeks, and momentum towards a possible Obama/ Democratic landslide building, it's worth beginning to ask, "What next? What happens here in America after the election?"

The world needs a strong and future-focused United States, but what we have is a U.S. nearing complete collapse. Our financial institutions have nearly failed, our dollar is weak, our government is in deficit spending, our people are neck-deep in debt. Our infrastructure is literally falling apart. Our military is in a shambles. Our health care system is the joke of the developed world, our education system fails half of our children, and we imprison more people than China. Meanwhile, we are the world's worst polluter, having built a car-dependent suburban way of life that pumps money out of our economy and planet-threatening emissions into the sky.

Many Americans, especially young Americans, see this nation's future disintegrating in front of their eyes, and realize that we no longer have options or time to debate. We have only one choice: launch ourselves immediately into a bright green economic transformation, or sink into a potentially irrecoverable decline.

We know that transformation is within our grasp. We know that we can move quickly to transition to smart growth and urban revitalization, green building, efficient electric cars, power generation from renewables, sustainable farming, ecological restoration of our wild lands and rivers, green taxes (with a carbon cap) and a strong commitment to education, public science and diplomacy. Solutions exist to the problems we face.

We know that making this transition quickly and strongly will produce millions of green jobs, and propel America back into the lead of the global economy while benefiting people everywhere. We know too that making this transition will leave Americans healthier, more prosperous and safer, while restoring fiscal stability to our government. A bright green transformation would not be a drag on the economy, but the means of its rescue. Finally, we know that only an all-out effort to make our prosperity sustainable offers us any hope of staving off a planetary ecological disaster.

With all we know, and all that's at stake, you'd think a strong, outspoken and immediate commitment to building a green economy would be something we could take for granted. It's not.

There's an old joke told to those going into a legislative process for the first time which goes something like this: "Write down a list of your expected accomplishments. Cut the list in half and put each half in a different envelope. Throw the envelopes out and take what you can get."

That kind of thinking now will destroy this nation, and the planet, in the very short term.

But that kind of thinking may be what we get. The next U.S. president and congressional leaders will find themselves under immediate fire from neo-conservatives, reactionary businesses and industries that are irredeemably unsustainable (like the Oil and Coal Lobbies) and will find themselves very quickly pressured to scale back their plans, to speak in the most triangulated language possible, to confine change to the smallest, most halting steps. Those in the U.S. who oppose change are strong, wealthy, unprincipled and ruthless. They're already gearing up to demand that given the tough times, change must be weak, small and slow.

But we don't have another decade to embrace change. We may not have another election, even. Indeed, we need a president and congressional leaders who stand up on their very first days on the job, and commit this nation to big, bold, rapid and visionary change. We need to set the terms of the fight at a level with the order of magnitude of change we need. The stakes are a nation transformed within the next couple years. Without that, even a landslide will prove to have been meaningless.

We are rapidly coming up on the rusted sign by the side of the road that says, simply, "too late." We need to demand action before we get there. If we don't win action now, there's no point in preserving power to fight for change later.

The task for all of us, over the next few months, is to figure out how to raise the largest ruckus imaginable in the public debate and in our communities and workplaces, demanding real change and articulating the kinds of solutions that are within our power to implement immediately.

Critically, we lack a real vision of what a bright green American would actually look like -- that's why we're hard at work on a book that explores what this nation could make itself into in 20 years, and how it might feel to live in that country.

But we needn't wait for the whole vision to advocate real change and the politics of optimism, and on that, expect more here soon.

The election was just a prelude. The fight that matters has not yet even started.

The Candidates and Climate: A Persistant Air of Surreality
Alex Steffen
October 7, 2008 6:07 PM
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/008827.html

Watching the U.S. presidential debates felt like an exercise in describing the problems of another planet altogether.

Consider this exchange:

QUESTION: Sen. McCain, I want to know, we saw that Congress moved pretty fast in the face of an economic crisis. I want to know what you would do within the first two years to make sure that Congress moves fast as far as environmental issues, like climate change and green jobs?
MCCAIN: Well, thank you. Look, we are in tough economic times; we all know that. And let's keep -- never forget the struggle that Americans are in today.

But when we can -- when we have an issue that we may hand our children and our grandchildren a damaged planet, I have disagreed strongly with the Bush administration on this issue. I traveled all over the world looking at the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, Joe Lieberman and I.

And I introduced the first legislation, and we forced votes on it. That's the good news, my friends. The bad news is we lost. But we kept the debate going, and we kept this issue to -- to posing to Americans the danger that climate change opposes.

Now, how -- what's -- what's the best way of fixing it? Nuclear power. Sen. Obama says that it has to be safe or disposable or something like that.

Look, I -- I was on Navy ships that had nuclear power plants. Nuclear power is safe, and it's clean, and it creates hundreds of thousands of jobs.

And -- and I know that we can reprocess the spent nuclear fuel. The Japanese, the British, the French do it. And we can do it, too. Sen. Obama has opposed that.

We can move forward, and clean up our climate, and develop green technologies, and alternate -- alternative energies for -- for hybrid, for hydrogen, for battery-powered cars, so that we can clean up our environment and at the same time get our economy going by creating millions of jobs.

We can do that, we as Americans, because we're the best innovators, we're the best producers, and 95 percent of the people who are our market live outside of the United States of America.

BROKAW: Sen. Obama?

OBAMA: This is one of the biggest challenges of our times.

And it is absolutely critical that we understand this is not just a challenge, it's an opportunity, because if we create a new energy economy, we can create five million new jobs, easily, here in the United States.

It can be an engine that drives us into the future the same way the computer was the engine for economic growth over the last couple of decades.

And we can do it, but we're going to have to make an investment. The same way the computer was originally invented by a bunch of government scientists who were trying to figure out, for defense purposes, how to communicate, we've got to understand that this is a national security issue, as well.

And that's why we've got to make some investments and I've called for investments in solar, wind, geothermal. Contrary to what Sen. McCain keeps on saying, I favor nuclear power as one component of our overall energy mix.

But this is another example where I think it is important to look at the record. Sen. McCain and I actually agree on something. He said a while back that the big problem with energy is that for 30 years, politicians in Washington haven't done anything.

What Sen. McCain doesn't mention is he's been there 26 of them. And during that time, he voted 23 times against alternative fuels, 23 times.

So it's easy to talk about this stuff during a campaign, but it's important for us to understand that it requires a sustained effort from the next president.

One last point I want to make on energy. Sen. McCain talks a lot about drilling, and that's important, but we have three percent of the world's oil reserves and we use 25 percent of the world's oil.

So what that means is that we can't simply drill our way out of the problem. And we're not going to be able to deal with the climate crisis if our only solution is to use more fossil fuels that create global warming.

We're going to have to come up with alternatives, and that means that the United States government is working with the private sector to fund the kind of innovation that we can then export to countries like China that also need energy and are setting up one coal power plant a week.

We've got to make sure that we're giving them the energy that they need or helping them to create the energy that they need.



Note that neither candidate, both supposedly standard-bearers for straight talk and change, puts the planetary crisis in anything like the proper perspective. Both candidates gave pandering, half-answers: for supposed climate champions, neither gave the kind of answers that will either inspire the American people nor prepare the kind of mandate we'll need to take action of the proper scale.

Now, of course, being an armchair candidate is the easiest thing in the world, but still, I wish one of them had said something more like this:

"Thank you for that question.
We hear a lot about climate change and other environmental problems these days, and that makes sense, because we place a planetary crisis of historic proportions. Humanity's future is at stake.

We know that we must change our economy, if we're going to avoid catastrophe. We need to slash our greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impacts, and that means we're going to have to change the ways generate energy. We're going to have to change how we get around. We're going to have to change the way we build. We're going to have to change the way we grow food, and manage forests, and run our factories. We're going to have to change everything.

To the people of another country, that might be scary. But we're Americans, and we know that the changes we need to make offer us the best opportunity we have to also change the things about our country that aren't working as well as we'd like. If we commit to building an economy that grows by protecting the environment, we will create whole new industries and millions of jobs, develop technologies and products we can sell overseas, rebuild our cities and infrastructure, and bring prosperity back to our farms and forest-dependent communities.

When I am elected president, one of my first actions will be to hold a top-level "climate crisis summit" to develop a comprehensive plan to move America into the carbon-neutral, bright and green economy of the future, so that we avoid catastrophe and renew our nation."


Because here's the thing: whichever candidate wins, he is going to need to stand up in front of the American people and tell them that we face an emergency, if we are going to have any chance of acting quickly enough on climate and other planetary problems to stave off disaster. It'd be nice to see that leadership now, and not just hope it blooms after 1/20/9.

In Turkey, Mosque Gets A Woman's Touch

by Ivan Watson
All Things Considered, October 21, 2008 ·
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95940942
(If you want to listen to the interview click on the link above!)
The role of women in Islam is an issue that's been furiously debated, especially in Turkey — an overwhelmingly Muslim country with a strict secular constitution.

The governing pro-Islamic political party was almost banned this year after it tried to allow women who wear Islamic head scarves to study at universities.

In the midst of this controversy, several Muslim women who do not wear head scarves have quietly reached a new milestone — these artists are helping build a mosque.

For centuries, Istanbul was the seat of the caliphate, the capital of the Islamic world and home to hundreds of magnificent old mosques. Now this city of countless domes and minarets is about to get a unique new addition.

Zeynep Fadillioglu is one member of a team of interior designers and architects overseeing the construction of the Sakirin Mosque. It is Fadillioglu's first mosque.

"I think I don't know of any other person — a woman — who has designed a mosque before," she says.

Tall and fashionably dressed, with long blond hair, Fadillioglu is better known in Turkey as a figure from the country's cocktail-sipping jet set. She made a career decorating restaurants, boutique hotels and homes for the very wealthy.

A Contemporary Spin On Ancient Art

In the mosque, Fadillioglu is putting a contemporary spin on religious art from the Ottoman era.

The iron on the mosque's enormous iron and glass facade was hand-crafted by specialists in Istanbul, Fadillioglu says. "The glass etching has got different layers of gilding on it, which is from verses of the Koran," she says. "We wanted people to feel more left alone with God in this place, rather then being distracted by too much ornamentation. I think that makes it more contemporary at the same time"

Fadillioglu also brought in other female artists to help her on the project.

On one particular day, beneath the mosque's 130-foot diameter dome, Nahide Buyukkaymakci instructs a worker on how to hang dozens of blown-glass rain drops from an asymmetrical bronze and Plexiglas chandelier.

The glass drops are inspired by a prayer that says Allah's light should fall on you like rain, Buyukkaymakci explains.

"Even though I'm not really a practicing Muslim, this is a very special project for me, because it's the first mosque to be designed by women," she says.

Professor Ali Kose studies the psychology of religion at Marmara University's School of Theology.

"Traditionally, the mosque is thought to be a place for men only," Kose says. But he says women played a much greater public role in mosques in the days of the Prophet Muhammad. That role, he says, deteriorated over time.

"Islamic societies, by time, have become male dominant societies," Kose says, "and this affected every part of life, and also affected the religion as well."

'More Room For Us To Pray'

Istanbul's Mihrimah Sultan Mosque was built in 1547 in honor of a daughter of the sultan. Muslim women are allowed to attend prayers here in specially designated women's sections.

They are ushered with their children to a small, curtained-off area in the back of the mosque, while the men kneel in front on a vast carpet enjoying an unobstructed view of the mosque's beautiful stained glass windows.

After prayers, a woman named Deniz Urash and her mother complain that the women's section is too small and crowded.

"It would be nice if they made more room for us to pray," Urash says.

Fadillioglu says in many Turkish mosques, the women's sections have suffered from neglect.

"I have been to some mosques of that sort, and that disturbed me," Fadillioglu says. "So, I prefer the women to use the mosque as much as the man if they want to, of course, and the same way."

As workmen paint and sand this new place of worship, Fadillioglu vows to make the second-floor balcony — where the women will one day pray — every bit as beautiful as the men's part of the mosque.

Related Story on BBC.com

Urgent Action: High court turns down Ga. death row inmate

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Troy Anthony Davis' appeal. His fate is back in the hands of Georgia authorities who may seek a new execution date at any time.

The Supreme Court's decision to deny Troy Davis' petition means that no court of law will ever hold a hearing on the witnesses who have recanted their trial testimony in sworn affidavits.

Doubts about his guilt raised by these multiple witness recantations will never be resolved. An execution under such a cloud of doubt would undermine public confidence in the state's criminal justice system and would be a grave miscarriage of justice.

The state of Georgia can still do the responsible thing and prevent the execution of Troy Davis:

Write a letter to the editor calling on Georgia to stop the execution of Troy Davis!

Call on the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to reconsider its previous decision and grant clemency to Troy Davis.

Urge your friends and family to go to amnestyusa.org/troydavis or text TROY to 90999 to add their voices to the over 200,000 that have already taken action on this case.

Justices halted execution to consider appeal of conviction of killing cop
The Associated Press
updated 3:55 p.m. ET, Tues., Oct. 14, 2008
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way Tuesday for a man to be put to death for killing a police officer, despite calls from his supporters to reconsider the case because seven of nine key witnesses against him have recanted their testimony.

The high court granted Troy Davis a reprieve Sept. 23, less than two hours before his scheduled execution. But the justices declined Tuesday to give his appeal a full-blown hearing, clearing the last hurdle toward his death by lethal injection.

It was not immediately clear when his execution will take place.

Davis, 39, was sentenced to death for the 1989 murder of 27-year-old Mark MacPhail, a police officer in Savannah, Ga. But doubts about his guilt and a high-profile publicity campaign have won him the support of prominent advocates including former President Jimmy Carter and South Africa Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Options are few
Davis' legal team said it was frantically searching for other recourse, but those prospects seem dim.

"I think it's disgusting, terrible. I'm extremely disappointed," said Martina Correia, Davis' sister, when told about the decision. "Well, we still have to fight. We can't stop."

MacPhail's family said it was relieved by the ruling.

"I'm hoping that soon we will have some peace, that this will all be over," said MacPhail's mother, Anneliese MacPhail, who is 75.


MacPhail was working off-duty as a security guard at a bus station when he rushed to help a homeless man who had been pistol-whipped at a nearby parking lot. He and was shot twice when he approached Davis and two other men.

Witnesses identified Davis as the shooter at his 1991 trial.

New evidence
But Davis' lawyers say new evidence proves their client was a victim of mistaken identity. Besides those who have recanted their testimony, three others who did not testify have said Sylvester "Red" Coles — who testified against Davis at his trial — confessed to the killing.

Coles refused to talk about the case when contacted by The Associated Press during a 2007 court appearance and has no listed phone number.

Prosecutors have said the case is closed. They also say some of the witness affidavits simply repeat what a trial jury has already heard, while others are irrelevant because they come from witnesses who never testified.

A divided Georgia Supreme Court twice rejected his request for a new trial, and the pardons board turned down his bid for clemency last month after considering the case again.

Two hours before Davis' scheduled Sept. 23 execution, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the stay, sparking a celebration among Davis supporters.

"This is not over yet," said Davis, who sounded upbeat speaking to the crowd by phone. "This is the beginning of my blessing."

Davis' supporters blast decision
As word of the top U.S. court's latest decision trickled down Tuesday, Davis' supporters sent out dispatches blasting the move.

"It is disgraceful that the highest court in the land could sink so low when doubts surrounding Davis' guilt are so high," said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA, which has lobbied for the inmate's release.

Chatham County District Attorney Spencer Lawton, who has declined to speak to the media about the Davis case while it was still pending, broke his silence with a 14-page statement after the Supreme Court's decision.

In it, he said the witness recantations failed to meet the legal threshold required to call a new trial. The high rate of recantations, he said, also "invites a suggestion of manipulation, making it very difficult to believe."

In a telephone interview, Lawton said his reaction to the ruling was "ambivalence."

"I'm not a great fan of the death penalty," he said. "I wish of course that none of this had happened, but it has. And I've done what I had to do. The law is the law. It says you kill a police officer, you're subject to the death penalty."


Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Global turmoil could reverse prosperity

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27058577/
Will the $700 billion bailout be enough to stem a worldwide financial crisis?
By David Cho and Binyamin Appelbaum
The Washington Post
updated 12:07 a.m. ET, Tues., Oct. 7, 2008
What went wrong?

Last week, the nation's political leaders said the financial system would collapse unless they passed a $700 billion rescue package for Wall Street. On Monday, the first day of trading after the plan passed, the financial system continued to melt down anyway.

Here's why: The plan developed by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. to buy troubled U.S. mortgage assets might not start for another month. And, despite its huge price tag, it already seems paltry compared with the scale of the rapidly evolving global crisis.

"People are realizing that the Paulson plan is not going to be nearly enough. It's not because the plan is ill-conceived. It looks like it's the right thing to do, but the problem is just growing astronomically," said Martin Evans, a professor of finance and economics at Georgetown University.

The bailout plan is focused on buttressing U.S. financial institutions. But it was global markets that plunged yesterday, as investors sold off commodities in Brazil, currency in Mexico, bank stocks in Russia and the short-term debt of the state of California.

Robert B. Zoellick, president of the World Bank, said the global financial system may have reached a "tipping point" -- the moment when a crisis cascades into a full-blown meltdown and becomes extremely difficult for governments to contain.

The mushrooming problems "will trigger business failures and possibly banking emergencies. Some countries will slip toward balance of payment crises," he said yesterday, speaking at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

The crisis threatens to reverse years of prosperity that financed the economic growth in developed and emerging countries through a global financial system that made credit widely available. Banks and governments were able to borrow money on an unprecedented scale by selling debt in new kinds of packages, allowing even the least credit-worthy consumers to borrow and spend.

China exported goods and then loaned the money back to the United States by buying those new debt packages. The story was similar for Russia, which exported massive amounts of energy to Europe, and for Brazil, which exported commodities including orange juice and sugar. All used the massive inflows of borrowed money from the developed world to fuel economic expansions and stock market bubbles.

Yesterday, trading on the major stock exchanges in Russia and Brazil was halted after prices crashed. China's major indexes fell about 5 percent. The bubbles appear to be bursting in rapid succession.


Faced with these developments, the markets have not been in a mood to cheer the passage of the Paulson rescue package. At one point yesterday, the Dow Jones industrial average had fallen nearly 800 points, more than 7 percent. It ended the day off 3.6 percent, below 10,000 for the first time since 2004.

"Quite frankly, what the market is looking for is some kind of coordinated action from central banks around the world." said Kathy Lien, director of currency research at GFT Forex. The Paulson plan, she added, is like a "Band-Aid for a problem that stretches way beyond the banking system now."


Treasury officials say that ramping up the rescue package will take time, and that they are working as fast as possible.

Yesterday, the department released the contracting rules for the asset managers they expect to hire to oversee its rescue program, requiring interested parties to apply by tomorrow. The Treasury also named Neel Kashkari as the interim assistant secretary of the Treasury for financial stability to oversee the rescue program until January when the next administration takes office.

Despite the mammoth bailout, Zoellick and other leaders are now urging central banks from the leading economies around the world to devise a coordinated response.

They don't have a lot of time.

It's been nearly three weeks since Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke warned lawmakers that the nation was at risk of a full-blown meltdown.

Since then, the same problems have afflicted Europe. Governments have bailed out five large financial firms, including two this weekend, triggering fears of additional bank collapses in Europe.

Hypo Real Estate, a German real estate lender, is collapsing under the weight of its own bad loans, forcing the German government and leading banks to announce Sunday that they would lend the company up to $68 billion.

The rescue follows the nationalization of one of England's largest real estate lenders, Bradford & Bingley. Iceland also has been forced to rescue one of its largest banks, Glitnir. And several European countries were forced to invest billions of dollars in Fortis, one of the largest banks on the Continent, in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to stave off its collapse. Fortis, too, has now been nationalized.

With confidence in banks basically shattered, governments increasingly have been forced to issue explicit guarantees that bank deposits will remain safe.

Ireland last week guaranteed all deposits and liabilities, totaling about $540 billion, at six domestic banks. The pledge included branches of the six banks outside of Ireland, and excluded branches of other banks in Ireland, raising concerns that deposits would now flow from rivals into the coffers of the six government-protected banks as investors fled to safety.

Germany promised Sunday to guarantee all private savings accounts, which hold at least $800 billion. Denmark yesterday announced that it would guarantee all deposits as well.

The economies of Ireland and Denmark have officially fallen into recession. Investors meanwhile are worried that Pakistan and Argentina might default on their debts. In India, the average interest on loans between banks jumped above 11 percent, reflecting a breakdown of trust.

The bailout has not even thawed critical segments of the U.S. credit markets.

U.S. corporations sold $1.25 billion in bonds last week, marking the sharpest drop in sales volume since 1999, according to Bloomberg. Short-term commercial borrowing fell to $1.6 trillion, down 9 percent in the past two weeks, almost entirely because of a massive decline in borrowing by financial companies that cannot find lenders at any price.

September saw the worst monthly losses in the history of the hedge fund industry. Investor withdrawals could lead to the collapse of major funds, triggering further sell-offs and exacerbating the financial crisis.


Investors are also increasingly concerned that more U.S. banks will fail before the Treasury can launch the rescue program. Shares of National City, a regional bank based in Cleveland, fell 27 percent yesterday.

Bank of America said its third-quarter profit fell 68 percent, largely because of losses on mortgage loans and credit cards. The company reduced the dividend on its widely held shares by half, and said it would try to raise another $10 billion from investors. Its shares were down about 7 percent to $32.22.

"These are the most difficult times for financial institutions that I have experienced in my 39 years in banking," chief executive Ken Lewis said in a conference call.

© 2008 The Washington Post Company
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AmEx rates credit risk by where you live, shop

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27055285/
Credit-card firm confirms members' mortgage lenders also may be a factor
By Mike Stuckey
Senior news editor
updated 6:42 a.m. ET, Tues., Oct. 7, 2008
As the global credit crunch reaches from Wall Street to Main Street, guilt by association has become a tool for evaluating the creditworthiness of American Express customers.

Among other criteria, cardholders are seeing limits reduced because of where they live, where they shop and who holds their mortgage.

“Absolutely unbelievable!” said Jesse Gilleland of suburban Washington, D.C., who says revisions of his American Express accounts and credit limits, at least partly for those reasons, could force him to close his once-thriving computer-consulting firm.

A letter sent to Gilleland by American Express, one of the nation’s largest credit-card issuers, includes these reasons why the spending limit on his Platinum Card was reduced:

“Our credit experience with customers who have made purchases at establishments where you have recently used your card.”
“Our analysis of the credit risk associated with customers who have residential loans from the creditor(s) indicated in your credit report.”
Credit-card experts and consumer advocates say that while such practices have been rumored for some time, this is the first time they’ve seen them cited as criteria for a credit limit reduction.

American Express spokeswoman Kim Forde confirmed that the company is analyzing its exposure to risk more closely as it reviews its cardholders’ credit profiles, including considerations it has always weighed — from payment history to credit bureau reports and income.

But, she said, “We are looking at some other factors, too, in light of the economy. We are looking at consumers holding subprime mortgages (and) those living in areas where there has been a greater deterioration in home prices.”

Asked about the letter to Gilleland, which cites shopping practices and merely obtaining a mortgage from a lender who also loans to other borrowers with "credit risk," Forde said, “You have to remember that this is one contributing factor. That’s not the sole reason, but it’s certainly data that we’re looking at.”

Limits revised for 20 percent each year
Forde said that in a typical year, American Express changes credit limits for about 20 percent of its cardholders. In recent years, about 80 percent of those members saw their limits raised while 20 percent saw them lowered, she said. Now, the ratio is about 50-50.


Limit reductions have pinched cardholders like Gilleland, who said he counted on three American Express accounts to fund startup and travel costs of his firm, based in Stafford, Va. Earlier this year, American Express shut two of the accounts and began lowering the limit on the third to match the balance as he paid it down. When he saw the letter outlining the reasons, he was stunned. He contacted msnbc.com in response to a solicitation asking small-business owners to talk about their challenges in the current financial crisis.


Gilleland said he has had an American Express Platinum Card for about six years.

“I’ve never had a problem," he said. "They’ve never imposed a limit on me before."

His computer security and data recovery work is “profitable, it’s busy,” he said. "I burn through between $6,000 and $8,000 in travel each month,” which is billed to his clients, he added. He has relied on credit cards to pay for that before being reimbursed and said “it’s been very painful” to have his limit continuously lowered, making his business less viable.

Consumer advocates and credit experts contacted by msnbc.com said they had never seen the profiling considerations cited as contributing to a credit limit reduction, but they were not surprised.

“It’s horrible,” said Linda Sherry, spokeswoman for the advocacy group Consumer Action. “It seems horribly unfair, but they are the ones doing the lending and there’s nothing under the law that can prevent them from doing that.”

Greg McBride, senior financial analyst with the personal finance Web site Bankrate.com, said, “This is something that’s coming across the radar screen as more and more consumers are being denied credit or seeing existing credit scaled back as a result of specific purchase behavior or other entities that they do business with. … Card issuers across the board are playing defense now. Nobody’s giving out credit like it’s candy anymore.”

Ed Mierzwinski, federal consumer program director with the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, said, “There’s no question that this type of behavioral score is used by everyone. They just don’t like to admit it. … It sounds like American Express is dialing up the impact.”

Dialing up 'the ding'
For instance, Mierzwinski said, “For years, you’ve been dinged if you purchased your stuff at a rent-to-own store on your credit card. The ding used to be very small. It sounds to me like they’ve dialed up the ding.”

Gilleland was mystified about what among his own purchases may have drawn attention from American Express’ risk analysis system.

“I’ll tell you where 90 percent of my purchases are: Avis, Hertz, Target and Best Buy,” he said. He also is irritated that a mortgage he obtained from the embattled lender Countrywide — now owned by Bank of America — had apparently brought scrutiny because it was a refinancing to get out of an adjustable-rate loan and into a 30-year fixed product.


Spokeswoman Forde said American Express would not divulge any of the "establishments" where a cardholder’s shopping might trigger a review. That is “one of the many factors in our property risk model, and it actually changes frequently,” she said.

The company does not review actual items purchased by its cardholders in assessing risk, Forde said.

On the mortgage issue, she said the company does not differentiate between loans obtained directly from a lender and those sold in the secondary market to such lenders. “In the aggregate, outstanding loans with certain lenders tend to have a higher proportion of credit issues on our card member base,” she said.

Forde stressed that “we take all appropriate measures to meet all fair lending laws.” “I think you have to keep in mind that these are not the only decisive factors,” she said. “We are looking at somebody’s overall profile. … It’s a holistic look at someone’s overall credit profile.”

For Gilleland, the father of three young boys, the credit crunch is just one of a number of financial blows hitting at once. His Virginia home has plummeted in value to far below the amount of his mortgage, and his business expenses are climbing.

“I’m literally at the point where I have to fold the business up, and another dream bites the dust,” he said. “I went out to Monster.com and uploaded my resume because I have to look for a W-2 job. … It will take years for me to recover from this, especially as I’m firmly committed to not filing bankruptcy.”

Consumers: Pay attention!
McBride, of Bankrate.com, said what happened to Gilleland is “something people need to know about, even if there’s not a lot of direct consumer action you can take.”

Consumers with good credit also need to be aware of the flip side of the story, he said.

“If you have a credit score of 700 and up, you should be seeing lower rates now than you did a year ago,” McBride said. “If you find that your card issuer isn’t playing ball, it’s time to shop around.”


© 2008 MSNBC Interactive
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27055285/


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Woman's idea saves thousands of Nepalese girls

Meredith May, Chronicle Staff Writer

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/22/MNVJ11RHRQ.DTL
(07-21) 20:17 PDT -- Olga Murray of Sausalito had been volunteering for five years in Nepal, helping abandoned and disabled children get an education, when she read something in the newspaper that she couldn't believe.

In the southern Dang district, rural Tharu farming families trapped in extreme poverty - earning less than a dollar a day - were making horrible sacrifices: selling their daughters as domestic slaves to wealthy Kathmandu families for $35 to $75.

"These girls are 7, 8, 9 and 10, and no one was checking up on them," said Murray, 83. "I was shocked."

That was in 1989. Her solution to break the practice has since made her a philanthropic legend in the area.

Her ingenious idea? Piglets.

Murray asked the Tharu village fathers to keep their daughters home and send them to school instead of selling them at the annual Maghe Sakranti Festival every January. In exchange, families could raise the pigs and sell them for the same amount they could fetch for their daughters. Murray's nonprofit organization, the Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation, also would pay for the girls' school expenses. Plus, it would kick in a kerosene lamp and 2 liters of kerosene a month - coveted items in an area without electricity.

It was an experiment based on Murray's understanding of Nepali culture after living there off and on for five years and sponsoring the education of orphans and street children. She knew pork is a prized meat and that for some families, selling a daughter was the only way to afford food for the rest of the family.

Of the 37 families she and her Nepalese counterpart Som Paneru approached that first year, 32 took the deal. Some asked for and received a goat instead of a pig.

Murray and Paneru have since steered 3,000 girls away from slavery and all but eradicated the long-held tradition of indentured servitude in the Tharu village.

Instead of spending their lives washing, baby-sitting, cooking and - in the worst cases - working in brothels, the girls are getting an education. Many have also become vocal about their hardships, unveiling the horrors of domestic slavery on radio programs and in street plays and marches. Some have formed a watchdog committee to visit the Tharu village and monitor the bus stops to make sure girls aren't being sold.

"The local schools are full of former kamlaris (girl slaves), and the size of the classrooms are swollen, and girls are outnumbering boys," Paneru wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle. "We've already built over 35 new classrooms, but the need is still not fully met."

It's illegal to employ children younger than 14 outside the home in Nepal, but in Tharu, one of the country's poorest villages, some fathers persist. In those cases, Murray, an attorney who worked for 37 years helping write opinions for two California Supreme Court chief justices in San Francisco, files a lawsuit in Nepal.

Typically, a warning letter persuades the father to keep his daughter home, Murray said. She has had to go to court only a few times, and she has won every time.

Selling girls has become shameful in Dang, and if it's done, it's done in secret now, Murray said.

The girls are resilient and have become fierce activists. The only time their voices quaver, Murray said, is when they talk about their little sisters.

"At rallies, or on the radio, they promise out loud that their little sisters will never, ever go through what they did, and that's when you hear them start to cry."

Murray and Paneru have been so successful in Dang, they have started to bring their pigs-for-girls program to the neighboring district of Bardiya. Since January, they have liberated 500 girls there, Murray said.

Her foundation is putting 1,500 girls through school at an annual cost of $100 per student. The Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation also runs two boarding schools, one for boys and one for girls who are abandoned or disabled. So far they've been able to send 30 of their boarding school graduates to college.

Murray shows no signs of slowing. She spends six months a year in Nepal and the rest of the year in her Sausalito home. Her coffee table books are unique - binders filled with before-and-after pictures of Nepalese children who were severely malnourished before spending two months in the Nutrition Rehabilitation Home she started for starving hospital patients.

"I saw three sick children die after being sent home from the hospital because they were so hungry, so we created a discharge place where they could go and eat, and the mothers can get education on nutrition and family planning and basic hygiene," Murray said.

For her work, Murray has been honored by the Dalai Lama and the former king of Nepal and was a guest on "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

Her life has been one long ride, and it just keeps getting better, she said.

As a child, she liked to linger at New York's Grand Central Station to watch the signs and see where all the trains were going. When she finished high school at 16, after skipping two grades, she hopped on one of those trains and never looked back.

She's crisscrossed the globe, has been married and widowed, and has had some interesting jobs, including opening the fan mail of the famous McCarthy-era muckraker journalist Drew Pearson in the 1950s. But nothing compares to the feeling she has now, when she marches in the streets of Dang with 2,700 freed girls to protest domestic slavery.

"I'm having the best dotage of anybody I know," she said. "Every morning I wake up knowing I'm going to be helping. I feel like I am making a difference."

To get involved
Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation 3030 Bridgeway, Suite 123 Sausalito, CA 94965

-- (415) 331-8585

-- www.nyof.org

Fast Food Hits Mediterranean; a Diet Succumbs

September 24, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/24/world/europe/24diet.html?emBy ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
KASTELI, Greece — Dr. Michalis Stagourakis has seen a transformation of his pediatric practice here over the past three years. The usual sniffles and stomachaches of childhood are now interspersed with far more serious conditions: diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol. A changing diet, he says, has produced an epidemic of obesity and related maladies.

Small towns like this one in western Crete, considered the birthplace of the famously healthful Mediterranean diet — emphasizing olive oil, fresh produce and fish — are now overflowing with chocolate shops, pizza places, ice cream parlors, soda machines and fast-food joints.

The fact is that the Mediterranean diet, which has been associated with longer life spans and lower rates of heart disease and cancer, is in retreat in its home region. Today it is more likely to be found in the upscale restaurants of London and New York than among the young generation in places like Greece, where two-thirds of children are now overweight and the health effects are mounting, health officials say.

“This is a place where you’d see people who lived to 100, where people were all fit and trim,” Dr. Stagourakis said. “Now you see kids whose longevity is less than their parents’. That’s really scaring people.”

That concern has been echoed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, which said in a report this summer that the region’s diet had “decayed into a moribund state.”

“It is almost a perfect diet, but when we looked at what people were eating we noticed that much of the highly praised diet didn’t exist any more,” said the report’s author, Josef Schmidhuber, a senior economist at the food organization. “It has become just a notion.”

Greece, Italy, Spain and Morocco have even asked Unesco to designate the diet as an “intangible piece of cultural heritage,” a testament to its essential value as well as its potential extinction.

The most serious effects of its steady disappearance are on people’s health and waistlines. Alarmed by the trends, the Greek government has been swooping into schools in villages like Kasteli annually for the past few years to weigh children and lecture them on nutrition. The lessons include a food pyramid focused on the Mediterranean diet.

It is an uphill battle, though. This spring, a majority of children who were tested at the elementary school of this sleepy port town of 3,000, also known as Kissamos, were found to have high cholesterol. “It was the talk of the school,” said Stella Kazazakou, 44. “Instead of grades, the moms were comparing cholesterol levels.”

In Greece, three-quarters of the adult population is overweight or obese, the worst rate in Europe “by far,” according to the United Nations. The rates of overweight 12-year-old boys rose more than 200 percent from 1982 to 2002 and have been rising even faster since.

Italy and Spain are not far behind, with more than 50 percent of adults overweight. That compares with about 45 percent in France and the Netherlands.

In the United States, 66 percent of adults older than 20 were overweight in 2004, and 31.9 percent of children 2 through 19 were overweight in 2006, although childhood statistics are compiled somewhat differently in different countries.

In Greece, the increase in the number of fat children has been particularly striking, parents and doctors say.

“Their diet is totally different than ours was,” said Soula Sfakianakis, 40, recalling breakfasts of goat milk, bread and honey. Her son, Vassilis, a husky 9-year-old who had a chocolate mustache from a recently conquered ice cream cone, said he preferred cornflakes in the morning and steak or macaroni and cheese for dinner.

Dr. Antonia Trichopoulou, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Athens Medical School, said the problem had grown acute with the spread of supermarkets and, especially, convenience foods.

“In the last five years it’s become really bad,” she said. “The children are all quite heavy. The market is pushing a lot, and parents and schools seem unable to resist.”

Advertising geared toward children has invaded Greece full force, stretching into the countryside. On television there are commercials for chips; at supermarkets there are stands of candy. Last year, Coca-Cola sponsored a play about healthful eating.

But facing both aggressive convenience food marketing and obesity for the first time, many rural residents here have little resistance to or knowledge of the dangers.

Dr. Trichopoulou said that some older people might have been tolerant of childhood chubbiness because Greece had for so long been a poor nation where hunger was a recurrent problem.

Outside one of Kasteli’s several ice cream parlors, Argyro Koromylla said, “You don’t want your child complaining or feeling left out, so you give him what he wants.” Her son Manolis, 12, was finishing a cone, a large T-shirt draped over his stocky frame.

Dimitris Loukakis, 44, said he was so concerned about changing eating habits that he had bought a farm to grow traditional crops himself. Sitting at an outdoor cafe by the beach, he and his wife drank iced coffee while their chunky 9-year-old daughter, Maria, nibbled on spinach pie and glumly drank water.

“I’m on a diet; I have to eat less,” Maria piped up, noting that the local school had recently started to teach students about nutrition.

“Some diet,” interjected her father. “We’re trying to keep her off sugar now. If we continue like this, we’re going to become like Americans, and no one wants that.”

The traditional diet, low in saturated fats and high in nutrients like flavonoids, was based on vegetables, fruit, unrefined grains, olive oil for cooking and for flavoring, and a bit of wine — all consumed on a daily basis.

Fish, nuts, poultry, eggs, cheese and sweets were weekly additions. Red meat, refined sugar or flour, butter and other oils or fats were consumed rarely, if at all.

Research on the diet took off in the 1990s, as scientists noted that people in Mediterranean countries lived longer and had low rates of serious disease despite a penchant for patently unhealthy habits like smoking and drinking. But that protection is now seen as rapidly eroding.

A generation ago, the typical diet in all Mediterranean countries complied with nutritional recommendations by the World Health Organization that less than 10 percent of calories come from saturated fats and that less than 300 milligrams of cholesterol be consumed per day.

Today, the typical diet in all of the countries exceeds those limits significantly, Dr. Schmidhuber said. In Greece, average daily cholesterol consumption has risen to 400 milligrams from 190 in 1963. Germany’s is similar. In Portugal, consumption went to 460 milligrams from 155.

In 2002, a British study found that 31 percent to 34 percent of 12-year-olds in Greece were overweight — a 212 percent increase since 1982 — and “it has gotten worse, much worse, since then,” Dr. Stagourakis said. One-quarter of all children on Crete have cholesterol problems, he said, and seeing children with diabetes and high blood pressure is no longer uncommon.

Unlike in the United States, where obesity is more pronounced in adults than in children, in the Mediterranean region the rise in weight problems has been more common among the young. Parents’ taste buds still tend to hew to a more traditional diet.

A survey by the World Health Organization last year of statistics from various countries found that among children in the first half of primary school, 35.2 percent in Spain were overweight — the worst rate — and 31.5 percent in Portugal. The lowest rates were in Slovakia (15.2 percent), France (18.1 percent) and Switzerland (18.3 percent). Greece was not included.

Being overweight, particularly being obese, is associated with a wide variety of medical problems, like diabetes and liver disease. While heavy children may not suffer immediate health effects, they are statistically far more likely to grow into obese adults than their trimmer classmates. And in adulthood the conditions can be lethal.

On traditional Crete, there was no need for calorie counting or food pyramids. People were poorer then, so their food was mostly homegrown, and producing it required more physical activity.

“We ate what we grew and what we could make from it,” said Eleni Klouvidaki, 46, who lives in Kalidonia, a mountain village outside Kasteli, and describes her preferred diet as “whatever’s green.” On a recent day she prepared a meal of her staple mix of zucchini, tomatoes and other vegetables, and tossed it all in homemade olive oil. Now and again, she augments this dish with beans, or meat from her chickens or rabbits.

But she said that as more women worked and shops had moved in, the food culture had changed. “We’ve entered an era of convenience,” she said. “Even in this rural village, the diet is very different than it used to be.”

She, too, occasionally grabs dinner in town, and four nights a week her son, who works in a car repair shop, drives to a fast-food restaurant. “They don’t deliver here yet,” she explained.

Experts offer alternatives to bailout

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26861562/
Leading economists argue that other solutions could address financial crisis
By Anthony Faiola and David Cho
The Washington Post
updated 11:38 p.m. ET, Tues., Sept. 23, 2008
To hear Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Ben S. Bernanke tell it, there is only one plan to save the economy -- use $700 billion in taxpayer money to take the worst of Wall Street's assets off its books.

But leading economists and financial thinkers argue that there are a host of alternatives that would reduce taxpayers' liabilities and perhaps more effectively address the urgent crisis in financial markets. Although these experts concede that the clock is ticking, they say different approaches have been dismissed too quickly.

While the government's plan is built around buying troubled assets, other options offer sharply different visions.

One approach seeks to reduce taxpayers' liability by offering collateral-backed loans to troubled banks, leaving them to work out their own solutions. Another idea is to have the government set up a profit-driven investment fund with the aim of infusing the financial system with cash without taking on bad debt. Still others suggest radically different tactics of directly helping homeowners by reducing mortgage principal or bolstering banks by suspending capital gains taxes.

The administration has said it is willing to negotiate key parts of its plan -- including a possible concession allowing the government to take equity stakes in financial firms in exchange for bailing them out -- but senior officials stand by the fundamental approach they have adopted to solve the crisis.

"They presented this as a comprehensive, decisive solution, but it's clearly not comprehensive and probably not decisive," said Simon Johnson, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The cost of a mistake could be huge. It could result in a catastrophic collapse of the U.S. financial system that could ripple across the world or in a staggering clean-up bill for taxpayers. At the core of the debate is whether Paulson, the former chief executive of Goldman Sachs now charged with rescuing Wall Street as Treasury secretary, and Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman and one of the leading academics on financial crises, are serving up the best possible recipe for purging the U.S. financial system of billions of dollars worth of distressed mortgage-related debt.

Under the administration's rescue plan, the Treasury secretary would have broad discretion to buy up to $700 billion worth of troubled mortgage-backed assets and other securities that Wall Street firms have been struggling to sell. Administration officials hope that once those assets are cleansed, money will flow freely through the financial system once again and that the government can hold onto the securities until they recover some of their value.

In testimony on Capitol Hill yesterday, Bernanke and Paulson explained that they formulated their plan after considering past crises, from the U.S. savings-and-loan bailouts of the 1980s to the bursting of Japan's economic bubble a few years later. But they ultimately decided that the response to the current crisis needed to be a fast and massive fix.

"The situation we have now is unique and new," Bernanke said. He later continued, "The firms we're dealing with now are not necessarily failing, but they are contracting. They are de-leveraging. They're pulling back. And they will be unwilling to make credit available as long as these market conditions are in the condition they are."

Many of the alternatives fall under four basic approaches:

Government as lender
Critics of the administration's plan argue that an alternative could be crafted to minimize the exposure of the government -- and taxpayers -- to risk. Johnson, the MIT professor, suggested that the government, instead of taking on the bad debt, could offer loans to troubled banks, allowing them to put up their sickened portfolios of mortgage-backed debt as collateral.


This would give the banks access to badly needed cash at attractive interest rates set by the government. But it would not completely let them off the hook for making those bad investments in the first place. Because government money would come in the form of loans, rather an outright purchase of the risky investments, taxpayers would be offered greater protection. Ultimately, the banks would have to pay off the loans and take back the securities, though at a time when the market for them may have improved. If the value of the securities is still depressed, that would be the banks' problem, not the taxpayers'.

"The risk to the government/taxpayer is that the bank goes out of business and so isn't around to settle up," Johnson said. "But the government is also the regulator, and they can do a more forceful job of making sure the banks have enough capital, so the incentives are pretty well aligned."

Interest rates would be set at a level attractive to banks, the relatively low rate at which the Treasury borrows plus a small premium. Only if the banks were nearing default would the government take a more active role in propping them up, perhaps even taking them over outright.

Government as hedge fund
Some market analysts and fund managers worry that the Paulson plan would allow Wall Street to dump the worst kind of mortgage securities on the federal government. One solution could be the establishment of a fund that limits its purchases to profitable mortgage securities and other assets.

The creation of a $700 billion investment fund could help reinvigorate the business of trading mortgage securities, greasing the wheels of the credit markets by bringing in a new, cash-rich investor: the federal government. While this solution runs the risk of not cleaning up enough of the bad debt on firms' books, taxpayers could be more confident of getting their money back because the government would be selective about which securities it bought.

Mortgage breaks
Liberal thinkers say the government could intervene in the financial system by addressing the ailing mortgages at the heart of the crisis. Under this approach, the government could reduce the amount of principal that struggling homeowners owe.

"It's about foreclosures, stupid," said John Taylor, chief executive of the liberal National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

One idea is for the government to take control of some mortgage-backed securities -- most likely by buying them from financial firms -- and then work to restructure the underlying loans into something homeowners could afford. The value of the securities, both those bought by the government and those in private hands, could improve as foreclosures and late payments drop. If so, financial firms holding mortgage-backed securities could see a recovery in their balance sheets.

To make it fair for homeowners who keep up with their payments, borrowers who receive federal help would be required to give the government some of their gains if they eventually sell their homes for a profit.

But advocates of the idea acknowledge that it may take time to address the problems of millions of struggling homeowners. In the meantime, critics of this approach say the financial system could fall into chaos.

Tax breaks for Wall Street
Conservative analysts take a different tack, though their criticism of the Paulson plan has been no less sharp. They say that because the proposal forgives Wall Street for its past sins, it creates an incentive for investors to behave irresponsibly in the future.

Some of these thinkers complain that the government's rescue punishes taxpayers too severely for Wall Street's mistakes. They propose a cheaper alternative that calls for the repeal of the capital gains tax for two years, which would provide Wall Street a stimulus to reinvigorate the financial system.

Accounting rules that require banks to estimate the market value of their troubled mortgage securities would also be suspended for five years, giving financial firms the ability to value these assets at prices more reflective of the market before the panic gripped Wall Street.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.) said this plan, which he announced on Capitol Hill yesterday, was still being finalized. Hensarling said the precise cost of the capital gains tax repeal, for instance, was still being determined.

"We agreed that inaction is not an option, but that doesn't mean that we've concluded that the Paulson plan is the only option," said Hensarling. "There are alternatives to consider, and we think we have a worthy one."

All of these alternatives try to get at the root of the turmoil facing the financial markets and the economy but in different ways. According to Lawrence Summers, former Treasury secretary, the government might have to try multiple approaches.

"If you have hypertension, you're way overweight and you're in the process of having a heart attack, what's your most fundamental problem? It's really not that useful to distinguish between them," Summers said at a Brookings Institute forum. "They're all components of the situation, and you're not going to get to a very satisfactory place unless you address all of them. That's how I think of our financial reality right now."


© 2008 The Washington Post Company
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War and Drought Threaten Afghan Food Supply

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/19/world/asia/19afghan.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
By CARLOTTA GALL
YAKOWLANG, Afghanistan — A pitiable harvest this year has left small farmers all over central and northern Afghanistan facing hunger, and aid officials are warning of an acute food shortage this winter for nine million Afghans, more than a quarter of the population.

The crisis has been generated by the harshest winter in memory, followed by a drought across much of the country, which come on top of the broader problems of deteriorating security, the accumulated pressure of returning refugees and the effects of rising world food prices.

The failure of the Afghan government and foreign donors to develop the country’s main economic sector, agriculture, has compounded the problems, the officials say. They warn that the food crisis could make an already bad security situation worse.

The British charity Oxfam, which conducted a provisional assessment of conditions in the province of Daykondi, one of the most remote areas of central Afghanistan, has appealed for international assistance before winter sets in. “Time is running out to avert a humanitarian crisis,” it said.

That assessment is echoed by villagers across the broader region, including in Bamian Province. “In all these 30 years of war, we have not had it as bad as this,” said Said Muhammad, a 60-year-old farmer who lives in Yakowlang, in Bamian. “We don’t have enough food for the winter. We will have to go to the towns to look for work.”

Underlying the warnings are growing fears of civil unrest. The mood in the country is darkening amid increasing economic hardship, worsening disorder and a growing disaffection with the government and its foreign backers, particularly over the issue of government corruption.

Returning refugees are already converging on the cities because they cannot manage in the countryside, and they make easy recruits for the Taliban or other groups that want to create instability, said Ashmat Ghani, an opposition politician and tribal leader from Logar Province, south of Kabul, the nation’s capital.

“The lower part of society, when facing hunger, will not wait,” he said. “We could have riots.”

The Afghan government, together with United Nations organizations, was quick to mount an appeal at the beginning of the year to prevent a food shortage as world food prices soared and neighboring countries stopped wheat exports.

The World Food Program, which was assisting 4.5 million of the most vulnerable Afghans with food aid in recent years, widened its program to include an additional 1.5 million Afghans and extended it further because of the drought to reach a total of nine million people until the end of next year’s harvest.

Several weeks ago, Oxfam warned in a letter to ministers responsible for development in some countries assisting Afghanistan that the $404 million appeal by the government and the United Nations was substantially underfinanced.

“If the response is slow or insufficient, there could be serious public health implications, including higher rates of mortality and morbidity, which are already some of the highest in the world,” the letter said.

It also warned of internal displacement of families who had no work or food, and even of civil disturbances. “The impact as a whole could further undermine the security situation,” Oxfam said.

The United States government announced this week that it would supply nearly half the emergency food aid requested in the appeal.

Susana Rico, the director of the World Food Program in Afghanistan, said last-minute contributions had come in to cover the immediate emergency. But there is still a rush to get supplies to the countryside before the first winter snows arrive next month, she said.

Development officials say that deteriorating security has made it harder to do that job in the countryside. Aid workers have become the targets of an increasing number of attacks from insurgents and criminals.

The dangers have restricted the scale and scope of aid operations, said the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, an umbrella group of nongovernmental organizations.

Those dangers, the agency says, have even spread to areas previously considered relatively secure. In the first seven months of the year, it reported, 19 workers for nongovernmental organizations were killed, more than the number in all of 2007.

The agency appealed for governments to take a broad range of measures, beyond the military, to combat the escalating insurgency.

“The conflict will not be brought to an end through military means,” the agency said in a statement. “A range of measures is required to achieve a sustainable peace, including strong and effective support for rural development.”

Neglecting a lifeline as vital as agriculture has been dangerous for stability in Afghanistan, as people are unable to feed themselves, several provincial governors said in interviews.

The governor of Bamian, Habiba Sarabi, has repeatedly complained that because her province has been one of the most law-abiding and trouble-free, it has been forgotten in the big distribution of resources from international donors.

Donors, and in particular the United States government, have spent far larger amounts in the provinces in the south and southeast to help combat the dual problems of the insurgency and narcotics, she said.

Hasan Samadi, 23, the deputy administrator of Yakowlang District in Bamian Province, said, “The economic situation of the people here is very bad and the government is not focused to help.

“They focus on other provinces and unfortunately not on Bamian, and not on remote districts of Bamian,” he said.

Daykondi, adjacent to Bamian, is one of the most underfinanced provinces in the country. It receives half the budget of its neighbor to the south, Oruzgan, which has two-thirds the population and a poor record on combating insurgency and the cultivation of the opium poppy, said Matt Waldman, a spokesman for Oxfam in Kabul.

In Daykondi, 90 percent of the population relies on subsistence farming, yet the provincial Department of Agriculture has a budget of only $2,400 for the whole year, he added.

The imbalance in aid to the provinces is being corrected now, Governor Sarabi said, but in the meantime it has put great strain on the people in her province.

She estimated that a quarter of Bamian’s population would need food aid this winter because of the drought. There have already been local conflicts over water supplies in two regions, she said.

Development officials warn that neglecting the poorest provinces can add to instability by pushing people to commit crimes or even to join the insurgency, which often pays its recruits.

While the severe drought contributed to the decline of poppy cultivation in the central and northern provinces, it also pushed farmers into debt. If they do not get help now, they could turn back to poppy-growing and lose their faith in the government, said Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Mr. Costa called for urgent assistance for farmers and regions that have abandoned poppy cultivation. He and others have also criticized the inefficiency of international aid.

Of $15 billion of reconstruction assistance given to Afghanistan since 2001, “a staggering 40 percent has returned to donor countries in corporate profits and consultant salaries,” the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief said in a March report.

“Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world,” Mr. Costa said during a recent visit to Kabul. “I insist on the importance of increasing development assistance, making it more effective. Too much of it is eaten up by various bureaucracies and contractors.”

Ten Year Old Girl Dies from FGM - Circumciser Arrested

http://v10.vday.org/news-alerts/cry-of-a-girl

On August 18, in the village of Narosura in the Rift Valley, a 10 year-old girl died from Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). At 5 that morning she was cut. By 10, she had bled to death.

Her family wrapped the body in a sheet and secretly buried it a few yards from their huts. By that afternoon, there was no evidence of the crime.

If it were not for the network of conscience that Agnes Pareyio has woven into the Maasai community, this child's death would have gone unnoticed. But an anonymous "informer" called her on the morning of the ceremony, in time for her to send one of her collaborators and an officer of the law to the hasty funeral.

As a result, for the first time in Maasai history, a circumciser has been arrested.

I have known of Agnes' work since the late nineties when Eve Ensler, founder of V-Day (www.vday.org), the worldwide movement to stop violence against women and girls, began collaborating with her. I remember hearing Ensler describe how she met Agnes in the Rift Valley, where the Maasai woman was traveling on foot from village to village, speaking out against her people's practices of FGM and ECM (Early Childhood Marriage) and educating the community about alternatives. At that time, she walked the miles of treacherous roads and donkey paths alone, carrying the "model" which has now become well known among those who work to stop FGM. The "model" is a plastic sculpture of a woman's pelvis with removable parts that fit into the pubic area. Each of seven or so exchangeable parts graphically represents a different form of FGM, as well as the medical complications that can ensue with time. The model, and the education Agnes brought with it, has had a huge impact in helping to eradicate this practice among the Maasai.

When Eve asked Agnes how V-Day could help her, she replied, "A Jeep would make it possible for me to get around more easily and save more girls." So V-Day bought Agnes a Jeep, not only enabling her to reach farther than she could on foot, but attracting trust and respect as people came to know her and her mission. Soon there was more interest in her work than she could address alone, and now she has trained several others to travel to the villages to teach girls, boys, parents, elders and leaders.

As Agnes reached more and more girls, some gained the courage to take control of their own lives and run away when they were in danger of being cut or forced into marriage. It soon became clear that a Safe House was needed for those girls who remained in danger living with their parents. The V-Day Safe House for the Girls (also called the Tasaru Rescue Center) was the next collaboration between V-Day and Agnes.

What began as Agnes' personal commitment to stopping FGM through education and sensitization has now become a multi-layered approach to community transformation. Through educational outreach into the villages, an invisible network of caring individuals has been put in place—women and men who are parents, teachers, church officials, and community leaders committed to informing the law of clandestine cutting ceremonies and aiding girls who need to seek refuge from them. The anonymous "informer" who called Agnes on August 18 was one of these.

I was visiting the Safe House when the call came in. I had come to work with the 40 or so girls who were living there during their vacation from boarding school. Girls at the Safe House are not only given refuge from FGM and ECM, each is placed in a primary or secondary school, and her school expenses are paid through graduation. This is revolutionary among the Maasai, where women and girls have been seen more as commodities than as contributing members of the community. In many villages, young girls are not permitted to go to school or are forced to drop out in order to be circumcised and sold into marriage. For a "bride price" of several cattle or sheep, a girl as young as 10 years old will become one of several wives belonging to a man many times her age.

August is a very busy month for the Tasaru Ntomonok Initiative. The Safe House is alive with girls home from school—studying, cooking, cleaning, playing soccer, or washing their clothes and laying them out to dry in colorful swatches strewn over the bushes and lawns. Between periods of study, the dining hall overflows with groups practicing line dances to "Bongo Flava" music (a kind of Kenyan hip hop), and singing in chorus in Swahili or Maa, the language of the Maasai. In the dorm, the girls engage in activities akin to teenagers all over the world—trying a new hat on one another, sharing jewelry, or watching the Olympics on a grainy-screened TV as they braid each other's hair.

August is also the time of the "Alternative Rite of Passage," a groundbreaking event that Agnes and her organization offer bi-annually. The ARP was created with the recognition that an alternative coming-of-age ritual was needed for girls to take the place of FGM. During the event, 60 – 80 girls from throughout the district gather for five days to learn about such things as sexuality, the dangers of FGM, and how to protect themselves from HIV/AIDS, rape, and early pregnancy. Tasaru provides them with lodging and food in a local boarding school free of charge.

The girls attend lectures in the mornings and afternoons, and everyday they meet in small groups with "Godmothers," older women from the Maasai community who are available to talk with them and answer their questions. The participants write songs and poems, take copious notes, and play games all focused on stopping FGM and empowering girls. At the end of the five days, they perform their creations at a joyful ceremony which many parents, district officials, religious leaders and activists attend.

August also has a darker side in Maasailand. Because schools in Kenya are on vacation, this is when many FGM and forced marriage ceremonies take place. It is a time when girls arrive at the Safe House, having fled a cutting ceremony or a wedding. Sometimes Agnes will be alerted by an informant before such an event, and will go with the police to rescue the girl.

The call on August 18 came too late to save the child in Narosura. However it was not too late to arrest those who circumcised her and make sure that justice prevailed. As soon as Agnes heard the news, she took action. Sending witnesses to the funeral and having the circumciser arrested was only the beginning. Even though FGM and ECM have been illegal in Kenya since 2001, many officers, as well as public officials and prosecutors, grew up in villages where these traditions are still practiced. It is not difficult to convince them to compromise. Agnes knew that the girl's family and others, including the local elected Counselor, would probably attempt to buy off the police to keep the story hidden. She knew that if she did not personally mobilize the police, the local Medical Officer and the Children's Officer to exhume the body and gain official proof of the cause of death, this girl would have died in vain.

It was only after hours of waiting at the police station, dozens of phone calls, and personally paying not only for the fuel for two vehicles to travel the treacherous road to Narosura, but also a stipend for the accompanying officers that the police agreed to the expedition.

When Agnes suggested that I accompany the men on the mission, I had no idea of the danger involved. I was unaware that the villagers, intent on keeping the exhumation from happening, had already planned to track our vehicle and set up an ambush.

So I was surprised when, arriving at the gas station in the center of town where we were to begin the journey, Agnes told me to leave the blue V-Day Jeep and get into one of the many battered, unmarked taxis that fill the streets of Narok. "We had to change the vehicle and travel undercover," she explained to me later. "The day before, three different people had casually asked me whether we were planning to take the Jeep to the exhumation—the man at the petrol station, one of the policemen, and the elected counselor from Narosura. It was then that I realized they must have already paid off the police and were planning an ambush. This is why you had to travel in a car they could not recognize."

I joined the Children's Officer, the doctor and Chris, who is the treasurer of Agnes' organization and her most active collaborator, in the taxi. After waiting for the police for half an hour at the agreed upon meeting point, we decided to go to look for them at the police station. There they were, unprepared, with no intention of making the journey. After another half hour of negotiations, three officers finally boarded the truck and were joined by were joined by the videographer that Agnes had hired to document the event.

Though this was usually the time of a short rainy season in Narok District, not a drop had been seen in months. As the taxi bounded and crashed over the rough terrain, the swirling clouds of dust were so thick that at times we were literally blinded and had to stop until visibility returned. Everything looked thirsty, the stunted brown bushes, the herds of wandering cows with their protruding ribs casting shadows on their skin, and even the herders, each wrapped in his bright red shuka (a Maasai blanket), the sudden stroke of color like an outcry against the relentless beige of the drought.

Suddenly the taxi stopped. All of us except the driver got out and began to walk across the barren savannah towards two huts about 10 minutes away. The taxi came too, leaving the road and bumping along behind us. "Stay close to the car," Chris warned me. "In case we have to run."

As we approached the huts, two Maasai men in western clothing and a woman in traditional Maasai dress of brightly colored material and many layers of beaded jewelry strode towards us. One of the men said he was the uncle of the girl. The other was the local elected Counselor.

An animated conversation ensued in whispered Maa between the uncle, the counselor and the doctor. Apparently the villagers were trying to "buy off" the officials. But in spite of the repeated offers, the doctor explained that there was no way to avoid the exhumation. Because of the presence of the witnesses from Tasaru, his reputation was at stake. He had to ascertain with his own eyes the cause of death.

After quite a while an agreement was reached. The doctor could exhume the body, but only the police could bear witness. One of the officers took my camera to document the exhumation. The police truck was maneuvered into a position that hid the proceedings.

I could certainly understand that the girl's community did not want the grave to be disturbed. I imagined this was because of religious beliefs and fears of black magic or other superstitions. Even while we were there several groups of women carrying 20 liter plastic water kegs on their backs, started to run as they approached, as if to pass through this blighted zone as quickly as possible. Chris had told me the death and the exhumation would cause many of the villagers to believe the area to be cursed now. They would take their livestock and move away. The girl's family, too, would probably burn their dung huts and evacuate, leaving the unmarked grave to disappear, anonymous in the dusty landscape.

It was not until I saw the photographs of the body of the 10 year old lying naked in the dirt that I realized what Agnes must have intuited all along. This was more complex than a simple case of FGM. The child's body, wrapped only in a blanket, was obviously about seven months pregnant. Maasai people who practice FGM believe the blood of an uncircumcised woman is unclean and will curse whoever comes in contact with it. So unless the girl was hurriedly cut, no one could help with such a birth and the child will be marked for life.

I learned later that the girl had already been promised to a very old man in marriage. The "bride price" had been paid. Apparently the wedding was planned as soon as the girl was cut and the baby was born and out of the way. Another reason for rushed FGM ceremony.

As the taxi driver negotiated the potholes and dust of the long road back to Narok, there was silence in the car. Seeing the photographs of the girl's body had thrown everyone into the heartbreak of the situation, not only putting a face on the child who had been victimized, but bringing home the reality that these violent practices are still being perpetrated upon Maasai girls in spite of years of activism against them.

"The fate of our girls is no longer a family issue," Agnes Pareyio said to 63 girls, their parents and local political and religious leaders at the closing ceremony of Tasaru Ntomonok's Alternative Rite of Passage the following Friday. "It is no longer even a tribal or national issue. It is an international necessity that these outdated practices be stopped. Though she may not die physically like the unfortunate young girl whose life was taken this week, each girl who is cut and forced into marriage undergoes a kind of death. Her future is changed forever. She cannot fulfill her potential and go on to give back to the community. And the world is denied a valuable participant in the evolution of Maasai life and culture."

Were it not for Agnes' work in the community, her insistence on justice, and the funds paid for the exhumation, this child's death would have gone unnoticed. "My work is to raise consciousness, to let everybody know," she said. "There is no way that I could ignore the cry of a girl who was killed by FGM then brutally buried. I must raise the alarm so she doesn't disappear into the ground without bringing awareness."

When I left the Safe House, Agnes' work had only just begun. The legal system that will try the case is easily compromised. It is not only possible to buy off the authorities at myriad junctures in the process, it is expected. At the time of this writing, the Tasaru Ntonomok Initiative hopes to raise the money to hire a lawyer to insure the prosecution proceeds truthfully, otherwise the case will surely go underground and never be recognized as the historic event that it truly is.

At the closing ceremony of the Alternative Rite of Passage, the girls who live at the Safe House performed several poems and songs about the importance of stopping FGM and educating girls. While most poems were spoken in chorus, Reginah Renu Masiaine, a petite girl of 15, spoke hers alone. Her voice rang out over the crowd, surprisingly clear and strong. The last stanza has stayed with me, sounding a summons for change:

Without a cut I can build a nation.
I can bring unity, love and hope where there is despair.
Father and mother, I am a child like a boy child.
Love, care and protection I needed from you.
Father, let me be me.

Though the work of Agnes and many others has greatly decreased the incidence of FGM in the Rift Valley, the child's death in Narosura is reminder that the work is not done. Please join V-Day and other anti-FGM initiatives to help put an end to these practices forever.

6 Weeks Until the Election!
September 18, 2008
Step Two: Know Your Candidates
Do you really know who you're voting for? Make sure you do your homework before you step into the polling booth on November 4th. Ask questions, review the candidates' voting records, and find out more than what the campaign commercials tell you.

Candidates' Nights Kick Off this Saturday...
Miami will play host to the first of many Candidates' Nights that AAI is hosting in key battleground states. Florida, Michigan, California, Virginia, Ohio, New Jersey and New York are all hosting a Candidates' Night or Issues Forum in the next six weeks. Don't see your state on the list? Volunteer to host an event. These events offer an excellent opportunity to hear from and speak with local candidates and elected officials in addition to surrogates from both the McCain and Obama campaigns.

It's the economy, stupid...
The latest AAI poll released this week, "How Arab Americans Will Vote in 2008 and Why," shows that the economy is the number one issue on Arab American minds this election season. Think you know what other factors are helping to decide the Arab American vote? You just might be surprised...

Unhealthy "Obsession"...
"Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West" will hit over 28 million homes this month in battleground states in the midst of an election already loaded with slurs, innuendos, and backpedaling on issues that most concern Arab Americans. On the surface, "Obsession" resembles an educational DVD, but scratch that surface and you'll find a propaganda tool wielding fear and hatred in a direct attempt to influence America's vote. America needs a balanced understanding of Islam, not disinformation and fear. Read the Action Alert and find out what you can do about it, and how to make your voice heard from now until the election.


November's not as far away as it seems. Don't forget to sign the Yalla Vote '08 National Declaration and subscribe to the Yalla Vote RSS feed or visit yallavote.org to keep up to date on how this year's elections are shaping up across the nation. Help AAI make Arab American voices heard in this election.

Congress to Vote on Off-Shore Drilling

I'm not much of a gambler myself, but I would never have bet that Congress would roll the dice and gamble against Mother Nature to open up the nation's coastlines to offshore drilling. Last night you and I were dealt a bad hand by the House of Representatives, and Big Oil walked away as the big winner - again.

On the heels of two major hurricanes in the Gulf, the oil spills and gas price spikes we've already seen in recent weeks, this vote basically places a bet on the big oil companies at a time when we should be placing all our chips on energy efficiency and clean renewable energy sources.
But the game isn't over yet. The next round of this high stakes game of political poker comes next week when the Senate votes on offshore drilling. We still have time to change our luck.

TAKE ACTION! Tell your Senators NOT
to play with our national coastlines
or our global climate.
It's time to stop giving big oil companies tax breaks they don't need and handing over irreplaceable national assets for their corporate profits.

Congress should focus instead on passing legislation that cuts tax breaks for Big Oil and returns that money to taxpayers to help offset rising fuel costs; doubles the average fuel efficiency of existing cars to at least 50 miles per gallon; invests in public transportation; and provides incentives for renewable energy so we can move toward a clean energy future.

Global warming isn't just a risk, it's a certainty, and we have to reshuffle the deck now if we want to avoid big losses from sea level rise, stronger hurricanes, and intense droughts in the near future. We have to quit our addiction to oil and invest in energy efficiency and renewable energy now.

Renewable energy, efficiency and cleaner transportation choices are a win-win for all of us. Changes like these will bring clean energy production into the US, create lasting new jobs, and help stabilize our economy.

Get educated and read AI's election brief and then RSVP for AI's national conference call.

Elections aren't just about candidates, press conferences and TV ads. During campaigns, the American people have a national conversation about where the country has been and where it's going.

I'm writing today to offer you a special opportunity to participate in that conversation with a vitally important question in mind:

How can we as Americans ensure that the next president -- no matter who it is -- restores our country's dedication to human rights?

As a nonpartisan, tax-exempt 501(c3) organization, Amnesty International USA neither supports nor opposes any political party or any candidate for public office, nor do we seek to influence the elections. But, we do think it's crucial to provide you and other human rights supporters with the information you need to engage candidates and fellow voters in a substantive discussion about human rights.

Get educated and read our election brief. Then, RSVP to attend our national conference call on September 23rd, 25th, or October 1st about the elections.

This is a crucial time for our country, so we're doing everything we can to spark a serious human rights debate.

We even brought our Guantanamo cell tour to both the Republican and Democratic conventions. It was the most dramatic way we could think of to educate both the public and the candidates about this decisive moment for human rights.

As a nation, we were once the champion of human rights. We helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the founding document for all human rights work, and then spearheaded its adoption by the world’s most powerful countries.

Tragically, our government has renounced the rule of law, rejecting fundamental human rights principles and engaging in reprehensible human rights abuses. The U.S. government sanctions the use of torture; detains people without giving them any legal recourse; and then publicly states that we’re in fact following the letter and spirit of the law.

To make matters worse, the government has shielded those responsible for such acts of inhumanity from being held accountable for what they've done.

Find out how you can help bring human rights concerns to the center of this election.

I hope you'll take a moment to read our elections briefs. Better still, I hope you'll accept our invitation to attend our upcoming conference call.

Thanks so much for all you are doing to help restore respect for human rights and to help Amnesty counter terror with justice.

Clemency DENIED: help stop the imminent execution of Troy Davis!

On Friday, September 12, the Georgia Board of Pardon and Paroles voted to deny clemency for Troy Anthony Davis. Troy Davis is still scheduled to be executed by the state of Georgia on September 23, even though his serious claims of innocence have never been heard in court.

Urge the board to reconsider its decision today!
Troy Davis was convicted of murder solely on the basis of witness testimony, and seven of the nine non-police witnesses have since recanted or changed their testimony, several citing police coercion. Others have signed affidavits implicating one of the remaining two witnesses as the actual killer. But due to an increasingly restrictive appeals process, none of this new evidence has ever been heard in court.

Take action and then forward this action to ten friends!
The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles gave no reason for its denial of Troy Davis' clemency petition, yet Board members do have the authority to reconsider their decision. On July 16, 2007, the Board did stay Troy Davis' execution, stating that it would "not allow an execution to proceed in this State unless and until its members are convinced that there is no doubt as to the guilt of the accused" (emphasis added).

The failure of courts to hear the compelling evidence of innocence in this case means that massive doubts about Troy Davis' guilt will remain unresolved.

Urge the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to reconsider its decision and prevent this execution from proceeding!

In solidarity,

Sue Gunawardena-Vaughn
Director, Death Penalty Abolition Campaign
Amnesty International USA

In Tangle of Young Lips, a Sex Rebellion in Chile

September 13, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/world/americas/13chile.html?_r=1&oref=sloginBy ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
SANTIAGO, Chile — It is just after 5 p.m. in what was once one of Latin America’s most sexually conservative countries, and the youth of Chile are bumping and grinding to a reggaetón beat. At the Bar Urbano disco, boys and girls ages 14 to 18 are stripping off their shirts, revealing bras, tattoos and nipple rings.

The place is a tangle of lips and tongues and hands, all groping and exploring. About 800 teenagers sway and bounce to lyrics imploring them to “Poncea! Poncea!”: make out with as many people as they can.

And make out they do — with stranger after stranger, vying for the honor of being known as the “ponceo,” the one who pairs up the most.

Chile, long considered to have among the most traditional social mores in South America, is crashing headlong into that reputation with its precocious teenagers. Chile’s youths are living in a period of sexual exploration that, academics and government officials say, is like nothing the country has witnessed before.

“Chile’s youth are clearly having sex earlier and testing the borderlines with their sexual conduct,” said Dr. Ramiro Molina, director of the University of Chile’s Center for Adolescent Reproductive Medicine and Development.

The sexual awakening is happening through a booming industry for 18-and-under parties, an explosion of Internet connectivity and through Web sites like Fotolog, where young people trade suggestive photos of each other and organize weekend parties, some of which have drawn more than 4,500 teenagers. The online networks have emboldened teenagers to express themselves in ways that were never customary in Chile’s conservative society.

“We are not the children of the dictatorship; we are the children of democracy,” said Michele Bravo, 17, at a recent afternoon party. “There is much more of a rebellious spirit among young people today. There is much more freedom to explore everything.”

The parents and grandparents of today’s teenagers fought hard to give them such freedoms and to escape the book-burning times of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. But in a country that legalized divorce only in 2004 and still has a strict ban on abortion, the feverish sexual exploration of the younger generation is posing new challenges for parents and educators. Sex education in public schools is badly lagging, and the pregnancy rate among girls under 15 has been on the rise, according to the Health Ministry.

Indeed, adolescent sexuality has changed throughout Latin America, Dr. Ramiro said, and underlying much of the newfound freedom is an issue that societies the world over are grappling with: the explosion of explicit content and social networks on the Internet.

Chilean society was shaken last year when a video of a 14-year-old girl eagerly performing oral sex on a teenage boy on a Santiago park bench was discovered on a video-hosting Web site. The episode became a national scandal, stirring finger-pointing at the girl’s school, at the Internet provider — at everyone, it seemed, but the boys who captured the event on a cellphone and distributed the video.

Chile’s stable, market-based economy has helped to drive the changes, spurring a boom in consumer spending and credit unprecedented in the country’s history. Chile has become Latin American’s biggest per-capita consumer of digital technology, including cellphones, cable television and Internet broadband accounts, according to a study by the Santiago consulting firm Everis and the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Navarra in Spain.

Chileans are plugged into the Internet at higher rates than other South Americans, and the highest use is among children ages 6 to 17. Therein lies a central factor in the country’s newfound sexual exploration, said Miguel Arias, a psychologist and head of the Santiago consulting firm Divergente.

Fotolog, a photo-sharing network created in the United States, took off in the last two years in this country. Today Chile, which has a population of 16 million, has 4.8 million Fotolog accounts, more than any other country, the company says. Again, children ages 12 to 17 hold more than 60 percent of the accounts.

Party promoters use Fotolog, as well as MSN Messenger, to organize their weekend gatherings, inviting Fotolog stars — the site’s most popular users, based on the number of comments they get — to help publicize the parties and attend as paid V.I.P.’s. Many of the partygoers use their online nicknames exclusively, and some of the wildest events are dominated by teenagers who call themselves the “Pokemones,” with their multiple piercings, angular and pressed hair, and devil-may-care attitude.

Dr. Arias did a study of the Fotolog phenomenon, scrutinizing the kinds of photos teenagers are posting, even the angles and distances of the pictures — all of which are part of an “identifiable” language, he said. “The kids of today are expressing their sexuality in erotic ways for the whole world to see.”

That online world also carries over to Santiago’s parks, plazas and the afternoon parties, where teenagers go to discover the physical side of their digital flirtations. At the Bar Urbano disco on a Friday afternoon, a 17-year-old boy, Claudio, danced with Francisca Durán, also 17, whom he had just met, and soon the two were kissing and rubbing their bodies together. They posed eagerly for photos, sucking each other’s fingers as Claudio put his hands under the girl’s T-shirt. Within minutes they separated and he began playing with the hair of another girl. Soon, they, too, were kissing passionately. Claudio, who declined to give his last name, made out with at least two other girls that night.

“Before, someone would meet and fall in love and start dating seriously here; at a party today, you meet like three people and make out with all three,” said Mario Muñoz, 20, co-owner of Imperio Productions, which organizes some of the larger 18-and-under parties.

“There are very few kids having serious relationships,” he said, an observation shared by some doctors trying to reduce teenage pregnancy here.

On a recent Saturday, about 1,500 teenagers piled into the cavernous Cadillac Club, another downtown disco, for Imperio Productions’ weekly event. The partygoers, many no more than five feet tall, lined up at the bar to buy orange Fanta and Sprite, wearing oversize sunglasses.

Not too long ago, Mr. Muñoz and his brother Daniel were teenagers attending such parties themselves. Now they defend their parties as good, clean fun. Alcohol is not allowed, and cigarettes are not sold, though smoking was widespread among the teenagers at the Cadillac Club. Security guards monitor bathrooms and regularly throw out boys whose groping crosses the line — if the girls complain.

The Muñoz brothers said that party promoters feel pressure to be “hotter” than their competitors.

That includes scantily clad, older male and female dancers; strip shows that hold back just enough to remain legal; and party names intended to titillate, like “What would you do in the dark?” On this night, dancing was interrupted for a “slapping” contest onstage in which a boy, pulled randomly from the crowd, was blindfolded and had his arms held behind his back. A lineup of girls and boys took turns slapping him, with the final blow delivered by a heavyset D.J. that sent the slender boy flying across the stage. As he rubbed his reddened face, the boy got his reward: the chance to make out with the girl of his choice in public to the screams of other teenagers.

“Everything starts with the kiss,” Nicole Valenzuela, 14, said during a break from dancing at the Cadillac Club.

“After the kiss follows making out, and after that, penetration and oral sex,” she added. “That’s what’s going on, sometimes even in public places.”

Her mother, Danitza Geisel, a 34-year-old sex therapist, said in an interview that she did not worry about her daughter’s attending the parties and, expressing a somewhat contrarian view among academics here, she said the current generation of teenagers was no more promiscuous than previous ones. But Ms. Geisel lamented the dearth of sex education in Chile.

The parents of most adolescents today never received formal sex education. Chile’s first public school programs were put in place at the end of the 1960s. But after the 1973 military coup, the Pinochet government ordered sex education materials destroyed, and moral conservatism took hold. It was not until 20 years later, in 1993, that a new sex curriculum was introduced in the schools. Even so, by 2005, 47 percent of students said they were receiving sex education only once or twice a year, if at all. And now educators say they are struggling to keep up with the avalanche of sexual information and images on the Internet.

“Of course we are not happy with that,” said María de la Luz Silva, head of the sexual education unit of the Education Ministry. She said that the explosion of Internet access had created a “tremendous cultural breach” that was straining the limits of educators, but added that the ministry was putting in place a new sex education curriculum this year to better “protect” children.

For now, Chile’s teenagers are making decisions on their own.

“This is about being alive,” Cynthia Arellano, 14, said after the Bar Urbano party. “It is all about dancing, laughing, changing the words of the songs to something dirty.”

And with a slight giggle creeping in, she said, “Well, it’s about making out with other boys.”

Pascale Bonnefoy and Tomás Munita contributed reporting.