December 24, 2008
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/24/world/middleeast/24jordan.html?_r=1&hp
AMMAN, Jordan — Muhammad Fawaz is a very serious college junior with a stern gaze and a reluctant smile that barely cloaks suppressed anger. He never wanted to attend Jordan University. He hates spending hours each day commuting.
As a high school student, Mr. Fawaz, 20, had dreamed of earning a scholarship to study abroad. But that was impossible, he said, because he did not have a “wasta,” or connection. In Jordan, connections are seen as essential for advancement and the wasta system is routinely cited by young people as their primary grievance with their country.
So Mr. Fawaz decided to rebel. He adopted the serene, disciplined demeanor of an Islamic activist. In his sophomore year he was accepted into the student group affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, Jordan’s largest, most influential religious, social and political movement, one that would ultimately like to see the state governed by Islamic law, or Shariah. Now he works to recruit other students to the cause.
“I find there is justice in the Islamic movement,” Mr. Fawaz said one day as he walked beneath the towering cypress trees at Jordan University. “I can express myself. There is no wasta needed.”
Across the Middle East, young people like Mr. Fawaz, angry, alienated and deprived of opportunity, have accepted Islam as an agent of change and rebellion. It is their rock ’n’ roll, their long hair and love beads. Through Islam, they defy the status quo and challenge governments seen as corrupt and incompetent.
These young people — 60 percent of those in the region are under 25 — are propelling a worldwide Islamic revival, driven by a thirst for political change and social justice. That fervor has popularized a more conservative interpretation of the faith.
“Islamism for us is what pan-Arabism was for our parents,” said Naseem Tarawnah, 25, a business writer and blogger, who is not part of the movement.
The long-term implications of this are likely to complicate American foreign policy calculations, making it more costly to continue supporting governments that do not let secular or moderate religious political movements take root.
Washington will also be likely to find it harder to maintain the policy of shunning leaders of groups like the Brotherhood in Egypt, or Hamas in Gaza, or Hezbollah in Lebanon, which command tremendous public sympathy.
Leaders of Muslim countries have tried to appease public sentiment while doing all they can to discourage the West from engaging religious movements directly. They see the prospect of a thaw in relations with the West, and see these groups as a threat to their monopoly on power.
Authoritarian governments view relative moderation as more of a political challenge than extremism, which is a security problem that can be contained through harsh methods.
“What happens if Islamists accepted the peace process and became more pragmatic?” said Muhammad Abu Rumman, research editor at the newspaper Al Ghad in Amman. “People see them as less corrupt and as the only real opposition. Israel and the U.S. might look at them differently. The regime is afraid of the Brotherhood when it becomes more pragmatic.”
The financial crisis only adds to the anxiety of governments in the Middle East that had hoped economic development could appease their citizens, create jobs for legions of unemployed and underemployed young people and dilute the appeal of Islamic movements. But the crisis and the drop in oil prices have hit hard, throwing the brakes on once-booming economies in the Persian Gulf region, and modest economic growth elsewhere in the region.
In this environment, governments are forced to confront a reality of their own creation. By choking off democracy and free speech, the only space where groups could gather and discuss critical ideas became the mosque, and the only movements that had room to prosper were religion-based.
Today, the search for identity in the Middle East no longer involves tension between the secular and religious. Religion has won.
The struggle, instead, is over how to define an Islamic society and government. Zeinah Hamdan, 24, has traveled a typical journey in Jordan. She says she wants a more religious government guided by Shariah law, and she took the head scarf at a younger age than anyone else in her family.
But when she was in college, she was offended when an Islamist student activist chastised her for shaking a young man’s hand. She wants to be a modern religious woman, and she defines that as working and socializing in a coed environment.
“If we implement Shariah law, we will be more comfortable,” she said. “But what happens is, the people who come to power are extremists.”
Like others here, she is torn between her discomfort with what she sees as the extreme attitudes of the Muslim Brotherhood and her alienation from a government she does not consider to be Islamic enough. “The middle is very difficult,” she said.
Focus on Popular Causes
Under a bright midday sun one recent day, Mr. Fawaz and his allies in the Islamic student movement put on green baseball caps that read, in Arabic, “Islamic Current of Jordan University” and prepared to demonstrate. Mr. Fawaz carried a large poster board reading, “We are with you Gaza.”
The university protest reflected the tactics of the Muslim Brotherhood in the country as a whole: precisely organized, deliberately nonthreatening and focused on popular causes here such as the Palestinians. The Brotherhood says it supports democracy and moderation, but its commitment to pluralism, tolerance and compromise has never been tested in Jordan.
Mr. Fawaz and about 200 other students stood in a straight line, extending nearly two city blocks, parallel to the traffic on the major roadway in front of the university. More than half of the students were women, many with their faces veiled.
State security men in plain clothes hurried up and down the line. “Brother, for God’s sake, when will you be angry?” one security agent screamed into his phone, recording for headquarters the slogan on a student’s placard.
At 12:30 p.m., the male students stepped into the road, blocking traffic, while the women rushed off to the sidewalk and melted back into the campus. One minute later, they walked out of traffic, took off their caps and folded up their signs, tucked them into computer bags and went back to school.
“I want to be able to express what I want; I want freedom,” Mr. Fawaz said, after returning to the campus. His glasses always rest crooked on his face, making him look younger, and a bit out of sorts. “I don’t want to be afraid to express my opinion.”
Mr. Fawaz grew up in a small village called Anjara, near Ajloun, about 50 miles from Amman. His father grew up in the Jordan Valley and worked as a nurse in Irbid. Mr. Fawaz said he was 8 years old he was first invited to “leadership retreats” with a youth organization of the Brotherhood.
When he was 13, the youth group took him on a minor pilgrimage to Mecca. So, he said, he had been enticed by religion at an early age. But he only decided to become politically active — and to join the Brotherhood — when he was denied a scholarship to study abroad.
While there are no official statistics on student membership in the Brotherhood, only a fraction of Jordan University students are formally affiliated. Yet many others say they share the same vague sense of discontent and yearning, the same embrace of the Brotherhood’s slogan, “Islam Is the Solution,” a resonant catchall in the face of many problems.
The university, with about 30,000 students from across the country, has long served as a proxy battlefield for Jordan’s competing interests.
Competing Loyalties
In Jordan, unlike Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood is legal, with a political party and a vast network of social services. It also has a political party, called the Islamic Action Front. While some fear it as too extreme, others argue that it has sold out by working within a political system they see as corrupt and un-Islamic. On campus, the Islamists try to build sympathy, handing out study sheets or copying notes for students.
Mr. Fawaz decided this year to run as an Islamist candidate for the student council, an influential organization with its own budget and the right to put up posters, distribute fliers and hold on-campus events.
The Islamic students’ movement had boycotted the elections for years to protest a change of election rules that called for appointing — not electing — half of the council’s 80 members. The rule change, decreed by the former university president, was made in order to block the Islamists, who were the most organized group on campus, from controlling the council.
That is a direct echo of how the state has long tried to contain the Islamist movement in Jordan. The Brotherhood is allowed to operate, but the government and the security services broadly control the outcome of elections.
Indeed, as Islamist movements have swelled, governments across the Middle East have chosen both to contain and to embrace them. Many governments have aggressively moved to roll back the few democratic practices that had started to take root in their societies, and to prevent Islamists from winning power through the voting booth. That risks driving the leaders and the followers of Islamic organizations toward extremism.
At the same time, many governments have tried to appease popular Islamist fervor. Jordan recently granted a Muslim Brotherhood-aligned newspaper the right to publish daily instead of weekly; held private talks with Hamas leaders; arrested a poet, saying he had insulted Islam by using verses of the Koran in love poems; and shut down restaurants that had served alcohol during Ramadan, though they had been licensed by the state to do so.
This year, the new president of Jordan University permitted all student council seats to be elected, but with rules in place that would, again, make it nearly impossible for the Islamist bloc to have control.
Two days before the voting took place, Mr. Fawaz was campaigning on the steps of the education building, dressed in his best suit and tie. His campaign message to the students was simply, “For your sake.”
Running as an Islamist risks consequences: Mr. Fawaz said that he was approached by a student in his class who he believed was delivering a message from the security services. “He told me that they will write about me; I will never get a job,” Mr. Fawaz said.
But even when the police ordered him to take down his posters on election day, he remained resolute and confident.
“Everybody knows that I am going to win,” Mr. Fawaz said, without sounding boastful. “Because I represent the Islamic movement.”
But he did not win. Instead, a candidate representing a large tribe from the city of Salt won, reflecting the loyalty to bonds of kinship and family heritage even as tribal culture has begun to absorb more conservative Islamic practices and beliefs.
Yet Mr. Fawaz was untroubled. “What is important for me,” he said, “is to serve the movement by spreading the word among the students.”
Amjad al-Absy, 28, remembers the moment when he pledged to join the Muslim Brotherhood. He was 15 and he was identified by Brotherhood recruiters when he was playing soccer in a Palestinian refugee camp. He described how the Brotherhood monitors young men — when they play soccer, go to school, to mosque, to work, as well as in the street and singles out those who appear receptive.
“Once you say yes, they put you in a ring, in a family,” said Mr. Absy. “Outside of the Brotherhood, there is no concern for young men, there is no respect. You are alone.”
Mr. Absy and his friend Tarak Naimat, 24, said that while they were students at the university, they had helped to recruit other young men.
“In the computer lab, in the mosque, you buddy up,” Mr. Naimat said. “Then you participate in events together. Then he becomes a member. If he’s advanced, it can take six months. If less, maybe two years.”
The appeal, Mr. Naimat said, was simple: “It gives you the feeling you can change things, you can act, you can be a leader. You feel like you are part of something important.”
Recruiters to the movement operate in a social atmosphere far more receptive than in the past. Every one of five young men talking near the cafeteria of the university recently insisted that the only way Jordan would have democracy was under an Islamic government, which is what the Brotherhood says it wants to achieve.
Muhammad Safi is a 23-year-old with neatly gelled hair and a television-white smile who described himself as the least religious student at the table. He said he had lived in the United States for five years and was eager to marry an American so he could return. Yet he declared: “An Islamic state would be better. At least it would take care of people.”
A Political Crossroads
The task facing Middle East governments and Islamic leaders is to figure out how to harness the energy of the Islamic revival. The young — the demographic bulge that is defining the future of the Islamic world and the way the West will have to engage it — have embraced Islam with all the fervor of the counterculture.
But the movement is still up for grabs — whether it will lead to greater extremism, even terrorism in some cases, and whether the vague dissatisfaction of young people will translate into political engagement or disaffection.
So the cycle is likely to continue, with religious identification fueled not only by the Islamic movements, but also by governments eager to use religion to enhance legitimacy and to satisfy demands of their citizens. That, in turn, broadens support for groups like the Brotherhood, while undermining support for the government, said many researchers, intellectuals and political scientists in Jordan.
The battle lines are clear on the campus of Jordan University. Bilal Abu Sulaih, 24, is a leader in the Islamic student movement. He returned to school this year to study Islamic law after being suspended for one year for organizing protests, he said. During the year off, he said, he worked as a student organizer for the political party office of the Brotherhood. “We are trying to participate,” he said of the movement’s role on campus. “We do not want to overpower everyone else.”
But his reassurances were brushed aside as another student confronted him. “It’s not true,” shouted Ahmed Qabai, 28, who was seated on a nearby bench. He thrust a finger in Mr. Sulaih’s direction.
“You want to try to control everything,” Mr. Qabai said. “I’ve seen it before, your people talking to women and asking them why they’re not veiled.”
Mr. Sulaih, embarrassed by the challenge, said, “It’s not true.”
Mr. Qabai made it clear that he detested the Muslim Brotherhood, getting more and more worked up, until finally he was screaming. But what he said summed up the challenge ahead for Jordan, and for so many governments in the region: “We all know Islam is the solution. That we agree on.”
Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting.
23 December 2008
Hanukkah Receives Kosher Pop Welcome
By JON PARELES
Published: December 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/arts/music/23mati.html?_r=1
Matisyahu deployed what may be the only large, mirrored, rotating dreidel in show business — a Jewish answer to a disco ball — at Webster Hall on Sunday night, the first night of Hanukkah. It was also the first of eight New York City shows for Matisyahu in his third annual Festival of Lights series, bringing different opening acts and guests each night. A large menorah was set up for a mid-concert lighting ceremony, with the blessings declaimed in Hebrew by an audience volunteer.
Matisyahu, who was born Matthew Miller, sings explicitly devotional songs about God, Moshiach (the Messiah) and Orthodox Jewish identity. By setting them to reggae, rock and hip-hop beats, and after working his way up the jam-band circuit, he also reaches listeners with their minds on more secular pursuits, like dancing and drugs. Simcha Levenberg, the M.C. who introduced him, drew big laughs with jokes about marijuana and LSD, although Matisyahu’s song “King Without a Crown” insisted, “If you’re trying to stay high, then you’re bound to be low.”
Matisyahu has built a career on analogies between Rastafarian roots reggae and Hasidic songs. Both are concerned with faith and survival struggles and have lyrics phrased in Biblical allusions; both draw on modal scales and melismatic vocal lines that can sound Middle Eastern. Near the end of the concert Matisyahu sang long, cantorial phrases while rocking back and forth, as if davening, or praying. Yet if his lyrics weren’t so clear about their references to Jewish history and the majesty of God, most of the time Matisyahu would simply be one more reggae-loving rocker.
In “Jerusalem,” which drew heartfelt singalongs, he worries about assimilation, singing, “Cut off the roots of your family tree/Don’t you know that’s not the way to be.” But the roots of his music are Afro-Caribbean and African-American. He uses Jamaican reggae and dancehall toasting, sometimes delivered with a Jamaican accent; he also uses hip-hop cadences and showed off his vocal beatboxing.
His band also segues into rock, for chiming marches that borrow their idealistic sound from U2. Matisyahu is less concerned with a musical heritage than with a religious one.
Album by album Matisyahu has expanded his music. Along with basic roots reggae he now uses faster, tongue-twisting dancehall toasting and the electronic beats and brooding chords of hip-hop. And he’s looking farther: Matisyahu joined Crystal Method, the thumping, rock-tinged electronica duo that opened the show, to sing and rap on a song from their next album, due in March.
Matisyahu rarely improves on his sources. His voice is thin and sometimes nasal, closer to Jack Johnson than to Bob Marley or Sting; his rhymes can be as awkward as they are earnest. But his band — which was augmented, for a few songs, by an Israeli oud player — carries simple vamps through multiple transformations, from meditations to shredding guitar solos. It’s music for believers, with a groove for everyone else.
Matisyahu is at Webster Hall, 125 East 11th Street, East Village, Tuesday and Thursday , and at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, 66 North Sixth Street, at Wythe Avenue, Saturday through Dec. 30. Tickets: (212) 307-7171 or ticketmaster.com.
Published: December 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/arts/music/23mati.html?_r=1
Matisyahu deployed what may be the only large, mirrored, rotating dreidel in show business — a Jewish answer to a disco ball — at Webster Hall on Sunday night, the first night of Hanukkah. It was also the first of eight New York City shows for Matisyahu in his third annual Festival of Lights series, bringing different opening acts and guests each night. A large menorah was set up for a mid-concert lighting ceremony, with the blessings declaimed in Hebrew by an audience volunteer.
Matisyahu, who was born Matthew Miller, sings explicitly devotional songs about God, Moshiach (the Messiah) and Orthodox Jewish identity. By setting them to reggae, rock and hip-hop beats, and after working his way up the jam-band circuit, he also reaches listeners with their minds on more secular pursuits, like dancing and drugs. Simcha Levenberg, the M.C. who introduced him, drew big laughs with jokes about marijuana and LSD, although Matisyahu’s song “King Without a Crown” insisted, “If you’re trying to stay high, then you’re bound to be low.”
Matisyahu has built a career on analogies between Rastafarian roots reggae and Hasidic songs. Both are concerned with faith and survival struggles and have lyrics phrased in Biblical allusions; both draw on modal scales and melismatic vocal lines that can sound Middle Eastern. Near the end of the concert Matisyahu sang long, cantorial phrases while rocking back and forth, as if davening, or praying. Yet if his lyrics weren’t so clear about their references to Jewish history and the majesty of God, most of the time Matisyahu would simply be one more reggae-loving rocker.
In “Jerusalem,” which drew heartfelt singalongs, he worries about assimilation, singing, “Cut off the roots of your family tree/Don’t you know that’s not the way to be.” But the roots of his music are Afro-Caribbean and African-American. He uses Jamaican reggae and dancehall toasting, sometimes delivered with a Jamaican accent; he also uses hip-hop cadences and showed off his vocal beatboxing.
His band also segues into rock, for chiming marches that borrow their idealistic sound from U2. Matisyahu is less concerned with a musical heritage than with a religious one.
Album by album Matisyahu has expanded his music. Along with basic roots reggae he now uses faster, tongue-twisting dancehall toasting and the electronic beats and brooding chords of hip-hop. And he’s looking farther: Matisyahu joined Crystal Method, the thumping, rock-tinged electronica duo that opened the show, to sing and rap on a song from their next album, due in March.
Matisyahu rarely improves on his sources. His voice is thin and sometimes nasal, closer to Jack Johnson than to Bob Marley or Sting; his rhymes can be as awkward as they are earnest. But his band — which was augmented, for a few songs, by an Israeli oud player — carries simple vamps through multiple transformations, from meditations to shredding guitar solos. It’s music for believers, with a groove for everyone else.
Matisyahu is at Webster Hall, 125 East 11th Street, East Village, Tuesday and Thursday , and at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, 66 North Sixth Street, at Wythe Avenue, Saturday through Dec. 30. Tickets: (212) 307-7171 or ticketmaster.com.
Young Muslims Build a Subculture on an Underground Book
By CHRISTOPHER MAAG
Published: December 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/us/23muslim.html?_r=1&hp
CLEVELAND — Five years ago, young Muslims across the United States began reading and passing along a blurry, photocopied novel called “The Taqwacores,” about imaginary punk rock Muslims in Buffalo.
“This book helped me create my identity,” said Naina Syed, 14, a high school freshman in Coventry, Conn.
A Muslim born in Pakistan, Naina said she spent hours on the phone listening to her older sister read the novel to her. “When I finally read the book for myself,” she said, “it was an amazing experience.”
The novel is “The Catcher in the Rye” for young Muslims, said Carl W. Ernst, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Springing from the imagination of Michael Muhammad Knight, it inspired disaffected young Muslims in the United States to form real Muslim punk bands and build their own subculture.
Now the underground success of Muslim punk has resulted in a low-budget independent film based on the book.
A group of punk artists living in a communal house in Cleveland called the Tower of Treason offered the house as the set for the movie. The crumbling streets and boarded-up storefronts of their neighborhood resemble parts of Buffalo. Filming took place in October, and the movie will be released next year, said Eyad Zahra, the director.
“To see these characters that used to live only inside my head out here walking around, and to think of all these kids living out parts of the book, it’s totally surreal,” Mr. Muhammad Knight, 31, said as he roamed the movie set.
As part of the set, a Muslim punk rock musician, Marwan Kamel, 23, painted “Osama McDonald,” a figure with Osama bin Laden’s face atop Ronald McDonald’s body. Mr. Kamel said the painting was a protest against imperialism by American corporations and against Wahhabism, the strictest form of Islam.
Noureen DeWulf, 24, an actress who plays a rocker in the movie, defended the film’s message.
“I’m a Muslim and I’m 100-percent American,” Ms. DeWulf said, “so I can criticize my faith and my country. Rebellion? Punk? This is totally American.”
The novel’s title combines “taqwa,” the Arabic word for “piety,” with “hardcore,” used to describe many genres of angry Western music.
For many young American Muslims, stigmatized by their peers after the Sept. 11 attacks but repelled by both the Bush administration’s reaction to the attacks and the rigid conservatism of many Muslim leaders, the novel became a blueprint for their lives.
“Reading the book was totally liberating for me,” said Areej Zufari, 34, a Muslim and a humanities professor at Valencia Community College in Orlando, Fla.
Ms. Zufari said she had listened to punk music growing up in Arkansas and found “The Taqwacores” four years ago.
“Here was someone as frustrated with Islam as me,” she said, “and he expressed it using bands I love, like the Dead Kennedys. It all came together.”
The novel’s Muslim characters include Rabeya, a riot girl who plays guitar onstage wearing a burqa and leads a group of men and women in prayer. There is also Fasiq, a pot-smoking skater, and Jehangir, a drunk.
Such acts — playing Western music, women leading prayer, men and women praying together, drinking, smoking — are considered haram, or forbidden, by millions of Muslims.
Mr. Muhammad Knight was born an Irish Catholic in upstate New York and converted to Islam as a teenager. He studied at a mosque in Pakistan but became disillusioned with Islam after learning about the sectarian battles after the death of Muhammad.
He said he wrote “The Taqwacores” to mend the rift between his being an observant Muslim and an angry American youth. He found validation in the life of Muhammad, who instructed people to ignore their leaders, destroy their petty deities and follow only Allah.
After reading the novel, many Muslims e-mailed Mr. Muhammad Knight, asking for directions to the next Muslim punk show. Told that no such bands existed, some of them created their own, with names like Vote Hezbollah and Secret Trial Five.
One band, the Kominas, wrote a song called “Suicide Bomb the Gap,” which became Muslim punk rock’s first anthem.
“As Muslims, we’re not being honest if we criticize the United States without first criticizing ourselves,” said Mr. Kamel, 23, who grew up in a Syrian family in Chicago. He is lead singer of the band al-Thawra, “the Revolution” in Arabic.
For many young American Muslims, the merger of Islam and rebellion resonated.
Hanan Arzay, 15, is a daughter of Muslim immigrants from Morocco who lives in East Islip, N.Y. In the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, pedestrians threw eggs and coffee cups at the van that transported her to a Muslim school, she said, and one person threw a wine bottle, shattering the van’s window.
At school, her Koran teacher threw chalk at her for requesting literal translations of the holy book, Ms. Arzay said. After she was expelled from two Muslim schools, her uncle gave her “The Taqwacores.”
“This book is my lifeline,” Ms. Arzay said. “It saved my faith.”
Published: December 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/us/23muslim.html?_r=1&hp
CLEVELAND — Five years ago, young Muslims across the United States began reading and passing along a blurry, photocopied novel called “The Taqwacores,” about imaginary punk rock Muslims in Buffalo.
“This book helped me create my identity,” said Naina Syed, 14, a high school freshman in Coventry, Conn.
A Muslim born in Pakistan, Naina said she spent hours on the phone listening to her older sister read the novel to her. “When I finally read the book for myself,” she said, “it was an amazing experience.”
The novel is “The Catcher in the Rye” for young Muslims, said Carl W. Ernst, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Springing from the imagination of Michael Muhammad Knight, it inspired disaffected young Muslims in the United States to form real Muslim punk bands and build their own subculture.
Now the underground success of Muslim punk has resulted in a low-budget independent film based on the book.
A group of punk artists living in a communal house in Cleveland called the Tower of Treason offered the house as the set for the movie. The crumbling streets and boarded-up storefronts of their neighborhood resemble parts of Buffalo. Filming took place in October, and the movie will be released next year, said Eyad Zahra, the director.
“To see these characters that used to live only inside my head out here walking around, and to think of all these kids living out parts of the book, it’s totally surreal,” Mr. Muhammad Knight, 31, said as he roamed the movie set.
As part of the set, a Muslim punk rock musician, Marwan Kamel, 23, painted “Osama McDonald,” a figure with Osama bin Laden’s face atop Ronald McDonald’s body. Mr. Kamel said the painting was a protest against imperialism by American corporations and against Wahhabism, the strictest form of Islam.
Noureen DeWulf, 24, an actress who plays a rocker in the movie, defended the film’s message.
“I’m a Muslim and I’m 100-percent American,” Ms. DeWulf said, “so I can criticize my faith and my country. Rebellion? Punk? This is totally American.”
The novel’s title combines “taqwa,” the Arabic word for “piety,” with “hardcore,” used to describe many genres of angry Western music.
For many young American Muslims, stigmatized by their peers after the Sept. 11 attacks but repelled by both the Bush administration’s reaction to the attacks and the rigid conservatism of many Muslim leaders, the novel became a blueprint for their lives.
“Reading the book was totally liberating for me,” said Areej Zufari, 34, a Muslim and a humanities professor at Valencia Community College in Orlando, Fla.
Ms. Zufari said she had listened to punk music growing up in Arkansas and found “The Taqwacores” four years ago.
“Here was someone as frustrated with Islam as me,” she said, “and he expressed it using bands I love, like the Dead Kennedys. It all came together.”
The novel’s Muslim characters include Rabeya, a riot girl who plays guitar onstage wearing a burqa and leads a group of men and women in prayer. There is also Fasiq, a pot-smoking skater, and Jehangir, a drunk.
Such acts — playing Western music, women leading prayer, men and women praying together, drinking, smoking — are considered haram, or forbidden, by millions of Muslims.
Mr. Muhammad Knight was born an Irish Catholic in upstate New York and converted to Islam as a teenager. He studied at a mosque in Pakistan but became disillusioned with Islam after learning about the sectarian battles after the death of Muhammad.
He said he wrote “The Taqwacores” to mend the rift between his being an observant Muslim and an angry American youth. He found validation in the life of Muhammad, who instructed people to ignore their leaders, destroy their petty deities and follow only Allah.
After reading the novel, many Muslims e-mailed Mr. Muhammad Knight, asking for directions to the next Muslim punk show. Told that no such bands existed, some of them created their own, with names like Vote Hezbollah and Secret Trial Five.
One band, the Kominas, wrote a song called “Suicide Bomb the Gap,” which became Muslim punk rock’s first anthem.
“As Muslims, we’re not being honest if we criticize the United States without first criticizing ourselves,” said Mr. Kamel, 23, who grew up in a Syrian family in Chicago. He is lead singer of the band al-Thawra, “the Revolution” in Arabic.
For many young American Muslims, the merger of Islam and rebellion resonated.
Hanan Arzay, 15, is a daughter of Muslim immigrants from Morocco who lives in East Islip, N.Y. In the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, pedestrians threw eggs and coffee cups at the van that transported her to a Muslim school, she said, and one person threw a wine bottle, shattering the van’s window.
At school, her Koran teacher threw chalk at her for requesting literal translations of the holy book, Ms. Arzay said. After she was expelled from two Muslim schools, her uncle gave her “The Taqwacores.”
“This book is my lifeline,” Ms. Arzay said. “It saved my faith.”
22 December 2008
Forest Plan in Brazil Bears the Traces of an Activist’s Vision
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/world/americas/22brazil.html?_r=1
RIO DE JANEIRO — Twenty years ago, a Brazilian environmental activist and rubber tapper was shot to death at his home in Acre State by ranchers opposed to his efforts to save the Amazon rain forest.
After his death at age 44, Francisco Alves Mendes, better known as Chico, became a martyr for a concept that is only now gaining mainstream support here: that the value of a standing forest could be more than the value of a forest burned and logged in the name of development.
This month, Brazil took what environmentalists hope will be a big step forward in realizing Mr. Mendes’s vision. The government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva introduced ambitious targets for reducing deforestation and carbon dioxide emissions in a nation that is one of the world’s top emitters of this heat-trapping gas.
The plan promises to make Brazil a more influential player in global climate-change discussions, helping to push the United States and the European Union to agree to emissions cuts and head off the adverse effects of climate change. It could also encourage more pledges from wealthy countries seeking to essentially pay Brazil to preserve the forest for the good of all humanity.
But some environmentalists question whether the new targets, which would reduce Brazilian deforestation by 72 percent by 2017, are achievable in a country that has shown few signs of adjusting its development model as a major food provider to the world, especially in the midst of a global economic crisis.
To achieve the first phase of planned cuts, Brazil would have to reduce deforestation next year by 20 percent, to less than 4,000 square miles. That would be the lowest amount per year ever recorded in Brazil, said Paulo Adario, the Amazon campaign director for Greenpeace in Brazil.
Brazil’s economy is centered on the export of agricultural products, like soybeans and beef, and commodities like iron ore.
“The Brazilian model is to be the food supplier to the world and a big supplier of ethanol,” Mr. Adario said. “The economy will continue to move in the same basic direction. There is no magic in Brazil.”
Up until now, Brazil’s economic choices have driven much of the deforestation in the Amazon, he said. In the late 1960s and the 1970s, the military government encouraged landless families to settle in the region. Road-building, land speculators and ranchers followed, and the forests fell at a quickening pace.
The burning and decomposition of trees produce carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.
Mr. Mendes organized tappers to confront crews and flew abroad to confront lenders paying for roads. His efforts to stop logging in an area planned for a forest reserve led to his death. Since his killing, on Dec. 22, 1988, more than 20 reserves have been created, protecting more than eight million acres.
Mr. Mendes was an early advocate of the idea that people who live in the forest could create livelihoods from sustainable forest resources, rather than the one-time economic benefit of cutting down trees. Carbon financing, the compensation of forest dwellers for pursuing sustainable industries, would provide an added incentive, which is vital given the uncertain markets for natural rubber and other non-timber forest products.
“The notion that we in the north will help pay for that climate service is an important development and represents the mainstreaming of the concept that Chico Mendes and those like him were pioneers in creating,” said Richard H. Moss, the head of climate change programs at the World Wildlife Fund in Washington.
The killings of Mr. Mendes and of Sister Dorothy Stang, a 73-year-old Catholic nun who was gunned down in 2005 for speaking out against logging in the Amazon, ratcheted up international pressure on Brazil to find ways to limit forest clearing without sacrificing development.
“Brazil was always on the defensive when it came to the question of climate change,” said Carlos Minc, Brazil’s environment minister. “And now it has completely changed, passing a bolder plan than India and China.”
Mr. Minc said the plan would help meet a demand of some of the more developed countries, including the United States, which has said it would not agree to firm emissions targets until less-developed countries that produce significant amounts of greenhouse gases do the same.
Deforestation produces more than a fifth of human-generated carbon dioxide by some estimates. Some 75 percent of Brazil’s carbon dioxide emissions come from deforestation, Mr. Minc said.
Brazil’s plan would sharply slice those emissions, reducing them by some 4.8 billion tons by 2018. Some environmentalists contend that deals involving compensation for forest protection could weaken climate agreements in many ways. They also say the plan leaves the most difficult targets to the government that will follow Mr. da Silva’s. His term ends in 2010.
Still, it is viewed by some scientists and climate experts as major step forward. “For the first time we have out in the open very clear goals for reduction in deforestation,” said Walter Vergara, the lead climatologist for Latin America at the World Bank.
The global recession could end up being a godsend by lowering demand for agricultural goods.
But it could also slow the flow of technology needed to make industries more efficient and limit pledges from foreign governments like Norway, Sweden and Germany, whose payments would help preserve the forest. So far, those countries have not suggested that they would reduce their contributions, Mr. Minc said.
“The global recession and the climate crisis don’t necessarily have to be adversaries, with one competing for the resources of the other,” Mr. Minc said.
RIO DE JANEIRO — Twenty years ago, a Brazilian environmental activist and rubber tapper was shot to death at his home in Acre State by ranchers opposed to his efforts to save the Amazon rain forest.
After his death at age 44, Francisco Alves Mendes, better known as Chico, became a martyr for a concept that is only now gaining mainstream support here: that the value of a standing forest could be more than the value of a forest burned and logged in the name of development.
This month, Brazil took what environmentalists hope will be a big step forward in realizing Mr. Mendes’s vision. The government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva introduced ambitious targets for reducing deforestation and carbon dioxide emissions in a nation that is one of the world’s top emitters of this heat-trapping gas.
The plan promises to make Brazil a more influential player in global climate-change discussions, helping to push the United States and the European Union to agree to emissions cuts and head off the adverse effects of climate change. It could also encourage more pledges from wealthy countries seeking to essentially pay Brazil to preserve the forest for the good of all humanity.
But some environmentalists question whether the new targets, which would reduce Brazilian deforestation by 72 percent by 2017, are achievable in a country that has shown few signs of adjusting its development model as a major food provider to the world, especially in the midst of a global economic crisis.
To achieve the first phase of planned cuts, Brazil would have to reduce deforestation next year by 20 percent, to less than 4,000 square miles. That would be the lowest amount per year ever recorded in Brazil, said Paulo Adario, the Amazon campaign director for Greenpeace in Brazil.
Brazil’s economy is centered on the export of agricultural products, like soybeans and beef, and commodities like iron ore.
“The Brazilian model is to be the food supplier to the world and a big supplier of ethanol,” Mr. Adario said. “The economy will continue to move in the same basic direction. There is no magic in Brazil.”
Up until now, Brazil’s economic choices have driven much of the deforestation in the Amazon, he said. In the late 1960s and the 1970s, the military government encouraged landless families to settle in the region. Road-building, land speculators and ranchers followed, and the forests fell at a quickening pace.
The burning and decomposition of trees produce carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.
Mr. Mendes organized tappers to confront crews and flew abroad to confront lenders paying for roads. His efforts to stop logging in an area planned for a forest reserve led to his death. Since his killing, on Dec. 22, 1988, more than 20 reserves have been created, protecting more than eight million acres.
Mr. Mendes was an early advocate of the idea that people who live in the forest could create livelihoods from sustainable forest resources, rather than the one-time economic benefit of cutting down trees. Carbon financing, the compensation of forest dwellers for pursuing sustainable industries, would provide an added incentive, which is vital given the uncertain markets for natural rubber and other non-timber forest products.
“The notion that we in the north will help pay for that climate service is an important development and represents the mainstreaming of the concept that Chico Mendes and those like him were pioneers in creating,” said Richard H. Moss, the head of climate change programs at the World Wildlife Fund in Washington.
The killings of Mr. Mendes and of Sister Dorothy Stang, a 73-year-old Catholic nun who was gunned down in 2005 for speaking out against logging in the Amazon, ratcheted up international pressure on Brazil to find ways to limit forest clearing without sacrificing development.
“Brazil was always on the defensive when it came to the question of climate change,” said Carlos Minc, Brazil’s environment minister. “And now it has completely changed, passing a bolder plan than India and China.”
Mr. Minc said the plan would help meet a demand of some of the more developed countries, including the United States, which has said it would not agree to firm emissions targets until less-developed countries that produce significant amounts of greenhouse gases do the same.
Deforestation produces more than a fifth of human-generated carbon dioxide by some estimates. Some 75 percent of Brazil’s carbon dioxide emissions come from deforestation, Mr. Minc said.
Brazil’s plan would sharply slice those emissions, reducing them by some 4.8 billion tons by 2018. Some environmentalists contend that deals involving compensation for forest protection could weaken climate agreements in many ways. They also say the plan leaves the most difficult targets to the government that will follow Mr. da Silva’s. His term ends in 2010.
Still, it is viewed by some scientists and climate experts as major step forward. “For the first time we have out in the open very clear goals for reduction in deforestation,” said Walter Vergara, the lead climatologist for Latin America at the World Bank.
The global recession could end up being a godsend by lowering demand for agricultural goods.
But it could also slow the flow of technology needed to make industries more efficient and limit pledges from foreign governments like Norway, Sweden and Germany, whose payments would help preserve the forest. So far, those countries have not suggested that they would reduce their contributions, Mr. Minc said.
“The global recession and the climate crisis don’t necessarily have to be adversaries, with one competing for the resources of the other,” Mr. Minc said.
27 November 2008
Arabs Should Act Now - Don't Wait on Obama
Washington Watch
November 24, 2008
Dr. James J. Zogby (c)
President
Arab American Institute
Because expectations across the Middle East are so high and the need for change is so great, during the next two months, all eyes will be focused on the early decisions made by President-elect Barack Obama. But precisely because the need is so great, I believe that the region's leadership should be more than spectators during this critical transition period. This is especially true with regard to efforts to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian peace.
The damage done by eight years of the Bush Administrations' neglect and recklessness is all too clear. The Palestinian house is in disarray, with leaderships in the West Bank and Gaza both physically and ideologically divided. Gaza, under the control of Hamas, is being strangled by an oppressive embargo, with an on-again, off-again truce punctuated by periods of rocket attacks and Israeli assaults. The West Bank itself is being slowly strangled by never-ending settlement growth, hundreds of intrusive and humiliating checkpoints, and an oppressive wall/barrier snaking in and out of Palestinian lands.
The paths chosen by the two leaderships, though contradictory, are both flawed. Hamas has made a religion of "resistance" which has won nothing but death and hardship for Palestinians, and insecurity in Israel and reinforcement for hard-line Israeli policies. Meanwhile the Palestinian Authority's commitment to negotiations, while commendable, has become pointless, since negotiating without leverage (and without control over the constituency for which they are negotiating) becomes an empty exercise.
On more than one occasion, Barack Obama has stated that he would make achieving Israeli-Palestinian peace a priority, and that he would take a different course than that of his predecessor. But, if we are to be honest with ourselves, we must acknowledge that when Obama takes the oath of office on January 20th, he is likely to find a rather unappetizing situation laid out before him in the Middle East.
If nothing changes in the next two months, the Palestinian house will still be divided, and the Israelis will still have no government and no clear mandate (elections, there, will occur on February 10th, and all signs point to either a hard-line Netanyahu victory or the cobbling together of a weak centrist-led coalition).
Therefore, the question before the new Administration will be: can anything be done?, and, if so, how to start. Because I believe that steps can be taken on the Arab side to put their house in order before January 20th, the region's leadership ought to use the next two months' time wisely.
The first priority must be to achieve Palestinian reconciliation, and the establishment of an effective and unified Palestinian government that can command both popular support and the respect of the international community. This will require more than a redux of the Mecca Accords. The current draft proposal being circulated in Cairo provides a useful framework with its focus on rebuilding a consensus government and an Arab-trained and supported internal security force. Compliance by both Palestinian leaderships is, of course, essential, but has thus far proven elusive. Instead of the current rather hollow threats of sanctions or "naming names," the Arab leadership ought to create incentives for acceptance.
Clearly what the West Bank and Gaza desperately need are job creation, infrastructure and capacity-building projects, as well as immediate relief. The Arabs do participate in international efforts to subsidize the Palestinian Authority budget, but that merely maintains the unacceptable status quo. To move the process forward, I would propose the creation of a rather massive multi-billion dollar "Peace and Reconciliation Incentive Fund" that would provide immediate relief and job-creating investment once the parties have agreed to a Cairo-like consensus. The bottom line purpose of the fund is to support the Palestinian people and to create the incentive and pressure for their divided leaderships to agree on a new government which, with Arab backing, is ready and able to make peace.
In addition, the Arab League, instead of merely reaffirming their 2002 and 2007 peace plan, would do well to enlarge upon it by putting, as it were, "meat on the bones". They could, for example, spell out in greater detail the types of investment and/or trade incentives that would accompany final peace and/or normalization. And they could even create a staged sequencing (for example, with the signing of an Israeli-Palestinian framework, stage one will occur; with removal settlements and checkpoints in compliance with agreement, stage two will occur, etc.). The Arab plan has attracted interest not only with the incoming U.S. Administration, but among many in Israel, as well. Spelling out, therefore, the benefits and vision that accompany final peace would be of enormous benefit.
In addition to the January 20th swearing in of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, there are two other deadlines fast approaching. A Palestinian agreement must be reached by January ninth, the formal date of the end President Abbas' term, or the already fragile internal Palestinian situation may become more conflicted. Equally important is the February 10th election in Israel. Rapid movement toward achieving Palestinian consensus and an enlarged and enhanced version of the Arab peace initiative would both remove the dangers presented by the first date and could have a positive impact on the latter.
Washington Watch is a weekly column written by AAI President James Zogby. The views expressed within this column do not necessarily reflect those of the Arab American Institute. We invite you to share your views on the topics addressed within Dr. Zogby's weekly Washington Watch by emailing jzogby@aaiusa.org.
November 24, 2008
Dr. James J. Zogby (c)
President
Arab American Institute
Because expectations across the Middle East are so high and the need for change is so great, during the next two months, all eyes will be focused on the early decisions made by President-elect Barack Obama. But precisely because the need is so great, I believe that the region's leadership should be more than spectators during this critical transition period. This is especially true with regard to efforts to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian peace.
The damage done by eight years of the Bush Administrations' neglect and recklessness is all too clear. The Palestinian house is in disarray, with leaderships in the West Bank and Gaza both physically and ideologically divided. Gaza, under the control of Hamas, is being strangled by an oppressive embargo, with an on-again, off-again truce punctuated by periods of rocket attacks and Israeli assaults. The West Bank itself is being slowly strangled by never-ending settlement growth, hundreds of intrusive and humiliating checkpoints, and an oppressive wall/barrier snaking in and out of Palestinian lands.
The paths chosen by the two leaderships, though contradictory, are both flawed. Hamas has made a religion of "resistance" which has won nothing but death and hardship for Palestinians, and insecurity in Israel and reinforcement for hard-line Israeli policies. Meanwhile the Palestinian Authority's commitment to negotiations, while commendable, has become pointless, since negotiating without leverage (and without control over the constituency for which they are negotiating) becomes an empty exercise.
On more than one occasion, Barack Obama has stated that he would make achieving Israeli-Palestinian peace a priority, and that he would take a different course than that of his predecessor. But, if we are to be honest with ourselves, we must acknowledge that when Obama takes the oath of office on January 20th, he is likely to find a rather unappetizing situation laid out before him in the Middle East.
If nothing changes in the next two months, the Palestinian house will still be divided, and the Israelis will still have no government and no clear mandate (elections, there, will occur on February 10th, and all signs point to either a hard-line Netanyahu victory or the cobbling together of a weak centrist-led coalition).
Therefore, the question before the new Administration will be: can anything be done?, and, if so, how to start. Because I believe that steps can be taken on the Arab side to put their house in order before January 20th, the region's leadership ought to use the next two months' time wisely.
The first priority must be to achieve Palestinian reconciliation, and the establishment of an effective and unified Palestinian government that can command both popular support and the respect of the international community. This will require more than a redux of the Mecca Accords. The current draft proposal being circulated in Cairo provides a useful framework with its focus on rebuilding a consensus government and an Arab-trained and supported internal security force. Compliance by both Palestinian leaderships is, of course, essential, but has thus far proven elusive. Instead of the current rather hollow threats of sanctions or "naming names," the Arab leadership ought to create incentives for acceptance.
Clearly what the West Bank and Gaza desperately need are job creation, infrastructure and capacity-building projects, as well as immediate relief. The Arabs do participate in international efforts to subsidize the Palestinian Authority budget, but that merely maintains the unacceptable status quo. To move the process forward, I would propose the creation of a rather massive multi-billion dollar "Peace and Reconciliation Incentive Fund" that would provide immediate relief and job-creating investment once the parties have agreed to a Cairo-like consensus. The bottom line purpose of the fund is to support the Palestinian people and to create the incentive and pressure for their divided leaderships to agree on a new government which, with Arab backing, is ready and able to make peace.
In addition, the Arab League, instead of merely reaffirming their 2002 and 2007 peace plan, would do well to enlarge upon it by putting, as it were, "meat on the bones". They could, for example, spell out in greater detail the types of investment and/or trade incentives that would accompany final peace and/or normalization. And they could even create a staged sequencing (for example, with the signing of an Israeli-Palestinian framework, stage one will occur; with removal settlements and checkpoints in compliance with agreement, stage two will occur, etc.). The Arab plan has attracted interest not only with the incoming U.S. Administration, but among many in Israel, as well. Spelling out, therefore, the benefits and vision that accompany final peace would be of enormous benefit.
In addition to the January 20th swearing in of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, there are two other deadlines fast approaching. A Palestinian agreement must be reached by January ninth, the formal date of the end President Abbas' term, or the already fragile internal Palestinian situation may become more conflicted. Equally important is the February 10th election in Israel. Rapid movement toward achieving Palestinian consensus and an enlarged and enhanced version of the Arab peace initiative would both remove the dangers presented by the first date and could have a positive impact on the latter.
Washington Watch is a weekly column written by AAI President James Zogby. The views expressed within this column do not necessarily reflect those of the Arab American Institute. We invite you to share your views on the topics addressed within Dr. Zogby's weekly Washington Watch by emailing jzogby@aaiusa.org.
PRESIDENT-ELECT OBAMA: 100 DAYS TO DEMONSTRATE COMMITMENT TO HUMAN RIGHTS
Amnesty International urges U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to make human rights central to his new administration. The organization is calling for certain concrete steps in his first 100 days in office that would demonstrate a genuine commitment to bringing the United States into line with its international obligations.
The new president will have the authority to rectify some of the unlawful policies and practices adopted during his predecessor’s term in office in the name of counter-terrorism and national security.
COUNTER TERROR WITH JUSTICE: A HUMAN RIGHTS CHALLENGE
In the first 100 days, Amnesty International is calling on the new administration to:
announce a plan and date to close Guantanamo;
issue an executive order to ban torture and other ill-treatment, as defined under international law;
ensure that an independent commission to investigate abuses committed by the U.S. government in its "war on terror" is set up.
These demands are part of a "checklist" of actions Amnesty International is asking the new U.S. President to take during the first 100 days in office.
PROMOTING HUMAN RIGHTS AT HOME AND ABROAD
Amnesty International has numerous human rights concerns in relation to the United States. The organization is seeking a meeting with President-elect Obama to discuss how the United States will take forward policies that will advance internationally recognized human rights both at home and abroad.
TAKE ACTION
Call on President-elect Barack Obama to demonstrate a commitment to human rights in his first 100 days in office.
Use our template to write a letter to the editor of your local media or comment on online news articles.
Take other important actions to end human rights abuses by the U.S. government in its "war on terror."
The new president will have the authority to rectify some of the unlawful policies and practices adopted during his predecessor’s term in office in the name of counter-terrorism and national security.
COUNTER TERROR WITH JUSTICE: A HUMAN RIGHTS CHALLENGE
In the first 100 days, Amnesty International is calling on the new administration to:
announce a plan and date to close Guantanamo;
issue an executive order to ban torture and other ill-treatment, as defined under international law;
ensure that an independent commission to investigate abuses committed by the U.S. government in its "war on terror" is set up.
These demands are part of a "checklist" of actions Amnesty International is asking the new U.S. President to take during the first 100 days in office.
PROMOTING HUMAN RIGHTS AT HOME AND ABROAD
Amnesty International has numerous human rights concerns in relation to the United States. The organization is seeking a meeting with President-elect Obama to discuss how the United States will take forward policies that will advance internationally recognized human rights both at home and abroad.
TAKE ACTION
Call on President-elect Barack Obama to demonstrate a commitment to human rights in his first 100 days in office.
Use our template to write a letter to the editor of your local media or comment on online news articles.
Take other important actions to end human rights abuses by the U.S. government in its "war on terror."
04 November 2008
Free sex toys — and much more — for voting
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27455136/
Businesses across nation ready to reward citizens for casting their ballots
By Mike Stuckey
Senior news editor
msnbc.com
updated 10:49 a.m. ET, Mon., Nov. 3, 2008
Just when you thought it was safe to focus on the issues in this historic election season, a chain of sex toy shops has joined retailers, restaurateurs and other businesses across the nation in the time-honored tradition of rewarding Americans who go to the polls.
Babeland, with stores in New York, Los Angeles and Seattle, is offering a pair of self-gratifying incentives for voters who present their registration cards, ballot stubs or “word of honor” that they voted next Tuesday.
The rewards are no-so-subtle reminders of this year’s campaign rhetoric. For men, it’s the “Maverick,” a "sleeve" for self-pleasuring. According to a press release, “He’s always there to lend a hand, he works for every man, and he bucks the status quo.” Women can choose the “Silver Bullet” mini-vibrator, which is “a magical solution to difficult problems” and “a great stress-reliever during these troubled economic times!” The promotion lasts through Nov. 11.
Babeland spokeswoman Pamela Doan told msnbc.com in an interview that the promotion is a first for the company, which she describes as “a sex-positive, women-friendly retailer for sex toys and accessories.”
Although the company is relying on press releases and bloggers to get the word out, “We’re expecting a good response,” Doan said. “Both of these toys are very popular. The Maverick retails for $20 and the Silver Bullet retails for $15. It’s a good reward.”
'Sex crosses party lines'
As to whether Babeland expects voters who take them up on the offer to lean one way or the other politically, Doan said, “Sex crosses party lines. … We’ve tried to make this into a nonpartisan reward because we welcome everyone. That’s our philosophy and our mission. We didn’t want to reward only Obama supporters. We have a lot of Republicans who shop at Babeland too.”
If the sex toys don’t float your vote, there are plenty of other less racy rewards to choose from in the afterglow of casting your ballot.
How about a free cup of Joe? Starbucks stores across the nation and Eat’n Park outlets in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia are among many U.S. restaurants offering complimentary coffee to anyone who presents a ballot stub or “I Voted” sticker.
Voters can get a beer on the house at Todd Conner’s pub in Baltimore’s historic Fells Point neighborhood.
Those with a sweet tooth can stop by participating Krispy Kreme or Ben & Jerry’s locations to receive special treats. Krispy Kreme will be handing out star-shaped doughnuts with red, white, and blue sprinkles, one each, to voters, while Ben & Jerry’s is serving up free scoops of ice cream to everyone who shows up on Election Day between 5 and 8 p.m., whether they voted or not.
But just as voters should weigh carefully the seemingly endless promises of politicians as they make their decisions at the ballot box, they should also read the fine print on Election Day rewards.
Take the offer extended to voters by Zov’s, a three-cafe chain in Southern California. “Show us your ‘I Voted’ sticker and enjoy a free slice of Zov’s All-American Apple Pie,” it says on its Web site.
To borrow from a past president, that all depends on what the definition of “free” is.
To score the pie, you must not only prove you voted, but also “buy any menu item, or order Zov’s family take-out dinner for 2 or 4.”
© 2008 msnbc.com
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27455136/
MSN Privacy . Legal
© 2008 MSNBC.com
Businesses across nation ready to reward citizens for casting their ballots
By Mike Stuckey
Senior news editor
msnbc.com
updated 10:49 a.m. ET, Mon., Nov. 3, 2008
Just when you thought it was safe to focus on the issues in this historic election season, a chain of sex toy shops has joined retailers, restaurateurs and other businesses across the nation in the time-honored tradition of rewarding Americans who go to the polls.
Babeland, with stores in New York, Los Angeles and Seattle, is offering a pair of self-gratifying incentives for voters who present their registration cards, ballot stubs or “word of honor” that they voted next Tuesday.
The rewards are no-so-subtle reminders of this year’s campaign rhetoric. For men, it’s the “Maverick,” a "sleeve" for self-pleasuring. According to a press release, “He’s always there to lend a hand, he works for every man, and he bucks the status quo.” Women can choose the “Silver Bullet” mini-vibrator, which is “a magical solution to difficult problems” and “a great stress-reliever during these troubled economic times!” The promotion lasts through Nov. 11.
Babeland spokeswoman Pamela Doan told msnbc.com in an interview that the promotion is a first for the company, which she describes as “a sex-positive, women-friendly retailer for sex toys and accessories.”
Although the company is relying on press releases and bloggers to get the word out, “We’re expecting a good response,” Doan said. “Both of these toys are very popular. The Maverick retails for $20 and the Silver Bullet retails for $15. It’s a good reward.”
'Sex crosses party lines'
As to whether Babeland expects voters who take them up on the offer to lean one way or the other politically, Doan said, “Sex crosses party lines. … We’ve tried to make this into a nonpartisan reward because we welcome everyone. That’s our philosophy and our mission. We didn’t want to reward only Obama supporters. We have a lot of Republicans who shop at Babeland too.”
If the sex toys don’t float your vote, there are plenty of other less racy rewards to choose from in the afterglow of casting your ballot.
How about a free cup of Joe? Starbucks stores across the nation and Eat’n Park outlets in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia are among many U.S. restaurants offering complimentary coffee to anyone who presents a ballot stub or “I Voted” sticker.
Voters can get a beer on the house at Todd Conner’s pub in Baltimore’s historic Fells Point neighborhood.
Those with a sweet tooth can stop by participating Krispy Kreme or Ben & Jerry’s locations to receive special treats. Krispy Kreme will be handing out star-shaped doughnuts with red, white, and blue sprinkles, one each, to voters, while Ben & Jerry’s is serving up free scoops of ice cream to everyone who shows up on Election Day between 5 and 8 p.m., whether they voted or not.
But just as voters should weigh carefully the seemingly endless promises of politicians as they make their decisions at the ballot box, they should also read the fine print on Election Day rewards.
Take the offer extended to voters by Zov’s, a three-cafe chain in Southern California. “Show us your ‘I Voted’ sticker and enjoy a free slice of Zov’s All-American Apple Pie,” it says on its Web site.
To borrow from a past president, that all depends on what the definition of “free” is.
To score the pie, you must not only prove you voted, but also “buy any menu item, or order Zov’s family take-out dinner for 2 or 4.”
© 2008 msnbc.com
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27455136/
MSN Privacy . Legal
© 2008 MSNBC.com
23 October 2008
Rape Victims’ Words Help Jolt Congo Into Change
October 18, 2008
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/18/world/africa/18congo.html?hp
BUKAVU, Congo — Honorata Kizende looked out at the audience and began with a simple, declarative sentence.
“There was no dinner,” she said.
“It was me who was dinner. Me, because they kicked me roughly to the ground, and they ripped off all my clothes, and between the two of them, they held my feet. One took my left foot, one took my right, and the same with my arms, and between the two of them they proceeded to rape me. Then all five of them raped me.”
The audience, which had been called together by local and international aid groups and included everyone from high-ranking politicians to street kids with no shoes, stared at her in disbelief.
Congo, it seems, is finally facing its horrific rape problem, which United Nations officials have called the worst sexual violence in the world. Tens of thousands of women, possibly hundreds of thousands, have been raped in the past few years in this hilly, incongruously beautiful land. Many of these rapes have been marked by a level of brutality that is shocking even by the twisted standards of a place riven by civil war and haunted by warlords and drug-crazed child soldiers.
After years of denial and shame, the silence is being broken. Because of stepped-up efforts in the past nine months by international organizations and the Congolese government, rapists are no longer able to count on a culture of impunity. Of course, countless men still get away with assaulting women. But more and more are getting caught, prosecuted and put behind bars.
European aid agencies are spending tens of millions of dollars building new courthouses and prisons across eastern Congo, in part to punish rapists. Mobile courts are holding rape trials in villages deep in the forest that have not seen a black-robed magistrate since the Belgians ruled the country decades ago.
The American Bar Association opened a legal clinic in January specifically to help rape victims bring their cases to court. So far the work has resulted in eight convictions. Here in Bukavu, one of the biggest cities in the country, a special unit of Congolese police officers has filed 103 rape cases since the beginning of this year, more than any year in recent memory.
In Bunia, a town farther north, rape prosecutions are up 600 percent compared with five years ago. Congolese investigators have even been flown to Europe to learn “CSI”-style forensic techniques. The police have arrested some of the most violent offenders, often young militiamen, most likely psychologically traumatized themselves, who have thrust sticks, rocks, knives and assault rifles inside women.
“We’re starting to see results,” said Pernille Ironside, a United Nations official in eastern Congo.
The number of those arrested is still tiny compared with that of the perpetrators on the loose, and often the worst offenders are not caught because they are marauding bandits who attack villages in the night, victimize women and then melt back into the forest.
This is all happening in a society where women tend to be beaten down anyway. Women in Congo do most of the work —at home, in the fields and in the market, where they carry enormous loads of bananas on their bent backs — and yet they are often powerless. Many women who are raped are told to keep quiet. Often, it is a shame for the entire family, and many rape victims have been kicked out of their villages and turned into beggars.
Grass-roots groups are trying to change this culture, and they have started by encouraging women who have been raped to speak out in open forums, like a courtroom full of spectators, just with no accused.
At the event in Bukavu in mid-September, Ms. Kizende’s story of being abducted by an armed group, then putting her life back together after months as a sex slave, drew tears — and cheers. It seems that the taboo against talking about rape is beginning to lift. Many women in the audience wore T-shirts that read in Kiswahili: “I refuse to be raped. What about you?”
Activists are fanning out to villages on foot and by bicycle to deliver a simple but often novel message: rape is wrong. Men’s groups are even being formed.
But these improvements are simply the first, tentative steps of progress in a very troubled country.
United Nations officials said the number of rapes had appeared to be decreasing over the past year. But the recent surge of fighting between the Congolese government and rebel groups, and all the violence and predation that goes with it, is jeopardizing those gains.
“It’s safer today than it was,” said Euphrasie Mirindi, a woman who was raped in 2006. “But it’s still not safe.”
Poverty, chaos, disease and war. These are the constants of eastern Congo. Many people believe that the rape problem will not be solved until the area tastes peace. But that might not be anytime soon.
Laurent Nkunda, a well-armed Tutsi warlord, or a savior of his people, depending on whom you ask, recently threatened to wage war across the country. Clashes between his troops, many of them child soldiers, and government forces have driven hundreds of thousands of people from their homes in the past few months. His forces, along with those from the dozens of other rebel groups hiding out in the hills, are thought to be mainly responsible for the epidemic of brutal rapes.
United Nations officials say the most sadistic rapes are committed by depraved killers who participated in Rwanda’s genocide in 1994 and then escaped into Congo. These attacks have left thousands of women with their insides destroyed. But the Congolese National Army, a ragtag undisciplined force of teenage troops who sport wrap-around shades and rusty rifles, has also been blamed. The government has been slow to punish its own, but Congolese generals recently announced they would set up new military tribunals to prosecute soldiers accused of rape.
No one — doctors, aid workers, Congolese and Western researchers — can explain exactly why Congo’s rape problem is the worst in the world. The attacks continue despite the presence of the largest United Nations peacekeeping force, with more than 17,000 troops. Impunity is thought to be a big factor, which is why there is now so much effort on bolstering Congo’s creaky and often corrupt justice system. The sheer number of armed groups spread over thousands of miles of thickly forested territory, fighting over Congo’s rich mineral spoils, also makes it incredibly difficult to protect civilians. The ceaseless instability has held the whole eastern swath of the country hostage.
In Bukavu, everywhere you look, something is broken: a railing, a window, a pickup cruising around with no fenders, a woman trudging along the road with no eyes.
The Congolese government admits it is at a loss, especially in keeping women safe.
“Every day, women are raped,” said Louis Leonce Muderhwa, the governor of South Kivu Province. “This isn’t peace.”
Activists from overseas have been pouring in. Few are more passionate than Eve Ensler, the American playwright who wrote “The Vagina Monologues,” which has been performed in more than 100 countries. She came to Congo last month to work with rape victims.
“I have spent the past 10 years of my life in the rape mines of the world,” she said. “But I have never seen anything like this.”
She calls it “femicide,” a systematic campaign to destroy women.
Ms. Ensler is helping open a center in Bukavu called the City of Joy, which will provide counseling to rape victims and teach leadership skills and self-defense. Her hope is to build an army of rape survivors who will push with an urgency — that has so far been absent — for a solution to end Congo’s ceaseless wars.
The City of Joy is rising behind Panzi Hospital, where the worst of the worst rape cases are treated. But even this refuge has come under attack. Last month, an irate mob stormed the hospital. The mob demanded that the doctors give them the body of a thief, so it could be burned. When the doctors refused, several angry young men beat up nurses and smashed windows. But it was not clear if the body was the only thing that had set them off.
“They don’t like our work,” said Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist. “Maybe what we’re doing is disturbing people.”
The stories of these rapes are clearly disturbing. But that is the point, to shake people up and grab their attention.
“The details are the scariest part,” Ms. Ensler said.
At the event last month, many people in the audience covered their mouths as they listened. Some could not bear it and burst out of the room crying.
One speaker, Claudine Mwabachizi, told how she was kidnapped by bandits in the forest, strapped to a tree and repeatedly gang-raped. The bandits did unspeakable things, she said, like disemboweling a pregnant woman right in front of her. “A lot of us keep these secrets to ourselves,” she said.
She was going public, she said, “to free my sisters.”
But Congo, if anything, is a land of contrasts. The soil here is rich, but the people are starving. The minerals are limitless, but the government is broke.
After the speaking-out event was over, Ms. Mwabachizi said she felt exhausted.
But, she added, “I feel strong.”
She was given a pink shawl with a message printed on it.
“I have survived,” it read. “I can do anything.”
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/18/world/africa/18congo.html?hp
BUKAVU, Congo — Honorata Kizende looked out at the audience and began with a simple, declarative sentence.
“There was no dinner,” she said.
“It was me who was dinner. Me, because they kicked me roughly to the ground, and they ripped off all my clothes, and between the two of them, they held my feet. One took my left foot, one took my right, and the same with my arms, and between the two of them they proceeded to rape me. Then all five of them raped me.”
The audience, which had been called together by local and international aid groups and included everyone from high-ranking politicians to street kids with no shoes, stared at her in disbelief.
Congo, it seems, is finally facing its horrific rape problem, which United Nations officials have called the worst sexual violence in the world. Tens of thousands of women, possibly hundreds of thousands, have been raped in the past few years in this hilly, incongruously beautiful land. Many of these rapes have been marked by a level of brutality that is shocking even by the twisted standards of a place riven by civil war and haunted by warlords and drug-crazed child soldiers.
After years of denial and shame, the silence is being broken. Because of stepped-up efforts in the past nine months by international organizations and the Congolese government, rapists are no longer able to count on a culture of impunity. Of course, countless men still get away with assaulting women. But more and more are getting caught, prosecuted and put behind bars.
European aid agencies are spending tens of millions of dollars building new courthouses and prisons across eastern Congo, in part to punish rapists. Mobile courts are holding rape trials in villages deep in the forest that have not seen a black-robed magistrate since the Belgians ruled the country decades ago.
The American Bar Association opened a legal clinic in January specifically to help rape victims bring their cases to court. So far the work has resulted in eight convictions. Here in Bukavu, one of the biggest cities in the country, a special unit of Congolese police officers has filed 103 rape cases since the beginning of this year, more than any year in recent memory.
In Bunia, a town farther north, rape prosecutions are up 600 percent compared with five years ago. Congolese investigators have even been flown to Europe to learn “CSI”-style forensic techniques. The police have arrested some of the most violent offenders, often young militiamen, most likely psychologically traumatized themselves, who have thrust sticks, rocks, knives and assault rifles inside women.
“We’re starting to see results,” said Pernille Ironside, a United Nations official in eastern Congo.
The number of those arrested is still tiny compared with that of the perpetrators on the loose, and often the worst offenders are not caught because they are marauding bandits who attack villages in the night, victimize women and then melt back into the forest.
This is all happening in a society where women tend to be beaten down anyway. Women in Congo do most of the work —at home, in the fields and in the market, where they carry enormous loads of bananas on their bent backs — and yet they are often powerless. Many women who are raped are told to keep quiet. Often, it is a shame for the entire family, and many rape victims have been kicked out of their villages and turned into beggars.
Grass-roots groups are trying to change this culture, and they have started by encouraging women who have been raped to speak out in open forums, like a courtroom full of spectators, just with no accused.
At the event in Bukavu in mid-September, Ms. Kizende’s story of being abducted by an armed group, then putting her life back together after months as a sex slave, drew tears — and cheers. It seems that the taboo against talking about rape is beginning to lift. Many women in the audience wore T-shirts that read in Kiswahili: “I refuse to be raped. What about you?”
Activists are fanning out to villages on foot and by bicycle to deliver a simple but often novel message: rape is wrong. Men’s groups are even being formed.
But these improvements are simply the first, tentative steps of progress in a very troubled country.
United Nations officials said the number of rapes had appeared to be decreasing over the past year. But the recent surge of fighting between the Congolese government and rebel groups, and all the violence and predation that goes with it, is jeopardizing those gains.
“It’s safer today than it was,” said Euphrasie Mirindi, a woman who was raped in 2006. “But it’s still not safe.”
Poverty, chaos, disease and war. These are the constants of eastern Congo. Many people believe that the rape problem will not be solved until the area tastes peace. But that might not be anytime soon.
Laurent Nkunda, a well-armed Tutsi warlord, or a savior of his people, depending on whom you ask, recently threatened to wage war across the country. Clashes between his troops, many of them child soldiers, and government forces have driven hundreds of thousands of people from their homes in the past few months. His forces, along with those from the dozens of other rebel groups hiding out in the hills, are thought to be mainly responsible for the epidemic of brutal rapes.
United Nations officials say the most sadistic rapes are committed by depraved killers who participated in Rwanda’s genocide in 1994 and then escaped into Congo. These attacks have left thousands of women with their insides destroyed. But the Congolese National Army, a ragtag undisciplined force of teenage troops who sport wrap-around shades and rusty rifles, has also been blamed. The government has been slow to punish its own, but Congolese generals recently announced they would set up new military tribunals to prosecute soldiers accused of rape.
No one — doctors, aid workers, Congolese and Western researchers — can explain exactly why Congo’s rape problem is the worst in the world. The attacks continue despite the presence of the largest United Nations peacekeeping force, with more than 17,000 troops. Impunity is thought to be a big factor, which is why there is now so much effort on bolstering Congo’s creaky and often corrupt justice system. The sheer number of armed groups spread over thousands of miles of thickly forested territory, fighting over Congo’s rich mineral spoils, also makes it incredibly difficult to protect civilians. The ceaseless instability has held the whole eastern swath of the country hostage.
In Bukavu, everywhere you look, something is broken: a railing, a window, a pickup cruising around with no fenders, a woman trudging along the road with no eyes.
The Congolese government admits it is at a loss, especially in keeping women safe.
“Every day, women are raped,” said Louis Leonce Muderhwa, the governor of South Kivu Province. “This isn’t peace.”
Activists from overseas have been pouring in. Few are more passionate than Eve Ensler, the American playwright who wrote “The Vagina Monologues,” which has been performed in more than 100 countries. She came to Congo last month to work with rape victims.
“I have spent the past 10 years of my life in the rape mines of the world,” she said. “But I have never seen anything like this.”
She calls it “femicide,” a systematic campaign to destroy women.
Ms. Ensler is helping open a center in Bukavu called the City of Joy, which will provide counseling to rape victims and teach leadership skills and self-defense. Her hope is to build an army of rape survivors who will push with an urgency — that has so far been absent — for a solution to end Congo’s ceaseless wars.
The City of Joy is rising behind Panzi Hospital, where the worst of the worst rape cases are treated. But even this refuge has come under attack. Last month, an irate mob stormed the hospital. The mob demanded that the doctors give them the body of a thief, so it could be burned. When the doctors refused, several angry young men beat up nurses and smashed windows. But it was not clear if the body was the only thing that had set them off.
“They don’t like our work,” said Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist. “Maybe what we’re doing is disturbing people.”
The stories of these rapes are clearly disturbing. But that is the point, to shake people up and grab their attention.
“The details are the scariest part,” Ms. Ensler said.
At the event last month, many people in the audience covered their mouths as they listened. Some could not bear it and burst out of the room crying.
One speaker, Claudine Mwabachizi, told how she was kidnapped by bandits in the forest, strapped to a tree and repeatedly gang-raped. The bandits did unspeakable things, she said, like disemboweling a pregnant woman right in front of her. “A lot of us keep these secrets to ourselves,” she said.
She was going public, she said, “to free my sisters.”
But Congo, if anything, is a land of contrasts. The soil here is rich, but the people are starving. The minerals are limitless, but the government is broke.
After the speaking-out event was over, Ms. Mwabachizi said she felt exhausted.
But, she added, “I feel strong.”
She was given a pink shawl with a message printed on it.
“I have survived,” it read. “I can do anything.”
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.
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.
22 October 2008
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
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
15 October 2008
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.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27179641/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MSN Privacy . Legal
© 2008 MSNBC.com
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.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27179641/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MSN Privacy . Legal
© 2008 MSNBC.com
07 October 2008
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
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27058577/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MSN Privacy . Legal
© 2008 MSNBC.com
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
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27058577/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MSN Privacy . Legal
© 2008 MSNBC.com
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/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MSN Privacy . Legal
© 2008 MSNBC.com
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/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MSN Privacy . Legal
© 2008 MSNBC.com
05 October 2008
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
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
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
